Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig [Doig, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, History
ISBN: 9780547546735
Google: 9L3_kI6_KRAC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1982-10-20T07:00:00+00:00

Swan on the Makah version of restlessness: Last evening Peter wanted his Squaw to go home with him, she was then in Tahahowtls lodge. She refused, whereupon Peter pitched into her, pulled her hair and blacked her eye. Tahahowtl interfered and Peter went at him and they had a hair pulling match and finally separated to get their guns but friends interfered. . . .

Noon. The morning would not be calmed, kept shoving aside Swan’s logbooks for its own. I let the hours roam back along the entire wordstream of this winter so far, turned them loose on the question of why the West takes hold of a James Swan, an Ivan Doig. Notions—they are not answers yet, if they ever grow up to be—tumbled like the scenes in yesterday’s retrieved notebook of the Marshall Wilderness days: . . . Perhaps the choice of place is in our body chemistry simply as other patterns of taste are, regulating me to dislike brussel sprouts, the color pink, and square miles of pavement. . . . The west of America draws some of us not because it is the newest region of the country but because it is the oldest, in the sense that the landscape here—the fundament, nature’s shape of things—more resembles the original continent than does the city-nation of the Eastern Seaboard or the agricultural factory of the Midwest. As for so much else, mountains account for it. They, and the oceans, are virtually the last pieces of earth we have not someway tamed, transformed. Although we are striving. Go in an airplane above the Cascade Range to see clearcut logging like countless patches of fur shaved off. Study the logging roads which incise the high edges of the Olympics. . . . Or are we drawn west, or merely deposited? The way, say, spores drop into a forest: some spot is found in the immense environment, life is stubbornly established and clung to, whether the site turns out to be rich humus or up a tree?

Enough. What counts for now, this winter, is to keep the question open, let the hours chase at it when they will.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.