William Kittredge - Hole in the Sky: A Memoir

Acclaim for

WILLIAM KITTREDGES

Beautifully written, wise, and absorbing. Hole in the Sky is a book about how we define and heal ourselves through the stories we tell.

Chicago Sun-Times

Generous in its moral quest, gentle in its humor, and a great story, too. Hole in the Sky is a memoir that will enlarge the personal world of every reader.

Louise Erdrich

Bill Kittredges Hole in the Sky, about a mans long, stumbling passage from fear and selfishness to compassion and communality is honest, wise, and immensely human.

Barry Lopez

One of the few thoroughly honest accounts of a western upbringing the kind of book I have been hoping to see come out of the West in greater and greater profusion, as the West at large discovers the sort of honesty that Kittredge has discovered in himself.

Wallace Stegner

[Kittredge is] among the best [of] the band of Western writers today examining where their region has come from and where its headed.

Christian Science Monitor

Hole in the Sky is the Rape of Eden recalled first as an idyll and then as a family curse. Kittredge is the child of people who conquered the land, but he hears the voices of its original inhabitants; and he knows what went under the plow because he helped put it there. Out of the pain and glory of growing up in a dying dream, Bill Kittredge has produced a great book.

Thomas McGuane

Wise, evocative and unflinchingly honest Kittredges luminous prose succinctly relates what hes learned. Keenly aware of the land, he confronts the consequences of greed, pride and manipulation on the regions complex ecology while noting the scars they leave on the landscape of the soul.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A courageous and engrossing book Kittredge writes a bountiful, wise, and lucid prose.

Jim Harrison

What a brilliant, radiant memoir this is! Frank, funny, elegiac, angry, full of love for the natural world and all the heroes of childhood. Hole in the Sky is magnificent in its feeling and its insights and in the sheer beauty of its writing. William Kittredge is one of our best writers about the West, and this is his best book.

Ron Hansen

Hole in the Sky is a heartbreaking masterpiece of a lifetime of growing self knowledge, and Kittredge is one of the best writers aroundanywhere. Like W H. Auden, he has the genius for seeing things and naming things that most of us think we know but dont.

James Welch

The Kittredges and the wideness of the West they encompassed are the very stuff of epic. Hole in the Sky is about consequences, to this fate-teased family and the earth they thought they commanded, and the one, clean, valid inheritance is what we are given in this booktheir rememberer, this good writer and just as good a man, William Kittredge.

Ivan Doig

If theres a literary New West, growing crazy wild and green and true right out of the Old one, Bill Kittredge is it. Compared to him, the rest of us are pavement.

David Quammen

WILLIAM KITTREDGE

HOLE IN THE SKY

William Kittredge is the author of two collections of storiesThe Van Gogh Field and We Are Not in This Togetherand a book of essays, Owning It All. With Annick Smith, he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

ALSO BY WILLIAM KITTREDGE

The Van Gogh Field
and Other Stories
We Are Not in This Together
Owning It All

Edited by William Kittredge

(with Annick Smith)
The Last Best Place:
A Montana Anthology

Copyright 1992 by William Kittredge

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1992.

Portions of this book have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: Esquire, Harpers, Hayens Ferry Review, Modern Maturity, Outside, Ploughshares, and Witness.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kittredge, William.

Hole in the sky. a memoir / William Kittredge.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1992.

eISBN: 978-0-307-76583-3

1. Kittredge, WilliamHomes and hauntsMontana. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. Authors, AmericanMontanaBiography. 4. MontanaSocial life and customs. 5. MontanaBiography. I. Title.

[PS3561.I87Z47 1993]

818. 5403dc20

[B] 92-50599

Author photograph Marion Ettlinger

v3.1

For
Gertand Al
Maude and Will
Jo and Oscar
Pat and Roberta
Karen and Brad
Zach, Riley
Max, and Leo

Thanks to Carol and Ivan Doig, who got me centered on the idea of this book in the first place; to Amanda Urban, who saw me through all the changes; to Gary Fisketjon, whose fine pencil helped it so much; and to Annick Smith, whose help is, and always has been, of course, invaluable

M aybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much. Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace. Im trying to imagine that it is, that our childhood love of things is perfectly justifiable. Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the worldfalling.

The year I was to turn six, the spring of 1938, out in the backlands of southeastern Oregon, I began a curious, end-of-innocence time, trying to fathom what there was to value about life. I was fresh from something like a year in hospital rooms, recovering from polio. People said I had almost died; I wanted to know why it was better to be alive.

At this moment I am nearing sixty, and wish I could go back to the world inside that child. I want to reinhabit his direct curiosity about himself, to know as that child knew. I want to smell the sour stink of springtime, and taste the air as I stood out on the lawn in front of the house my father had built for us.

The men who worked on our ranch were hauling manure from the corrals on horse-drawn stoneboat sleds, rebuilding the long dams across the swales in the hay meadows, flood-irrigating the swamp grasses, which had all at once turned brilliantly and variously green, sedges and field lilies, and tules in the sloughs. Waterbirds would come and go, and my father would worry about coyotes killing spring calves, and raccoons in the nests of ring-necked pheasants, sucking eggs in thickets of willow that were sprung to leaf. The world was beginning to accumulate an irresistible momentum.