Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley - Hardcover

Rember, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375422072 ISBN 13: 9780375422072

Publisher: Pantheon, 2003

Synopsis

In 1987, John Rember returned home to Sawtooth Valley, where he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the same forty acres that had sustained his family’s horses had sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but to Rember this was no longer home.

In Traplines, Rember recounts his experiences of growing up in a time when the fish were wild in the rivers, horses were brought into the valley each spring from their winter pasture, and electric light still seemed magical. Today those same experiences no longer seem to possess the authenticity they once did. In his journey home, Rember discovers how the West, both as a place in which to live and as a terrain of the imagination, has been transformed. And he wonders whether his recollections of what once was prevent him from understanding his past and appreciating what he found when he returned home. In Traplines, Rember excavates the hidden desires that color memory and shows us how, once revealed, they can allow us to understand anew the stories we tell ourselves.

About this title

About the Author:

John Rember was born in Sun Valley, Idaho, and grew up in the nearby Sawtooth Valley. He was educated at Harvard and the University of Montana. Rember teaches English at Albertson College in Caldwell, Idaho, and he is the author of two previous books, Coyote in the Mountains and Cheerleaders from Gomorrah.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley

In 1987 I cashed out of the ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, and went fifty miles north to my family’s place in Sawtooth Valley to build a house. I did so out of a deep homing instinct—the same forty acres that had sustained our tiny herd of horses every summer for thirty-five years had sustained, for me, a vision of a place where I belonged in the world, where I could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River, or simply step out to watch the sunrise light the Sawtooths above their dark foothills. And then, depending on my horoscope in a week-old Idaho Statesman or the shape of the morning’s clouds, I could fix the fences, cut firewood, change the water on the pasture, plant trees, or just fish some more.

It was a vision of a life, I think now, that came from memories of our horses, brought from winter pasture every June, whinnying and bucking around the fence lines, biting into the spring grass, running full-gallop through the shallow water on flooded river islands, home at last. Such memories become metaphors, and in early middle age, such metaphors become calls to action.

So when I found myself in the unexpected financial condition of being able to return home, I did. The house was begun in September 1988 and, owing to good weather all through that fall, was finished in February 1989.

That March I sat at my desk, warm and comfortable, the nearby cold of the Sawtooth Valley spring held harmless by thermopane windows and six inches of fiberglass. If I looked up from my monitor, I could see the cold stone towers of Mount Heyburn, their ragged edges smoothed by thick drifts of snow. The willows in the river bottom were skeletal and frosted, but every bit as beautiful as they would be that July, when the horses would hide in them to escape the flies and the heat. The snow on the valley floor held my weight in the mornings, and at least once a day I went out to wander the fence lines, or sat on the melted-off riverbank to watch the flyovers of returning geese, or skied the hill behind the house, or ran to the mailbox when I heard the mailman accelerate toward his next target, my neighbor’s mailbox a mile up Highway 75. Home at last.

But it wasn’t home. I found what once was familiar was unfamiliar. What once was real was no longer real. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but things had become more surface than substance for me.

That fall the power crew spent a few days digging trenches and driving a pipe under the highway in order to run power underground from the pole on the other side of the road to the house. There were to be no wires in the air outside the windows of my home.

The United States Forest Service wanted it that way. That agency is charged with maintaining the pastoral values of Sawtooth Valley as part of its larger mission of oversee-ing the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a central Idaho enclave of fun that includes the Sawtooth, White Cloud, and Boulder Mountain Ranges, and the small patches of flat ground between them. Forest Service agents were authorized to purchase land and easements under the 1974 Act of Congress that established the SNRA, and while my family was lucky enough to be allowed to stay, the Forest Service has told us what structures we may build and where they may be placed ever since they bought the easement on our property. In their view, electrical wires and pastoral values do not mix, and so the wires went underground.

I wanted them underground anyway. A wire running into a house looks ugly, as do the strung-together lines of great steel crosses stretching across formerly pagan Idaho deserts. They remind me of the wires that run above any of western America’s commercial strips: wires that power neon signs, the flash fryers of franchise restaurants, the spotlights of auto showrooms, and the hundreds of whirling ceiling fans hanging over home-care customers.

But as I was pulling underground cable along the bottom of the trench that led to my house, I remembered the summer of 1955, when I watched with a child’s awe as the Rural Electrification Administration planted the first power poles in the glacial gravel of Sawtooth Valley. I was only five, but I can remember sensing the great expanding outside nation that those poles represented.

