English Creek by Ivan Doig

All I am trying to work into words here is that my father was a man born into the land, in a job that sometimes harnessed him to a desk, an Oliver typewriter, a book of regulations. A man caught between, in a number of ways. I have since come to see that he was of a generation that this particularly happens to. The ones who are firstborn in a new land. My belief is that it will be the same when there are births out on the moon or the other planets. Those firstborn always, always will live in a straddle between the ancestral path of life and the route of the new land. In my father's case the old country of the McCaskills, Scotland, was as distant and blank as the North Pole, and the fresh one, America, still was making itself. Especially a rough-edged part of America such as the Montana he was born into and grew up in.

Driving through Montana this summer, I got to see my first forest fire. It didn't look like much; it wasn't a big pillar of fire: just a few white curls of smoke up on a hill, though you could see on the state' digital map that it was quite large. More unsettling, in fact, was another day, when the yellow smoke drifted overhead from a fire we couldn't see and blotted out the sun. At the U.S. Forest Service Museum outside Missoula, we learned about how central fire prevention was to the organization from the very beginning: the vast resources and manpower committed to keep the forests of the west from blowing up. Just such a conflagration is the setting for the final third of Ivan Doig's English Creek, about a boy coming of age in exactly the Montana foothill country we passed through.

Jick McCaskill is fourteen years old. His father is a ranger in the Forest Service. It's the Great Depression. His older brother, Alec, has foreswore the college education his parents have planned for him in order to marry the beautiful Leona, and has taken a job as a cowboy with the area's largest rancher, and their parents are incensed. To Alec, cowboying seems an old Montana tradition, but his parents seem to understand that working for a huge ranch like the Double W is really another, more frightening version of the country's future, in which smallholding sheep and cattle ranches have been pushed out and consolidated. For Jick, the break between Alec and his parents is destabilizing, and he fears the dissolution of his family.

Alec's disappearance is one of two events casting a shadow over Jick's fifteenth summer. The other happens when Jick and his father, checking on the region's remote sheep ranchers, come across an old Forest Ranger named Stanley Meixell. Stanley is "camptending," delivering supplies to the ranchers' remote camps, and he's hurt his hand; Jick's father volunteers Jick's services for reasons that are unclear to the teenager. On the trip, Jick comes to understand that the history between his father and Stanley goes back much farther and deeper than he realized, and he spends the remainder of the summer trying to pry into that history. The ultimate revelations are rather less than shocking, but for Jick the knowledge stands in for a wider history of Montana and the "Two Medicine" district he grew up in; to understand Stanley--who, among other things, was the rancher who established the national forests' very first boundaries--might be to understand the world in which he was brought forth.

English Creek is one of those novels that might be described as a "love letter" to its particular locale. You know the ones--a love letter to Albania, a love letter to the Pacific Northwest, a love letter to Columbus, Ohio. Though the "Two Medicine" is a made-up pastiche, Doig's deep knowledge and love for western Montana is clear. You come out of English Creek knowing not just how to fight a forest fire, but how to pen sheep and harvest a hay crop. One thing it does well is capture just how fleeting our sense of a place really is: the Two Medicine country that Jick knows was more or less created by men like Stanley and his father, and in the hands of the big ranchers, it's already passing away. At the end of the novel, Hitler's invaded Czechoslovakia, and we understand that both Jick and Alec, at prime fighting age, will come to live very different lives than the ones they had anticipated.