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Author Pete Fromm Ventures Once More into the Woods

Wilderness Speaker Series features acclaimed author whose new memoir chronicles experience monitoring fish eggs in ‘The Bob’

By Tristan Scott
Pete Fromm jokes with the crowd during a reading at the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation's Wilderness Speaker Series at FVCC on March 22, 2017. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

Although Pete Fromm’s new memoir, “The Names of the Stars,” is set in a place familiar to the author — a burly chunk of Montana wilderness — its narrative captures him at a point in life that contrasts with the youthful whimsy of his only other memoir, “Indian Creek Chronicles.”

That book, Fromm’s first, published a quarter-century ago to international acclaim, tracks the Wisconsin-born writer’s seven-month sojourn into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where he lived alone in a canvas wall tent monitoring salmon eggs in a small hatchery channel. His sole responsibility, from October to June, was to cleave ice away from the channel’s edge.

The job took five minutes each day.

“The other 23 hours and 55 minutes was free time,” Fromm recalled recently at the final installment of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Speaker Series. “So I thought that sounded pretty cool. I could be a mountain man at last.”

And so began the captivating narrative of a 20-year-old Fromm, who drops out of his wildlife biology courses at the University of Montana, intoxicated by the romance of living alone in the woods, a glamourized sentiment that erodes as the months wear on, replaced with the stark reality of an experience that instills the author with a deeper appreciation of nature, solitude, self-reliance, wildlife, and the fundamental need for human company.

In “Indian Creek Chronicles,” Fromm’s lone companion is a half-husky, half-shepherd called Boone, named for Boone Caudill, the hero of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s mountain-man bible “The Big Sky.” His tools of experience don’t extend much beyond the script of those pages, but he begins honing his mountain-man chops, describing his progress and pitfalls in self-deprecating, conversational prose that flirts sparingly with longer, stem-winding meditations on the tenacity of nature, life, death, and the human condition.

He learns to run a chainsaw, bucks up a dozen cords of wood, hunts, prepares meat, cooks, and staves off the specter of loneliness that lurks behind every Ponderosa in his hemmed-in postage stamp of wilderness, a remote landscape whose geographic features the reader comes to know as intimately as the solitary author. His only human contact is via an unreliable crank phone at a U.S. Forest Service cabin 10 miles away, the occasional visit from the wardens who employ him, a few wintery romps on snow machines with a clutch of local lion hunters, and his cherished monthly mail deliveries.

It’s an honest and unflinching reflection on the natural world, published 12 years after the experience, and the reader is crestfallen when the tale ends, missing Boone and the newly seasoned mountain man.

It’s not surprising then that Fromm fans the worldwide (he is a bestseller in France) rejoiced when they learned that the author was debuting another book, this one about monitoring fish eggs. Alone. In the woods.

“Indian Creek Chronicles did really well, and it cemented my legacy as the world’s foremost babysitter of salmon eggs,” Fromm joked. “Job offers started to roll in. Twenty-five years later I got one.”

In “The Names of the Stars,” readers find Fromm, a longtime Great Falls resident who now lives in Missoula, venturing to an outpost in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area near the North Fork Sun River, at the Gates Cabin, a lonely endeavor that requires a daily 10-mile hike to check on incubating grayling eggs and record his observations in a waterproof notebook.

This time, the bouts of loneliness feel different as Fromm, who survives Indian Creek, trains his consciousness on his family, his role as a father, the persistence and fragility of life — deftly juxtaposed with the task of rearing the delicate grayling eggs — and his early desire to venture into the unknown.

He also employs a similar narrative voice, only now he is 25 years older, with a wife and two young sons, the oldest of whom, Nolan, 9, had planned on joining his father until the federal government put the kibosh on the idea.

Now 22 years old, Nolan refuses to read “Stars.”

“He says it’s too sad,” Fromm said in an interview with the Beacon. “More than half his life later and it’s still this disappointment.”

At the Gates Cabin, Fromm sleeps on a Batman pillow that his son loaned him to keep him safe and ward off grizzly bears, which make frequent appearances throughout the book, and he reflects on his absence from his family. He is disappointed, too, and the romance of walking alone into the woods that pervaded “Indian Creek” is not as potent.

“I wasn’t as fully charged because I had let my kids down,” he said.

He still pokes fun at himself in moments of heedlessness, and he has sharpened his craft as a writer, but unlike his gig up “Indian Creek,” Fromm enters the Bob Marshall with a book offer in hand, knowing he’ll chronicle the experience in a narrative arc.

Twelve years later, enter “The Names of the Stars.”

“My wife just says that it takes me 12 years to come up with an idea,” he said. “That was probably the biggest challenge, was not to go all writerly. ‘Indian Creek’ was easy, because I didn’t know what I was doing, both living there and writing about it.”

Fromm, who has published four novels and five short story collections and was awarded the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award a record five times, and continues to work on another upcoming novel and collection of short stories, prefers writing fiction, but says with any genre, writing openly and honestly is key.

“If you’re not being honest, you’re dead in the water,” he said. “There were moments up Indian Creek that were so embarrassing that I didn’t want to share it with the world. But you can’t hide. You have to expose yourself.”