I don’t know if John Graves is well-known outside Texas or not, but down here he has been kind of a minor deity of sorts ever since his book Goodbye to a River was published in the sixties. That book is a story of a canoe trip down the Brazos River with lots of commentary on the history of the region and our changing relationship with the land.

About the same time that he was writing that book Graves bought the first piece of land that later became his 400-acre ranch that he calls “Hard Scrabble.” In the book that takes its name from the place, he discusses the land and how he came to find and fall in love with it and eventually build a house and move his family to the place, located near the little town of Glen Rose, Texas.

It’s an area that has better value for its scenery and colorful history than for economic purposes. Graves is the first to admit that his story would not much serve as inspiration for anyone hoping to make their living off the land. But Graves finds the land has great value to him in other ways and that is what makes the book worth reading.

There are some stories of cattle and goats and fence-building and stone-masonry and many other things that go with ranching and farming. But it is not intended as instructional. There is also a little about the natural history of the place. But the subject of this book is man’s relationship with the land, mostly Grave’s relationship himself but also the previous stewards of the place and his neighbors and many others who contributed to it’s being what it is today.

When it comes to use of the land he is not really a purist or even entirely “politically correct,” at least by current standards. I had to wince at one paragraph when he told of planting a field in KR bluestem, a grass that is frowned on as an invasive exotic by most environmentalists. But that may not have been the prevailing view 30 years when this book was written, so maybe that is not an entirely fair judgement.

What I like best are the stories and anecdotes about the characters in the region. I was raised about three counties over to the east and about three decades later in time, but these characters come to life for me like ghosts from my childhood. Their speech and habits ring true. Like Mr. Graves I left the region after childhood, although in my case for the big cities and corporate world instead of his more exotic locales. Reading this book makes me wish I had stayed closer to the land.