Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River (review)

What a pleasing book. George Handley has calmly scripted a place-based masterwork in Home Waters, one likely to be on syllabi and under Christmas trees for years to come. This is a Utah book, and an LDS book, but it speaks of longings and connections tangible outside any one state or any one religion.

Home Waters is nominally about the Provo River, but its true subject is something beyond fly-fishing, beyond the Latter-day Saint community, and even beyond the environment. Handley’s book seems to me a Mormon theodicy, mulling divine power in relation to a world of suffering and selfishness. As in Annie Dillard’s canonical Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), these factors are played out against the land, and in Handley’s case, the land is woven through with long years of family history.

But perhaps I make this sound too philosophical a work; in your hand, the readable text sandwiches a fisherman’s journal of casts and rods around questions of family, faith, and landscape. This is a physical book. The intense experience of a bodily passion like fishing sensitizes the practitioner to the natural world’s subtle vulnerability to development and climate change.

So Home Waters engages knotty questions of conservation through the familiar pattern of a year on the land. One should not expect a careful attention to chronology in this year’s journey—the traditional narrative arc is not forefront here—rather the reader must let go of these orientations and accept instead a wild tour of a watershed’s many elevations and moods. There is a fine history of American nature writing following this calendar form, stretching from Walden (1854) to Jack Turner’s Teton ode Teewinot (2000). But Handley’s book has a distinctly Utah flavor and is thus more helpfully compared to Steven Trimble’s recent Bargaining for Eden (2008), Amy Irvine’s Trespass (2008), Maximilian Werner’s Black River Dreams (2010), and for the lucid quality of its prose, Wallace Stegner’s essays. This last is of course high praise, but again and again, the writing lifted me with its precise similes or its able flexing of metaphorical muscle.

Sitting in Salt Lake City reviewing a book written in Provo for Logan-based Western American Literature means there are some Mormons involved … and that’s the best part of this book. Handley is a brave guide to LDS practices and uncertainties, with a capable eye for the long interaction between Utah’s landscape and Utah’s dominant faith. In one sense, this makes Home Waters a welcome addition to the shelf for the many non-LDS Utahns struggling to get acquainted with a land and a faith so singular. In another sense, though, Handley’s faith may alienate the secular reader, unaccustomed to exegesis and uncomfortable with claims to scriptural authority for the Book of Mormon or “the seer, Joseph Smith” (121). Overall, I think skeptics will be swayed by Handley’s honesty. He earnestly believes what he tells us, and he offers us his perspective with respect and openness. Indeed, Handley may well unsettle LDS readers with self-assessments like “the overwhelming religious homogeneity of this community makes us lazy and resistant to hard self-questioning” (81). The religious skeptic should recall that the pulpit can be a powerful force for shaping behavior, and a revived environmental consciousness can be motivated by the emerging religious environmentalist movement.

Home Waters offers a useful lens for readers of contemporary ecocriticism. The book moves the conversation about nature away from wilderness and toward community. If first-wave ecocriticism focused on narratives of self-discovery in wild nature, books like Home Waters are part of second-wave ecocriticism’s attention to a built setting and nature’s overlap with human culture. Having said that, Handley’s focus is clearly on place, and this puts his work at odds with cutting-edge arguments by Timothy...