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Hole in the Sky: A Memoir
William Kittredge's stunning memoir is at once autobiography, a family chronicle, and a Westerner's settling of accounts with the land he grew up in. This is the story of a grandfather whose single-minded hunger for property won him a ranch the size of Delaware but estranged him from his family; of a father who farmed with tractors and drainage ditches but consorted with movie stars; and of Kittredge himself, who was raised by cowboys and saw them become obsolete, who floundered through three marriages, hard drinking, and madness before becoming a writer. Host hauntingly, Hole in the Sky is an honest reckoning of the American myth that drove generations of Americans westward -- and what became of their dream after they reached the edge.
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
About the author
William Kittredge
47 books27 followersWilliam Kittredge was born in 1932 in Portland, Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
June 9, 2021
A Hole in the Sky
This memoir focuses on Kittredge’s life that began on a ranch on the alkali plains of southeastern Oregon during the Great Depression. Part environmentalism, part nostalgic pining for the old days and part history lesson are all wrapped into a memoir.
5 stars
This memoir focuses on Kittredge’s life that began on a ranch on the alkali plains of southeastern Oregon during the Great Depression. Part environmentalism, part nostalgic pining for the old days and part history lesson are all wrapped into a memoir.
5 stars
November 18, 2020
William Kittredge, a famed author who is lauded in The Oregon Encyclopedia as a “preeminent voice of the American West,” reflects back on his life growing up on his family’s ranch in eastern Oregon.
I picked this up while my husband and I were staying in Oregon for six months with his job. I like to read books set in the state we’re currently in and Hole in the Sky showed up as a nonfiction pick on the lists I work from (Literary Hub and Book Riot, if you’re curious).
I just couldn’t click with this book.
Kittredge does write beautifully and he writes of a way of life that seems to be disappearing. He writes fondly of the hands who worked the ranch, some of them for years and years for little more than room and board. He describes the difficult land in the salt flats of eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Readers share in the stark beauty of the harsh land even as his family is bending it to their will with irrigation pipes and heavy equipment.
The rest of this review doesn’t feel fair, but it’s how I feel. The toxic masculinity put me right off. Kittredge himself acknowledges that he grew up on a hard land that made the people hard. He recognizes that his own extended adolescence lasted at least into his 30s. He liked to throw his weight around when he had authority and he was unreasonably hard on his men even while he was trying to get away with his own drunken workdays. He neglected his children and cheated on his wife shamelessly. And he acknowledges in the book that none of this was right or good. I applaud him for admitting his own faults and putting them out there for anyone to read but I disliked the young man in these pages and, rightly or wrongly, that colored my perception of the entire book.
Readers who are better able to separate the author from the work and the older, wiser man from the younger, more foolish one will enjoy this more than I did. It is at its heart a reflection on a way of life that has all but disappeared.
I picked this up while my husband and I were staying in Oregon for six months with his job. I like to read books set in the state we’re currently in and Hole in the Sky showed up as a nonfiction pick on the lists I work from (Literary Hub and Book Riot, if you’re curious).
I just couldn’t click with this book.
Kittredge does write beautifully and he writes of a way of life that seems to be disappearing. He writes fondly of the hands who worked the ranch, some of them for years and years for little more than room and board. He describes the difficult land in the salt flats of eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Readers share in the stark beauty of the harsh land even as his family is bending it to their will with irrigation pipes and heavy equipment.
The rest of this review doesn’t feel fair, but it’s how I feel. The toxic masculinity put me right off. Kittredge himself acknowledges that he grew up on a hard land that made the people hard. He recognizes that his own extended adolescence lasted at least into his 30s. He liked to throw his weight around when he had authority and he was unreasonably hard on his men even while he was trying to get away with his own drunken workdays. He neglected his children and cheated on his wife shamelessly. And he acknowledges in the book that none of this was right or good. I applaud him for admitting his own faults and putting them out there for anyone to read but I disliked the young man in these pages and, rightly or wrongly, that colored my perception of the entire book.
Readers who are better able to separate the author from the work and the older, wiser man from the younger, more foolish one will enjoy this more than I did. It is at its heart a reflection on a way of life that has all but disappeared.
