I am excited for release of two new works of narrative non-fiction between late summer of 2018 and spring of 2019. 

The Voices of Rivers: Reflections on Places Wild and Almost Wild became available in April of 2019, from Homebound Publications . This collection of essays was set in Alaska, Montana, and Maine. Much of writing was based on my time as Artist-in-Residence at Glacier National Park (Montana) in June of 2017 and Artists-in-Residence at Acadia National Park in (Maine) in May of 2018, as well as time spent in National Parks, National Forests, and State Parks of Alaska, especially some amazing time over three trips to The Farm Lodge in Lake Clark National Park with visits down to Katmai National Park and Preserve. Scan down for some early response to this new book with praise coming from nature writers, fly fishing writers, environmentalists, and poets alike.  

Over the Summer of 2018, A Tale of Three Rivers: of Wooly Buggers, Bowling Balls, Cigarette Butts, and the Future of Appalachian Brook Trout was published by Wings Press . This is the second volume in the Heart Streams series that began with Trout in the Desert. A Tale of Three Rivers is a small collection of essays set in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Vermont, and Maine. I wrote it at the Cabin at Shotpouch Creek while a Writer-in-Residence on the Spring Creek Project.  

As the title suggests, the book shares the story of three different rivers going in different directions--or, rather, of one little tile in the mosaic that is the story of each of these rivers. The book speaks of warning and loss as well as of hope: of streams full of old appliances and a trout eating cigarette butts, as well as the return of osprey, eagles, loons, and trout to a river once listed among the filthiest in the United States. See below for an excerpt.  

Excerpt from A Tale of Three Rivers

I stood with my 5-wt 9’ fly rod in hand, looking down the steep bank toward the stream that flowed beneath me. Despite the excitement I had felt on the drive here, I was not especially eager to descend the bank. I took my time pondering what fly to tie on. Some below-the-surface search pattern, perhaps? Probably a black bead-head wooly bugger or cone-head wooly bugger, my favorite search pattern in rivers that might hold big fish. But I might have also been considering a smaller brown wooly worm with some sort of pheasant tail or hare’s ear nymph tied below it as a second fly, a “dropper”. I was somewhat ambivalent. The river looked lifeless, and that was how I felt.

It was not the mud, nor the grey February skies, nor the barren oaks and sycamores that gave this morning its bleak lifelessness—that made the river appear dead and unappealing. Even the old rusting appliances and abandoned autos lining the streamside, the dishwashers, clothes washers, and Toyota Capris, unsightly though they were, did not utterly destroy the delight I usually have when approaching a river where I hope to find trout. It was the new raw trash strewn along the bank, and floating down the current that did me in: Styrofoam cups and plates and fast food restaurant refuse, plastic garbage bags, plastic cartons, and the castoffs of pre-packaged modernity. The streambed was a moving landfill, a shouted obscenity.

Sugaring season was barely starting up north. I had been cross-country skiing a few days earlier. But winter ends much earlier in North Carolina than in my home in Vermont. Even in the higher reaches of the Smoky Mountains in the western part of North Carolina, the snow had melted and spring did not look far away. My brother informed me that the river levels had come down considerably from the week earlier when the snow had been melting. The spring spawning run of rainbow trout out of the nearby lake was probably over. The water was only slightly off-color, as if it had rained two days before. Or a farmer had recently spread manure or tilled his field somewhere upstream.

I have lived much of my life in and around the Appalachian mountains. I have been awed by their beauty and splendor. And I have spent time around others from a variety of different backgrounds, religions, careers, and educations who have loved its landscapes as much as I, and who have worked hard to care for them. Economic status, at least in my experience, is not a reliable indicator of one’s attitudes toward nature. I have known those both with and without worldly wealth who have lived in harmony with others and with the world. And I have know both rich and poor who have actively exploited, or at least wantonly disregarded, the natural and human world.

Still, there is a particular brand of Appalachian poverty I have too often seen that seems to go hand in hand with an attitude of disregard and disrespect for nature. It is a culture that engenders this disrespect. This was not the first river I’d been to that had been turned into a landfill by the lazy disposal of old appliances and automobiles that paid no heed to either the beauty or the health of the land being “filled”.

Excerpt from Downstream

It is mid-morning on a late June day when we arrive in the tiny village of Gilead, Maine and put our canoe into the Androscoggin River. We park the car at the bridge downstream from the small delta where the Wild River flows in from the south out of Evans Notch and the shadow of Mount Washington. It is a rich and verdant valley. The shores are lined with a varied mix of hardwoods and conifers. Tall pines and spruce tower over the smaller cedars right on the water’s edge. The white of the occasional paper birch stands in sharp contrast to the deeper greens. Standing here I think of the Biblical town of Gilead in another mountainous region, one east of the Jordan River in ancient Israel. The name Gilead means “hill of witness.” This modern Gilead, also, will be a witness of something good, of life where there once was death. It will be a place of balm to heal an old and mortal wound.

