Customer Reviews

Hole in the Sky: a Memoir

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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.

I read this book to gain a better understanding of my cowboy neighbors in Eastern Oregon, but I gained so much more. Anyone with a passion for southeastern Oregon will love this book. At times, Kittredge's descriptions of the land are poetic. I found myself driving through Kittredge's Oregon recently, and so much of what he wrote kept leaping to the forefront of my consciousness, stimulating my own fresh perspective of this open country and those who call it home.

William Kittredge, like Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane and William Stafford, uses the modern fall of the Western Myth as a backdrop for creating the personal memoir. In Hole In The Sky, Kittredge mangages to capture the sad fallacy that underscores western machismo with often heartbreaking results. Kittredge pulls off the near impossible in this modern age of weepy pseudo therepy memoir writing: he reveals inner failings without sounding tiresome, whiny or trivial. He writes in a prose style that is devoid of any pretensious posings or trappings. He also captures a true sense of time and space. As my fellow reviewer has said, this book is a must read for anyone about to venture into Eastern Oregon (where I am from) or the rodeo backwater towns of the west. Well worth a look.

One should be cautious when critiquing a memoir, especially one as skillfully written as William Kittredge's "A Hole in the Sky: A Memoir." After all, one's life experiences, memories, and musings are unique, therefore sacrosanct. How the memorist wishes to portray them is--and should be--his prerogative. So in that respect, I'm willing to give Kittredge's memoir some leeway. The author describes the landscape of his youth, the deserts, playas, and marshlands of Southeastern Oregon, with love and poignancy. He does the same with the landscape of relationships, the ranch hands who shuffle in and out of his young life, how he learns from and is touched by these men. The chapters and passages he devotes to these physical and interpersonal landscapes express feeling and nostalgia: a love of place; a love of the ranching life; a respect for manliness. But there is another landscape Kittredge shares in his memoir: an emotional landscape, the landscape of introspection. A memoir is certainly the place to chronicle the examined life, but too much self-examination, especially when it borders on masochism, was first bothersome and then tedious to this reader. In the latter chapters of "A Hole in the Sky" Kittredge's self-deprecation was to me excessive. Asking the reader to slog through such a tortured landscape was bad enough, but the fact the memorist not only dwelled on and seemed to enjoy this personal castigation abused not only himself: it bordered on near abuse to the reader, as well. One's life is what it is, was what it was. I see no need to present it with microscopic, self-denigrating scrutiny.

I bought this book because I live in Eastern Oregon and was eager to read a memoir of someone with literary skills and a regional ranching background. What I got was very satisfying writing, and an insight into agri-business. What I didn't like was the anxiety ridden, self-deprecating, mostly negative tone and typical alcoholic blaming of everyone else for one's shortcomings. In his defense, he was born into an era when male writers were influenced by others who were romanticized as self-obsessed and notorious drunks. Their literary license was seen as more important than the welfare of their loved ones. I kept waiting for him to "get it." He never did.

William Kittridge's autobiography, A HOLE IN THE SKY begins in the wilderness around the foothills of southeastern Oregon and retells, in lucid detail, the events of his childhood leading up to his time in the Air Force, to his many marriages, to his emergence as a writer who writes in a prophetic voice with a great sense of prose.
Looking back to his childhood years, Kittridge aims to return to that innocent age and allow the reader to engage in his coming of age...to the point where your feet are engulfed in the wet grass of early morning dew, and you imagine the grandeur of taking care of 8,000 acres of open territory.

In the end, he claims that: "We are a part of what is sacred. That is our main defense against craziness, our solace, the source of our best policies, and our only chance at paradise." Thus, we are open to the realities that life, growing up on the western plains, was not an American historical fairy tale, but rather a true test of ones self-worth and distinction.
A wonderful read...I highly recommend!

I'm going to read this book again. The first time was to find out what it's about and who Kittredge is and what happens. The second time will be for the pleasure of reading his writing and the enjoyment of how his mind works. The conclusions he is making about life are true and gracious, out of a chaotic and sometimes miserable past. (But he doesn't moan about that--don't worry.) I'm so glad he recognized himself as a writer.

I picked up this book at the request of a woman whom I had met at a rodeo in Northern California. She said it would be a good introduction to Eastern Oregon. What she didn't tell me was that it would be a good introduction to the rest of my life.

Kittredge picks up where Ayn Rand leaves off in The Fountainhead. He paints a picture of a life of individualism and isolation which is not as rosy and romantic as a Great Basin sunrise. Kittredge started his life as a young Howard Roark in a rugged setting. Three wives and countless whiskeys later, the author still can't kick the habit of rugged individualism, but his beautifully written memoirs might dissuade a young person who is lured into that desert lifestyle.

If you're going to San Francisco, read this book. If you're leaving San Francisco, in your heart you'll know why.

William Kittredge is a worthy successor to Thomas Hardy and Aldo Leopold. "Hole in the Sky" is both a personal memoir and a portrait of a vanished way of life in the remote Warner Valley in eastern Oregon. The author witnessed the end of farming with horse teams when diesel tractors came to the valley after WW II and changed the rural economy forever. Thomas Hardy's novels ("Far from the Madding Crowd" and others) tell a comparable story of the English countryside in the 19th Century, when the agrarian society that had existed for 400 years was disappearing. Mr. Kittredge also tells how the tractors meant the end of wild birds and mammals that had been part of his life in Warner Valley. He writes with an ecologist's eye for the land, reminiscent of Aldo Leopold in his "Sand County Almanac," a book that introduced so many of us to ecology and the concept of saving wild places.

Readers may be inspired to visit Warner Valley for themselves, and it is a worthwhile trip for lovers of the wild. I first went there 50 years ago, when it was still 36 miles from the nearest paved road. Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge protects the high fault-block mountain looming above Mr. Kittredge's valley. Its marshy lakes harbor many species of ducks and waterbirds. My brother-in-law just returned from a visit in September 2005, and he reports: "pronghorn antelope on the hillsides all 'round, glorious views in all directions, grand sweeping vistas." That's where William Kittredge comes from.