April 21, 2012
Kittredge's excellent, thoughtful, and well-written book is a memoir of growing up on a ranch in southeastern Oregon. This is arid country where spring runoff from the mountains gathers in lakes and swamps used for millennia as a stopover by migrating waterbirds. Enter the enterprising Kittredge family, and during the 20th century thousands of acres here were transformed into a vast irrigated ranch, its chief output evolving from cattle to grain to hay to feed milling and feedlots. More to the point, they built an agricultural empire and became wealthy.
The author, born into this world in the 1930s, looks back from the vantage point of 1992, long after leaving the ranch behind and settling in Montana. What he sees is the wreckage of three generations blighted by ambition, greed, arrogance, and no small amount of alcohol. Kittredge talks often about how personal stories illuminate and ground people's lives, yet he and so many of the people around him are directionless and unmoored. His book is a story in which words like "reckless," "hapless," and "heedless" are often used to describe actions.
It is a painful book because there is so much heartache in it, so much confusion, shame, isolation, and fear. There are betrayals, infidelities, friendships and marriages ended, deaths from accidents and mishaps. In all of it, from earliest memories to those of a man on the verge of middle-age, the author describes a deep uncertainty about his own worth and his purpose in life. For many years, it seems to be only the grueling hard work of the ranch, which he only half understands, that keeps him distracted from a sense that nothing is real. (Steady consumption of alcohol and extramarital sex also figure into the mix.)
The book is something of a coming-of-age story about a young man whose manhood continually seems to elude him, well into his thirties. He can go through the motions in the hardworking environment of seasoned cowboys and field hands (an episode in which he takes the place of an injured hay stacker is an example), but he remains unsure of himself, wanting the security of the family ranch, while hating himself for not pursuing the writing career he believes is his real vocation. It's a wonderfully (and frustratingly) complex picture of a young man self-destructing. And in his seeming indifference to his own children, you sense a repetition of the same indifferent parenting that has led him into this emotional cul-de-sac. Significantly, he remarks often about the lack of a guiding hand to show him the way to be a man.
As a kind of confessional, it is a compelling book, and the impact of the story is underscored by the vast Western landscape against which it plays out. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the West and ranch life, cowboys, family sagas, and coming-of-age memoirs. As a companion volume, I'd also suggest Judy Blunt's ranch memoir "Breaking Clean" for its similar themes of emotional dislocation.
The author, born into this world in the 1930s, looks back from the vantage point of 1992, long after leaving the ranch behind and settling in Montana. What he sees is the wreckage of three generations blighted by ambition, greed, arrogance, and no small amount of alcohol. Kittredge talks often about how personal stories illuminate and ground people's lives, yet he and so many of the people around him are directionless and unmoored. His book is a story in which words like "reckless," "hapless," and "heedless" are often used to describe actions.
It is a painful book because there is so much heartache in it, so much confusion, shame, isolation, and fear. There are betrayals, infidelities, friendships and marriages ended, deaths from accidents and mishaps. In all of it, from earliest memories to those of a man on the verge of middle-age, the author describes a deep uncertainty about his own worth and his purpose in life. For many years, it seems to be only the grueling hard work of the ranch, which he only half understands, that keeps him distracted from a sense that nothing is real. (Steady consumption of alcohol and extramarital sex also figure into the mix.)
The book is something of a coming-of-age story about a young man whose manhood continually seems to elude him, well into his thirties. He can go through the motions in the hardworking environment of seasoned cowboys and field hands (an episode in which he takes the place of an injured hay stacker is an example), but he remains unsure of himself, wanting the security of the family ranch, while hating himself for not pursuing the writing career he believes is his real vocation. It's a wonderfully (and frustratingly) complex picture of a young man self-destructing. And in his seeming indifference to his own children, you sense a repetition of the same indifferent parenting that has led him into this emotional cul-de-sac. Significantly, he remarks often about the lack of a guiding hand to show him the way to be a man.
As a kind of confessional, it is a compelling book, and the impact of the story is underscored by the vast Western landscape against which it plays out. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the West and ranch life, cowboys, family sagas, and coming-of-age memoirs. As a companion volume, I'd also suggest Judy Blunt's ranch memoir "Breaking Clean" for its similar themes of emotional dislocation.
