Lime Creek Odyssey

Reflecting on Homer's epic, photographer Meyers finds himself more in sympathy with Penelope than with Odysseus. He prefers intimate exploration of familiar places to heroic travel in distant lands; thus he here reveals the essence of his home ground. Meyers has written an extraordinarily sensitive account of one individual's perceptions of and reactions to his surroundings: Lime Creek, a small stream in the heart of the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, where he has climbed many of the peaks, waded the streambeds, fished and walked the woods in solitude. Earlier he had been a surveyor on projects that held a threat to the environment, and he ponders on the moral inconsistency in his attitudes toward his work and his love of the land, focusing on his sense of personal responsibility for the natural world about him. Lime Creek represents joy and sorrow (the death of a loved one), but also hope and renewal. Meyers is confident that life will go on there--as it always has. (Apr.)