Steven J. Meyers

Notes from the San Juans

Steven J. Meyers

This book, more than anything else, is a book about place. Centered on the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, a range of jagged peaks inhabited by the sometimes equally jagged people of small mountain towns, it is a book about the search for a place to call home, after other homes have been wrecked. Steve Meyers, a transplanted easterner, speaks for tens of thousands of younger people who have searched for a way of life outside of the homogenizing pressures of contemporary American society. His search led him to the San Juans and he writes with extraordinary warmth and depth about a way of life that has become increasingly rare and a region that has managed to maintain its startling beauty and idiosyncrasies; and he writes movingly about a father who vanished and about personal loss and about triumph. Throughout the book, wild trout and colorful people appear as comfortable residents of this relatively remote region in which the act of fly fishing seems as natural as eating and sleeping. Ultimately Notes from the San Juans is the story of a man who has been seduced by the pleasures of the mountains and the joys of fly fishing and bright mountain streams—but it is also very much a story of human values and courage and hard-won joy.

Lime Creek Odyssey

Steven J. Meyers

As Steven Meyers writes, an odyssey need not involve a long journey, simply a profound one. First drawn to Lime Creek for its fly fishing, this stream serves as Meyers’s muse in seven transcendent essays that explore journeys in the discovery of self, of home, and what it means to be human. The essays also explore loss and grief, of finding healing in the powerful presence of nature and in the awareness and experience of natural cycles. The tender eloquence of his writing and his compassion for all living things make for a contemplation of place in the tradition of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Desert Solitaire.