field guides

I found this book a nice easy read in general. My main reason for picking it up is because this true story takes place within minutes of my residence. It was interesting to read about another person's adventures in the same wilderness that I hike, hunt, camp, and explore in on a regular basis. It is honest in that the author is not constantly glorifying himself or trying to prove that he was an expert mountain man. He also shows the reader the harsh, unforgiving environment that this area can become during the long winter months, and the dangers of not being prepared. Since it is a true story told in first-person perspective, it is more of a journal or autobiography than escape literature.

A chance conversation with a college friend sends the author venturing into the Bitterroot Wilderness along the Montana-Idaho border, where he spends a winter tending to salmon eggs for the Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game. This responsibility takes only minutes out of each day; the rest of the time is his own, and what this gregarious, impulsive, party-loving 20-year-old does with seven months of isolation in the wilderness is the central theme of this book.

Fromm makes clear from the outset that he's almost utterly unprepared for this experience, with little guiding him but a fascination for the rugged, self-sufficient mountain men whose adventures he has read about. Packing a couple books on outdoor survival, he plans to figure it out as he goes, and given a need to keep himself busy and his mind off the isolation, he acquires a range of on-the-job skills, from operating a chain saw, to camp cooking, skinning animals, and curing meat. He also hunts for game, subsisting on grouse and squirrel until he amazingly (and illegally) bags a moose with a muzzle-loader.

In fact, Fromm is not entirely alone -- he has a dog as a constant companion -- and there is a trickle of visitors throughout the winter. Besides the occasional visit by the wardens, who bring mail and packages, there are hunters and their guides who trek in on snowmobiles (snowmachines, as he learns to call them). Welcoming the company -- and curious -- he goes along on hunts, witnessing the shooting of a mountain lion.

There are some disappointments. His father and brother travel from Milwaukee and attempt to ski in but are turned back by cold and bad trail conditions. A planned "vacation" with friends in Missoula has to be cancelled when snowslides make access difficult. He consoles himself after killing and skinning an injured bobcat that he wouldn't have had this experience if he hadn't been on his own.

The book invites comparison with C. L. Rawlins' "Broken Country," in which the author recalls a college-boy summer as a cook and horse wrangler for a sheepherder in the mountains of western Wyoming. A reader will also be reminded at times of Edward Abbey's youthful "Desert Solitaire."All exhibit a willingness to abandon themselves to adventure without considerable forethought, but there's a relative lack of reflectiveness on the part of Fromm, who is able to report straightforwardly what he observes but tends to avoid making connections to the ideas of other people or to think deeply or critcally about his experience. This makes the book more of a page-turner; you rarely put it down to let something he's written soak in.

In the end, you forgive him his youth, give him credit for surviving (there are some close calls that may have turned his story into another "Into the Wild"), and appreciate the clean, clear style and the ability to create and maintain suspense (for example when his father and brother fail to arrive). I'm happy to recommend it to anyone with an interest in Western nonfiction, wilderness adventures and the psychological aspects of isolation.

"I hiked and hiked and the days grew longer but I wished for days longer still," Pete Fromm writes in this adventure memoir; "it seemed there wasn't nearly enough time to see everything I needed to see" (p. 173). After completing his degree in wildlife biology, Fromm attended night classes in Missoula's Creative Writing Program. In those classes, Fromm first began chronicling his seven-month winter adventure, guarding two and a half million salmon eggs in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, while living all by his lonesome in a canvas tent with his dog, Boone. He eventually expanded those writing assignments into his award-winning INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES, which begs comparison to John Krakauer's INTO THE WILD (1996). Both books follow the journeys of inexperienced young men into the realities of harsh winter wilderness. However, unlike Krakauer's protagonist, Fromm survived to tell his coming-of-age story, which involves face-to-face encounters with mountain lions and bobcats, learning to operate a chainsaw and trap wild animals (his raccoon story gave me nightmares), surviving food poisoning, and then readjusting to the "movement everywhere" of modern life. Easy to read and full of wilderness adventures, Fromm's book will appeal to the Thoreau in each of us.

G. Merritt