A Song for the River

June 15, 2018

As a fire lookout at New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Connors (Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout) spent summers working in the Gila River wilderness, getting to know the region and its inhabitants intimately. This moving memoir recounts a trio of tragic events that impacted him deeply at a time when he was recuperating from several significant life changes. The mountain he calls home burns, another lookout he has grown close to dies suddenly, and a plane containing a group of optimistic students and their teacher working to save the river crashes. In the style of Annie Dillard, Anne LaBastille, and Aldo Leopold, Connors interlaces all of these stories into a poignant plea for change--of our attitudes toward nature as well as to all forms of life. VERDICT Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work, Fire Season.--Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 9, 2018
This slim but potent volume of essays from Connors (Fire Season) beautifully examines themes of fire and water, life and death, and wonder and grief in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. Connors begins with a litany of suffering—his own and his friends’—from disease, divorce, wildfire, and deaths. Among the last, Connors writes about John, a fellow fire lookout, who died when his horse slipped off a mountain path and fell on him, and three teens (including Ella Jaz, an advocate for an undammed Gila River) who died in a small-plane crash. As Connors tells of these deaths and the ways in which he honors them (Jaz’s death led him to get involved in her cause), he also tells of his own physical hurts and of Mónica, the woman who relieved his pain and became his wife. His sumptuous descriptions of the Gila’s natural wonders, from a lone mountain tree frog to roaring wildfires, enliven the entire work, as do his skillful turns of phrase and pointed observations (“Each of us, in the wake of a bullet’s destruction, had checked into the guilt suite at the Hotel Sorrow and re-upped for a few hundred weeks”). This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying.