Having Roots and Being Windblown: Contemporary Writers in the Western LandscapeMemory of stories and sensory experience of a particular place at a particular time provide writers stabilizing and nurturing roots. By Janne Goldbeck William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky: A Memoir As Kittredge suggests, the land one knows is a beginning place, the point of connection through which are focused different times, different peoples, one’s own and others’ stories, one’s sense of self. And different types of landscape, their contours, vegetation, weather and history can shape the imagination differently. A particular set of qualities is shared by writers of the high desert northwest, though the writers themselves are quite different. These qualities are most apparent in memoir and autobiography. For these writers, an awareness of landscape comes in two ways: through direct, close experience of the land and through story---their family histories and the stories of those who inhabited the land before them. These two ways of knowing and absorbing the landscape are often closely intertwined, arising from the writers’ childhood experiences and no longer separable. Or they are part of a conscious intention by the adult to rediscover his or her connectedness to the land. These two sorts of experience---memory of stories and immediate sensory participation in a particular place at a particular time---provide the writers with their roots, something to stabilize and nurture them. In his memoir Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge announces that his reason for writing the book lies his desire to repair what he sees as a loss of family story and to rediscover, relive if possible, his childhood sense of being vitally connected to the natural world. "What I am looking for," Kittredge says, "at least so I tell myself, is a set of stories to inhabit, all I can know, a place to care about" (9-10). And in a similar way, John Rember, in his essay "On Going Back to Sawtooth Valley," speaks of his "deep instinct" to return to his family home: "The same 40 acres that has sustained our tiny herd of horses every summer for 35 years has sustained for me… a vision of a right place in the world, a place I belonged…" (Where The Morning Light’s Still Blue 81). Mary Clearman Blew’s memoir Balsamroot also shows the impossibility of separating landscape from the stories of the people who have lived and now live in it. She searches, through the story of her aunt’s life in Montana, for a family story that can help her understand her own story. She must, to retell both stories, locate them in the high, open landscapes of Montana and west central Idaho; descriptions of the land intertwine with her narrative of events. But the story of the land does not begin with the story of the white settlers. For deep in the Caucasian writers' sense of connection to a family history in a western landscape lies a strong sense of disconnection. The immigration of their families broke the continuity of the histories of the people already living there. For descendants of native peoples, like Janet Campbell Hale, this land remains their only home, the place, as she says, where she "grew up knowing we had existed as a tribal people…for countless generations" (Reflections of a Native Daughter," in Where the Morning Light’s Still Blue 35-36). This place, eastern Washington and northern Idaho, for her, is "the ancestral land, the first place I remember, forever" (35). Yet she, like many other Native Americans, is also displaced, unable to feel that she belongs anywhere. The Caucasian writers express this sense of discontinuity differently, of course. They realize that their own history has been made as the result of displacing another. Mary Blew recognizes that when she tries to "reconnect" with her own roots, she finds "a story that has been rewritten. In fact, a whole alternate history" (147). The "empty" country that her ancestors settled was emptied by them: "the history of this place is a hundred-year-old repressed memory. One story can be narrated only by denying another" (Blew 149). William Kittredge includes in his memoir parts of the history of the dispossession of the Blackfoot tribe. And Kim Stafford, in Lochsa Road, while affirming his connection, his recognition and comradeship with the ordinary people of Wyoming and Montana, also reaches for connections with the earlier peoples of those places. Assuming the persona of a wanderer, a pilgrim, he defines the Indian tribes of the high desert west as also wanderers, placing himself in their tradition. For Stafford, part of learning the land and being healed by it comes from "older forms of coherence than my culture had taught me" (79). These writers thus experience an essential duality in their sense of personal history. They have real and strong connections to the history of Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, embodied in their family stories. But they are aware of the wrongs committed to establish that history; part of the story is a story of dispossession. In that sense, they cannot feel that they are on "ancestral land" as Hale can. On the other hand, they often feel an emotional connection with the earlier Native American people, a desire for a shared history and love for the land that could create a new continuity. This desire is never fulfilled. However; the sense of connections one-sided. So, while