April 13, 2018
Love this genre of the western memoir and the freedom and beauty of the west. This particular book finally tired me out however, because the author always learned life's lessons day late and a dollar short. Still, a fascinating lifestyle and time to be there.
October 12, 2011
I cant believe I'm the first one to rate this book. What power.
A memoir of his life and his struggles trying to live out his grandfathers dream of the land, knowing it is not him, knowing it is wrong, and finally coming to terms with that.
Having spent summers on my grandfathers farm, some parts of this book struck me as my life: "my people sent me to the desert as a child so I would learn how to work. My life since has been colored by what I got those four of five summers with those men".
Yet as he tried to live out his grandfathers dream he began to see what he was doing...."the ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in even more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live."
The result for him was failed marriages, estrangement from his children, drinking, madness....and eventual wholeness through writing.
A memoir of his life and his struggles trying to live out his grandfathers dream of the land, knowing it is not him, knowing it is wrong, and finally coming to terms with that.
Having spent summers on my grandfathers farm, some parts of this book struck me as my life: "my people sent me to the desert as a child so I would learn how to work. My life since has been colored by what I got those four of five summers with those men".
Yet as he tried to live out his grandfathers dream he began to see what he was doing...."the ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in even more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live."
The result for him was failed marriages, estrangement from his children, drinking, madness....and eventual wholeness through writing.
July 21, 2019
What a great reality story of growing up. Smart and so poignant for today. A journey into one person's realness, through expectations of the past. And yet, the past is what made the future real.
People go walking into nature. They say they feel they are becoming part of things. They say they want to be like a stone, or a flower; they say such release from self is bliss, a kind of religious ecstasy, and they want it over and over.
But you have to wonder. Philosophers argue that we cannot be aware of ourselves without language. They say we are created by our language, that we live immersed in language and cannot escape; they say language stands as a scrim between us and what we think of as "real," and that we have to name things before we can know them. As a result we can never know what is "actual." All we know is names, and stories. (pg.9)
This book is a great story of a man and his family. His generation in the middle of past generations and generations after. It's told from one man's boxcar in a long timeline of a world with land and space. It's a memoir. And a damn good one.
People go walking into nature. They say they feel they are becoming part of things. They say they want to be like a stone, or a flower; they say such release from self is bliss, a kind of religious ecstasy, and they want it over and over.
But you have to wonder. Philosophers argue that we cannot be aware of ourselves without language. They say we are created by our language, that we live immersed in language and cannot escape; they say language stands as a scrim between us and what we think of as "real," and that we have to name things before we can know them. As a result we can never know what is "actual." All we know is names, and stories. (pg.9)
This book is a great story of a man and his family. His generation in the middle of past generations and generations after. It's told from one man's boxcar in a long timeline of a world with land and space. It's a memoir. And a damn good one.
March 8, 2021
A fascinating confessional and glimpse into the faded glory of Oregon desert-side ranching and a fortunate old Oregon family. A must-read for anyone who loves the Oregon country, especially the dry side. But the author was a textbook poor little rich boy. His self-lamentations made him seem very sad but not so relatable. Much wasted good fortune. At least he is most humble about his writing talents. Magically, near the end of the memoir, Kittridge says he is saved by Montana and a conversion to environmentalism. Not convincing after the decades of confusion and sadness. Still, this book was hard to put down and a vivid look into this guy's life and soul. I have not read his other work but I am curious how good it is.
January 27, 2022
I appreciate the book. The writing is excellent, but it seems to be written more for the author's conscience/remorse than for a reader's enlightenment. Not a memoir so much as a "regret".
May 25, 2023
As much as William Kittredge fancies himself a student of Hemingway, of sparse prose, littered with proper nouns of rugged places, and matter-of-fact descriptions of men doing men's work, he misses the mark by a couple thousand acres. Kittredge's concept of Hemingway's iceberg theory seems to involve assuming the reader already knows all of the people and stories in his life, so when he simply skims over what should be narrative milestones, you get the drift, right?
