In the heart of Idaho's Salmon River Mountains, a woman unknowingly begins what becomes a journey of understanding. Haunted by personal loss and the complex history of the American West, she seeks beauty and understanding at alpine lakes, beside wild rivers, crosscountry skiing, on trails, and with her dogs. Here, amidst granite peaks and endangered beings, she confronts the challenges and awe of nature, the ethics of hunting, the past, an uncertain future, and the depths of her own being. As she navigates physical and emotional landscapes, she grapples with questions of identity, belonging, and the delicate balance between humanity and the wild.
This is more than a personal narrative; it is a powerful call for environmental awareness, the feminine, understanding of history, and a celebration of beauty. With unflinching honesty, CMarie Fuhrman examines the complexities of history, the sacredness of the land, and the urgent need to protect our wild spaces. These essays resonate with a deep reverence for Indigenous people, history, and the natural world. They will speak to anyone who has found refuge in nature, wrestled with the past, or dared to envision a brighter tomorrow.
Intense and reflective, heart-wrenching and heart-expanding, this essay collection holds contradictory and complex emotions together with tenderness and care.
Salmon Weather offers hard-won truths and yet wonder. It is fierce and yet humane. It is honest and yet full of compassion. An ode to all things wild, these essays are written with precision and masterful prose. Readers are welcomed into this wild world—and will leave a changed person.
—Laura Pritchett, winner of the PEN America award for fiction, author of Three Keys
For each of the ruins that CMarie Fuhrman stunningly excavates in this gorgeous collection, she offers a formidable measure of intellect, heart, and grace. Here is a writer who refuses easy consolation and smug pontification toward the people and forces that rupture life, land, family, and culture. Here is a writer who can imagine herself the sort of survivor who both kills and cleans up, who is as open to taking responsibility as she is to pursuing transcendence. I’ve read Fuhrman’s essays online and in the paper for years. I am thrilled to finally be able to press her long-awaited collection into the hands of all the readers who will be transformed by it.
—Kate Lebo, author of Pie School
These deeply moving essays amount to a shared journey, during which Fuhrman does something rare and precious—takes readers, regardless of our own immensely varied stories, onto perilous ground. Thanks to this Indigenous woman’s gifted prose, an old white guy like me can better grapple with identity, fear, and loss, with love for particular places, dogs, and people, with prospects for a hopeful future.
—Harry W. Greene, Cornell University emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, author of Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art
Gorgeous, gut-wrenching, and transcendent. CMarie Fuhrman offers the reader both her arrant honesty and her giant heart.
Salmon Weather casts a love spell.
—Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West
Here comes a long-anticipated book from a major voice in the American West.
Salmon Weather is an intimate and generous text, beautifully written in dense, rich prose, a paean of discovery and loss on the South Fork of Idaho's Salmon River. A growing Indigenous curiosity permeates these pages, that ancient view of seeing all nature as alive and kin. And there is tension: CMarie Fuhrman shows up in the wild sometimes as Crazy Horse, at other times, Columbus—seeking metaphor and story, tangled initially in fear that often dissolves in love. The richness of wild nature, dogs, family and community are all celebrated. This is a wonderful book.
—Doug Peacock, author of Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness
Salmon Weather is a map to becoming, of finding oneself inside the arms of landscape, of loving and leaving and living and dying. It explores not only the deep wild of the Idaho backcountry but also the deeper wildness of the human heart. In essays both tender and unflinching, CMarie Fuhrman bears witness to stories and places, animals and people, and the profound paradoxes that have shaped her identity as an adopted Native person. In the end, this book is a love letter not only to place and a life deeply lived inside weather and seasons but also to life itself, in all its uncertainty, for all of us—to the person we were and the one we hope to become.
—Karen Auvinen, author of Rough Beauty: Four Seasons of Mountain Living
When I wonder about the weight of inheritance—about what landscapes hold, the heft of history, the texture of identity, about what my role is to steward the present for the future—I turn to CMarie Fuhrman’s deft, muscular, and challenging writing. These essays are bedrock for who we’ve been and who we can become.
—Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
To read a new book by CMarie Fuhrman is to experience life-changing revelations: to see mountains and waters as full of vibrant, sentient creatures; to find intimacy in the interweavings of the braids of a river and the lines of a hand; to feel a fawn’s last heartbeat pulsing in a human palm; to hear how a land speaks through songs of coyotes and bugles of elk; to learn how poems and bodies can be maps to 'restoration' and 'restoryation' of wounded minds and scarred wilds; and to intuit, at last, the contours of a new 'geography of hope.'
—Katie Ives, author of Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams
There is a line that lingers perhaps midway through
Salmon Weather that stays with me, like the sublime terror that follows a rapid run earlier while reflecting at the evening campfire: 'Her last heartbeat is still in my palm.' It is powerful in its moment of appearance, and I haven’t forgotten since reading it high over Turtle Island aboard a jet hurtling me east and away from everything familiar. I found CMarie Fuhrman’s fearless beating heart echoing through this profound collection of essays, its rhythm keeping me grounded to all the wild things and places near to my own, beautiful and dangerous and conflicted as they are, as I traveled, in a fashion I haven’t experienced in some time. What a companion to living this book is!
Salmon Weather is a mighty and essential gift.
—Chris La Tray, Métis storyteller, author of Becoming Little Shell
