This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [0]
Landscapes of a Western Mind
Ivan Doig
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A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London
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To my wife, Carol.
Westward we go free.
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Copyright © 1978 by Ivan Doig
Preface copyright © 1992 by Ivan Doig
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doig, Ivan.
This house of sky.
(A Harvest book)
1. Doig, Ivan. 2. Doig family. 3. Meagher Co.,
Mont.—Biography. I. Title.
[F737.M4D643 1980] 978.6'612'030924 [B] 79-18783
ISBN 978-0-15-689982-6
Printed in the United States of America
DD FF HH JJ KK II GG EE
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Introduction
In the last years of the 1960s, when this country was going through convulsive self-questioning, I was as usual out of step. It was getting clearer and clearer to me what I was in life. I was a relic.
And the son of another relic. And the grandson of yet a third relic.
This clearheadedness came over me in a most unexpected place: graduate school. I was at the University of Washington working toward a doctorate in history and noticed that I seemed to have come out of a time warp that I had left in Montana not all that many years before. In my Montana upbringing, I had worked in a lambing shed, picked rock from grainfields, driven a power buckrake in haying time and a D-8 Cat pulling a harrow during summer fallowing and a grain truck at harvest, herded sheep, trailed sheep, cussed sheep—even dug a well by hand and whitewashed a barn—and now I didn't seem to be finding other people who had done any of that.
Then during one of those winters of discontent in graduate school, my father and my grandmother—my mothers mother—came to Seattle to live with my wife, Carol, and me for the sake of my father's health, in our losing struggle against his emphysema. In almost all instances, I had done only enough of each of those Montana ranch jobs to convince me I did not want to do it every day the rest of my life. But here was a pair of persons who had gone on doing those tasks, and many more, until they simply could not any longer.
The sight of these two people of the past who had raised me—Bessie Ringer, ranch cook, diehard Montanan since her early twenties, when she stepped off a train in Three Forks with an infant daughter and a jobless husband; and Charlie Doig, ranch hand and rancher, born on a sagebrush homestead in the Big Belt Mountains south of Helena—the daily sight of these two in our Seattle living room, with a shopping center out the window below, made me very much aware of the relic-hood of the three of us. In the strictest dictionary definition: "an object whose original cultural environment has disappeared."
It has been twenty-two years now since I finally put a period to the 410th page of the manuscript built upon those musings. This reappearance of This House of Sky in new covers, bookdom's equivalent of knighthood, seems the natural occasion for telling the books own life story—an against-all-odds chronicle at least as chancy as the fate of any of us inhabiting its pages. My hands still sweat as I see the points at which the years of Sky carpentry could have failed. Most installments of the long work of getting Sky's words into print are clear enough from notes and letters and diary entries I made along the way, but genesis is never easy. What at last became This House of Sky seems not to have had a beginning, but beginnings.
One of these took place in the summer of 1968 when, as far as I knew, I was researching a magazine article. I was still in graduate