As a mere twelve-year resident of Wyoming, I sometimes hear the
refrain: “You should have been here when it was good.” This refers
to any time from the '60s through the '80s, before the '90s
technological revolution that has helped make the American West the
fastest growing region in the country, sending subdivisions and
“ranchettes” spreading to the horizon. John Rember is one of those
folks who was here “when it was good.” His Traplines: Coming
Home to Sawtooth Valley (Pantheon Books, 237 pages, $22) is a
craftily written memoir of a vanished time and place.
Rember was born in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1951. Like many western
states, Idaho in the '50s was an amalgam of an agricultural economy
and a tourist one. Sun Valley had skiing and sheep drives through
town and celebrities such as Ernest Hemingway wandering into local
barrooms. Nearby Stanley — where Rember grew up — had a winter
population of 36, and a summer count of twenty times that number.
Today, he laments that the true ranch life is gone, and the region
is dominated by “a population of caretakers.”
The author’s roots in Idaho go back generations, and he vividly
recounts the lives of an extended family. His Grandmother Alice
Rember was an eccentric who collected alarmist books about the Cold
War and UFO stories. His father John Rember taught him how to hunt
and fish and handle horses and mules, the latter skills useful to
the son while working for the Forest Service later in life. And in
hard times Rember, Sr. was an accomplished deer poacher, and the
subject of many stories about him outwitting local game
wardens.
The book’s setting is the Sawtooth Range country of central
Idaho, specifically Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey, Challis and
Stanley. The latter, for instance, is hard up against the
Sawtooths, mountains as spectacularly jagged as those other
American Alps, the Tetons. It is a region of lush, green summers
and ferocious winters. Ranches, noisy creeks, and chattering groves
of aspen sheltering herds of regal elk beneath the snowy peaks.
Fish stories are a big part of the book. The region in the '50s
was famous for its Chinook salmon fishing, the spawning runs
blocked — or at least impeded— by the construction of dams on the
Snake River later on. Back then the salmon runs even crowded
irrigation ditches in the Sawtooth Valley. There were beaver ponds
that teemed with brook trout on ranches now subdivided and the
ponds drained. The author’s father was a summertime fishing guide
on the Salmon River, and his clients included Eisenhower
presidential adviser Sherman Adams, out on a scouting trip. Ike
himself considered the Sawtooth area for a western Camp David,
until his first heart attack, when his doctors advised against
spending time at high altitudes. Of the vanished fisherman’s
paradise, Rember writes: “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 at wonder at a world not entirely
reduced to human dimension.”
Rember’s “hippie” period in Stanley in the late '60s is
chronicled in a chapter whimsically titled “When Fences Fly,” when
he worked at among other things building a fence for the late Las
Vegas casino king Bill Harrah. Harrah had a remote ranch on the
Middle Fork of the Salmon River that was wholly bordered by the
Sawtooth National Forest, from which he was forbidden to take
lumber. So Rember and others cut the fenceposts elsewhere, and they
were flown in to Harrah’s private airstrip at the ranch in his De
Havilland Twin Otter. This was Rember’s first experience with
someone who had enough money to make his own mark upon the world.
As he accompanied the 3,000 pound fencepost loads and marveled at
the views on his first bumpy airplane rides, Rember compared
Harrah’s life to his, and thought that having money “was not just
something you had to keep the bank from taking away the house or
the farm. Harrah could fly whole fences into his ranch simply
because he didn’t want to argue with the Forest Service about
cutting trees on the Middle Fork.” This observation speaks volumes
about how the West has changed in the last generation.
John Rember’s late father was an expert trapper, an old school
westerner who could literally support a family thanks to his deep
knowledge of the natural world. Traplines consist of stops at
carefully planned sites designed to yield the harvest of an animal
valuable for itself. And always an animal — such as a beaver, a
fox, a coyote or a bobcat — smart enough not to get caught unless
the trapper has expertise.
So John Rember’s Traplines. Work the line, though the
take gets thinner. Change and adapt or get swept out of the way by
unforgiving economic forces. But there are the memories; revel in
them.
Never forget what a wonderful time it was.