Not really, no. The continuity of Hole in the Sky feels so fractured that for the first hundred pages or so, every chapter feels like an introduction, and each new scene claws desperately for any semblance of flow. The best scenes, Kittredge and his father in an early jazz-club, or a brief interlude about Kittredge's drunken uncle Hank, do find their groove briefly, but these scenes never build toward anything. Much of Hole in the Sky reads like a man's journals, private thoughts and sketches intended to help him through a process of healing, or grieving, or moving on. I applaud this sort of writing. It's therapeutic, and Kittredge seems to gain solace from the act of laying his past to paper, but it should have been just for him, something to be set down and then set in a drawer, to be pulled out on lonely nights where he was anchor-less, as he so often still seems in his recollections. These are his stories, and unfortunately, his alone. Of the ranches, the mountains, and the West, Kittredge paints a beautiful picture, but in all that open expanse, he never finds the place where the universal and the personal meet. Not quite.
Not really, no. The continuity of Hole in the Sky feels so fractured that for the first hundred pages or so, every chapter feels like an introduction, and each new scene claws desperately for any semblance of flow. The best scenes, Kittredge and his father in an early jazz-club, or a brief interlude about Kittredge's drunken uncle Hank, do find their groove briefly, but these scenes never build toward anything. Much of Hole in the Sky reads like a man's journals, private thoughts and sketches intended to help him through a process of healing, or grieving, or moving on. I applaud this sort of writing. It's therapeutic, and Kittredge seems to gain solace from the act of laying his past to paper, but it should have been just for him, something to be set down and then set in a drawer, to be pulled out on lonely nights where he was anchor-less, as he so often still seems in his recollections. These are his stories, and unfortunately, his alone. Of the ranches, the mountains, and the West, Kittredge paints a beautiful picture, but in all that open expanse, he never finds the place where the universal and the personal meet. Not quite.
March 29, 2015
Not sure when this was written but it seemed to me that the author was still too attached emotionally to his earlier life to write more forcefully of that time. It seemed as if he was constantly apologizing about it as well as straddling the fence as to whether he would ever believe in himself as a writer. I found the very last section where he offers an opinion on environmental responsibility we all have for this earth sort of a tack-on. I would have left it out. We didn't need to know the author is not on the fence anymore. That would go without saying; otherwise, why even write the book?
I don't think anyone would expect a child or even a boy going into his teens to be so aware of the implications of the vastness of his family's land practices. And if it took him years to come to the realization the extent of the destruction, he shouldn't have to keep apologizing, and that is how I felt as I read this book. It wasn't all his fault nor all his family's fault. But if someone felt that remorseful about the end result there are many organizations today whose aim is to return the land and wildlife back to what it once was.
I don't think anyone would expect a child or even a boy going into his teens to be so aware of the implications of the vastness of his family's land practices. And if it took him years to come to the realization the extent of the destruction, he shouldn't have to keep apologizing, and that is how I felt as I read this book. It wasn't all his fault nor all his family's fault. But if someone felt that remorseful about the end result there are many organizations today whose aim is to return the land and wildlife back to what it once was.
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May 3, 2016Like Wallace Stegner before him, Kittredge struggles to understand how the contemporary West is shaped, but unlike the more elegiac Stegner, comes up seeing the whole history of the West as one of hypocrisy and hubris, defined by ritualized masculinity and an ethos of perennial capitalist expansion. I'm generally suspicious of memoirs that attempt to politicize personal experience, but this was alright. I have to think that this was, to a certain degree, because he sees his experiences as just one of many examples of the destruction of a landscape, instead of single-mindedly focusing on family trouble.
August 22, 2009
In this autobiography, the author is brutally honest about mistakes, misconceptions and his imperfect view of the world as a young man. But for all of his candor, you realize that somewhere along the way he was transformed from clueless child to self-aware adult. The author employs the misuse of the American West to symbolize our tendency to trash our human spirits and lives and loved ones. But don't get me wrong: he is wise and gentle with everyone in this book... including himself. A thought-provoking read which I haven't completely absorbed just yet.
