Traplines: Coming Home to the Sawtooth Valley by John Rember
In this memoir, John Rember recounts his experiences of growing up in the Sawtooth Valley at a time when 
fish were wild in the rivers and electric light seemed magical. His father was a trapper/fishing guide, and everyone in his family–including his mother–hunted. After he moved back home as an adult in 1987, Rember realizes that those same experiences no longer seem to possess the authenticity that they once did. The rural West, he discovers, has been transformed, both as a place to live and as a terrain of the imagination.
Funny, beautiful, and philosophical, this book weaves memories and reflections into an anecdotal narrative which displays deep affection for place and family. Not only has the place where he grew up changed, he realizes, but he has, too. Reviewers called Traplines “a requiem, of sorts, for one of the last best places,” a “voyage to self-consciousness,” and “a captivating and contemplative look at how we have evolved our communities in the rural West.”
Author Information
John Rember is a fourth-generation Idahoan who was born in Sun Valley and grew up in the Sawtooth Valley. His mother was a nurse, his father drove a ski bus and worked as a miner, fishing and hunting guide, trapper, and mechanic. Rember was educated at Harvard and earned an MFA at the University of Montana.
He has written numerous articles, stories, and essays for publications ranging from Travel and Leisure to Skiing Magazine to Wilderness Conservation, and his work has been often anthologized. In addition to Traplines (which was named Idaho Book of the Year in 2004 by the Idaho Library Association), he has published two short story collections, Cheerleaders from Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago, and Coyote in the Mountains. He is Writer-in-Residence at Albertson College of Idaho and teaches in the Pacific University MFA program in Forest Grove, Oregon. He lives in the Sawtooth Valley with his wife. His website is www.johnrember.com.
Photo by Jan Boles
Discussion Questions
1. In Traplines’ first essay, John Rember considers what it means to go “home” to a place that looks like itself but has changed. Even as he calls the new Sawtooth Valley a “museum,” he clearly feels “at home” there. Why? What is the same for him, despite all the changes? What makes a place “home?”
2. In what ways were the young Rember’s values and attitudes shaped by his rural western upbringing (both by absorbing his family’s values and reacting against them)?
3. The book’s world is full of people who keep their own company, including the narrator himself (in the essay titled “Solo” and elsewhere). What draws them to solitude? Does the quality of their solitude seem somehow “western” to you?
4. What does it mean to be a “local” in this book? Is this simply an exclusive insider’s designation, or do the outsiders in the book seem substantially different in the way that they approach life?
5. “Stories are artifice,” Rember writes, even as he tells the story of his life. Why, then, tell a story like this?
6. “There is no continuity of self through time . . . but there is continuity of love through time,” the book concludes. What does this mean in the context of the narrative? Do you agree?
7. Why is the book called “Traplines?”