Side Trips From Cowboy is a personal exploration of the Nez Perce story and the American West coupled with a intimate look at the nature of addiction. Anyone who is, loves or has a friend who's an addict - and that's nearly all of us - might benefit from this book. Follow a blue Chevy pickup with license plates that read ADVNTUR as it carries author Sandy Compton and friends across the West in the tracks of the Nez Perce who suffered the war of 1877. They are looking for ghosts and find not a few - in wild, excruciatingly beautiful country. Braided into this tale is the author's lifelong search for Cowboy, his fight with addiction - a disease he dubs growupus interruptus - and his path through the 12 Steps of Recovery. He finds this path isn't always - or often - easy. But it's a damned sight better than the alternatives - death, prison or insanity. Side Trips From Cowboy is an adventure that explores wilderness - wild places both within and outside of us - and leads to startling, not-so-easy, yet somehow comforting revelations about the nature of addiction and recovery. You're invited along on this adventure to learn this path and consider what you really want to be when you grow up.
About the Author: Sandy Compton grew up in Western Montana, where he lives still. He is an avid backpacker, wilderness advocate and traveler, particularly in the American West. Sandy has been writing for publication for 30 years and has multiple novels, non-fiction works, and hundreds of essays and articles to his credit. As an addict in recovery, he writes unflinchingly about his own struggle and the nature of addiction in a memoir, "Side Trips From Cowboy: Addiction, Recovery and the Western American Myth." "Side Trips From Cowboy" was published in 2009, with a second edition released in May of 2013. His novels include "Jason's Passage" (1995), "Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now," (2005) "The Friction of Desire" (2012), "Scars on Top of Scars" (2014)," and "Archer MacClehan & The Girl Who Wouldn't Stop Running," (2014). He has also recently released a children's Christmas book, "Caleb's Miracle," and "Camping In Wyoming," by his grandmother, Mariam Lawton Clayton. "Camping In Wyoming" was designed around Mariam's handwritten account and original "kodaks" of her honeymoon trip to Yellowstone National Park in 1910. With eight books to his credit and more on the way, he has become an important regional voice in the Northern Rockies. He has also helped other authors make their books reality through Blue Creek Press (www.bluecreekpress.com) In his "other" life, Compton is program coordinator for Friends of the Scotchman Peaks Wilderness (wwwscotchmanpeaks.org), advocating for wilderness designation for the 88,000-acre Scotchman Peaks on the border between Idaho and Montana near where he lives.