People outside the valley walls cared about us, we who lived in this most remote place, and were including us in their progress. No longer would we have to use oil lamps for illumination. No longer would our radios run off car batteries. No longer would we be people without power.

The only analogous experience I have had since is watching the ending of the film Dr. Zhivago. There, the final image of a great hydroelectric dam clears away messy images of human tragedy and replaces them with crystalline Soviet light. At age five, in wonder and delight, I switched the newly wired lights of our cabin on and off and on again. At age five, I would not have wanted to bury the power lines.

The next year, a substantial section of the highway between Sun Valley and Stanley was paved, including the section in front of our home.

My father was a fishing and hunting guide. The paved road meant more tourists, and more tourists meant better business. His clients would come to the house at four a.m. for sourdough pancakes and strong black coffee. After breakfast, he would take them back through the willows to the river, hook a Chinook salmon, and hand them the pole so they could land it, all for $10 per person per day. He didn’t guarantee them a fish, just a fish on the line.

In the spring, before the salmon runs, my father and his clients would fish in the inlets of Redfish Lake for bulltrout, and I can remember days when a limit of trout, spread out on the grass of home for a photo opportunity, weighed more than a limit of salmon.

It was a kind of paradise we lived in. We had electricity, paved roads, a new ’56 Ford, and an endless string of professional visitors—doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and politicians, all of them from places like New York and Dallas and Washington, D.C.—who assured us that we were living the kind of life they would live if they could only break free of their responsibilities to live it. I took literally every yearning word they spoke, even when the snow drove us out every fall and we moved south over Galena Summit to the Wood River Valley, where my mother was a nurse at the Sun Valley Hospital and my father drove ski bus after his fall trapping season ended. By Christmas, our southern freezer was full of venison and elk and the French-bread shapes of paper-wrapped salmon, and we had only to look at our dinner plates to know where we were based and where our sustenance lay. Every May we returned, over the still-frozen Galena, to a valley mirror-bright with water and new willow leaf, noisy with the sounds of nesting birds and the roar of rapids.

This world lasted longer than it had any right to. It lasted long enough for me to be raised in it. It lasted, I suppose, from our ’56 Ford to our next car, a ’65 Ford. But the power lines and the paved roads and the Fords and even the salmon in the river were destabilizing forces, and eventually it came to an end.

The valley became crowded with people. Some of our neighbors began subdividing their ranches and selling them off, taking the money and running to places that were warm in the winter, where life was neither as beautiful nor as hard as it was in Sawtooth Valley. They left behind them little deposits of summer cabins, where people from Twin Falls and Boise and Pocatello spent summer weekends. The sagebrush flat just west of Obsidian Mountain, three miles upriver from our place, came to be filled with trailers and prefabricated kit houses.

In the Salmon River there were fewer and fewer salmon. The Army Corps of Engineers, afflicted with the same naive fascination with power I had displayed at the light switch of our cabin, had built great roaring spillways on their hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and the Snake Rivers. Slack water and turbines killed millions of little salmon swimming to the oceans, and the depleted returning runs faced gill nets, nonfunctional fish ladders, and the nitrogen-poisoned waters flowing from the spillways.

Government programs poisoned grasshoppers with DDT in Sawtooth Valley, and we stopped seeing eagles and hawks and ospreys and herons. The Idaho Fish and Game Department used Toxaphene to poison Petit Lake, ten miles upriver from us, and inadvertently poisoned the river as far downriver as Stanley, baby salmon and all. Four years later, in August, my father rode up the river for three miles, looking for spawning salmon and didn’t find a single one. By that time he had stopped guiding for a living and had begun working as a mechanic and welder for road construction projects.

By 1974 Sawtooth Valley had been cut up into thousands of pieces. Plans for condo projects on the moraine above Stanley had been drawn up and were about to be implemented. A good percentage of Castle Peak in the White Clouds was determined to be molybdenum, and ASARCO—a mining company—was planning to build a road into it and carry it away, bit by profitable bit.

The act of Congress that established the Sawtooth National Recreation Area had the effect of reversing many of these later changes. In Sawtooth Valley, except within three small designated communities, parcels of land under twenty acres were purchased outright by the Forest Service. Larger parcels, such as our place, were placed under strict zoning to preserve the early-ranching character of the valley, and their owners were compensated for the difference between what the land was worth as agricultural land and what it was worth as homesites. In most cases, this represented about 95 percent of the land’s value.

It was as if the valley was suddenly populated with lottery winners. One of our neighbors ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375422072
• ISBN 13: 9780375422072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256