Photo by David N. Seelig 

A melancholy memory

John Rember's 'Traplines' evokes
the true nature of his own public Idaho

By Jennifer Pattison

The pioneering spirit of Idaho flows in the blood of author John Rember, instilled there by a childhood in the heart of Sawtooth Valley. In the book “Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley,” he captures that spirit in a stark and unrelenting way.

The words between the covers of this autobiographical work exact a truth hidden beneath the well-intentioned struggle against change. From naive enthusiasm at the introduction to the valley of power lines and summer cabins in the ’50s, to condescension at the government’s efforts to halt such visible signs of human progress in 1972, with the creation of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Rember presents the perspective of the land from one who is irrevocably a part of it.

Rember extracts a lesson from the history of Sawtooth Valley. Once something has been altered by humanity, attempting to recapture its former state results in a museum-like, hypocritical existence, where farmed fish swim in place of their wild cousins and a population of caretakers flows between the mountain peaks in place of cattle. But, as Rember reflects, “There are worse lives than those lived in museums.”

In the following excerpts from “Traplines” Rember evokes the struggle of man, beast and mountain against the tide of civilization.

“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.”

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“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 … 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.”

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“There are still cows in the valley, but their owners worry more about the price of money than the price of beef. The ranches are still here, as pastoral as ever, but their owners are often elsewhere, especially during the coldest part of the winter. Some of the old ranch houses have been torn down and giant new log homes have been built for new owners, who live here during the summer and fall.
We have a population of caretakers.”

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“Everyone is living out his or her own story on the trail. Stories are artifice, and when you live your own story what you’re doing is placing one artifact—the self—within another artifact—the story. You’re making a thing like an Oriental carving, a thing like a jade bird with delicate jade feathers enclosed in a cage of woven jade reeds. It’s fragile. The whole thing can shatter if you drop it.

Get out in the wild, away from houses, cars, diplomas, software, and jobs. Then stop speaking, lose language, fail to grasp the word, and your self just might begin to slip from your story. We all instinctively know that. It’s why people on the Iron Creek Trail tell people they’ve just met intimate details of their own lives. It’s why they carve their name on trees on the shores of Sawtooth Lake. It’s why they shoot guns and spray-paint rocks and toss beer cans into twenty feet of crystal-clear water. They’re making their stories strong enough.”

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“Lately I’ve been thinking about all the sadness that attends the death of a salmon run. I remember seeing schools of sockeye swim in Redfish waters, and I remember the spawning Chinook that were thick in the river where it runs through the pasture west of my house.”

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“One of the things that happens when we get confronted with no-fish-where-fish-used-to-be is that we remember moments when we looked with wonder at a world not entirely reduced to human dimension.

The grief that attends that memory is unbearable. That’s why we pretend that the runs can be restored again, as if those restored runs would be anything but the Chinook and sockeye equivalent of planted rainbow. If we admit what has finally happened—that the wild runs are extinct—we end up … mourning the death of the poor fish, but actually mourning the death of a wondering part of ourselves.”