Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots by DJ Lee (review)

The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, which crosses the Idaho-Montana border, forms “the largest area of roadless land in the contiguous United States” (2), and it calls to memoirist DJ Lee, as it did to earlier generations of her family. Lee’s memoir, Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots, is the unfolding story of her relationship with her mother, an exploration of the gaps in the family narrative of the generations that precede hers, and a poignant, heartfelt exploration of the mysterious disappearance of a beloved mentor. The book, in fact, is all about disappearances, whether of people or of histories, and of the necessity of inventing narratives that allow us to endure and perhaps even celebrate them.

As the memoir opens— in October 2018— Lee receives a call informing her that her friend and wilderness mentor, Connie Johnson, along with her dog, Ace, have disappeared from a remote hunting camp near the Moose Creek Ranger Station in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness where she was working as a cook. Johnson, deeply knowledgeable about the area, makes her disappearance unusual and her failure to return unnerving: “to Connie, this place is home” (2). Lee will return to this narrative thread throughout the book, pulling us across time as the search for Connie continues. Connie’s is the clearest and most intense story Lee weaves; it is not surprising it was this addition to her memoir, on which she worked for years, that seems to allow her to finish it.

Remote’s other narrative strands include Lee’s journey to become an archivist of her own family history and an accomplished wilderness person in her own right. The heart of the family story includes her estrangement with her mother, Shirley, and the haven Lee found, especially as a young girl, with her grandmother, Esther. As a child Lee discovers roll after roll of 16mm film in her grandmother’s house, a place she was free to explore endlessly. Urged by Esther on her deathbed, she returns to her grandmother’s home and retrieves a box with family memorabilia. What Lee finds there is evidence of a long-lost and silenced period of Esther’s life, when she was married to George and lived at the Moose Creek Ranger Station. George was a ranger there, and a sort of filmmaker, and Lee’s mother’s memories of that time include strange and perhaps abusive behavior by Esther. All of this is enveloped in silence, her mother’s memories jarring with what she knows of her grandmother. It’s this silence and mystery that Lee tries to penetrate.

Remote is nonlinear, making it a challenge to pull these different strands of her story together in ways that reveal their connections when there is still much Lee does not know. It helps to understand how Remote interweaves genres that compound the narrative’s sense of uncertainty. This is a story of the wilderness and those who come, perhaps unexpectedly, to love it. It’s a personal memoir and an attempt at a partial family biography. It’s a work of archival digging and patchwork assembly. It’s a story of unsolved mysteries: What was the secret to her grandmother’s endurance? Was her grandfather George Indigenous? How did the reclusive pilot Dick come to have the 16mm films Lee had ferreted out at her grandmother’s home as a child? Was Connie’s disappearance deliberate or accidental? To Lee’s credit, we don’t get all the answers.

Connie’s dog, Ace, eventually returned, but Connie’s remains have not yet been found. Lee’s “Coda” to Remote is one of the more beautiful tributes to the irrefutable ways in which life turns death into new life, and it is a graceful “solution” to the mystery. It reminds us that, in a biological and planetary sense, all paths lead toward home.