Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River [Paperback]

George B Handley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2010

People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.

Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and family history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that come with the territorial claims to a homeland, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as an alternative, a kind of belonging that is informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. While it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a perspective from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"the poet who attends to this river [is]... an insightful scholar,...a devout pilgrim, and an expansive guide as these home waters descend from the High Uintas through defining stories of family and identity."--Stephen Trimble --Back Cover

"practices theology like a doctor practices CPR: not as secondhand theory but as a chest-cracking, lung-inflating, life-saving intervention.... It's what you've been wanting to read."--Adam Miller --Times and Seasons

"...nature writing at its best.... a call for his people to wake up and embrace the stewardship required of them. And it is some stunningly good reading.....Read this book. It will change you."--Steve Peck  --By Common Consent

"extends... beyond a particular creed or geographic area to address broader issues related to habitation and brings into conversation... theology and place studies." --Paul Formisano, ISLE

"What a pleasing book. George Handley has calmly scripted a place-based masterwork.... again and again, the writing lifted me with its precise similes or its able flexing of metaphorical muscle." --Jeffrey McCarthy, Western American Literature.

"Wallace Stegner wrote: 'No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.' In this fortunate pairing of place and poet, we learn about Utah’s Provo River—a paradox of wildness and extinction, pioneering and restoration. We learn that the river is embedded in community—Mormon community—a fact inseparable from the place. And we learn about the poet who attends to this river, a man who turns out to be an insightful scholar, an exuberant fly fisherman, a devout pilgrim, and an expansive guide as these home waters descend from the High Uintas through defining stories of family and identity, to pour down the Jordan River to the Great Salt Lake."—Stephen Trimble, author of Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America

 

"With his poetic writing, Home Waters…is an enjoyable read and is a must-have for any spectator of nature."—Utah Historical Quarterly

 

"BYU professor of humanities and comparative literature George B. Handley offers an invigorating draft of mountain waters for nature and gospel lovers.... You'll enjoy this masterful book, which is destined to become a classic in Latter-day Saints studies."—BYU Magazine

From the Inside Flap

"Handley has made a most uniquely compelling case for how the physical world--both environs as well as our flesh--provides landscapes in which one touches the divine in the most intimate ways. In exploring the watershed of his ancestors, Handley has articulated how LDS culture has compromised the health of the systems that sustain life, and in the same breath he has illuminated the Mormon stories and doctrine that offer possibilities for a re-creation of God's works, and indeed, our own souls."  Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: University of Utah Press; 1st Edition edition (October 31, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1607810239
• ISBN-13: 978-1607810230
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #798,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Book March 3, 2011

By Jonathan

Format:Paperback

Being from the Provo area that George Handley is writing about, Home Waters is personally special to me. It was comforting, nostalgic, saddening, and sobering to read his thoughts and feelings about the area - its environment and the culture - and how it connected to his own life. This was also a humbling read, for I got the sense that while I have lived my whole life in this area and Handley has not, Handley feels a connection, responsibility, and love for the area that runs much deeper than my own. How is it that I could live here my whole life, claim to like the area, and yet fail to connect with it as intensely as Handley seems to have? That's probably not an important question. More valuable would be that I learned that my feelings for home, my capacity to love the Provo area (or any area I am living in) and its people; my knowledge of its history, its geology & geography, and all its natural systems could grow. That's a sobering, encouraging, even exciting feeling, because there is still much I can learn in life. And Home Waters teaches me that what we learn can help us love the world and people even more than we do right now. Humanity's capacity for folly is only matched by its capacity for goodness.

Home Waters is an eloquent and densely thoughtful personal examination of self, family, the environment, community, history & genealogy; where spirituality & religion and literature are weaved throughout to show how all of these things are connected, coalescing into a collective guide to seeing and understanding the world more clearly, humbly, and charitably. For Handley, all these things are important and he uses all of them to help guide his thoughts on some of life's most deep and fundamental questions. This is a beautiful read, which I imagine will reveal even more insightful thoughts with a second and third reading.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Utah Love November 20, 2010

By J. Brian Watkins VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I suppose a professor must yearn for open spaces, being stuck inside all day. I read to discover new viewpoints and to have the vicarious experience a fine author can provide--typically indoors, however. The author's opinions often challenged this reviewer, but his arguments were sound and convincing. In that light, this book succeeded. This was a book that invites the reader to evaluate opinions and to think deeply about one's impact on the world and others, it is largely about the currents that bring us to become the people we are.

Introspective to only the degree a humanities professor can achieve, I think the problem I had with the work was that if we were all to adopt our author's love for the river and outdoors, the spaces sacred to the author would quickly be overrun and much of the magic found in the magnificent solitude would be lost. Perhaps the natural resistance to having beliefs tweaked, this reader perceived a hint of an attitude that people who do not share the author's appreciations are failing to honor the maker of the world. I respond that it would be hard to share a wonderful kayak ride on the Provo River with a few hundred other souls and Mr. Handley would weep to see the San Gabriel River on any given weekend, with literally thousands of people and their cars turning the natural world into a parking lot. In order to foster and protect his view of the perfect world, the author is willing to make demands on others that they scale back things that they might enjoy--be it a fine home on the bench, a drive on a mountain road or a wide expanse of soft green turf in an otherwise arid climate. A minor quibble, yet a major problem in this world; how to bring the sacred to the masses without profaning that which we seek to elevate? To what degree is it justifiable to coerce others to act in a fashion that we believe to be beneficial even if our beliefs are not shared? To be fair, the author adopts the appropriate tone of encouragement--he would change attitudes by persuasion and honest concern--I appreciated that.

People build cities and communities--it's what we do. Historically they build them by sources of water--rivers. In my neck of the woods, Los Angeles, we have abused our poor river into a sterile concrete channel that is great for car chases but certainly inappropriate for an inspiring day of fly fishing. We have proved Mr. Handley's point. Yet, I can drive to wilderness from Los Angeles quicker than Mr. Handley can get to Kamas, we have tried and succeeded in preserving a great deal. We can't revert back to aboriginal lifestyles and we should be extremely careful about how we choose to impact the freedoms of others, whether it is their freedom to pursue their own lifestyle, or as the author notes, their freedom to enjoy the world in its natural state. Like life itself, the dilemma is complex and not easily resolved. But a healthy dose of respect for others usually makes it easier.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A much needed perspective April 13, 2011

By skyler

Format:Paperback

George Handley's Home Waters offers a Latter-day Saint (LDS) perspective of ecology, theology, and the tie of these themes to our modern context. Handley's memoirs present insight derived from his adventures in the Utah backwoods and he adeptly carries the reader by using a sublime combination of personal experience, history, literature, and science. His writing is replete with imagery and his narration is honed by the strong sense of personal honesty that guides his introspection, the second making it a provocative work.

A thoroughly enjoyable passage for me was the very specific LDS perspective he gives on how the LDS culture distinguishes itself from other cultures. When we more plainly understand who we are is when we are among those that hold different beliefs than our own. Similarly, when a person lives in a highly dense population with beliefs similar to his/her own, to recognize one's own uniqueness is harder to see. Handley uses this idea to show how the LDS population has become apathetic ecologically due to the knowledge of an impending restoration of the earth when Jesus Christ comes again. Handley argues that despite LDS doctrine to care for the "Eden" that the pioneers were given, they have turned their backs on the world prematurely by trusting "in his innocence and immortality" to save his/herself and the world.

The powerful stories drawn from history inspire all those that want to shape the future by educating the reader in the present. This is done in a way that will leave the reader both reverent for the ecology and the theology that this part of the world has cradled.