This is a journal about one man’s journey after life comes crashing down around him; career and marriage–gone. Inspired by the teachings of the mystics, he decides to find that elusive something that he, until then, has been only vaguely aware is lacking in his life, and so he sets out on a solitary three-season hike in the Montana wilderness.
Walking into Silence tells of an encounter with a mysterious woman sheepherder named Eddie; of a brush with a devastating wildfire; of learning about a homesteader who tried to kill God; and above all, of encountering the silence and solitude that change those who become immersed in it.
“Bob Rice’s book is simultaneously about a quest and a homecoming. The questions that take him on his solo hike into the mountains are deep and real. What he finds there is equally profound. He has a poet’s eye for the telling detail and a novelist’s surefooted sense of plot. This is an absorbing book: remarkably honest, filled with wry humour, and tremendously observant about wilderness–the death, beauty, terror, and serenity that are inseparably present in it. Rice draws his readers into the far reaches of that pure, clear mountain air and equally into the puzzled and puzzling fretwork of the human soul.” Jan Zwicky, recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry
Robert Rice 