Dave and I are here with Dave’s thirteen-year-old son Michael for a day of fly-fishing and canoeing along a six-mile-long float of the Androscoggin. In the past, the river has held transplanted European browns and west coast rainbows. But recently native eastern brookies have been returning—some on their own, finding their way down from clean mountain tributaries like the Wild River, and some with the help of state hatchery trucks. We are hoping to hook some brook trout, but we will be happy to catch any trout at all.

To say that the water is high, however, would be a gross understatement. Two weeks of daily thunderstorms have turned it into a dark and wild torrent. “Almost unfishable” is the expression we use to describe it. And dark clouds are threatening even more rain. We consider turning back to the camp where we are staying twenty minutes away in the village of Bryant Pond. But Dave and Michael have driven from South Dakota to spend a week with me in Maine. We don’t have the luxury of waiting a few days for the water to settle. So we go through the motions of setting up our rods and tying on flies, even though this small labor may prove futile.

Just below its confluence with the Wild River, the main current of the Androscoggin divides around a wide gravel bar. The stronger current flows down the southern shore past a pair of huge granite boulders, deposited here centuries ago by the forces that shape rivers. A few dozen yards below the boulders, the river narrows and the southern channel swirls hard around a long, deep ledge. A smaller channel, though one still too deep to wade except in mid-summer, follows the wooded northern shore. The gravel bar separating these two channels is about thirty yards wide and fifty yards long. In the summer it typically ranges from a few inches deep to something just over the knees. When the water is at mid-summer low, some of the gravel bar becomes exposed, and the currents on either side are slow and shallow enough that a steady and adventurous wader can sometimes work out to it from upstream. On the downstream side, however, it drops off into a deep hole and is accessible only by boat.

My favorite way to fish this stretch is to canoe up from below, anchor the canoe on rocks or in shallow water midstream between the swift currents, and then step out of the canoe and wade the gravel bar in the middle of the river. In this way I can cast to either side or work the deep pool below without having to deal with the clumsiness of casting from a canoe.

On this day, however, this gravel bar is under so much water it isn’t even visible. Not that it matters. We couldn’t paddle a canoe against the heart of the rain-swelled current. There is no way up there without an outboard motor. And no anchor would hold us even if we succeeded in getting there. The best we can do is paddle hard up the eddies against the north shore and take a few casts behind the boulders that stick out a dozen yards downstream of the gravel bar. Dave is in the bow of our canoe, and Michael sits in a low seat in the middle. I am in the stern. Dave and Michael tie on streamers, and I put on a large heavily weighted stonefly nymph. We make the requisite casts, letting our flies sink as deep as they can. The casts, as expected, are fruitless. We should probably remove the word “almost” from the phrase “almost unfishable”. The turbulent water is the color of tea that had been left steeping far too long. Perhaps Earl Grey, Dave’s favorite afternoon blend. How many feet of visibility in a really large cup of Earl Grey?

Excerpt from Trout in the Desert

However there are native trout in the arid southwest. They live high in the mountains, often at 6000’ or 7000’ in elevation, in waters fed much of the year by snow runoff, and by cold springs exposed tens of thousands of years ago by volcanic eruptions like the ones that created the caldera from which the headwaters of the West Fork of the Gila flow. They remain shielded by a canopy of forests that grow even in the southwest at altitudes where peaks can trap passing moisture.

Many of these trout populations are gone, mostly because of human changes to their environment. But endangered remnants of some remain, where they and their environment have been protected. Strains of native cutthroats can still be found even in the higher elevations in tributaries of the Rio Grande near the border of Texas and New Mexico. There are even trout in the mountains further south in Mexico. Among all these desert trout, the Apache and Gila trout of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona—golden-hued relatives of the rainbow trout—hold a special place in my imagination. I had never caught or even seen one.

For the past few weeks, as I prepared for the trip, I have been reading Greg McNamee’s account of Gila: the Life and Death of an American River. It is a beautifully written tale, but also a tragic one, recounting some of the extremes of atrocities that humans are willing to commit upon one another and on the earth. It is a tale of a river that once sustained an abundance of life—including human life—over tens of thousands of square miles from the mountains of what is now New Mexico for six hundred miles westward to the Colorado River. And which now is just a dry river bed for much of its length.

Growing up in the northeast, where water is abundant, it is hard for me to imagine that a once swift and abundant river like the Gila could be so dammed and exploited that its waters no longer reach the ocean. But, of course, the Colorado River itself no longer reaches the ocean much of the year.

High up at its headwaters in the national forest that bears its name, however, the Gila still flows year round, clean and clear and cold. It has been offered some protection, thanks in part to the efforts of Aldo Leopold. Which is another reason for me to visit. I have taught courses at Middlebury College exploring the writings and ideas of Leopold, whose only life was shaped in part by his experiences along the headwaters of the Gila and by the beauty of that area. I wanted to see this land that so inspired and shaped one of our country’s most important conservationists.

Endorsements and Reviews: