In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • In These Hills
  • Gregory L. Morris (bio)
Ralph Beer , In These Hills, University of Nebraska Press

Several years ago, Ralph Beer published a compelling novel called The Blind Corral, about a young man's return to a family ranch in Montana. Then, for the general reader, Beer appeared to fall silent. But for the western ranching reader, Beer was still at work, both on his ranch and at his desk, turning out regular pieces for Big Sky Journal. Those short essays, and various others not written for the magazine, are collected here in In These Hills. The voice in most of these essays is folksy and across-the-fence, and Beer sort of sidles up to his reader in a familiar western way. So it would be easy to mistake this collection for a random haul of disparate opinions and short-lived observational wisdom, a bit of bunkhouse reportage. But Beer achieves much more with these essays, managing a coherent and often powerful statement on things as they are and as they have been in the rural West.

Perhaps it's best to begin at the very end. At the close of this collection, Ralph Beer writes: "Stories outlast stone." Stories may also outlast imperfect, impermanent relationships with place, and Beer tells his "stories" as a defense against loss. What Beer resists in particular is the loss of an identity shaped by a generational connection to a world and a way of life in the West. For Beer, that way of life is embedded in a family ranch that lay "in the evening shadows of the Continental Divide" near Helena, Montana.FourgenerationsofBeers-andespeciallyofBeermen-worked this ranch, not always profitably, but always with a sense of commitment and fidelity to the land and its history. What Ralph Beer - the end of the Beer line, the last direct male descendant of the original Beer homesteader - must wrestle with is his decision to sever that familial connection by selling the ranch. In the voice that tells these stories, we hear a persistent, pervasive twinge of guilt. Ghosts haunt Beer. Great-grandfather, grandfather, father: all were defining figures in Beer's life and in the way of life of this place, and all now stand at Beer's shoulder, questions rising in their hearts and their eyes. Beer writes, in part, to quiet those ghosts, to answer their doubts, to reconcile himself to having given up on a world once (and still) full of meaning.

This is a book steeped in memory. Over and over again, Beer veers into reminiscence and recollection, making a sometimes desperate effort to retrieve people and times close to his heart. As he admits at one point:

Lately I've begun to spend more time with people who have receded into the past and with places that exist nowhere as they once were, except in the nightland of my dreams. And I'm coming to see that only in memory and dreams do those places and people still live. I want to believe that by repeating the names of the dead I can postpone [End Page 192] their final disappearance. Some of the dead I want to claim as my own.

(167)

But Beer resists nostalgia, even as he reaches back to grab fistfuls of the past. He resists as well a sort of idealizing vision of the past and of the place through which his family was sifted and by which it was shaped. He looks to recreate parts of that past in order to establish its value; like his forebears, Beer has a good deal riding on and invested in this place - this ranch, this West - and he doesn't wish to give up his small portion of it with too much emotional ease.

Yet while Beer's voice is frequently elegiac, he still pitches that voice perfectly to the various timbres of the land he describes. Beer's descriptions of the work that is done in this place, his evocations of the physicality and the energy and the inherent rhythms of that work, ring unerringly true. Beer recalls himself as a boy, following men, woodcutters "tough and quick as burnished steel," into the...

pdf

Share