August 1, 2023
Kittredge is a talented writer. There were things I really liked at times about this book, especially about the very beginning and the very end. Towards the end he says "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." He could have written the perfect American novel based on his life, but with characters and experiences similar to his. So very much of this memoir was about his own failings, frailties and failures. TMI, I kept thinking as I read about his drinking binges and sex with women other than his wife. I was disappointed in his lack of relationship with his own children. Yes, he was broken...mainly by not having a sense of his own value. No one taught him to value himself. There are a lot of people in the world like that. Many are men, destroyed by their father's disappointment in them. Some turn to drugs and booze and women. Some do terrible things. Some wander listlessly through life. Some rise above it all and learn that life is about more than feeling sorry for yourself till you are old and grey. I kept hoping Kittredge would get it together, long before he did...turn to God, and find value in the little things. I had to wait till the very last chapter when he was indeed much older before he found his joy. There is no mention of God, sadly, but at least he finally pulled it together. All those wasted years. It's sad.
January 24, 2023
I picked up this book as a fan of western writing and William Kittredge's short stories. I was a bit disappointed. While this book had some interesting philosophical insights, especially in its early pages, I can't exactly say I enjoyed the writing. Many of the book's takeaways come in the form of "tell" rather than "show," and the telling is vague at that. The "show" stories from the authors life of growing up in eastern Oregon are somewhat hit or miss. In its latter half, the author is such an unsympathetic character that it is difficult to feel invested. He is a first -born son in a rich ranching family who uses his privilege to become an alcoholic and a deadbeat dad. In the final pages, I'm not sure if we're supposed to feel that he is "redeemed" by discovering the wrong of his ways and turning toward environmentalism and anti-capitalism. If so, the shift in perspective is too sudden to really work -- I would have been more interested in hearing how his perspective evolved, rather than jumping to what he thinks in the present. I'm giving 2 stars because of the scattered beautiful passages about connecting to nature in the west, which are more prevalent at the start of the book.
February 10, 2020
"Most of all, it is supposed to be a book about taking care inside whichever dream we inhabit."
Bill, why such a sad and tortured journey to the place where you ignited so much good? Why is it so impossibly hard for people to be happy and not broken? Why is the incredible beauty and wonder of the places we inhabit never enough to hold us steady through the contortions of growing up and finding our way?
It is difficult for me to reconcile a spirit that can conjure such beautiful language and expressions of understanding with the shockingly lost and angry person that most of this memoir follows. But in between all of the wandering anger and defensiveness and hurt, there are really good questions. There is really burning philosophy on what and why. There is a point of light that grows into a vast and satisfying perspective.
Then it catches ones breath . . .
October 10, 2020
“People have always seen patterns in the stars. Like a revolving map over their heads...so it was natural for people to study the heavens as they tried to orient themselves on the surface of the earth.”
“Out there in that plywood housing development our women were the philosopher kings and they talked security. Who could blame them? Married to such hapless boys and so often pregnant with their children. Somebody should write about it; I wish I’d possessed the wit to, back when it was my life. But real life, I thought, was somewhere else. Like Hemingway’s Europe or home in Warner Valley.”
“Out there in that plywood housing development our women were the philosopher kings and they talked security. Who could blame them? Married to such hapless boys and so often pregnant with their children. Somebody should write about it; I wish I’d possessed the wit to, back when it was my life. But real life, I thought, was somewhere else. Like Hemingway’s Europe or home in Warner Valley.”
April 18, 2021
I was drawn to this book when I read in High Country News that William Kitteridge had passed away on December 4, 2020. The author was born in 1932, coming of age during the Korean War. This memoir of his early life was published in 1992.
The setting is Warren Lakes and Lakeview in the southeast corner of the state of Oregon. He describes the area beautifully. His life and that of his family is, as Wallace Stegner says, “one of the few thoroughly honest accounts of a western up brining...” Working closely with family and hired hands on a ranch the size of Delaware gives rise to an honest look of conflicting emotions and coming of age in this unique region.
