A Temporary Refuge: Fourteen Seasons with Wild Summer Steelhead

by Lee Spencer, Jim Lichatowich (Foreword by), Cathy Eliot (Illustrator)

Overview

As featured in the documentary, DamNation (2014).

Every May for 14 years, Lee Spencer and his companion, a herding dog named Sis, have camped next to a deep pool along the North Umpqua’s Steamboat Creek. Their explicit job, until December, is to protect the 400 to 800 cherished wild summer steelhead who come up from the Pacific to spawn in Big Bend Pool, from poachers who had been known to dynamite the pool to create a massive kill. His implicit calling is to observe and record the web of life that nurtures the pool and its surroundings and inhabitants.

A distillation of 14 years of detailed observations, in this surprisingly engaging almanac Spencer has captured natural history teeming with fish, water, vegetation, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians, seasonal changes, and interesting events and stories. Spencer is a modern day Thoreau, and the steelhead pool is his Walden Pond. In the grand tradition of The Sand County Almanac, this book will educate, inspire, and activate conservationists and anglers to appreciate and protect the waterways they love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938340673
Publisher:	Patagonia
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Lee Spencer was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1950 and was raised in Minnesota.  After being awarded a Master’s in Anthropology in 1978 by the University of Oregon, he worked as a field archeologist for more than twenty years, mostly in the desert west and often excavating dry rock shelters.  He has cast flies for steelhead on his river of choice, the North Umpqua, for the last thirty-five years and, in 1999, with his good dog, Sis, he began volunteering with The North Umpqua Foundation at Big Bend Pool. 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

As an intricate tapestry of aquatic and riparian life is revealed to him, year after year, season by season, Lee Spencer’s pool becomes not just a refuge but a sanctuary. What is the holiness we glimpse there? Laotse calls it “the Mysterious Female." The tribes 600 miles north call it “Creek Woman.” Aldo Leopold calls it, “a vast pulsing harmony, its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.” Lee, echoing Rainer Maria Rilke, calls it “the Open that lies so deep in an animal’s face, free from death,” and never tires of revealing the warp and weft of all that the Open weaves. A Temporary Refuge is an incandescent work of natural history, an Oregon cultural treasure, and a sanctuary for aching hearts in a dark time.  David James Duncan, author of The River Why and My Story as Told by Water

“From these pages flows the elusive beauty that compels the defense of wild rivers.” – Matt Stoecker, Ecologist and producer of the documentary DamNation (Patagonia, 2014)

Editorial Reviews

This is strong nature writing—descriptive and thorough, and helped by Spencer’s obvious devotion to his task.” —Foreword Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)

“A Temporary Refuge succeeds on multiple levels. It effectively documents regional wildlife and the perilous annual migration of the wild fish. It puts the interaction between man and nature into important context, and shows why the wild population is so important, even as hatcheries breed more and more salmon. And it’s also a meaningful memoir about a man and his dog who were devoted to helping protect part of our shared natural heritage, year after year.” —Foreword Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)

This is strong nature writing—descriptive and thorough, and helped by Spencer’s obvious devotion to his task. For years, from May to November, Lee Spencer stood guard over the population of wild steelhead salmon in the same northwestern waters, helping protect the fish from the poaching and dynamite fishing that had threatened their numbers for at least half a century. In A Temporary Refuge, he consolidates his years of experience into a calendar year of anecdotes, taking readers through the steelheads’ annual cycle via his memories and observations. What makes the book so effective is that Spencer’s approach to conservation is firsthand, on-the-ground work. Though he incorporates plenty of facts and history about the fish to satisfy the most clinically minded readers, his writing is never clinical. This is strong nature writing—descriptive and thorough, and helped by Spencer’s obvious devotion to his task. He shares anecdotes of conversations with other visitors to the area, describes the various human threats to the steelheads’ environment, and even tracks the impact of humans on the area, from prehistory to today. While it is steelhead that specifically drew the author in, he relates plenty of stories about the area’s other wildlife and includes lovely illustrations by Cathy Eliot of several species. He writes about the merganser ducks that use the same waters, the otters who play in them, and the beavers who build dams there. Spencer also movingly bookends his observations with tributes to Sis, his beloved dog, who accompanied him for ten of the fourteen seasons chronicled and acts as a major character in her own right. A Temporary Refuge succeeds on multiple levels. It effectively documents regional wildlife (the specific spot is never named, to avoid encouraging more visitors) and the perilous annual migration of the wild fish. It puts the interaction between man and nature into important context, and shows why the wild population is so important, even as hatcheries breed more and more salmon. And it’s also a meaningful memoir about a man and his dog who were devoted to helping protect part of our shared natural heritage, year after year. JEFF FLEISCHER (July/August 2017)

“Spencer is a keen observer of everything around him: plants, weather, trees, birds, lizards, even the few people that visit him and his dog Sis on their little fish perch. It’s a beautiful tour of his little slice of Oregon and an inspiration to simply find a quiet, pretty place to sit and watch.” —Adventure Journal

“One of the best outdoor books of the summer.” —Adventure Journal

“[A Temporary Refuge] is proof that personal observation, practiced with dedication and openness to wonder, can produce extraordinary insights.” —MidCurrent http://midcurrent.com/books/book-excerpt-a-temporary-refuge/

From the Publisher

In the spirit of Thoreau, A Temporary Refuge will delight curious readers, and inspire and teach them why we should care about protecting not only the fish at Big Bend Pool, but all vulnerable creatures.

Fly Fisherman Magazine