ongoing. But the green tundra that surrounds the stream’s beginnings as small furrows of trickling water above tree line, the alpine meadows and dense forests of its midstream meanders, the narrow, deep rock canyon of steeply tumbling chaos that characterizes the wild creek just before its confluence with Cascade Creek a mile or so above its joining with the Animas River several thousand vertical feet below Lime Creek’s lush green beginnings do not appear to have changed at all.
But the region the stream flows through and the man who steps into that stream are no longer the same.
Those who have read the first edition of this little book already know that an extended essay begun in the attempt to explore one idea grew in the course of its writing into a collection of small vignettes that added another theme. The first edition began with the assertion that, in an age when bold journeys to distant places seemed to have captured the fancy of many readers (often to the exclusion of reading about more humble excursions), significant journeys of discovery did not require great distance and even greater adventures in order to be meaningful. In fact, that introduction asserted, perhaps the best place for such a journey of discovery was one’s own home, one’s own region, one’s own place. A few months into the writing, my partner and love, Karen Boucher—K. B., was diagnosed with leukemia and within a year, before the book had been completed, she had died from the ravages of that disease. What began as an exploration of physical place, a collection of tales set in a valley we both dearly loved, became also an exploration of the experience of illness, loss, and grief, and the discovery of rebirth and healing in the powerful presence of nature and in the awareness and experience of natural cycles.
It was this rebirth that was anticipated, hoped for but not yet fully realized, that was metaphorically represented in the first edition’s epilogue as the coming of spring, an inevitable spring that would follow as it must, as it always had, a long winter in the Lime Creek valley.
The first edition alluded to environmental concerns with an incipient awareness that sensed a reality climate science would soon confirm. The carbon emissions that we’d been pouring into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, that we’ve continued to pour into the atmosphere over the course of the thirty years since this book was begun have dramatically altered the alpine environment. Surrounding peaks once climbed in deep, firm, hard snow as late as early July now rarely hold snow (except in their most shaded north-facing gullies) much past May. Warmer, drier winters have seriously stressed the forests of the San Juan Mountains allowing cataclysmic fires to rage with a frequency and intensity they rarely demonstrated before, many of those fires fueled by acre upon acre of standing deadwood the result of beetle kill. The trees of those forests once suffered less stress because they had been well watered by deep, long lasting winter snows. The bitter, subzero cold that was once common in winter greatly reduced tree-killing insect populations. As a consequence, previous cleansing fires had been less frequent and far less catastrophic. On the Atlantic side of the Continental Divide, not terribly far east of Lime Creek in the Rio Grande River headwaters, the effects of beetle kill have been so severe, so extensive, that over great swaths of land few healthy trees remain.
Strangely, wonderfully, the worst ravages of climate change have not yet appeared in the Lime Creek valley. The winters are not as cold. The snow is not as deep. Winter doesn’t last as long as it once did, but vast expanses of standing dead timber have not yet appeared. The high tundra still absorbs and gently releases the downpours from summer storms. Other streams in the region now quickly rise and become muddy during such spates, but for the most part Lime Creek remains clear. How long it will last, I do not know, but for now the Lime Creek valley is a place one can go and experience the world as it was, a place where one can imagine that there are still regions relatively untouched by the ravages of human population growth, modernization, and the now readily seen as not entirely wonderful consequences of industrial progress. For now, for a while, Lime Creek remains a place of natural beauty where one can go to heal a wounded modern soul.
There have been other changes.
The child I wrote about in the first edition of this book, my son, Daniel, who once roamed the dense woods that press up against the banks of some favorite stretches of stream, places I often fished while he played in and explored his own private Lime Creek, is no longer a child. He is a grown man entering middle age, a father with a career all his own and two wonderful daughters, my grandchildren. He now lives in Oregon, but it was to Lime Creek he brought his first daughter, Julia, to learn to skip stones in the same calm glide of creek where he first skipped his own flat stones, and after his second child had come it was in the forest beside Lime Creek where both my granddaughters, Julia and Sophia, gathered their first wild mushrooms. We gathered them together with my partner, my wife, my love, Debbie.
The years subsequent to the publication of the first edition of this book have afforded me the pleasure of travel to some very extraordinary, quite wild places. As anyone who has read either this or any other of my books knows fly fishing is no small part of my life. In fact, it was the hope of taking a trout on a fly that first drew me to Lime Creek in 1976, almost immediately after I’d made a home in the nearby mountain town of Silverton. My writing about fly fishing and my desire to see and come to know other streams, other rivers have found me gleefully casting for and sometimes catching the steelhead and salmon of Vancouver Island and northern British Columbia. I’ve fussed over some picky trout in Montana. I’ve even dabbled a bit with the temptations of saltwater species in the brackish mangroves and bays of southern Florida. The rivers and streams of Colorado and northern New Mexico, and most especially the five great trout rivers and the headwater streams that constitute those rivers’ beginnings in the southern flank of the San Juan Mountains have been my home for much of my life. For twenty-five years, I made a living guiding these waters. The rivers and streams I have fished and come to know, the wild places I have been privileged to experience are now numerous. But one remains my favorite. One is the headwater of my own understanding. One is the place I return to again, and again. That stream is Lime Creek. That place is the Lime Creek valley. And it is this stream, this valley, that continues to frame and inform my own personal odyssey.
INTRODUCTION
The contemporary mind seems to have reserved a rather distant and peculiar place for nature. Some (the least perceptive among us) feel that nature is simply the place where we find the resources to fuel our existence. Some feel compelled occasionally to travel to this place called nature in order to restore their mental health or to learn the lessons that nature has to teach. We are surrounded by magazines, books, and documentary films that show us the incredible value, beauty, richness, and diversity of a distant nature. In each case—as a thing to be exploited, a place to visit, or a place from which to learn—nature exists as something separate from ourselves.
Humans have walked upon the earth for countless millennia, but for most of that time travel was limited. Magazines, books, and films did not exist. Exposure to distant places and events did not occur. Each individual had access to his own observations and his own immediate place. Shared experience took the form of a cultural inheritance, embodied in slowly evolving rituals and oral tradition. These too were rooted in place. Even those who ranged through a relatively wide expanse of terrain—moving with the seasons, following good weather, and migrating game—moved at a pace slow enough to allow a constant sense of immediacy. Nature, I suspect, would have been a foreign concept in this context. Life absorbed it, and it could not be conceived of as a separate entity. I believe there are advantages to be had in regaining this perspective.
Contemporary literature reflects the values of the societies within which it flourishes. Much writing ranges widely, explores the distant, details the strange, and revels in the obscure. The tendency is not strictly modern. We find evidence of it for as long as there has been literature. Homer expressed the Greek heroic ideal by sending Odysseus off to a distant war and then on a roundabout journey home. His travels to faraway lands were filled with discovery, and we are led to believe that such a life brings great knowledge. Appearing much less heroic and learned in these tales was Penelope, who waited at home for the return of her husband.
Contemporary ideals of heroism, greatness and significant exploration seem to follow the Greek heroic model. Discoveries aren’t discoveries at all unless they are made far from home in