I just returned from a quick trip to mid-twentieth century
Montana. The vehicle? Ivan Doig’s 1978 memoir “This House of
Sky.”
Mr. Doig’s enchantment with the land and the work grounded
thereon is exceeded only by his appreciation of family. Doig’s father, Charlie, wed a woman
much younger than he. Tragically,
only a few years after Ivan’s birth, she dies. Her mother, after a time, comes to live with the bachelor
pair, forming a unique family unit with uncommon stresses and uncommon
devotion.
Ivan Doig recounts the hopscotch life of a ranch foreman
(his father) across Montana’s landscape of ferocious beauty and through towns
the map has long forgotten. Doig
tells of his times summering with sheep in high meadows (catch the rescue
efforts during an unseasonal storm to realize it ain’t all that bucolic all the
time), rooming in town with, essentially, strangers, because that’s what had to
be done while attending school, and wrestling with the conflict of honoring his
Dad’s legacy and life and turning away from it for a university education and
the potential of better tomorrows.
Along the way, we are introduced to a cavalcade of characters that will
come to populate much of Doig’s fiction.
This is a touching, evolutionary tale set in a past kids my
age still remember. It is a book
that, once again, once I finished it, I didn’t pick up another for a few days,
simply so I could savor the story and its telling.
See your local, independent bookseller.
o0o
“This House of Sky – Landscapes of a Western Mind” Ivan
Doig. 1978, 1998. $14.95.
© 2014
Church of the Open Road Press
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