Indian Creek Chronicles. - book reviews

American Forests, March-April, 1994 by Bill Rooney

Pete Fromm was a brash 20-year-old college kid when he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to forego his senior year at the University of Montana in favor of spending the seven coldest months of the year alone in a canvas tent high in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. His job: to keep open and ice-free an 80-yard-long six-foot-wide channel, home to millions of salmon fry that his employer, the Idaho Fish and Game Department, hoped would "imprint" with whatever signal it is that brings salmon back from the ocean to their home stream.

This is the story of a journey--not the fish's thousand-mile homecoming, but rather Fromm's odyssey into himself. You do a lot of ruminating when your job takes up only half an hour a day--and when your camp is low in a river canyon whose walls admit the sun about 10 a.m. and shut it off by midafternoon. And when the crank-up phone doesn't work because trees have fallen on the lines.

Of course, there was Boone, a ratlike little dog a roommate had given him. And a dozen cords of wood to be cut to get him through the Bitterroot's bitter nights--something to do in his spare time. And Paradise guard station was just up the road a few miles (no one was in it, though, and he didn't have a snowmobile).

For a while the toughest thing was the loneliness. Oh, elk and lion hunters came by now and then, and the wardens snow-machined out once a month or so to check on him and the channel. But no amount of wood gathering or snowshoeing up to where the sun shone all day could keep away the longing for friends and family.

Gradually, though, the brash young college kid began to handle it. He somehow made it through the 40-below nights, the solitary Christmas dinner, the exhausting snowshoe trips to the sun. To supplement his larder of rice, beans, and other basics (his pretrip shopping spree was a disaster), he killed a young moose out of season. He made an unforgettable discovery of an elemental encounter between a deer and a large bobcat, which he had to put out of its misery.

Fromm's decision to tackle the wild that winter was fueled mostly by the mountain-man mentality and a young man's belief in his own invincibility. But those seven months took him far beyond that place. If you liked A River Runs Through It, you'll love Indian Creek Chronicles.