For the past three days I've had my nose in a book every spare minute. i checked all three books in Ivan Doig's Montana trilogy out of the Alameda Free Library and read them straight through. I can't think of when I've enjoyed a work of fiction more. And I do agree with the critics that Doig is a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner in terms of the passion and power with which he writes about the west.
Doig's three books, English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me Mariah Montana are all set in a very precise region of central Montana, directly south of Glacier National Park and east of the Continental Divide. They're the story of a family started by a young Scottish immigrant who becomes a sheep rancher, and of later family members who served as rangers in the US Forest Service in the Two Medicine area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The family is fictional, of course, but Doig, who grew up in this region, writes of many real-life events, including fires, droughts, blizzards, and the liming out of the forest boundaries by some of the first rangers.
I learned about Bob Marshall, a young forest ranger who founded The Wilderness Society and who fought for the establishment of permanent wilderness areas, under The Wilderness Act of 1964. One of the protected wilderness areas is named for Bob Marshall and plays a key role in one of the three books.
Anyway, Doig has reminded me again that I am a westerner to my bones, that I love the west, and probably could never again live happily anywhere else. He powerfully evokes the open skies, the saw-toothed mountains, the rush of mountain streams, and the rugged people who populate the west. I'm not talking about the cowboy-movie view of the west, but simply the land of space, openness and infinite possibilities. When I was driving from Sedona to Phoenix last week, I had not yet encountered Doig's books, butI shot a few photos of those spaces that are so dear to my eyes and heart.
west books literature literary wilderness Montana mountains forest+service novel western westerner