Ancient Places

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RELEASE DATE OF MAY 19, 2015

Contact Haley Stocking, Publicist • 206/826-4318 • [email protected]

"I can think of no better guide to this corner of the West than the lyrical naturalistJack Nisbet, whose latest, Ancient Places, is a fascinating read."

—Jess Walter, author of We Live in Water

Jack Nisbet weaves a story like no one else can in Ancient Places:

People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest (Sasquatch

Books; $21.95; May 2015). Author of celebrated books including

The Collector, Nisbet engages some of the touchstones in

Northwest history in this assemblage of nonfiction stories that

reveal the symbiotic relationship of people and place in the Pacific

Northwest. From rural Oregon, where a controversy brewed overthe provenance and ownership of a meteorite, to the great floods

15,000 years ago that shaped what is now Washington, Oregon,

and Idaho, this is a compelling collection of stories about natural

and human history. Although the scale of time and space in some

of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to

leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming,

small places and their key components somehow persevere.

Drawing on a range of fresh personal research, both oral and written, Nisbet’s prose is alive

and vibrant in Ancient Places, demonstrating why he has become a prominent voice for bringing the

natural history of the Pacific Northwest to life.

(MORE)

Ancient PlacesPeople and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest

Jack Nisbet

mailto:[email protected]




About the Author

PNBA Book Award winner and best-selling author Jack Nisbet is

a historian, teacher, and author who focuses on the intersection ofhuman history and natural history in the Pacific Northwest. He is

the author of the highly regarded Sources of the River, for which

he was awarded the Murray Morgan Prize by the Washington

State Historical Society; The Collector; David Douglas, a

Naturalist at Work ; and Visible Bones. Visit JackNisbet.com.

Also by Jack Nisbet

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Ancient Places

People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest

Jack Nisbet

May 2015 • $21.95 • 256 pages • Hardcover ISBN 978-1-57061-980-9

Available wherever fine books are sold.Sasquatch Books • 800/775-0817 • www.sasquatchbooks.com

Visible Bones

978-1-57061-953-3

Sources of the River

978-1-57061-817-8

The Collector

978-1-57061-725-6

David Douglas,

A Naturalist at Work

978-1-57061-830-7

http://www.sasquatchbooks.com/








Praise for Jack Nisbet

Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest

“I can think of no better guide to this corner of the West than the lyrical

naturalist Jack Nisbet, whose latest, Ancient Places, is a fascinating read.”—Jess Walter, author of We Live in Water

“Master historian Nisbet has communed with Indians, astronauts, miners, andscientists to reveal a wonderfully personal, engaging, and authoritative pictureof the cultural and natural history of the Inland Northwest. Ancient Places takes the reader from the earliest geological events that defined the region tothe human and environmental forces at work today.”—John Marzluff, author of Welcome to Subirdia and Gifts of the Crow

The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural Historyof the Northwest

“Nisbet’s well-researched narrative has considerable bounce and drama . . . It’sa portrait of a true adventurer . . . a solid piece of scholarship and synthesis.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An exhilarating

biography that provides an entertaining portrait of theunfettered determination that drove one of the giants

in the field of botanicalexploration and infused the young nation he viewed with a keen andzealous spirit.”—Booklist

David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work

“This new volume will delight anyone with an interest in wild Northwesthistory and the naturalist’s adventure.”—Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet

“Those who love the intersection of human history and natural history are infor a treat.”

—BC Studies

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Ancient Places Events

May 19th, 7:00 pm

Launch party, Q&A, reading, and signing at Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA

May 21st, 7:00 pmPresentation at Moses Lake Art Center, Moses Lake, WA

May 28th, 5:30 pm

Presentation at Museum of Culture and Environment, Ellensburg, WA

June 3rd, 7:00 pm

Reading at Book People of Moscow, ID

June 9th, 7:00 pm

Presentation at Seattle Public Library (Central Library), Seattle, WA

June 10th, 7:00 pm

Presentation at Village Books, Bellingham, WA

June 11th, 7:00 pm

Presentation at State Capital Museum, Olympia, WA

June 13th, 6:30 pm

Presentation at Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

June 24th, 6:30 pm

Presentation at Missoula Public Library, Missoula, MT

Events subject to change, please contact [email protected] for up-to-dateinformation and see JackNisbet.com for the author’s ongoing talks.

