Many astute observers have noted that the Pacific
Northwest doesn’t quite fit in the American West, a land where the
most apt word is aridity; yet here we are, moist, green,
mountainous, ocean-lined, and irrevocably the upper left corner
until such time as the Great Quake makes us an island. Yet we are
not just gray and green; we are also high sage deserts, vast
wheatlands, roaring rivers, many millions of people. What are the
basic texts for understanding this anomalous West, this species of
Westerner?
In no particular order, here are a few, with
an Oregonian bent; all due respect to our cousins Washington and
Idaho and Montana and Alaska:
Sometimes
a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey, 1964. Best novel
ever about Oregon, a brawling prickly dense muddled muddy sweeping
epic in which rain is arguably the main character. Made into an
awful movie, unlike Kesey’s other great novel One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is a
terrific film.
The River
Why, by David Duncan, 1983. The great novel
about coastal rivers and salmon-fishing, sort of, although of
course it is really finally about love and epiphany and growing up
a little. Duncan, like Kesey, wrote a second masterpiece, also a
glorious book about the Northwest, The Brothers
K, which is three times as thick and twice as
coherent as his first; but The River
Why is a classic I’d make every teenager here
read if I was in charge.
Wildmen,
Wobblies, & Whistlepunks, by Stewart
Holbrook, edited by Brian Booth, 1992. No one has ever written
about loggers, robbers, hookers, charlatans, mountebanks, false
prophets, fallen utopias, sailors, taverns, crime, and hilarity
here quite like Holbrook, a Vermonter who famously, after his first
few days wandering the vast cedar and fir forests here, nailed his
bowler hat to a stump and declared he was home.
Ricochet River, by Robin
Cody, 1992, another great coming-of-age-in-Oregon novel, and, says
Cody himself, the worst feature film ever made in the United
States, its only redeeming value being that it was Kate Hudson’s
first movie.
River
Notes, by Barry Lopez, 1979. The state’s great
modern writer, a visionary who at his best makes tales that are
riveting, mythic, penetrating, evocative, and unforgettable. A land
riven by great waters is blessed by a great poet of waters.
Riverwalking, by
Kathleen Dean Moore, 1996. Speaking of rivers, a gentle and
sharp-eyed essayist here considers all sorts of waters and rushing
prayers. Beautiful. Read it back-to-back-to-back with
The Habit of Rivers, by Ted
Leeson, and Reach of Tide, Ring of
History, by the late Sam McKinney.
Stepping Westward, by Sallie
Tisdale, 1991. This Portland writer’s best books are perhaps
Lot’s Wife, about the lore
and legends of salt, and Harvest
Moon, about being a nurse, but her
memoir-rumination about childhood in the Klamath basin and
adulthood in Oregon is thoughtful, piercing, stimulating, and
lovely.
Hole in the
Sky, by William Kittredge, 1992. Best known as
a longtime Montanan, Kittredge was born and raised on a vast ranch
in dry Oregon, and this haunting memoir about breaking nature and
being broken as a man is the great book (so far) of the high
Northwest desert.
The Nez Perce and the
Opening of the Northwest, by Alvin Josephy,
1965. In many ways this single book opened modern history and
culture to the reality of settlement in the West, and Josephy, also
the author of the remarkable 500
Nations, was a lyrical and meticulous writer.
The Journals of Lewis and
Clark, edited by scholar Frank Bergon, 1989.
The Iliad and Odyssey of
American literature, as Bergon says, and a colorful, often funny,
remarkable account of a great journey through the West. And the
spelling variations are to die for.
Overstory Zero: Real Life in Timber
Country, by Robert Leo Heilman, 1995. A
collection of pieces by a wry, angry, open-hearted essayist deep in
the timber country of southern Oregon. As the extractive industry
here ended in its roaring form, an elegy.
Having Everything Right, by
Kim Stafford, 1986. Best known as a poet, and patient shoulderer of
the capacious legacy of his brilliant poet dad William Stafford,
Kim Stafford is also a very fine essayist, and this is perhaps his
best book, being the most grounded in the soil and bees and trees
and hopes of Cascadia.
And finally
Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged
Land by Robert Michael Pyle, 1986, or maybe his
new Sky Time in Gray’s River, both thorough, humorous, informed (Pyle is a master naturalist)
tomes about all sorts of beings in the Willapa Hills of Washington
state.
If there was ale enough and time we could talk
about so very many other writers of the Northwest – John Daniel and
Tom Robbins, Ivan Doig and John Haines, Annie Dillard and John
McPhee, Norman Maclean and Ursula Le Guin, David Guterson and Jack
London, Thomas McGuane and Don Berry – but here comes the end of
the page and the pint, so. …
The author is the editor
of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author
of eight books, none of which is one of the best ever in the
Northwest.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wet words.
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