Life’s most pivotal moments often spring from impulse. And impulse is what brought Coloradan CMarie Fuhrman to Idaho. Instinctively she notes, “the coincidence of Idaho’s abbreviation: ID. Identity,” is where she has fully developed hers.

CMarie Fuhrman (credit: Dean Davis)

Raised in Loveland, Colorado, Fuhrman homesteaded near Red Lodge, Montana with her husband Randy. After his death, a central tragic event she visits in her new  book of essays, Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, Fuhrman weathered throughout the West until new love brought her to McCall, Idaho. She lives there with her partner Caleb, a fish biologist, and their dog, Apache, in an A-frame cabin near the Snake and Salmon Rivers and Payette Reservoir. Walking this land, Fuhrman has leaned into who she is and what she stands for.

Fuhrman understands what it means “to bear witness, to share stories, to reveal the raw and tender truths” of her place in this world. Over the decades she has formed her literary community in various ways. She earned her MFA at the University of Idaho. She is Director of the Elk River Writing Workshop in Pray, Montana. She is the Associate Director of the low residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado. And she is the voice for the Terra Firma podcast on Colorado Public Radio.

Of Acoma Pueblo and European-American ancestry, Fuhrman was adopted as an infant and raised with an adopted sister of nearly the same age, along Colorado’s Front Range within a European-American family. As a child, when scraped knees turned to tough skin, she was called “Cindian” in elementary school—a teasing play on her childhood name. As an adult, she deepened her allegiances to her Native identity. This she explains in the essays collected in Salmon Weather, Fuhrman’s “markers on a growth chart, cairns along a winding path, monuments to the person” she has become.

Fuhrman describes her Idaho home where the air smells damp and seasons come on strong. In this place the earth exhales a summer breath before the winter freeze. This is “where [she] feels most [her]self, most free.” Along mountain trails she takes in the countryside dotted with balsamroot and writes, “Iris of gold, pupil of earth. I am never alone when walking among them, each petaled eye watching.” Companionship is a relationship she has developed in tandem with the flora and the fauna. Each are fed by what she calls, “salmon weather,” a reference to rain that cascades down ridges, flows to creeks, then to the river. This deluge provides enough depth for Chinook and Kokanee salmon to swim upstream. At end-of-river tributaries they spawn and plant their fertilized eggs in pebbled beds. The eggs germinate, fledge into hatchlings and flow, downstream, finger-sized.

Fuhrman has formed her own patterned “continuation of life”  through a cycle of tragedy and slow recoveries, from impulse-driven desire to grace that burns with love. She holds the land’s beauty, knowing the environmental perils it faces, “in order to believe in something as difficult as hope.” This is the grace she gives herself, so that she, too, can go on living to recognize her mistakes, question her choices, and make new stories.

 In Salmon Weather Fuhrman keeps coming back as a witness to her own stories. She is a hunter, a giver, an abandoned child and lover, and in these essays, she is a found woman building strength in her own identity on the buckskin-colored earth and below Idaho’s clear blue skies. Fuhrman “depends on wilderness to power [her] imagination.” She lets the art of the natural world move her emotions in order to provide the spark that ignites her writing. Through her words she hopes for “something of value. Something useful. To not be forgotten. Something that someone might uncover with an oh and remember what it feels like to be filled with wonder.”