TRAPLINES: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley

After nearly 30 years away, Rember, a Harvard-educated English professor at Idaho's Albertson College and holder of various odd jobs, returns to his backwoods roots in Stanley, Idaho. The hardscrabble wilderness of his youth has seen major changes: pushed to the brink of environmental disaster from nuclear waste runoff and overbuilding, it has been reclaimed by well-meaning preservationists and returned to something that resembles home, only "what once was familiar was unfamiliar. What once was real was no longer real." Native fish have long disappeared, replaced by farmed fish; wild game replaced by protected "wildlife." Yet, sunsets are still magical and the old fences and ruined cabins still have stories to tell. As Rember relives his youth, his focus moves away from the ways his surroundings have changed to the ways he has changed. As he revisits his home grounds—looking at the antlers his trapper/fishing guide father collected; finding an old photo of his grandma, who lived "on the ragged far edge of consensus reality"; remembering the elks he shot and gutted—he relives the turning points, the revelations, the small epiphanies "for which all subsequent living is merely repetition and elaboration." He used to think life was about "free will," but now, feeling the tug of his own history, he can settle for "free fall." Rember writes sentences so elegantly crafted they seem effortless, tells stories so well turned readers will want to read them aloud. Beneath the writing, it's Rember's voyage to self-consciousness that gives his story power and meaning. (July 15)

Forecast:Readers who loved William Gruber's On All Sides Nowhere (Mariner, 2002) may enjoy this very different but beautifully rendered Idaho memoir.