Rogue River Reprieve
…is the story of a fishing guide named Beck Stoddard who thinks being a fishing guide on the Rogue River in Oregon is about as close to paradise as any mortal can get. He’s paid to float through remote wilderness canyons and witness the color changes of the trees in the fall, the habits of deer, bear and cougar, and the seasonal migrations of salmon and steelhead. He marvels as these silver-sided beauties push against the relentless onslaught of the river in a timeless cycle of migration from the Pacific Ocean to the high Cascades to spawn and nourish a new generation. After twenty-plus years, however, the sheen of guiding has begun to fade. When Stoddard encounters a woman stranded in the middle of the river’s most notorious and dangerous rapids, he embarks on a different kind of adventure. She’s intent on stopping an acid leachate mine in the lower canyon and becomes Stoddard’s guide as he faces a quagmire: will he join a fight that pits him against a multi-national’s slurried plans? Knowing his decision could flush him out of his cloistered corner of Eden, Stoddard plunges into an adventure that transports him to new vistas and insights.
Reviews
"Northwesterner Paul Hoobyar's new novel, Rogue River Reprieve takes a fresh look at what is an old and apparently insoluble question: What shall be the fate of the public lands and waters of the American West? Shall they be the terrain of
industrial exploitation or the largely wild garden of natural fulfillment for what is
here now and in the future? The word “reprieve," the postponement of punishment, warns us as readers that the Rogue River is already under the threat of despoliation from acid leach mining backed by national and international industrial forces in collusion with crooked locals, ready to join the outside profiteers. Hoobyar imparts his choice for the Rogue's future in his epigraph to the novel, a loving claim from an old character, Water Rat, in an old book, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: ”There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." It is a big claim, but Lordy what Hoobyar does with it. More than any river writer I know, he captures the emotional rush of running difficult rivers in a drift boat—preferably a wooden one but OK for aluminum as well—by the strictest attention to the rower's blade work with a pair of oars and the accompanying dynamics of water, as well as the judgment, nerve, and luck that attend the sport. Author Hoobyar gets it all in and he gets it right. And in his concentration on oarsmanship and the beauty of the banks and country that reaches beyond the tips of his oars, he gives a new touch of nobility to messing about in boats."
- Glen Love is editor of Fishing the Northwest: An Angler's Reader, OSU Press, 2000. Love is a retired University of Oregon Professor of English, Emeritus, who rowed for four years on the University of Washington's crew in the early 1950's.
"Salmon, love, greed. A hard rock miner. A corrupt sheriff. An ugly fistfight. A deadly stretch of whitewater deep in the Rogue River wilderness. These are among the true-life ingredients in this precise, white-knuckle story of the new Old West, told by one of its survivors."
- David Bayles, author of Art and Fear (Image Continuum Press 2001/2011) and Notes on a Shared Landscape (Image Continuum Press, 2005
"In Rogue River Reprieve, Paul Hoobyar, an experienced guide and watershed consultant, puts his expertise to work in a love-letter to a favorite Oregon waterway. His affection for all wild rivers and the canyons they grace, and his fear for their survival, shine through each page of this adventure in which a despoiler's greed is met by nature’s own poetic justice. The unadorned narrative’s absorbing detail leaves the reader wondering how much of this might be drawn from the author’s own life on western waters."
- John Rolfe Gardiner, author of Somewhere in France (Knopf, 1999). His latest novel, Newport Rising was published in 2017. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker and The American Scholar. Three collections of his short stories have been published, including The Magellan House (Counterpoint, 2004)
"Paul Hoobyar writes about the river like the lifelong expert he is—in boating, fishing, restoration, and guiding. His debut novel, Rogue River Reprieve, brims with eco-intrigue, old-time fistfights, sumptuous camp feasts, backcountry riches, and river love. Reprieve’s host of greedy baddies and earnest good guys is both brand-new and all-too-familiar: they want what the river offers, but in entirely different ways. Hop into these pages for a wild ride with a master guide."
- Rebecca Lawton, author of Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Books, 2002) and The Oasis this Time: Living and Dying with Water in the West (Torrey House Press, 2019).