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May 13, 2015

S

Culture & Food » Arts & Culture

KICKING ROCKS

Jack Nisbet's latest book, Ancient Places , tells surprising stories of the InlandNorthwestBy Ted S. McGregor Jr.

Young Kwak

Jack Nisbet: "I guess I've always been looking for different ways to reveal the landscape."

pokane writer Jack Nisbet sees the little things — the things all around us that mostof us don't take the time to consider. Ants, for example — there's an entire chapter in his

new book, Ancient Places , about the mysterious genius of ants.

"There's so much to explore right here," Nisbet says of his policy of keeping his subject

matter all within a day's drive of his South Hill home.

AMERICA'S BEST READ URBAN WEEKLY | LEARN MORE »






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G

Or magpies — just the mention of the misunderstood bird launches a spirited discussion

about why they're so hated, almost like wolves. But no, that's not in this book — he's not

quite done with that subject yet. Maybe it'll make his next book.

How about that icon of all things Inland Northwesty, the ubiquitous ponderosa pine? Well,

did you know, as he writes in Ancient Places , that "the thick outer bark that glows like a

ruddy sunburn... supposedly marks the passing of the trees' first century"? I love the fact

that somebody knows this stuff. When I bring it up, he adds that he and a friend bore-testeda particularly ruddy specimen along the High Drive bluff. Age: 350 years.

As Aristotle, the original student of nature, put it, "In all things of nature, there is

something of the marvelous." Through Nisbet's eyes, there's wonder all around us.

The name of Nisbet's book, Ancient Places , is taken from the obtuse, religious Francis

Thompson poem, The Kingdom of God : "Angels keep their ancient places / Turn but a stone,

and start a wing!"

Wow, that's deep — maybe too deep for me to follow. So I ask Nisbet what the line means to

him.

"When I kick rocks," he says with a chuckle, "stuff comes out."

In his chapter about Wes Wehr, the eccentric founder of the Stonerose Interpretive Center in

Republic, Nisbet writes that Wehr "followed the European Enlightenment tradition... that

any understanding of the larger world required not only close examination of its smallest

motes, but also a steady awareness of their place in time."

In that line, it's as if Nisbet has written the job description for the career he has carved out

for himself: Kicking rocks and studying whatever motes float up into view.

etting here was no straight path. Nisbet was born along the line that splits North and

South Carolina, around the Catawba River. Two of his aunts were writers; he was given

an old fruit box filled with the work of one after she died — kind of Dorothea Lange-esque,

Depression-era vignettes of life in the rural South. His mom was a chemist and loved bugs.

But she died while he was in high school, and he was looking to move away even in his teens.

"I grew up in a racist world," Nisbet says matter-of-factly. "It was ugly. I wanted to get away

from it."

Acceptance to Stanford University was his ticket, and learning from the great Wallace

Stegner added the inspiration — Nisbet especially identified with Stegner's memoir, Wolf

Willow . He graduated with an English degree in 1971 and wound up in northeastern

Washington, where a classmate's dad had some murky mining claims. Soon Nisbet was

working construction, driving tractors and starting to take notice of the mountains, the

streams and the people.





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I

Young Kwak

Jack Nisbet at People's Park; his subjects are generally within a day's drive of Spokane: "There's so much to exploreright here."

He became a columnist for the newspaper in Chewelah — a 10-year run that created the raw

material for his book Purple Flat Top . "In fact," Nisbet says, "I view Purple Flat Top , Visible

Bones and Ancient Places as a kind of trilogy."

His big break came in 1994, when he finally sold — after 10 rejections — Sources of the River , one of the best books about the Great Northwest. Telling the tale of fur trapper David

Thompson, whose fingerprints are all over our region, Nisbet worked on the book for nearly

a decade. Since '94, he and his wife Claire have lived in Spokane, where they raised two kids.

Today, Nisbet works on his stories, teaches kids all over the Inland Northwest about local

history and publishes new books at a steady clip.

've had the pleasure of working with Jack for many years now; we've published his

work here in the Inlander from time to time, and it's always been fun kicking rocks with

him. I feel like Ancient Places is a great introduction to the way his mind works — it jumps

around a little bit but stays true to those big themes of his.

Nature is central in each of the 10 chapters, for sure, but it's the people he profiles who add

depth and color to the big picture. There's Byron Riblet, who helped solve the problem of

getting remote stashes of dolomite to the World War I effort by creating a massive gondola

to carry the ore to a railhead. His Riblet Mansion is now the Arbor Crest Winery; his





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company also installed the first ski lifts in the region.

