Tag: Boulder-White Cloud Mountains

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On John Rember, Sun Valley and Ernest Hemingway

This morning Betty and I are in Sun Valley, Hollywood in Idaho, at the Sun Valley Film Festival. Our film wasn’t chosen to be screened but our friend and mentor, Christopher Beaver has a film—Tulare-The Phantom Lake—entered and he invited us to represent him since he would be busy filming elsewhere.

Besides representing Chris, we will be doing some networking with film folk and as always, finding time for Betty to practice her photography.

Sun Valley is a beautiful place, but like many locations that sport ski areas, it seems a little too glitzy for me, so we will take a break or two from the festival and head north (if the weather permits), over Galena Summit into the Stanley Basin and escape to something a bit more real.

Fairfield, on the Road to Sun Valley

The Stanley Basin is a hard country—a beautiful country—but a hard country. The Salmon River and several of its tributaries meander down from the surrounding peaks and form a bowl that holds the heavy air of winter so that the climate in the Basin is some of the coldest in the country. People who endure in the Basin year ‘round are few, they are hardy and they have an arrogance that announces they can make it through the frost, the cold, the wind, the snow, the long, long teeth of winter’s bite.

The valley is rimmed by the Sawtooths on one side and the Boulder-White Clouds on the other. The bottom land is willows and sage and aspen in the cold, wet spots. A favorite recreational area, the Basin draws sportsmen from all over the world as does Sun Valley, but a twain often resides between the kinds of men and women who go after the glitz of Sun Valley and the folks who travel into the Stanley Basin.

Big Wood River, south of Sun Valley

Not to say that I am either a glitzer or a rough-necker, I am neither. I do enjoy the outdoors, but also enjoy the conveniences of the town where I live.

The Stanley Basin is one of those places that is so beautiful in late spring and summer and fall that you just want to rent or buy a cabin and live there away from it all. But according to Stanley Basin dweller and part time native, John Rember, the Basin and its hardies eat up newcomers like premium ice cream.

Last month I heard Rember, an author and educator, talk about writing. He also read one of his short stories. Rember lives in the Basin on the property his father and mother weaned him on when being able to kill a buck, an elk, catch a salmon, really mattered to one’s ability to survive. Not like now, where the state regulates hunting and fishing and we go do it because it’s fun and our friends want to kill something and so do we.

I was so impressed with Rember, I bought two of his books, MFA in a Box (Dream of Things, Downers Grove, Ill, 2010) and Traplines (Vintage Books, New York, NY, 2004).

MFA in a Box is a how-to, a why-to book about creative writing. But more than that it is a journey through literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Ernest Hemingway. On the way, we get a little Jung, Dostoevsky, Boccaccio, Borges, Atwood, Camus, Conrad and Bly, to name a few. We also get a look into Rember’s life. Besides being a survey of literature and a how-to book about writing, I think the book is also memoir.

For example, here is a passage from the chapter on “Writing Image.” Rember is writing about a dream he had, about Hemingway (Rember evidently used to run into Hemingway before that author’s suicide in 1961), and other things.

I’m walking along a river. It’s swollen with spring runoff, and as I am wading through flooded riverbank grass I look ahead to a crowd of people clustered at the side of a bridge. I get closer and see that they’re looking at a body wrapped around one of the pilings. When I get to the crowd, I ask who has drowned. Somebody says it’s Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway looks awful. Fish have eaten off his nose and his flesh has the clean translucence of death-by-washing.

When I initially read this passage, I thought it was real because of the quality of the writing. Notice Rember’s prose. Short and gets to the point, and not unlike something Hemingway would have written ninety years ago. Notice how Rember uses imagery in the piece. You can see the setting, the people, the death.

In his book Traplines the author delivers fourteen essays about the Stanley Basin: learning to hunt and fish, making bombs, building fence, and trapping, among other things. In his spare prose, similar to Hemingway’s style in that regard, Rember muses on his days running a string of pack mules in central Idaho; on skiing volcanoes; on shooting rockchucks with his first date, an older girl named Corinna, the sheriff showing up as they are drinking beer, Rember being the age of fourteen; hauling freshly cut and peeled posts in Harrah’s old De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft into a ranch in the back-country.

Along the way, we get insights into how Rember thinks, what is important to him. Educated at Harvard and the University of Montana, having taught creative writing at College of Idaho(among other places), he has a somewhat unique point of view considering the meaning of life.

I have not been into the Sun Valley or Stanley Basin country since I read these two books by John Rember. So when we go over the summit, I will be looking at the country to see if I can identify places he talks about. Along the road looking at the russet branches of willow and the bare limbs of the quakies in the cold places, I will consider what he told me in his books and mesh that with what I think, what I know about life coming from another place—the desert—and having my own stories of hard-bitten life.

And if I see a moose, or not, I will think I’m in the wilderness, even though the glitz is just over the summit.

