Synopsis
"The wardens climbed into their truck, ready to leave. 'You'll need about seven cords of firewood. Concentrate on that. You'll have to get it all in before the snow grounds your truck.'"
"Though I didn't want to ask, it seemed important. 'What's a cord?'"
So begins Pete Fromm's seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness guarding salmon eggs. After blundering into this forbidding errand as a college lark, Fromm gradually come face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. Brutal cold, isolation, and fearful risks balance against the satisfaction of living a unique existence in modern America.
This award-winning narrative is a gripping story of adventure, a rousing tale of self-sufficiency, and modern-day Walden. From either perspective, Fromm lives up to his reputation as one of the West's strongest new voices.
Reviews
From out of the deep, deep wilds of Idaho comes this story of a short-story writer (The Tall Uncut, 1992)-turned-reluctant- backwoodsman. Fired up by the seemingly romantic life led by mountain men, Fromm accepted a position tending a stream full of salmon eggs in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness. It was to be a stint of seven months, nearly all of them in the meanness of winter. But even before Fromm arrived at camp, he had second thoughts. This wasn't just backcountry, this was way backcountry, and he was grossly unprepared for all the boogies that swarmed down on him-- loneliness, inexperience, the awesome interstellar cold, fear. Slowly coming to terms with his situation, the author beat back the demons by keeping busy and taking care not to concentrate too much on just what he had gotten himself into. This retelling of his foray into the wild is strangely compelling, considering its unassuming, understated character. Fromm catalogs his up-country days: settling in; looking after his stream; visiting with his few, far, and mostly absent neighbors; wrestling with his ambivalent feelings about the mountain-lion and bear hunts that figure so prominently in the region; taking long, therapeutic hikes that by and by surrendered the lay of the land to him. The author is sensitive enough to have enjoyed moonlight on snow and the eerie silence of the limitless cold, and, with tenderfoot luck, he witnessed an unexpected total eclipse of the sun, an event that sent him into a vital, whirling dance. Nothing outrageous happened, nothing beyond the pale, but his modest adventures reckoned up to a tale well worth the telling. It was a long haul for Fromm, a brute circumstance, full of tribulation. But he survived to write this fresh-faced account. Bully for him. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
YA-An absorbing personal account. Disenchanted with college, 20-year-old Fromm accepted a job with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and set off to spend the winter in the middle of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. For 15 minutes a day, 7 days a week, he checked salmon eggs planted in the channel between the Selway River and Indian Creek, and made sure ice was cleared from the end of it. The closest plowed road was 40 miles away and the closest person 60 miles. The fruit of his labors was about 20 fish returning to Indian Creek out of the 2 1/2 million he watched over. Entertaining nonfiction.
Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It was an act of bravado that prompted 19-year-old Fromm to leave college and accept a winter job with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game in 1990. His assignment was to check daily on two million salmon eggs planted in a channel between the Selway River and Indian Creek. The nearest road was 40 miles from camp; by mid-November the only access was by snowmobile. Fromm had dreamed of being a "mountain man"--a la Jim Bridger or Jedidiah Smith--but he was a tenderfoot, hardly prepared to spend seven months alone with his dog Boone in the wilderness. Fromm gives an engaging account of that winter; his job took about 15 minutes a day, so he had to combat loneliness and fill the hours. He learned to hunt, to tan leather, to preserve meat. There were occasional parties with hunting groups, brief visits by the game wardens, a few narrow escapes. A fine tale of adventure and self-sufficiency.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
What do you get when you drop into the remote, icy wilderness of Idaho an impulsive tenderfoot who remanticizes the "mountain man" ethos? Death or a darn good story. After narrowly eluding the former, Fromm delivers the latter. His job--chipping ice out of a channel--only took a few minutes a day, so in addition to enduring bitter cold and extreme hardship, he had to face an oppressive amount of "free time." Hiking, hunting, reading, and cooking helped pass it, but boredom drove him to stupid, perilous outings. Fromm had sporadic contact with backwoods hunters and eventually became a true mountain man scornful of the rangers zipping out of the woods to return to desk jobs. This is a good example of "new nature writing" typified by the straight-ahead narratives of Rick Bass rather than the more literary styles of Barry Lopez or Annie Dillard. Antihunting activists and the squeamish may dislike parts of this book, but it is still recommended for most nature and adventure fans from high school age up.
- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. at Chico
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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