Book Review: Mountain Time

Mitch Rozier has problems. He’s estranged from his two kids, neither of which quite understands his budding relationship with Lexa McCaskill. The environmental newspaper he works for is going under. And now his father, Lyle, has called him home to Twin Sulphur Springs, Montana with another get rich quick scheme. Enter into the mix Mariah McCaskill—Lexa’s freewheeling sister. A photojournalist home from her latest whirlwind tour of dangerous assignments, Mariah is ready to ambush Mitch with a collaborative effort that will force him to confront his troubled relationship with his father.

We’re first introduced to the McCaskill clan in English Creek—the first book of Doig’s “Montana Trilogy.” The McCaskill family history is intertwined with the first century of Montana statehood. The story of four generations of McCaskills sprawls across the pages of the trilogy: from Scottish forebear Angus McCaskill’s story in Dancing At The Rascal Fair (book two); to his son Varick and grandson Jick’s story in English Creek (book one); to Jick and his daughter Mariah’s trans-Montana Winnebago adventure in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana (book three).

For decades, this was author Ivan Doig’s well-traveled terrain: a post-boom town, post-Great Depression Montana, still struggling to find an identity somewhere between dude ranches and rodeos and coffee shops, craft beer, and predatory corporate ranching. 

The tension between Big Sky country as natural beauty and nature’s bounty—between past promise and present frustration—works its way through Mountain Time, and through the personal lives of its characters. We find a conflicted Lyle Rozier—ready to reduce his patrimony to rubble to pave roads for natural gas exploration, yet unexpectedly sentimental about his work building a fire tower for the CCC (one of the Roosevelt administration’s “alphabet agencies”) in the national forest’s “primitive area.” Mitch is haunted by the small town hopes he’s carried with him since leaving his hometown for the Univerity of Washington on a football scholarship; and his vagabond life in print media ever since. And Lexa fears that the life of sad compromises she left in Alaska following the Exxon Valdez spill is visiting her relationship with a suddenly adrift Mitch in Seattle.

Doig, who died in April of this year, hated seeing his work dismissed as “regional writing.” “I don’t think of myself as a ‘Western’ writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate ‘region,’ the true home, for a writer.”  The prose of Mountain Time is spare and haunting, painting scenes specific to the cold, often hard lives lived in the shadow of mountains; but the themes are universal, and not without plainspoken truth and beauty. Or, as Mariah says to Lexa (quoting their father)—describing the Hebner clan, their hard luck written in their features—“All the faces in that family rhyme.”