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Leaf Peeping

I am a desert rat and have since childhood mouthed dialogue about the beauty of the mountains vis à vis the desert. The mountains generally have no sand and wind that drives the sand and pits the paint job on your new Mercedes Benz, no short-legged plants, no spiny cacti, but trooping phalanxes of spruce and fir and pine. But here I am after a life lived and I’m still in the desert. The mountains are close, but I still hover around the roots of the big sage, the bitterbrush, the winter fat.

Once it was mesquite and palo verde and saguaro and Indian wheat. The names have changed but the milieu remains the same. Relatively dry, relatively warm. Big open vistas, a certain beauty to the landscape, even if it is harsh, or its ambiance is harsh.

Yet the harsh nature of the desertscape is no more dangerous than what one encounters in the pine-clad high country to the north of Boise, Idaho, where we live. I’d say fifty below is harsh even if it inhabits the pristine beauty of a winterland of ice crystals and frozen mist and miles and miles of spear-point spruce sheathed in an armor of ice. Maybe that is why I stick to the lower extremities of earth.

Regardless of my obvious preference for desert climes, for six years I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico and the legacy it left me, among other things, was a love for the turning of the leaves. Once I read an essay in The New Yorker Magazine by Stephen King about “leaf peepers.” When I saw the title I was curious about leaf peepers and what kind of insect they might be that sat on leaves and peeped their lives away in search of sex, breeding and compliance with the ultimate command to all life on earth: survive. When King described the leaf peepers, I was surprised to find out they are the people who come to Maine to watch the colors of the maple trees change from green to red and gold. As I read that article, I knew right then that at heart, I was a leaf peeper. I admit it. I am a tourist of foliage, a consumer of ripe reds, and orange tones that look like phosphorescent tints, and rusty hues that are redolent with memories of old Caterpillar engines left out in the rain for ages.

Two weekends ago, Betty and I, along with friends, ventured to Sun Valley, Idaho for a number of reasons, one being to take part in leaf peeping. We arrived on a Thursday evening and were disappointed with the color, but it was spitting a mixture of rain and snow and there was snow in the high country and I figured as soon as it cleared off, the frost would arrive and then the color change would accelerate.

On a Saturday morning that broke clear and fresh, we pulled out before sunrise and headed north out of the Wood River Valley, over Galena Summit and down into the Stanley Basin. As we broke over the summit, the Sawtooth Mountains on the west of the basin and the Boulder-White Clouds on the east reared up with their high shoulders, their peaks covered with fresh snow. The sunlight was just breaching the dawn and lighted up the peaks of the Sawtooths snaking from south to north. Sawtooth is an apt name for the peaks that remind one of the saws lumberjacks used to employ to knock down the big trees, long before chain saws showed up. Saws with large, sharp teeth that could bite into live wood, or flesh.

Fog and mist and nary a hint of air pollution hung in the air. Pronghorns grazed in the pastures of cow and sheep outfits with names like Busterback Ranch and Stanley Basin Ranch and Sawtooth Mountain Ranch.

I love aspen and learned it I suppose from the huge groves that cape the cold sides of the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. Aspen grow in huge gangs there, and love places where the snow gets deep and stays deep into the spring. Elk and deer and black bear seem drawn, as do I, to the groves.

When autumn arrives, the trees know (do they know like we do on some epistemological level?) that they need to go into survival mode to make it through winter. The green color in the leaves vacates and leaves the underlying golds and reds behind. The sugar in the leaves gets trapped and the frost, when seared by sunlight, reacts with the sugar and the leaves take on even more brilliant hues. This is what I adore, this chemical reaction turned into art….art….art.

When I was young, I went on camping trips with the Boy Scouts up to Holly Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was usually August, so the leaves had not changed by then, but I still wondered at the way the Rocky Mountain Maple leaves reminded me of Picasso-like hands and how the sunlight caught in the dimples of the aspen leaves and shimmered as they quaked in the alpine breezes. (The locals called them “quakies.”)

One summer as we loaded vehicles to head out of the high country, we discovered a porcupine climbing an aspen. Since porcupines tend to be nocturnal, I suppose it was climbing up to find a notch in the limbs to sleep the day away, or maybe it was headed for an aspen leaf breakfast. I watched with…with…with what….horror? as some of the bigger boys bombarded the creature with stones, then large rocks and big rounds of aspen we had cut down for firewood. I recall the porcupine fell to the ground and I refused to look at it as they laughed and finished it off. I walked away and got in the back seat of an old green Chevy Suburban and we drove out of the mountains, back into the Sonoran Desert.

But on this latest leaf-peeping trip of a couple of weeks ago, the violence of humanity was not so readily apparent. Nestled in the coves, the rincons, the draws of the mountains and foothills lining Stanley Basin were stands of aspen in varying degrees of leaf peeper heaven. Yellow, gold and a red tints that seemed to capture all the glitz of Times Square as they shined at us, neon-like, as we drove the road toward Stanley. And they shined something else at us, a promise…a promise of more color to come.