these writers have roots, they also have doubts about how far down those roots really strike. This troubled sense of duality underlies the relationship that each writer has to his or her homeland and is expressed in a variety of ways. Both Kittredge and Rember speak of the "paradise" of their childhood worlds. They remember eastern Oregon or central Idaho as pristine country, inhabited by few people, where waterfowl, salmon, deer, and elk flourished. Part of the attraction of these places for them is that some of this abundance and beauty still remains. These are still sparsely populated areas, where hunting and fishing are integral parts of the inhabitants’ way of life. But both man are also keenly aware of the marks that human history has left on these places. Rember lives in what he calls a "museum" of an earlier way of life, where the land is no longer wild, where "what once was familiar is unfamiliar, what once was real is no longer real" (82). An important part of Kittredge’s story involves the loss of his family’s land as they worked harder and harder to change it and finally finished by losing real connection to that land’s original character. And yet he very much admires the people who settled in the high Oregon desert and worked hard all their lives to prosper. They taught him, he reminds himself, to work. Mary Blew also comments on the dreams of early settlers in Montana to become self-sufficient, independent creators of fruitful ranches and gardens. But she questions the possibility of achieving such dreams asking "Do you really dream that you can impose yourself on this landscape?" (105). It may be that the basic quality of this landscape is the source for some of the duality in these writers’ responses to it. It is a beautiful country, spacious, untamed, but harsh and demanding, as well. It can be a source of healing in its spareness and quiet, as Stafford indicates. Or as Leslie Leek puts it in "Clark County: God’s Country" (in Where the Morning light’s Still Blue), "you might feel the solid hand of silence press against your heart, and this could be a great comfort and a great pain" (178). Healing solitude or isolation? Kim Stafford writes of wanting to "turn over loneliness and find plain solitude" (38), but he cannot accomplish it. The barren landscape "bristles with detail" (Stafford 25) of sun, stone, the motion of wind through grasses, its own austere loveliness, yet it is "not a landscape for the faint of heart" (Blew 3). The Montana country in which Blew’s aunt grew up makes her resistant to comfort all her life; comfort, she says, is "debilitating." One cannot survive hard conditions in comfort. The settlers in eastern Oregon, according to Kittredge, were "willing to live in isolation" in order to try out their dreams of livestock and land, in " a territory measured in hundreds of miles" (25). Great distance is perhaps the most important quality of the landscape these writers live in. It conditions what is perhaps the most important response these writers make to their western landscape. Distance seems always to lie at the foundation of their sense of home and, once again, to become a source of duality of response. Leslie Leek calls the high mountain desert " a landscape that leads a person to believe not only in distance, but to expect a reward for surviving it" (173). Surrounding distances can make the settled home place seem more secure, more enclosed in itself simply by contrast. Kittredge tells his readers that "[i]n Warner we lived surrounded by immense distances, and yet we were safe in our refuge" (16). Mary Blew writes of making a "safe place" in her Washington home. Yet Blew also expresses an essential desire---even a basic need---for motion across the wide, defining distances that surround her:
In spite of their attempts to root them selves in specific places and their histories, these writers seem most at home when they are travelling. They learn the land by travelling through it, as Stafford does in Lochsa Road. Travel itself becomes a solace, a way of discovering understanding about the land and about themselves. The title of Rick Ardinger’s "The Highway Home" (in Where the Morning Light’s Still Blue) carries this double meaning: it is both a way to get home and the home itself. He knows the land because he knows the road so intimately. Travel is a necessity:
Kittredge finds his most satisfying concept of life in the saddle, riding out to the chuck wagon as a boy on his grandfather’s ranch. His growing up begins in long, often exhausting, rides across the desert. Blew ends Balsamroot with as account of riding with her daughter above the Snake River. She realizes the transitoriness of this landscape, of her own life. But she finds that she is herself here, riding "home toward the confluence of rivers in the deepening Idaho twilight" (211). A similar sense of self emerges in Stafford’s essays: "Your home is in travel, still homesick for the road. This feeling now---of longing, uncertainty, and hope---this is home" (61). For these writers, at least, place and motion are inseparable; they move through the land, through stories of its past; never arriving, they keep coming home.
Janne Goldbeck is a poet an professor of English at Idaho State University. Works Cited
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Last updated: November 13, 2006 - 1:56pm by eric.hildreth
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