Lime Creek Odyssey

Steven began his post-college career as a banker in New York City but quickly discovered that banking was not his calling. After completing graduate studies in Chicago, he moved to Denver to take a job with a small publishing company, Sundance Publications. Meyers has called the San Juan Mountains of Colorado home since the spring of 1976 when Sundance relocated to Silverton. When the publishing company returned to Denver, Meyers chose to stay in the mountains. In 1987, he moved downriver to Durango. In addition to working for the publishing company, during his time in the region he worked in the Sunnyside Mine as an electrician, as a member of a backcountry surveying crew and as an instructor in the Ski School at Purgatory Ski Area. For twenty-four years he was a member of the professional guide staff at Duranglers Flies and Supplies. During this time he also worked as a photographer and writer. His large format, black-and-white landscapes of the American West have appeared in juried shows across the country. While active as a photographer, he was represented by Alonzo Gallery in New York City. Steven has taught English and Writing at Fort Lewis College since the winter of 2000. His writing has appeared in his published books and also in numerous national publications and journals. In 1981 he was the Colorado Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, Honored Artist. In 1992 he was awarded Colorado Council on the Arts/Western States Arts Foundation CoVisions Grant. The Colorado Endowment for the Humanities has twice named him the Colorado Journeys featured author (1996, 2004).

• AcknowledgmentsPreface to the WestWinds Press EditionIntroductionChapter 1 Of Meatballs, Swiss Cheese, and SpongesChapter 2 A Gothic RomanceChapter 3 The Fisher and the Marten Chapter 4 On Being HumanChapter 5 Thoughts from the Real WorldChapter 6 Weaving the TapestryChapter 7 The Naming of NamesEpilogue

“Reflecting on Homer's epic, photographer Meyers finds himself more in sympathy with Penelope than with Odysseus. He prefers intimate exploration of familiar places to heroic travel in distant lands; thus he here reveals the essence of his home ground. Meyers has written an extraordinarily sensitive account of one individual's perceptions of and reactions to his surroundings: Lime Creek, a small stream in the heart of the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, where he has climbed many of the peaks, waded the streambeds, fished and walked the woods in solitude. Earlier he had been a surveyor on projects that held a threat to the environment, and he ponders on the moral inconsistency in his attitudes toward his work and his love of the land, focusing on his sense of personal responsibility for the natural world about him. Lime Creek represents joy and sorrow (the death of a loved one), but also hope and renewal. Meyers is confident that life will go on there—as it always has.” —Publishers Weekly“Lime Creek Odyssey is a lovely ode to the natural world, very powerful in its simplicity, in its respect for water, air, earth and all other elements. It’s a love poem to the joy of our remaining wild places, and a cautionary tale that we must act quickly to save what we still have. It’s also a sad and beautiful elegy to the passing seasons, to all the inevitable cycles and to the deaths of people we love. To read it is to be renourished and replenished in our souls just as Lime Creek is replenished each springtime by the singing waters of melting snow.The book is perfect in its low-key tone and lack of hysteria; it is quite elegant in all its simple gentleness. By any and all accounts, a work of art to savor.” —John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War