Embracing ‘Salmon Weather’

When CMarie Fuhrman first moved to Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains in 2011, long, snow-laden winters were an inconvenience.

Born and raised in the outdoors, Fuhrman favored the life and joy of the West’s warmer months. Finally, her partner Caleb, a fisheries biologist, responded to her complaints about the winter weather.

“But it’s salmon weather,” he said. “This is the weather salmon need to survive.”

For Fuhrman, salmon not only represent the health of the Salmon River — the south fork of which is one of her favorite places in the world — it also represents Indigenous culture, strength and resilience. 

“It made me realize how selfish I'd been, and it’s really a reflection on our larger culture,” she said in an interview with Mountain Journal. “We complain about the weather, and we've been doing things so selfishly that it's affecting every other living being around us … Whether it's a tree or whether it's snow, we’ve tried to remove all those barriers to our living so that we could live so easily, and we've made it so much harder for everything else that is nonhuman.”

This perspective and reflections on human’s relationships with nature resound throughout Fuhrman’s new book, Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return. 

Fuhrman’s book of essays brings readers into her life in the Salmon River Mountains. She is generous with her personal narrative — we can almost feel her joy, the sunshine on her face and grass beneath her feet, as well as the gut wrenching moments of loss and pain. Her life, it seems from this book, is to be viewed through the lens of nature.

In Fuhrman’s writing, nature and humanity collide, sometimes literally, as in a fawn struck by a vehicle or a coyote caught in a trap. These stories are common occurrences in the West, but Fuhrman illuminates them and challenges readers to feel their weight. 

“The West has for so long been white hat-black hat guys, bad guys, cowboys versus Indians, dams versus free rivers,” she said. “And we know better. We know that there's not one or the other and that we have to find a way to merge the two, to maybe just live in that gray area.”

Fuhrman was raised in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. In her first week of life, her parents took her camping. As a girl, she couldn’t sleep with the windows closed — she had to hear the sounds of out there, she said — and later took to sleeping on the lawn with her dog until her parents moved her bed to the patio in the summertime. 

Nature, Fuhrman said, is like a sibling. In her essays, the landscapes, wildlife and vegetation are characters she depicts in stunning detail. Fuhrman writes of what she sees and smells throughout her travels and reflects on the Indigenous communities who came before her, the white settlers who pushed them out in pursuit of their own ambitions, and the logging and mining and damming that came after them. 

Though these stories don’t shy away from contention, Fuhrman writes with authority. Yet she withholds judgement. She says she wants her readers, whether they are loggers or environmentalists or a person who has never set foot in Idaho or its surrounds, to feel welcome in nature and in her work.

“It’s very important to me not to point fingers and not to be didactic,” she said. “I'm all for questioning and resisting certain systems, certain things that are happening, but I'm not for hurting people or hurting people's choices and making them feel bad.”

Still, the themes that Fuhrman explores in her essays are increasingly relevant as the Trump administration’s actions put federal public land management and conservation measures in flux. In the essay “Lake 8,” she references a map of alpine lakes drawn up by a Forest Service colleague of Caleb’s named Peggy.

“When I ask, Caleb tells me that among many other tasks that Peggy completed as a seasonal employee since the 70s, such as riparian surveys and road inventories, she also performed lake surveys,” Fuhrman writes. “Packing an inflatable raft, gill nets, fishing poles, her tent, and camping supplies, she hiked from lake to lake to determine whether fish had survived from decades earlier stocking efforts by Idaho Fish and Game.”

Now, as federal employees face layoffs and pressure to resign from powerful Washington-based politicians, Fuhrman hopes these essays celebrate both the land and the people who do this work. And, because people protect what they love, she hopes these essays coax readers to grow into a relationship with nature.

Salmon Weather is available on March 15.