Traplines (eBook)

Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley 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. And then, depending on my horoscope in a week-old Idaho Statesman or the shape of the morning's clouds, I could fix the fences, cut firewood, change the water on the pasture, plant trees, or just fish some more. It was a vision of a life, I think now, that came from memories of our horses, brought from winter pasture every June, whinnying and bucking around the fence lines, biting into the spring grass, running full-gallop through the shallow water on flooded river islands, home at last. Such memories become metaphors, and in early middle age, such metaphors become calls to action. So when I found myself in the unexpected financial condition of being able to return home, I did. The house was begun in September 1988 and, owing to good weather all through that fall, was finished in February 1989. That March I sat at my desk, warm and comfortable, the nearby cold of the Sawtooth Valley spring held harmless by thermopane windows and six inches of fiberglass. If I looked up from my monitor, I could see the cold stone towers of Mount Heyburn, their ragged edges smoothed by thick drifts of snow. The willows in the river bottom were skeletal and frosted, but every bit as beautiful as they would be that July, when the horses would hide in them to escape the flies and the heat. The snow on the valley floor held my weight in the mornings, and at least once a day I went out to wander the fence lines, or sat on the melted-off riverbank to watch the flyovers of returning geese, or skied the hill behind the house, or ran to the mailbox when I heard the mailman accelerate toward his next target, my neighbor's mailbox a mile up Highway 75. Home at last. But it wasn't home. I found what once was familiar was unfamiliar. What once was real was no longer real. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but things had become more surface than substance for me. That fall the power crew spent a few days digging trenches and driving a pipe under the highway in order to run power underground from the pole on the other side of the road to the house. There were to be no wires in the air outside the windows of my home. The United States Forest Service wanted it that way. That agency is charged with maintaining the pastoral values of Sawtooth Valley as part of its larger mission of oversee-ing the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a central Idaho enclave of fun that includes the Sawtooth, White Cloud, and Boulder Mountain Ranges, and the small patches of flat ground between them. Forest Service agents were authorized to purchase land and easements under the 1974 Act of Congress that established the SNRA, and while my family was lucky enough to be allowed to stay, the Forest Service has told us what structures we may build and where they may be placed ever since they bought the easement on our property. In their view, electrical wires and pastoral values do not mix, and so the wires went underground. I wanted them underground anyway. A wire running into a house looks ugly, as do the strung-together lines of great steel crosses stretching across formerly pagan...