The tension between the original owners of these lands and the settlers who came after is

another of Nisbet's big themes, and here we meet hero/scoundrel William Manning, who, in

controversial fashion, collected many artifacts owned by local tribes — a haul that today

makes up the bulk of the MAC collection. After the two cultures clashed during what Nisbet

calls that "period of flux," the fallout has been, well, complicated.

"'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces," the Thompson poem continues, "that miss the many-

splendored thing."

Nisbet wants us to look so we don't miss those many-splendored things — to see, as he

shows in Chapter One, a wonder like the Northern Lights. Aristotle nailed it: All those tiny

motes do add up to something truly marvelous. ♦

Jack Nisbet reads from Ancient Places • Tue, May 19, at 7 pm • Auntie's • 402 W. Main

• auntiesbooks.com • 838-0206

BOOK EXCERPT

TERRA-COTTA MAN

BY JACK NISBET

Outsider artist Leno Prestini emigrated to the United States with his family from Besano,

Italy, in the early part of the 20th century. His father worked as a terra-cotta finisher for the

Washington Brick, Lime and Sewer Pipe Company in Clayton, just north of Spokane. After

the elder Prestini passed away, young Leno dropped out of school and joined his brother

Batista at the brickyard.

It was during the 1930s that Leno Prestini emerged as a unique figure in local lore, proving

himself time and again to be a gifted design artist crossed with a clever engineer, a broad

conversationalist and a mad adventurer. He seemed to breathe in the essence of

northeastern Washington — including the Clayton brick plant and its machine shop; the

region's sawmill and mining culture; its mountains, coniferous forests and glacier-carved

lakes; tribal culture and extended trail-horse rides; the taverns, churches and country music

— and spit them back out in ways that were entirely personal.

When Leno decided he wanted to go boating on nearby Loon Lake, he fashioned a craft with

cement-sack sails and an iron rudder oriented like the tail of an airplane. The keel was a

coffin cover held in place with a length of company strap iron, and the thin steel wouldbegin to hum as the boat picked up speed.

After seeing a round diving helmet made by a Spokane machinist, Leno and his friend

Burton Stewart used an acetylene torch to shape their own helmet out of a hot water heater,





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decorated it with a sculpted octopus and installed double glass to prevent the faceplate from

fogging. Adapting a garden hose for an air supply line, they put their odd headdress to work,

diving after lost property for the summer lake crowd. Soon the dive team started descending

beyond available sunlight, so they cobbled up an underwater flashlight from a six-cell

battery enclosed in an aluminum cylinder, with a fuse head to hold the glass and a Model T

radiator cap to seal the end. As their dives in Loon Lake approached 90 feet, they ordered

balloon cloth from the Goodyear company to sew into a suit that could handle the cold

temperatures.

Stewart and Prestini's eccentric operations were just getting warmed up. They salvaged a

stainless-steel cream can and fabricated an improved helmet. A beer-barrel pressure pump

regulated the air supply flowing through their garden hose. One dockside photograph shows

Burton and another pal, in dark shirts, bending over the compressor in the background while

Leno, fully tricked out in the white Goodyear diving suit, weighted yoke and leaden shoes,

stares at the camera like Captain Nemo himself. They thought enough of their efforts to

exhibit the suit at the Spokane Interstate Fair that fall and to answer a call from the Colville

Police Department to help locate the body of a drowned man in a lake north of town.

Leno and Burton Stewart climbed mountain peaks all around the region. When the terra-

cotta plant shut down for a brief period, they customized a 10-foot ladder and used it to

scale the kiln's 110-foot brick smokestack, taking panoramic photographs from the top to

prove it.

And at every opportunity, Leno added his own strange creations to the terra-cotta kiln. He

molded a diver dodging dangerous sharks, and an elf lamp that carried an unsettlingly dark

aura. A two-headed mountain climber seemed to teeter toward an abyss, and when his

brother Batista asked him about the double heads, Leno replied, "Every time I get to the top

of the mountain, my problems are still with me." ♦

Reprinted by permission from Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging

Northwest by Jack Nisbet. Published by Sasquatch Books.

RELATED EVENTS

JACK NISBET BOOK LAUNCH @ Auntie's BookstoreTue., May 19, 7 p.m. Free

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Ancient Places