The setting is Warren Lakes and Lakeview in the southeast corner of the state of Oregon. He describes the area beautifully. His life and that of his family is, as Wallace Stegner says, “one of the few thoroughly honest accounts of a western up brining...” Working closely with family and hired hands on a ranch the size of Delaware gives rise to an honest look of conflicting emotions and coming of age in this unique region.
June 9, 2021
The truth is difficult to write about; it takes so many forms—factual, historical, geographical, sociological, intellectual, psychological, emotional—for just a few. When it comes to writing the truth about ourselves, how close to the truth is it possible to get? Kittredge uses the memoir to probe in an attempt at self evaluation and does pretty well, maybe as well as anyone can do. In the process he also tells the story of the appropriation and exploitation of the Twentieth Century American West full of bravado, recklessness, misguided masculinity, entitlement, and the myth of endless bounty.
October 1, 2022
A fine book for any aspiring writer to read. Kittredge examines his early life with a highly self-critical eye. It's all in there and made me want to read his short stories. One of those Montana Literary Mafiosos--perhaps even the Godfather of it all--who had no choice but to be a writer and sacrificed everything to get there. A perfect account of hearing the call to one's vocation (writing) and the folly of ignoring it.
February 13, 2020
Memoirs are hard to read because there's so much narrative (especially if one reads a lot of fiction), but this was a pretty quick read. The author uses existential prose to sometimes describe what happened to him, which was hard for me to follow. I'm still trying to decide if he had a nervous breakdown in his life or "just" a serious mid-life crisis.
January 12, 2018
One of best memoirs I have read. The writing style choppy but I liked it. Author seems to be brutally honest in his self-discovery; which came about only after he sobered up and made peace with his imagination.
January 12, 2020
Started out strong then devolved into a mess with a lot of repetition, gaps and forced ending. Was of special interest as I am from the area and know the ranch. Wish it had been better edited and the missing and rough parts addressed.
October 14, 2019
An ok read but felt like a RIP-off of Sand County Almanac with a lot of open ended and meandering life pontificating.
June 1, 2022
This book was terrible. I only kept reading it see if it would get any better. It didn’t. Don’t waste your time.
June 6, 2023
I lived my childhood passion of living in the West, ranching, the cowboy life, being a cowgirl through this book. Of course all was not as wonderful as I had dreamed, and what the heck is a cowgirl anyway? In any case, the book was wonderfully evocative of that life and I savored the descriptions.
The author grew up in a rich family that owned a ranch of mind-boggling size, acres and cattle numbering into the thousands. I loved the authors honesty about his own experiences (including lots of hard work) and feelings.
The author grew up in a rich family that owned a ranch of mind-boggling size, acres and cattle numbering into the thousands. I loved the authors honesty about his own experiences (including lots of hard work) and feelings.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 17, 2021
Beautifully written life story. Grew up working on farm/ranch in rural Oregon. Served in AF. Rough patch in late 20's and early 30's before family ranch sold and he becomes free to follow his passion for writing. Uneven story - some chapters are amazing (A+), others are hard to follow and depressing (C-). Also, no real unifying theme other than his life.
November 9, 2016
Second Look Books: Hole in the Sky by William Kittredge (Alfred A. Knopf, $20)
Review first published Sunday, August 30, 1992.
It seems impossible, but there is a place in America that is so empty, so terrifyingly beautiful, that one, on seeing it for the first time, would almost imagine that the country had hardly been touched by civilization at all. Bordered on the north by the John Day River, on the south by the lunar-lava landscape of Pyramid Lake and Mount Shasta, on the west by the great Cascade Range, and finally, on the east by the mysterious Owyhee mountains, this land, southeastern Oregon, is truly an American treasure. But untouched by civilization it is not.
Into this country, in July 1911, rode William Kittredge, grandfather and namesake of William Kittredge the writer, a man who owned cattle in California, and who was looking for a place to feed them and fatten them for market, which is the same thing as saying that Bill Kittredge was looking for a competitive edge. What he found that summer was the Warner Valley, near what is now Lakeview, Oregon. The native peoples, Modoc and Paiutes, had long before been run off, enslaved, murdered, marched and exterminated, and what was left was a windswept basin and range country studded by shallow seasonal lakes filled with Tule and cattail, long green runs of grassy hills, spring creeks in abundance, and millions of water birds, both spring and fall, coming and going to Canada. Yellow monarch butterflies floated in the breezes, and there was a 6-foot thick layer of rich peat for topsoil laid down over the millennia.
