There's a LOT about fishing. I found the chapters on the western states/provinces the most interesting. ( )

I discovered Howard Frank Mosher's work by accident, while looking for something else. But it was a good accident. I haven't read any of his fiction yet, but this memoir of Mosher's picaresque journey from Maine to Washington across the top of the U.S. the year he turned fifty is an absolute gem. It may not exactly sparkle with definite highs and lows, but it does emit a steady glow of interesting observations of people he meets and the places he visits along the way. Of particular interest to me was his pilgrimage to the Whitemud River territory of southern Saskatchewan, along the Montana border, the country where Wallace Stegner grew up and described so vividly in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and other works. Mosher's musings on this area and his own obvious admiration for and tenuous connections with Stegner moved me enough to go to my own bookshelves and find a copy of Stegner's Wolf Willow, which had been languishing there for nearly a year since I bought it. And now I've begun reading it. As he traveled through the Big Sky country, he also mentioned a memoir by A.B. Guthrie I'd never heard of, The Blue Hen's Chick, which is now on my to-read list. I also remembered James Dickey's book, Deliverance, and the subsequent movie version, when Mosher told of meeting - and being briefly stalked by - an oddly sinister survivalist armed with a high-tech bow and arrow somewhere in the mountains of northern Idaho. And there was the lonesome cowboy he encountered, still pining for a woman who'd left him three years before; and the cynical yet hopeful small-town newspaper editor, trying to dry himself out along the fishing streams of Washington. The book is filled with small stories of people and places that make you stop and think about this beautiful country we live in. A damn good read. Thanks for writing it, Howard. ( )