Overview
"William Kittredge writes about the West," Raymond Carver once wrote, "with pity and terror and love. His work is singular and unforgettable." And in this extraordinary, much-awaited memoir, he explores one of our primary national mythologies through the history of his own family.
The Great Basin is a sagebrush desert extending from Oregon into Nevada and California, ringed by mountains and crossed by oasis valleys--and, until white men arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, home to the Klamaths, the Modocs, and the northern Paiutes. By then their destruction was inevitable, as was a future of Manifest Destiny and massive ranches. One of these--the MC, later known as the Warner Valley Stock Company--was William Kittredge's birthright and curse.
He was born, in 1932, into a frontier childhood of natural beauty and cowboys all around; and for him, unlike the vast flocks of migrating waterfowl, this was a place to be rooted forever, among people who for three generations had owned it all. But gradually everything changed, as surely as horses gave way to the tractors that drained the swamps and transformed the land, and as the distances between fathers and sons and husbands and wives came to be measured in resentment and silence.
This is the story of a great pioneer family's decline and fall, and of a childhood dream that turned into an adulthood of dislocation and loss, the end of a way of life. But it is also Kittredge's account of coming to terms with this complex inheritance and to a new, deeper, understanding of both himself and the West. Based on his experience and our collective past, Hole in the Sky is an epic of American life.