Bill Kittredge looked at all this country—the silence, and what he saw was an empire, country waiting to be worked up into a healthy profit.
“Hole in the Sky” is the story of what this profit meant to a family, and to a territory, a kind of cautionary tale in which love is subtracted from the earth and its inhabitants, and the sum is totaled. William Kittredge, the writer, grew up in the Warner Valley, with stopovers at Klamath Falls and Palo Alto for education. He watched the irrigation ditches being built, the lakebeds and tule fields plowed; he watched the cows move in and chew out all the grass. He learned the rules of ranching—handle your horse and never hire someone you drink with. Kittredge’s own father and mother became estranged, there were jealousies over money and influence, the ranch and family fell apart at about the same time the land gave out and went to leached salt because all the water had been pumped out. This is the caution—this is what happens when love is subtracted from the land and its inhabitants.
“Hole in the Sky” is lovely and terrifying, a kind of ultimate search for things as they should be, for childhood and its immediacy of feeling, and for what went wrong. Kittredge writes with tremendous feeling about the ranching life, the loneliness of the cowboys, the vastness of youth.
“I want to see the Lombardy poplars and apple trees and posts supporting the woven-wire fence around the house where I lived in that boyhood, I want to see if they are glowing in the luminous world. I want things to be radiant and permeable. I want to be welcome inside these memories if nowhere else, and think I was welcome as a child.”
Kittredge the writer drifted away from the Warner Valley and into the Air Force, and into a marriage that seemed to have no reason to exist. He drank too much, and was unfaithful, and fell headlong into depression. Parted from the land, subtracted from his family, he was alone.
As a memoir, “Hole in the Sky” is worth to stand beside Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” though Kittredge falls short of Maclean’s unique fictive ability. But Kittrege excels at recreation, and has an almost haunting ability to lift the veil on a scene—a dusty barroom, for example—and reveal the marrow of its hypnotic sadness. If there is a fault in the book, it is that the concluding section, devoted almost entirely to environmental concerns, is structurally out of square with the tone of the rest of the book. Sadly, too, Kittredge says little of his own children, and seems unable to heed his own cautionary words in this regard.
Most of us, Kittredge says, are eager to live in connection with a specific run of territory and its seasons, in some intimacy with the animals that happen to inhabit that country creature to creature.
How true. And how many of us are subtracted from this need.
Review first published Sunday, August 30, 1992.
It seems impossible, but there is a place in America that is so empty, so terrifyingly beautiful, that one, on seeing it for the first time, would almost imagine that the country had hardly been touched by civilization at all. Bordered on the north by the John Day River, on the south by the lunar-lava landscape of Pyramid Lake and Mount Shasta, on the west by the great Cascade Range, and finally, on the east by the mysterious Owyhee mountains, this land, southeastern Oregon, is truly an American treasure. But untouched by civilization it is not.
Into this country, in July 1911, rode William Kittredge, grandfather and namesake of William Kittredge the writer, a man who owned cattle in California, and who was looking for a place to feed them and fatten them for market, which is the same thing as saying that Bill Kittredge was looking for a competitive edge. What he found that summer was the Warner Valley, near what is now Lakeview, Oregon. The native peoples, Modoc and Paiutes, had long before been run off, enslaved, murdered, marched and exterminated, and what was left was a windswept basin and range country studded by shallow seasonal lakes filled with Tule and cattail, long green runs of grassy hills, spring creeks in abundance, and millions of water birds, both spring and fall, coming and going to Canada. Yellow monarch butterflies floated in the breezes, and there was a 6-foot thick layer of rich peat for topsoil laid down over the millennia.
Bill Kittredge looked at all this country—the silence, and what he saw was an empire, country waiting to be worked up into a healthy profit.
