Mountain time, p.29
Mountain Time, page 29
“Whoa, here you go.” The Hutterites looked at the swoop-necked branding iron she was brandishing. “The U Cross, next best thing,” she maintained.
“Ve vant a T Cross,” the two Hutterites said in chorus.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why the f—heck does it have to be a—?”
“Ve go the alphabet.”
“Could you sort of spell that out for me?”
“Ven ve hive a colony, t’e new colony gets t’e next letter for its brand,” the elder Hutterite explained. “T’e New Alberta colony, t’at vas our first, its brand is t’e A Cross.” His beard lifted a little like a preacher coming to his favorite part of Deuteronomy. “T’e next vun, Kipp Creek Colony, t’e B Cross. Right up the alphabet, ve go. Now ve vant a T Cross.”
She gave up and rummaged some more. “Look, this is as close as it gets—an ET Cross. Must’ve been Spielberg’s his very self.”
The Hutterite men looked at her. “Nein, t’at is Ernie Toomey’s old brand.”
“Never mind. See, all you have to do is cut off the E.” She cast a wild glance at the tools here and there along the wall. “I’ll throw in that hacksaw and a blade, even.”
The Hutterites conferred with each other in German, and with a great show of reluctance snapped up the deal.
• • •
Wedding-goers gone, bride and groom on a floatplane whirring to the San Juan Islands, the Do-Re-Mi Catering crew was cleaning up. The crew, which looked a little hurt at having to get by with less than usual bossing, left a space around the bar, where a great amount of public kissing and earnest vowing was still going on.
“So he had love trouble in spite of himself,” Lexa digested his account about Lyle.
“It used to run in the family,” said Mitch, and reached for her again.
• • •
Back in the living room of the Rozier house, Mariah stood over the pages of the Montanian spread out on the desk, eating her thoroughly cold hamburger with one hand and running the other critically over the sheets of newsprint, trying a tighter cropping on one image, tracing and retracing the angle of perspective through another. Finally, more or less satisfied, she balled up her napkin from one hand to the other. All this time on a newspaper and I still don’t know why the ink has to come off on a person’s fingers.
The still unvanquished face of Lyle gazed up at her from the dozen incarnations on the pages. All at once she was reminded of his habit of E-mailing Ritz about each triumph in selling off a branding iron. Last favor, you old handful and in the general cyber-direction of Jakarta, One from beyond the grave, kid. Turning on the tired-looking old set and connecting to WebTV, she plopped into the big chair, keyboard cradled in her lap, then went to E-mail and typed out the message. When she came to the designation of the brand she tapped a capital T onto the screen and then the plus sign, pleased by its resemblance to a cross so that Ritz would have a nice evocative T+ for his E-mail equivalent of a scrapbook. She clicked on SEND, but that didn’t seem to want to be the end of it. Something still tickled at her, back up there in the vicinity of the plus-sign key. For curiosity’s sake she tried its nearest neighbor, the minus sign, then typed another capital T. Sure enough, the -T there on the screen nicely approximated another brand, the Bar T.
Doing away with the minus sign, she shopped further along the row of keys, to the caret sign. Recognizably the Rafter T.
She took off the caret and moved over a couple of keys to the asterisk. T*. A pretty presentable T Spur.
Faster now, she deleted the asterisk, held down the shift key and tapped the colon key, twice. ::T. The Dice T. Dumped that and put a pinky down in the lowest right of the keyboard. /T. The Slash T.
Mariah stared down at the keyboard. She wasn’t even into dingbat options, circles and boxes and triangles and hearts and spades and diamonds and the whole computer zoo of other graphics. Nor had she started to go the alphabet, pairing twenty-five more letters and combinations thereof with each of these keyable mutations.
She lunged for the phone book, pawed out the number, waited impatiently for response at the other end.
“Donald, is it? Could you send Matthew over here to the Roziers’? I’ve got something on the screen I need to have him check out.” Then she called Seattle.
• • •
BlazingBrands.com, as quick as they got it on-line, billed a junior fortune in orders its first week. Brands went from being the return addresses of cows to the latest must-have as PICs—personal identification codes—in the cyber frontier beyond PINs, and the Webspeak equivalent of monograms transposable to everything from tech team T-shirts to personalized steaks sizzling on barbecue grills at company get-togethers. From ZYX headquarters arrived a fine fat offer to buy all three of those letters, in all permutations.
Wouldn’t you know, Mariah set her sights on the world again. This time, with her cut of our cyber gold rush, she figured she could poke the planet in the ribs with her camera for as long as she wanted. Before she could take off, Mitch and I asked her to perform the photo honors the day Lyle’s ashes were dealt with.
She was circling around the site, restless as a jay, her camera bag bumping on her hip, when Mitch and Lexa pulled up.
The box clutched to him, Mitch ducked into the lee of the BlazingBrands.com corporate Chevy Blazer, Lexa and Mariah already huddling there.
“This place is going to miss him,” Mariah mused.
“But it doesn’t need any more like him, either,” Mitch said with equal meditation.
“Watch your footing out there,” Lexa warned.
“Where was that advice the last time I needed it?” He sent her a flit of a grin, then looked soberly at Mariah. “Got your camera angle scoped out?”
“Always got that.”
“Then here goes.”
The two women watched him transport the ashes the last little way, carefully edging himself into position.
“Lexa?” ventured Mariah in a lip-biting tone. “No hard feelings?”
“Oh, yeah. But other kinds too. We’re still sisters.” She gave Mariah a reflecting smile. Then gently gave her a push, fond but a push, out into the wind.
Mitch stood at the edge of the Donstedder benchland where the coulee cut in. The pile of rocks below still seemed oddly concentrated here in this one place, like a sac of glacier stones. Lexa stood off to one side a little, upwind. Mariah went around to the brow of the coulee on the other side of them and cocked her camera.
“Maybe in error, but never in doubt—that was my father.” Mitch’s voice steadied against the wind. “He read himself wrong there at the end. He thought he could make himself add up to all that he wasn’t, with these”—Mitch raised the ashes a little—“and Phantom Woman. If he figured he had to have a monument, there is nothing shameful about this one. This one he earned over and over.”
He opened the lid of the box, undid the plastic liner inside it. Hands high, he leaned out over the coulee and carefully turned the box upside down, shaking the ashes. They were the consistency of sand, and of the same color as the rocks they fell among.
• • •
In a mountain valley as old as the visit of glaciers, the hiker stopped to drink out of the swift stream.
He gazed around with care as he walked out onto the low smooth outcropping that led right to the creek. Upstream, a waterfall slid with a pleasant little roar, and then water that looked as if it had fish in it pooled against the parentheses of bank before riffling off down the valley. Pretty sonofagun of a place occurred to him with a small smile. And it had the lookout tower beat for calm instead of commotion. All in all, he supposed he could tell himself he had come up in the world by coming down from Phantom Woman. But tired, Lord, he was tired and thirsty after the hot pace on the trail; it had been a long time since that fortifying can of tomatoes at lunch.
Taking off his hat and wiping away sweat, he looked for somewhere to set the hat and his things while he watered up, but there was nothing of the kind on the bare ledge of the creek crossing. He backtracked off the dock of rock and put it all, his Stetson on top, against the nearest aspen. Then came back to the stream’s stone edge. He drank from his hands, wiped his sleeve across his mouth, and stayed squatting on his haunches a minute, simply looking around. No matter how old he lived to be he would never cease to be captivated by the green tingling leaves of aspens. Everywhere under them, flat rocks from a sedimentary ledge vastly larger than the creek’s namesake where he hunkered. The spill of rocks out of the mountainside was like a flow of stone joining the creek. A lot like flagstones. Tempting. It wouldn’t take much to pile them.
Running his eyes over the palette of rocks he mulled whether to put up a cairn, mark this place for the kick of it. Didn’t really have time. Another hour, maybe two, he could pound on down the trail before calling it a day. But the trail would be there in the morning, too. The monument this spot of solace seemed to want would not, unless he lent a hand to those rocks.
Leave it up to gravity, he decided. He stood up and dug into his britches pocket for the good-luck piece he carried, a Liberty head silver dollar. If the toss came up heads, camp here and work with the rocks until they mounted up in monument form. Tails, then—he chortled at the play of words, starting to feel like himself for the first time this day—hightail on down the trail.
Bob Marshall poised the silver dollar on his broad thumbnail. Then flipped the coin high, the lucky piece spinning its arc of tails and heads up, up, into the mountain air.
Acknowledgments
Bill Tidyman for gallantly refurbishing my memory of rock picking; John Maatta for circumnavigating the Sweetgrass Hills with me; Lynn Korman for skillfully threading me through San Francisco’s Friday-night weave of Rollerblading; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for access to Bob Marshall’s notebooks; Laird Nelson and Sarah Auerbach for tuning up my ear to techies and their music; range scholar Hank Mathiason for tutelage in livestock brands, and Dave Walter for his inimitable role as interlocutor; Bud Moore and George Engler for readily sharing their decades of experience on the trails of the northern Rockies; Cheryl Oakes and Pete Steen of the Forest History Society for fire tower data; Mike Olsen for stimulating observations on the Baby Boomered West; Bradley Hamlett for Montana haying lore, and Rebecca and Joe Brewster for sharing their thoughts on going home again to where they and I came from; bush pilot Scott Reeburgh for the unforgettable Anaktuvuk flight; Lennart Lovstrand, whose WebTV I poetically licensed dingbats to; Gloria Flora, Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor, for acting as Bob Marshall would have toward the Rocky Mountain Front; Ann Nelson, Sarah and Nile Norton, Jean and John Roden, Linda Sullivan and Marcella Walter for cheerfully cross-examining wayward scenes for me; Richard Maxwell Brown, Linda Bierds, John and Katharina Maloof, Sarah Nelson, Margaret Svec, Walter Walkinshaw, and Mary Jane and Andy DiSanti for bits of inspiration that they made the mistake of letting drop within range of my notebook; the Avenue of the Americas bookmakers, Nan Graham, Susan Moldow, Carolyn Reidy, Brooke Zimmer and Brant Rumble; Rebecca Saletan, in at the launch; Marshall Nelson, without whom I would do I know not what; and companion on our high lonesome in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the other geographies of love, Carol Doig.
A SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION READING GROUP GUIDE
* * *
MOUNTAIN TIME
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. Discuss Lyle, Mitch, Lexa and Mariah’s differing relationships to the natural world. How do the characters’ childhoods and career choices reflect or shape their connections to the land? How do their attitudes toward nature serve as both barriers and bonds in their relationships with one another?
2. Discuss Doig’s use of flashbacks. What effect does he achieve by offering vivid glimpses of his characters’ pasts?
3. Mitch wants to safeguard the environment while his father Lyle seems bent on exploiting it. Do you view Mitch’s environmentalism as a filial rebellion, a conscious departure from his father’s lifestyle and choices? Or, do you think it reflects a generational shift from considering the earth an inexhaustible resource to viewing it as endangered?
4. Does Mariah use her camera as a way of connecting with the world or of keeping it at a distance? What do you think of her pairing of “earthly resemblances” to document the “natural family of forms”? Does she photograph natural and historic sites as a means of protecting or preserving them, or simply to achieve an aesthetic end?
5. Mitch decides not to honor his father’s dying wish. Do you think he is courageous and his action defensible, or is he wrong? By defying Mitch, is Lexa primarily defending Lyle’s decision, or trying to help Mitch let go of his bitterness?
