Wilderness of Hope: Fly Fishing and Public Lands in the American West
Quinn Grover
University of Nebraska Press $26.95
Reviewed by Glen Young
My own trout fishing did not wind up as planned this past season, the result of a busy work schedule and an unexpected late summer injury. Quinn Grover’s Wilderness of Hope: Fly Fishing and Public Lands in the American West (University of Nebraska Press) is helping to salve my ache, though.
To be sure, these stories are about trout fishing in beautiful places, like Utah and Idaho, and elsewhere in the West. But there is an environmental ethic running throughout it as well: the belief that wild places are worth preserving because “the importance of wildness and the role of public lands” benefit us all.
Invoking Wallace Stegner, Emily Dickinson, Ted Leeson, and others, Grover believes we cannot “forget that wilderness is by all rights our ancestral home, that we are wild creatures and that we cannot escape that wildness temporarily, only to return to it later when civilization wears us down.”
In “Fridays,” for example, Grover recalls skipping classes in college to fish, though he now recognizes how longing for the good old days is time wasted. Providing for his family is important, but so too is the balance he finds in fishing, something made easier by his employer’s flexible schedule. “My soul-crushing nine-to-five gives me every other Friday off,” Grover writes. This schedule offers him a chance to extend trips or plan fresh outings and the perfect way to achieve the needs of others with his need for fish.
In “Solo” and “The Case for Inefficiency,” as well as in “Mistress” and many others, Grover demonstrates the lure of home waters and adventure, how the dark holds secrets, and how fear molds us.
I appreciate Grover’s topics because he likes what I like: casting flies to hungry trout, discovering new waters while appreciating the familiar haunts of home. But the writing must also prove useful and artful. He is up to the task here. His prose melodic then straight forward; lyrical then instructive, as when he recounts his first golden trout, surrounded by “the granite and the choked high-country grass,” or later when he explains such places “cannot be purchased by credit cards or handshake agreements, where the golden treasures are trout and the only currencies are sweat and willpower.”
Grover’s stories commonly fold back to his youth in Utah and beyond, where remembering, for example, his grandfather’s cabin on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, underscores how, “Public lands tie the various versions of America together through our joint ownership, because public lands belong in public hands, not with private enterprise.”
One conundrum here, however, is how Grover convincingly portrays the necessity of wilderness and escape, but also laments—too often—the many moments he spends with other “workaday robots.” His insistence on reminding readers of the limits of his time in the water dulls the promise just a bit.
Hopefully my shoulder will heal and next summer will turn out differently than this last season. Until then, I can recall some of the trout magic in Wilderness of Hope: Fly Fishing and Public Lands in the American West.
Glen Young is a teacher, writer, kayak guide, and house painter. His poetry has appeared in The Walloon Writers Review and the anthologies Beneath the Lilac Canopy and Thoreau at Mackinac. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Teaching and Learning as well as the Little Traverse Literary Guild. He serves on the board of the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book and the Mackinac Arts Council. He divides his time between Petoskey and Mackinac Island in northern Michigan.