A Review of Breaking Clean
Often over the past couple decades, I have marveled at a country that can hold within its boundaries some of the greatest metropolitan areas and some of the most isolated rural communities that exist on the earth. Growing up in rural Montana, I had no concept of this isolation. Somehow I just thought that that was the way things were. And there may be more isolated areas in this country than the Northern Montana Hi-Line that Judy Blunt writes about in Breaking Clean, but I don?t think people live there.
There are several good reasons to read her book, including the fact that it is well written and has won accolades from a couple of the University of Montana?s literary big guns, William Kittredge and James Welch. This alone is no small task.When you finish reading Blunt?s story of her years in Northern Montana, there is no way you can fault her for her honesty. What she writes of was the way it was and is the way it is. Though technology has changed much in the last fifteen years or so, with satellite dishes, more and more ranch families moving to town, and the Internet in places you can?t drive to three months out of the year, you can still see the places, the roads, and the people she describes if you take the hundred-and-fifty mile scenic tour of South Phillips County. When Blunt writes about four-wheel-drive pickups plowing down gumbo roads, you can feel the mud sticking to your tires. And when she writes of the cohesiveness of the rural community in Phillips County, the ranchers driving out to the country road to see their neighbor safely on his way during an emergency trip to the hospital in Malta, you get a feel for the tradition that maintains that one of life?s greatest responsibility is to help your neighbor in the time of need.
In writing her book Breaking Clean, Blunt preserves a sense of the oral tradition. In all families there is a sense of the family story, the story that makes one family different from another, the story told around the supper table, at family gatherings, at children?s bed time. This sense of story is even more apparent in the kind of isolation Blunt describes, where the family history becomes the way children learn to relate to the world, because it is the only history they know first hand. And it is through the pathos in this story that she learns such truths as the patriarchal order. ?Memories of my grandfather?s death were tied to another small death, the day I discovered that as a girl, I would never own my childhood ranch.?
Much of Blunt?s story deals with time. Time doesn?t exist in the middle of the open prairie the same way it exists in the city, and those who live on the prairie must deal more intimately with the natural order of the seasons. The year is segmented into sections such as haying, calving, feeding, and the like. When Blunt writes of the calendar she peruses in the abandoned Andrews homestead, time is measured in eggs, temperature, and gallons of milk, painting as clear a picture of life on the prairie as any carefully written journal.
And Blunt doesn?t leave out a touch of humor, the kind of humor one often finds in the cowboy poetry and western memoirs of the legion of western writers who have gone before her. Her description of the visit to a church in Hayes with her sister and a schoolteacher is especially representative. ?He dipped his finger into a container of water and turned to us. He drew a small cross over my sister?s head, then touched her forehead with his wet thumb. He dipped again for me. We stood quietly until he was done, reading his face for signs that we could move on again. By then he could have dragged a live chicken from his vest and bitten its head off and neither of us would have flinched.?
Understandably, some might be concerned about the publishings of a local writer, for neither writers nor prophets are dealt with kindly in their own country. However, they need not fear. Blunt?s book is not about revealing secrets or settling old scores. Her autobiographical sketches paint an honest, graphic picture of rural Montana life, dealing with the good, the bad, the victories and the defeats of growing up on the plains and building a sense of personal worth. In the settling of the west, many families and many individuals broke with the past to make a new life for themselves, and that is exactly what Blunt writes of in her narrative.
However, in her book, Breaking Clean, Blunt has written more than the story of her own survival. She has written a piece of the story of the survival of all the families who settled this state, lived through its blizzards, sweated in its summer heat, and carved their own names in the windblown dirt of the Montana prairie.
