Hole in the Sky: a Memoir, by William Kittredge (New York: Vintage Books, 1992)
With the beauty of language and heart-wrenching honesty, William Kittredge writes about his slow path to maturity. Set primarily in southeastern Oregon, on and near his family’s 15,000-acre ranch, readers imagine both the great beauty of his childhood landscape and its gradual destruction as profit increasingly takes precedence over stewardship.
“Warner Valley is the main staging ground for my imagination. We never learned much in the way of local and family history, but I know my own stories, and Warner is a landscape where the names of people are connected to things that happened around me, and what happened reminds me of where, and then we are back to the landscape and another round of connection.” – from Hole in the Sky: a Memoir, by William Kittredge
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey (New York: Penguin Classic, 2006; first published in 1964)
When a logging strike hits the Oregon coast, the unforgettable Stamper family refuses to yield. This big, “wild-spirited tale” pulls you into the lives and rivalries of a truly dysfunctional family and into the green, wet, Oregon landscape Kesey knew and loved.
A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.
The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges follow its southern. No bridges span its first ten miles. And yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. Look…
Rain drifts about the windows. Rain filters through a haze of yellow smoke issuing from a mossy-stoned chimney into slanting sky. The sky runs gray, the smoke wet-yellow. Behind the house, up in the shaggy hem of mountainside, these colors mix in windy distance, making the hillside itself run a muddy green.
On the naked bank between the yard and humming river’s edge, a pack of hounds pads back and forth, whimpering with cold and brute frustration, whimpering and barking at an object that dangles out of their reach, over the waer, twisting and untwisting, swaying stiffly at the end of a line tied to the tip of a large fir pole…jutting out of a top-story window.
Twisting and stopping and slowly untwisting in the gusting rain, eight or ten feet above the flood’s current, a human arm, tied at the wrist, (just the arm; look) disappearing downward at the frayed shoulder where an invisible dancer performs twisting pirouettes for an enthralled audience (just the arm, turning there, above the water)…for the dogs on the bank, for the blinking rain, for the smoke, the house, the trees, and the crowd calling angrily from across the river, “Stammmper! Hey, goddam you anyhow, Hank Stammmmmper!’
And for anyone else who might care to look. – from Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey
Related Websites
Kesey’s Oregon – National Geographic Online Video
Also…
You can enter scenes from the 1971 movie adaptation, starring Paul Newman, Lee Remick, and Henry Fonda, by taking a drive along the Siletz River (Oregon Route 229), leaving U.S. Route 20 just east of Newport and connecting with U.S. 101 near Lincoln City. I imagine that the Victorian house that figured so prominently in the movie still sits beside the river. Scenes were filmed throughout the Newport area, including Mo’s Restaurant along the town’s waterfront.
“They had formed into a solid party, it seemed, of forty wagons.. They crossed a river in more rain, then had a drying day, the evening cold and still. Frost lay sharp next morning. She walked. She cooked barefoot while clots of mud fell off the wagon, and the girls with knives cut chunks of the day’s mud from all their shoes and scrubbed them. She went to bed, fell into dreams at once, with no idea where she was.” – from A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher
A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher (New York : Random House, 2005)
“Such a pitiable hunger we all have, simply to be known.” – from A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher
Karen Fisher says risk and sorrow are two of the themes she explores in A Sudden Country, a novel based on an 1847 journal kept by her great-grandmother, Emma Ruth Ross Slavin. James MacLaren, a trapper for the Hudson Bay Company, grieves the departure of his wife and deaths of his children. Lucy Mitchell mourns the loss of her home and her first husband’s untimely death. Out of her sorrow Lucy risks everything when she turns to MacLaren, while her second husband, Israel, also risks all with his insistence on resettling in Oregon. While this may sound like the basis for a romance novel, Fisher moves in a different direction, revealing how the journey forever alters lives and landscape.
“There is no forgiveness without stories. There is no dignity. There is no way to speak in other tongues but that.” – from A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher
Related Websites
A Sudden Country Website
“This air seemed filmed with moisture, the distance pale and muted. She had a sense of sea. And breaking over the rim at last, she did behold it, with her pail. The true Columbia. She slid down and down the shady bank to the gray sand of the river’s edge. So, she thought. We are here.” – from A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher