As are many of Doig's previous books, this one is also set in northwestern Montana, between Browning and Choteau, with the incredibly gorgeous front range of the Rockies on the western horizon.
It's the story of Tom Harry and his 12-year-old son Rusty and their lives in the small town of Gros Ventre in the early 1960s. Rusty has no idea who his mother is, always wondering and trying to figure this out, but settles in with his somewhat mysterious father who owns and runs the Medicine Lodge Bar. (He had lived with an aunt in Arizona until he was 6 years old when his father suddenly appears one day and brings him home to Montana to live with him.)
A few more characters show up, including a young girl and her parents who take over a local restaurant, and I was soon drawn into the story.
I remembered and relived MY first experience in this wild and beautiful landscape. It was 1992 and I was driving the main road along the front range north towards US2 where I would eventually turn west through Glacier National Park. It's a lonely road with stunning scenery. And after leaving Choteau (where I spent the night as sole occupant in a little motel), I was driving one May morning and had to stop because a herd of sheep were moving along and across the road. A cowboy wearing chaps and on his horse apologized for the delay....
This novel has a bit of sheepherding, and fishing reservoirs, small town characters, confusing family intricacies, and an eastern Ivy League-educated young man who arrives and begins recording oral history...
A good old-fashioned tale...with Doig's descriptions of the land the next best thing to actually being there...
"Del and I hung on his every word as he described how twenty thousand people lived any crazy way they could while the wages lasted, in tar paper shacks and drafty government barracks and any other kind of shelter that could be slapped together and called housing. It made the life of Two Medicine sheepherders seem luxurious" (Tom telling of conditions during the building of Fort Peck dam as they gather for a reunion of those who worked on the dam, and whose stories Del is recording.)
"All over town, the cottonwoods were suddenly snowing, the fluffy seed filament they were named for drifting down like the most tardy flakes of the thirty-year winter....and through the heart of this soft storm...a rainbow was glowing....a hypnotic arch stretching from somewhere beyond the Medicine Lodge and the other downtown buildings to the far hay field of the creek valley. I watched, riveted, its full band of colors from red through yellow to violet phenomenally mixed with the snow-white fluff...."
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