Bitterroot - A Memoir: Echoes of Beauty & Loss

by Steven Faulkner

Overview

By road, foot, mountain bike, and canoe, Steven and Alex experience the vast landscape and try to capture an understanding of the Wild Northwest.

Using the letters of the 19th-century explorer Pierre Jean De Smet, Steven Faulkner and his eighteen-year-old son, Alex, follow De Smet across the High Plains to the fur trappers’ rendezvous on the Green River, then on to the Lewis and Clark Trail, where they are taken over the Rockies–the part of the journey that almost killed the two explorers–and into the homeland of the Nez Perce whose fate is strangely tied to these emissaries from the east

 Through many chance encounters with modern residents, like Bubba, the LA gangster taking refuge in Idaho’s mountains; or Jean, the retired school teacher who as a visceral hatred of the EPA; and even Mary, the dog trainer who fought the Forest Service for ten years and won at the high cost of $100,000; Steven and Alex are able to broaden their perspective of the terrain, and themselves, in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780825307928
Publisher:	Beaufort Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/15/2016
Pages:	377
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Steven Faulkner grew up in what is now South Sudan and in Ethiopia in Africa, and later in Kansas. After dropping out of college, he worked a variety of jobs: driving dump trucks, planting grave vaults, newspaper and doughnut delivery, and fourteen years as a carpenter. He returned to school, acquired the necessary degrees, and now teaches Creative Writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. His first two books, Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss. are both nonfiction accounts of father-son journeys along historic trails.

Editorial Reviews

06/20/2016
Faulkner (Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts) marched—and drove, biked, hiked, and portaged—into history when he and his 18-year-old son Alex bonded on the Lewis and Clark Trail in the Great Northwest. In this fulsome popular history of their “risky travels,” Faulkner juxtaposes the past with the present. He contrasts his family vacation, topped by bedtime readings from Tolkien, with explorations of the Corps of Discovery and missions of Fr. Pierre DeSmet, among other intrepid 19th-century westward pioneers. The teams, past and present, share demanding land, threatening weather, and colorful interactions with people along their trail. “Baggy-bellied” father and shy son did not prepare well (no bails, no rehearsal with 60-pound packs), but they encountered nothing like the demands of the book’s historical subjects when they slogged west. Faulkner honors DeSmet’s baptisms, miles, and commitment to cooperation, and White Thunder’s record of the generous Nez Perce nation. Faulkner’s verbs vivify, his quotes enlarge his experience, and his poetic descriptions exploit all five senses colorfully; still, keener editing would have pared the backwoods baroque. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2016-05-05
A well-recounted father-and-son journey in the Missouri River country.That land is definitively Lewis and Clark territory, and that duo figures prominently, though mostly in the mountainous region of the title, a place that Faulkner (Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts, 2007)—a Kansas flatlander by way of Virginia—knows well. More, it was the haunt of Pierre Jean De Smet, a Jesuit priest who in 1840 and 1841 traveled the Oregon Trail and in the bargain helped "popularize that arduous journey west." De Smet makes a good tutelary spirit for the journey, a wise intermediary among the worlds of Europe and Native America, a binary that still exists out on the land. Mixing in accounts by a Nez Perce warrior named White Thunder, Faulkner ventures a "three-legged understanding of the northern half of what was then called the Far West." To make life interesting, he and his 18-year-old son Alex traveled by a variety of conveyances, including canoes, bicycles, and their own two feet, meeting all sorts of people, from wary sheriffs to itinerant Indians to truckers and scholars. Alex's presence complicates the narrative, but in good ways, for the father-son business between them is emphatically less fraught than what readers encounter in the kindred spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's a pleasure to find the drama in hailstorms and the bawls of grizzly bears instead. Faulkner tells an unadorned, unaffected story, with an occasional tendency to overquote from historical sources more than balanced by his strong descriptions of people and places—e.g., "We are on a high bluff of whitish-grey, speckled limestone, much of it silted over with a thin soil and fringed in blowing prairie grasses." Among the many high points are a sympathetic reimagining of Little Big Horn and a hell-for-leather bicycle ride down an impossibly steep mountain, "down and down, swerving, leaning, braking, vast treescapes of fir and spruce greeting us at every turn." A fine travelogue worthy of shelving next to Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat-Moon.

Kirkus Reviews