Notes from the San Juans

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.