6. Mitch “had the terrifying suspicion that he was beginning to understand extinction, from the inside out.” In the course of the book, Mitch is faced with several endings: the dissolution of his first marriage, the end of the “Coastwatch” column, and the end of his father’s life. What does the novel suggest about the significance of endings, and of our chances for beginning anew?
7. In pondering the past, Mitch asks: “Do things back somewhere count, or don’t they?” Find examples of how Doig explores the past and its effect on the present. Is it wise for Mitch to find Fritz and dig for the reasons behind the old daybook controversy? Is he better off knowing what he finds out?
8. Doig alternates accounts of Lexa’s climb out of the mountains for help with Bob Marshall’s last hike along the Continental Divide, the “high lonesome” of wild passages he so loved. What effect does Doig achieve by pairing these characters in this way?
9. What do the cairns, those stone monuments erected in the mountains, symbolize? What do they reflect about our need to alter the natural world, leave reminders of our presence and create things that may outlast us?
10. Bob Marshall is invoked several times in the novel, which ends with a scene of his stream-side reverie. What significance does Marshall’s legend lend to the choices and struggles of the four main characters? Why do you think Doig ends the book with the image of Marshall tossing a coin to decide whether or not to build a cairn?
11. Ivan Doig has said that he uses the places he knows to write about that larger country: life. Do you think that the themes of Mountain Time could successfully be set in some other place?
12. Who do you think is the strongest character in the novel? Which one is most sympathetic to you? Provide examples that help explain why you think so.
NOTE TO READERS FROM IVAN DOIG
No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Brontë, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—“Reader, I married him”—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist, even one from the Montana highlands rather than the Yorkshire moors, must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: “Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back.” Our books come to you with bright-cheeked hope, but before you take the time to get to know them you might well want to know: where do these suitors in their printed jackets and composed pages come from? What, as Ms. Brontë would grant that you have a perfect right to ask, is their parentage? My own literary “begats” now add up to nine books, and a biographical browsing of me customarily brings up such phrases as these:
“Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, in 1939 . . . grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front where much of his writing takes place . . . first book, the highly acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, was a finalist for the National Book Award . . . former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism . . . he also holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Washington . . . in the century’s-end San Francisco Chronicle polls to name the best Western novels and works of nonfiction, Doig is the only living writer with books in the top dozen on both lists: English Creek in fiction and This House of Sky in nonfiction . . . he lives in Seattle with his wife Carol, who has taught the literature of the American West.”
Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the redheaded only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had twenty-one members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
At the time, my motivation seemed to be simply to go away to college and break out of a not very promising ranch-work future in Montana. Jobs in journalism followed—as an editorial writer in Decatur, Illinois (where I truly grasped Keats’s meaning of “amid the alien corn”), and as assistant editor of The Rotarian magazine in Evanston. Then, starved as we were for mountains and ocean, Carol and I left the Chicago area in 1966 and came to Seattle, with the notion that I would get a Ph.D in history as background to bring to journalism teaching.
What graduate school taught me, though, was that I wanted to write more than I wanted to teach. I was continuing to freelance magazine articles during grad school and I also began, to my surprise, writing poetry, which I had never even thought of attempting before.
My eight or nine published poems showed me that I lacked a poet’s final skill, the one Yeats called closing a poem with the click of a well-made box. But still wanting to work at stretching the craft of writing toward the areas where it mysteriously starts to be art, I began working on what Norman Maclean has called the poetry under the prose—a lyrical language, with what I call a poetry of the vernacular in how my characters speak on the page. (In Mountain Time, for instance, one of the McCaskill sisters says of a set of neighbor kids who were hard to tell apart: “All the faces in that family rhyme.”) One of my diary entries, midway through the half-dozen years of effort on This House of Sky, shows me trying “to write it all as highly charged as poetry.” Twenty-five years and these nine books later, that’s still my intention.
