The Big Picture
INSIDE THIS HOUSE OF SKY
Photographs by Duncan Kelso '63, text by Ivan Doig. Atheneum, 1983. $27.95.
Memory is our only true time machine. And of all the Proustian devices, the smells, sounds, and random tastes which aid us to recall the past, surely photographs provide the most dependable mechanism of all. The snapshot brings, if not total recall, at least the closest approximation to what it was like that sunny Fourth of July after the war when we were six and sat eating watermelon in our bib-overalls with all those other tow-headed chums on the kreosote-soaked front porch of McGrath's General Store.
It is not surprising that my memories of an upstate New York childhood should be different from Ivan Doig's recollections of growing up in White Sulfer Springs, Montana at about the same time. More than mere geography separates these extremes. Yet both our pasts, are continually informed by a casual photographic record. His grandmother's family albums were at Doig's side when he came to write his haunting reminiscence This House ofSky. And now the memories have come full-circle. Photographer Duncan Kelso has journeyed to the scenes of Ivan Doig's Maegher County boyhood and captured a part of Montana which seems changeless and eternal.
Appropriate quotations from ThisHouse of Sky serve as captions for many of the pictures, but I don't wish to speak here of that remarkable book I've already given it that ultimate thumb-nail review: a dust-jacket blurb. In any case, Duncan Kelso's book is not merely an extension of Doig's. His handsome photographs easily stand on their own without any association with the other man's work. I can vouch for the authenticity of the varying moods they capture for I know the country. I lived for a dozen years in neighboring Park County and have often made the drive to White Sulfer up the Shield's Valley along the narrow asphalt ribbon of U.S. 89. Many of Kelso's images form a part of my own memory: a starkly beautiful weathered and boarded-up church on a hillside overlooking what's left of Ringling, the vivid white crosses punctuating the highway like miniature headstones wherever reckless driving claimed another fatality, lonesome log homesteads, abandoned and roofless among the sage-choked draws. I know these places, and through the magic of Kelso's lens, you will, too.
The shots of Ringling are particularly telling. The remnants of a town named for a circus owner are scattered along the single track of the electric train that once hauled hay grown locally to feed big top elephants and trick ponies. When I first saw the place, it was little more than a collection of ruins and trailer homes. All that was left of the bank was the iron vault, standing like a sentinel above the rubble. The sole surviving business was a tiny bar dwarfed by a glittering mountain of empty beer cans heaped out back. Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffett, and I stopped here for a drink ten years ago on a fishing trip to the Smith River. Buffett's memorable song ("Ringling, Ringling, fading away . . . ") and Kelso's vivid photographs are a more eloquent testimonial than most ghost towns ever receive.
Montana is in so many ways a monochromatic landscape that Kelso's duotone prints seem entirely appropriate. The mood he captures of drifting shadows and sunlight piercing a ragged storm-gray sky to highlight random hills is exactly right. But, if one were to find any fault with the book, it would be to wish for an occasional color shot to emphasize the subtle palette with which the countryside is embued; the tawny, lion-colored hills of summer, vivid scarlet and silver lichens splotching the granite outcrops, the brief golden moments of the aspen groves in autumn. It is to Kelso's credit that his art suggests these nuances even though limited to black and white.
One other small complaint: I was bothered that the book is unpaginated and that there is no index giving the location of each photograph. Although I am familiar with the area, I realize that most readers will not be, and a more precise catalogue would have been helpful. But these are minor irritations compared with the overwhelming beauty of Duncan Kelso's work. One picture is said to be worth a thousand words. This review is not quite that long. So much for the title page. There are 63 more pictures in the book and I've run out of space.
William Hjorstberg, author of Falling Angel and other novels, is currently inEngland working on ".Legend," a filmfor which he has written the script.Most of the time, though, he's inMontana.
