Lou Ureneck's Backcast Book of the Month for National Geographic Traveler

Trip Lit: New Books that Transport Us
By Don George, National Geographic Traveler

Book of the Month:
Backcast, by Lou Ureneck

This deeply moving memoir explores two uncharted territories: the wilderness of Alaska, specifically the Kanektok River in the southwestern part of the state, and the wilderness of Parenthood, specifically the region where a recently divorced father and his teenage son try to find new ways to understand each other. I have never been to Alaska, but I've been wandering the land of Parenthood for two decades now, and Ureneck presents a clear-eyed portrait of its tundras and torrents, valleys and peaks. This makes me trust and appreciate all the more his keenly detailed evocations of Alaska.

Like the Kanektok River, Ureneck's narrative races along, braiding memories of his own fatherless upbringing and failed attempts to become the father he never had with his account of a poorly planned one-week post-graduation rafting trip with his son in the unforgiving wild. Ureneck's powers of perception and analysis have been stripped raw by life, and his writing is spare and sinewy; the prose resonates with authenticity on every page, whether he is talking about the misery of awaking in a soaking-wet sleeping bag or in a disintegrating marriage.

The Alaskan wilderness leaps to life in its gritty reality—fast-rushing rivers, misty rolling hills, bears "the size of church doors," relentless rainfalls, eddies roiling with fat salmon and char—just as the tenuous terrain between father and son leaps to life too. Anger and hurt thread through this book—but so do taut stretches of beauty, wonder, and redemption in the riches of life in the wild.

By the end of the journey, this fraying camping and fishing pilgrimage has become a metaphor for something far greater: a desperate attempt to fix the heart of this father-son relationship in the larger heart of Alaska. To Ureneck's credit, his humble, honest odyssey touches and transforms the Alaska in us all.

To see the other books reviewed in this article, please click here.