UM prof's stories follow his life's path to Montana

In this collection of 14 personal essays, Missoula writer Phil Condon chronicles his life path from a childhood in Omaha, Neb., to the Ozarks to Montana, where he now teaches environmental writing and literature at the University of Montana.

As a newlywed on a raw chunk of land on the Niangua River with no well and no house, he found that the land beneath his feet related to him for the first time: "absolutely vital," in "the ways the water moved, and didn't move. The ways the stone gave, and didn't give."

Ten years of hard work carving out a life there ended in disillusionment and loss—the marriage, the house and garden and well built on love, and the very ground where the simple life could not sustain them.

"If my life felt like a losing stream, I would just have to keep faith that it would surface again," he tells himself outside the courthouse of divorce.

He brought a mason jar of the sweet water from that land to Montana from which to sip the memories. Why Montana? Condon cannot say, except for the draw of lots of mountains and rivers, wanting to hike and write, "Where the ground water's different ... harder, you know."

A few years later, Condon recalls that "losing stream" on the banks of Fish Creek in the Bitterroot Mountains, pondering Montana's largest ponderosa pine trees he chews on the words of the Forest Service sign, "Big Pine contains enough lumber to build two average size houses."

Accustomed to brick houses of his own building, this assessment of the value of a grand tree more than 20 stories tall reveals much of the West's culture. Condon turns from the big ponderosa to watch his little brother examining ice forming in the creek, kicking snow in to melt and then freeze to clear, nearly invisible crystals. But the cold shoos them out of the woods, and as they look back at Big Pine, the boy says, "I wonder which way it would fall."

Condon works out the irreverence of the boy's words and decides it is an honest query.

In his way of posing new questions rather than solutions, Condon writes, "For a culture of betters, it seem(s) a much larger question, and one we're all going to face."

Ice reappears in another essay, "forming and being," on the Clark Fork River near Jacobs Island. In an artful metaphor, "the past takes shape in ice" the way "a thought forms at the edge of the mind around something solid that wits there before the thought ... and it is beautiful."

In the essay "City Under Snow," Condon likens words to snowflakes, immeasurably light and distinct. "When we inhale, we breathe the fine white lace of language."

Without sentimentality (the exception being the animation of a larch tree, which speaks), Condon writes well of these sad, jarring times of our best place. The drowning of a young man named Ryan by Jacobs Island, for example. The homeless hobo camped nearby, the death of a woman hit by two cars by the university. The greed of the cyanide leach miners, the tribes tortured slowly for oil and gold, and "Too many boots on the ground in a foreign land, too many darker citizens lost and bleeding, and buried in their darker ground."

Missoula author William Kittredge seizes upon this last statement in the book's introduction, urging Americans to "cast out flagrantly inhumane and incompetent regimes like the one in power," harking back to "disillusionment and sadness ... the lost summers of love and the tragic Vietnam War and the Nixon disgraces."

For my part, this hook reminds me that I am cradled in a house of logs, and I remember to be grateful.

Condon is also the author of "River Street: A Novc1la and Stories," and "Clay Center," a novel that won the William Faulkner Creative Writing Award sponsored by the Faulkner Society of New Orleans.