“Hole in the Sky” is the story of what this profit meant to a family, and to a territory, a kind of cautionary tale in which love is subtracted from the earth and its inhabitants, and the sum is totaled. William Kittredge, the writer, grew up in the Warner Valley, with stopovers at Klamath Falls and Palo Alto for education. He watched the irrigation ditches being built, the lakebeds and tule fields plowed; he watched the cows move in and chew out all the grass. He learned the rules of ranching—handle your horse and never hire someone you drink with. Kittredge’s own father and mother became estranged, there were jealousies over money and influence, the ranch and family fell apart at about the same time the land gave out and went to leached salt because all the water had been pumped out. This is the caution—this is what happens when love is subtracted from the land and its inhabitants.
“Hole in the Sky” is lovely and terrifying, a kind of ultimate search for things as they should be, for childhood and its immediacy of feeling, and for what went wrong. Kittredge writes with tremendous feeling about the ranching life, the loneliness of the cowboys, the vastness of youth.
“I want to see the Lombardy poplars and apple trees and posts supporting the woven-wire fence around the house where I lived in that boyhood, I want to see if they are glowing in the luminous world. I want things to be radiant and permeable. I want to be welcome inside these memories if nowhere else, and think I was welcome as a child.”
Kittredge the writer drifted away from the Warner Valley and into the Air Force, and into a marriage that seemed to have no reason to exist. He drank too much, and was unfaithful, and fell headlong into depression. Parted from the land, subtracted from his family, he was alone.
As a memoir, “Hole in the Sky” is worth to stand beside Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” though Kittredge falls short of Maclean’s unique fictive ability. But Kittrege excels at recreation, and has an almost haunting ability to lift the veil on a scene—a dusty barroom, for example—and reveal the marrow of its hypnotic sadness. If there is a fault in the book, it is that the concluding section, devoted almost entirely to environmental concerns, is structurally out of square with the tone of the rest of the book. Sadly, too, Kittredge says little of his own children, and seems unable to heed his own cautionary words in this regard.
Most of us, Kittredge says, are eager to live in connection with a specific run of territory and its seasons, in some intimacy with the animals that happen to inhabit that country creature to creature.
How true. And how many of us are subtracted from this need.
July 5, 2012
I felt conflicted about this book while I was reading it and now that I am finished I still cannot decide how I feel about it. On one hand, the writing is beautiful- Kittredge offers these amazingly insightful views of his movement through life, set mostly in the Warner valley of southern Oregon. On the other han, the content I found utterly depressing. He seems to be apologizing for himself,to his family I presume, and there is something unsettling about a memoir that appears to be a substitute for face to face interaction (I am making some assumptions here). I suppose I just don't find it a great medium for apologizing for what may have been a lifetime of mistakes (my interpretation of how he'd describe many of his younger years). Mostly, I hope he's found peace in who he currently is and, if it is indeed an attempt at an apology, that his loved ones have found some solace in his beautifully written words.
The book also provides great insight into the development of agriculture in Southern Oregon and the fate of large ranches/farms as they are handed down to younger generations.
The book also provides great insight into the development of agriculture in Southern Oregon and the fate of large ranches/farms as they are handed down to younger generations.
November 28, 2012
A beautiful memoir. Kittredge tells the stories of his family and the land they occupied in southeast Oregon. He acknowledges the mistakes they made in "industrializing" the land and he acknowledges the mistakes he made in his own life. It took him a long time to outgrow his "little boy" stage and he left some wreckage in his wake. I got a little fed up with his alcohol fueled pity parties but he does salute the people in his life who nudged him in constructive paths. His odes to the land and to the tough people who worked it are wonderful. And his deep felt history of this land and his family had me setting my roots in it along with him.
June 24, 2014
"In a family as unchurched as ours there was only one sacred story, and that was the one we told ourselves every day, the one about work and property and ownership, which is sad. We had lost track of stories like the one which tells us the world is to be cherished as if it exists inside our own skin. We were heedless people in a new country; we came and went in a couple of generations. But we plowed a lot of ground while we were there."
A beautiful book, but not one with any real sense of the reader. And that's fine. Sometimes reading someone else's notes to the world is fine enough reading.
A beautiful book, but not one with any real sense of the reader. And that's fine. Sometimes reading someone else's notes to the world is fine enough reading.
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