The Departure of Doig

Only the most gifted authors can transport readers and make characters inseparable from the landscape that molds them. Ivan Doig more than fits that description. He just died a few weeks ago and it struck me more than an author's death normally would.

It's due to the serendipitous circumstances under which Nancy and I met him.  He was reading and signing at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, a fact I discovered the morning before the signing. Nancy and I had planned two days in the Garden City as part of a weeklong Montana tour, and I was reading The Bartender’s Tale, his latest, which brought Doig to Missoula that weekend.

Even then, Doig was grappling with the cancer that would claim him in April 2015. His kindness to the people waiting for signatures gave no signal of illness. Neither did his writing pace during his final years – at the time, he had just released The Bartender’s Tale, with Sweet Thunder to come in 2014 and a final volume due in August.

The Bartender’s Tale hooked me. Blame my obsession with Montana if you must, but damn, Doig ensconces his readers in Montana. The state, its geology and its small towns (Doig generally uses amalgams of real places in his fiction) all hum to life in his prose.

The young protagonist lived with his bartender father in a small town on the Rocky Mountain Front (where the Rocky range meets the plains).

A few pages in, it became clear that Doig was both a novelist and historian, his tales wrapped in actual events. But they are not historical novels or western novels – the characters ultimately form the core of every book, no matter the fantastic landscapes or events swirling around them.

 In the past year, I’ve read three Doig books --- the acclaimed memoir This House of Sky (after two false starts, I read the entire thing on a round-trip between Nashville and Seattle), new release Sweet Thunder and Mountain Time, which brings flourishes of 1990s Seattle into the mix.

Heading to the Kings Hill Scenic Byway in 2010, I had driven through White Sulphur Springs, but I had no idea it was Doig country. This House of Sky gave me a new appreciation for its livelier days and the hard-scrabble people who eked out a living. His unusual childhood - his mother died young, and his father enlisted Doig's maternal grandmother to help raise him - and way with words elevates the memoir to a top-notch read.

In his fiction, Doig’s characters were inseparable from the land. In Sweet Thunder depicts 1920s-era Butte, and the environment drives the book. It simply wouldn’t be a Doig book without the disparate Montana voices. Sweet Thunder rebuilds shattered Butte to its glory days, before mining companies sacrificed half the town for a massive open-pit mine that now hosts a poisoned lake, the Berkeley Pit. The mining companies ruled in Sweet Thunder as well, but the city has a boom town sheen that hasn't worn away yet.

In Mountain Time, Doig traverses the 20th century history of the Rocky Mountain Front, traipse through the Bob Marshall Wilderness and see the conflict between generations in a hard-scrabble community on the cusp of extinction. When an easy conflict with a grizzly bear could have shaken up the novel, Doig goes in a different direction, and the book is better for his subtle touch. Even in Mountain Time, family quarrels and grudges form the book's core. None of these books are simply travelogues or history lessons.

Having not returned to Montana in several years, Doig's works have become even more important for me. I can visit Butte of a century ago or imagine the Missouri River’s bends flanked by cottonwoods before the Fort Peck Dam back up the waters for 100-plus miles. Who cares if I ever see when I can immerse myself in his words and instantly imagine the terrain?

The day Doig died, I ordered a hardcover copy of Bucking the Sun, his tale of a farming family and the construction of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.

When it arrived, few things stood out for an inexpensive book – it was signed, and at page 336, the book hid a leaflet from speech Doig gave at UC Boulder in 1996. Like Doig’s story, the book's page shoulders its share of history.

Doig preserves history in his pages, both personal and cultural. Shepherds, bartenders, alfalfa farmers and miners virtually step off the page, even if some no longer inhabit Montana. At the same time , the history of his books preserves Ivan Doig, an author of the West and chronicler of life through fiction .