Hole in the Sky by William Kittredge (review)

Reviews -Hole in the Sky. By William Kittredge. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. 238 pages, $20.00.) Hole in the Sky is a memoir, not a novel, nor still less an inspiring fable. The strength of the book is in its reverence for what occurred, for the texture of lives: . . . On a dour November afternoon my father sat on a wooden case for shotgun shells in the deep tules by Pelican Lake like a crown prince of shotgunning, and dropped 123 ducks for an Elks Club feed. The birds were coming north to water from the grain fields and fighting a stiff headwind. They flared and started to settle, just over him, and they would not stop coming into the long red flame from his shotgun as darkness came down from the east. What the book fails to do is to re-enact the Western myth: to recount a young m an’s progress through ever-greater toughness and disregard to become a wind-burnished, squint-eyed stockman, impervious as basalt. Kittredge, inheri­ tor of the vast MC Ranch in Oregon’s Warner Valley, who was once that man in the flesh, not only rejects this conclusion but reveals it as a continuous tragedy. With its unwavering focus and emotional drive, this would be a difficult book to read if not for Kittredge’s style, which combines precision with a grace of statement that can only be called eloquence: I want to think that all creatures, even us, are in love with the makeup of their actualities like bats at the throat of some desert flower while no one is watching, spreading pollen in ways the flower would love if flowers did such things. And maybe they do. His metaphors—wild birds, the flow of water—lend a rich context, and remind us that there is no human fact that exists in isolation. It is this spacious, compassionate view that provides the balm in this book. In a Western, the hero is forced into progressively greater acts of violence, which anesthetize him both to moral horror and equally to the expression of human feeling. Yet the tight-lipped hero of the classic Western bears an uncom­ fortable resemblance to the postmodern psycho who shoots up a Burger King at rush hour, or to the president who calmly orders down a rain of fire on Iraq. The Wild West: it’s not over yet. 146 Western American Literature It is precisely this moral anesthesia that Kittredge fights: his grandfather’s harrowing numbness to pain of any sort, his family’s mutual alienation and destructiveness, the drunken lurch of Manifest Destiny in the present tense. The Western myth, in all its bloody splendor, is one that doesn’t work out well in living flesh. If we don’t know that yet, we should. So Kittredge tracks the immense disquiet that subtends the myth. His West is like L’Amour’s in its violence, but lacks the quick redemption of a gunshot. It’s a place—like any place—in which we must continue, in which we have relatives, friends, homes, and histories. As he sums up, in the final chapter: We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated. There will never be another setup like the one in which we have thrived. Ruin it and we will have lost ourselves, and that is craziness. l^erL . RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming A Garlic Testament: Seasons On A Small New Mexico Farm. By Stanley Crawford. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 241 pages, $20.00.) Until I read Stanley Crawford, my knowledge of garlic was purely culinary, a necessary flavoring for some salads and casseroles. Horticulturally I didn’t know a bulbil from a root node. But now, after two hundred and twenty-nine pages of A Garlic Testament: Seasons On A Small New MexicoFarm, I feel I know more about the anatomy and worth of that vegetable than any other of the field. The author, as a bachelor-Californian, educated at two American universi­ ties and the Sorbonne, casually went to the...