Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River - Softcover

Handley, George B

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607810239 ISBN 13: 9781607810230

Publisher: University of Utah Press, 2010

Synopsis

People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.

Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and family history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that come with the territorial claims to a homeland, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as an alternative, a kind of belonging that is informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. While it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a perspective from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.

Winner of the Mormon Letters Award for Memoir.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Wallace Stegner wrote: 'No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.' In this fortunate pairing of place and poet, we learn about Utah's Provo River--a paradox of wildness and extinction, pioneering and restoration. We learn that the river is embedded in community--Mormon community--a fact inseparable from the place. And we learn about the poet who attends to this river, a man who turns out to be an insightful scholar, an exuberant fly fisherman, a devout pilgrim, and an expansive guide as these home waters descend from the High Uintas through defining stories of family and identity, to pour down the Jordan River to the Great Salt Lake."
--Stephen Trimble, author of Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America

From the Inside Flap:

"Handley has made a most uniquely compelling case for how the physical world--both environs as well as our flesh--provides landscapes in which one touches the divine in the most intimate ways. In exploring the watershed of his ancestors, Handley has articulated how LDS culture has compromised the health of the systems that sustain life, and in the same breath he has illuminated the Mormon stories and doctrine that offer possibilities for a re-creation of God's works, and indeed, our own souls."  Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1607810239
• ISBN 13: 9781607810230
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256