A rural western paradise recalled with joy and sorrow

It’s been said, referring to the maintenance of long-term relationships, that “love” is a verb. We must enact it through our attitudes and actions, because if we wait for the starry-eyed emotion to carry us along, we’ll lose out. John Rember, in “Traplines,” a stirring account of his return to his childhood home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley, takes this idea of love as a verb and applies it to his sense of place and home. The passion he expresses for his intimately drawn Sawtooth Valley is not a Hallmark card sentiment of ardor steeped in saccharin. Rather, it’s an attachment that spans generations, has been through the wringer and is now a bit tattered, yet remains constant just the same. As he honors the world of his rugged boyhood, “when the fish were wild in the rivers, when our neighbors had always been cowboys,” Rember also bemoans its passing. His is a devotion that takes unflinching measure of the frailties and hardships of this beloved landscape.

Rember’s essays span his childhood years from the late 1950s through the early ‘60s, as the son of a trapper and hunting guide; he relishes the hardscrabble, rural existence, learning to hunt, fish and trap from a young age, taking a gun on his first date. This childhood is juxtaposed against his return as a Harvard-educated English professor in 1987, when he builds a new home and life for himself on the soil of his youth. The arc of the narrative celebrates the valley’s harsh climate, the difficulty of surviving in this severe environment, along with the great joys of hardy Idaho living, an existence made vivid by hiking, wildlife and the sound of grass rustling in the wind.

Tremendous change has occurred in Sawtooth Valley over the course of his lifetime, and Rember documents some of it, beginning with the Forest Service’s decision in the 1950s to bury the power lines to keep the vista pristine. While the view may have been preserved by this particular intervention, it fails to compensate for the damage being done to the area’s ecosystem. “Government programs poisoned grasshoppers with DDT in Sawtooth Valley,” he tells us, “and we stopped seeing eagles and hawks and ospreys and herons. The Idaho Fish and Game Department used Toxaphene to poison Pettit 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.” Now when he catches salmon in his backyard river he knows they’re no kin to the wild salmon of his youth. Raised in a hatchery, transported over dams by human handlers, they’ve become “artificial wildlife,” having “more in common with my neighbor’s domestic cows than the wild salmon I caught when I was ten and twelve.”

As his outside world has changed, so too has his interior landscape. One of the book’s strongest essays, “Making Bombs,” tracks Rember’s late adolescence when, still living in Sawtooth Valley, he acquired a hippie persona and managed to alienate many of the region’s locals. He grew his hair long, sported a goatee and wore tie-dyed bell-bottoms. “I looked like no one remotely related to my history....I had stopped being who I had been and had constructed someone else to be.” This hippie creation, he realizes, was a step in defining himself, in setting himself apart from his background, a separation that allowed him to then go on to Harvard. Rember shudders now when he thinks of other personas he might have constructed that year on his own -- perhaps a nice guy who followed all the rules, got a neat haircut, shaved. “That person,” he reflects, “would have been much more difficult to escape.”

In “Solo,” he writes humorously of the distinctions between summer people and local people in Stanley, the town where he lives -- though most residents would claim he doesn’t live in Stanley, it being a point of stubborn pride that only those who’ve “paid their dues” can say they live in Stanley. “[A]lmost everyone in Stanley thinks everyone else is an outsider,” he tells us. And yet for all the changes and destruction, the not-belonging and the severe weather, Rember celebrates in a Whitmanesque manner the stunning Sawtooth realm. “I get up in the morning, open the doors to the sun and tree-cleaned air and a backyard river that has never known a discharge of treated effluent, look up at mountains that tear holes in the clouds, watch the eagle that has made this stretch of the river his home this winter, and consider myself among the luckiest of men.” His ardor is contagious, inviting readers to see once again the majesty of the natural world and to love what we find, austere weather and human-wrought damage notwithstanding.