Doris Knowles Pulis

I loved this book. Now how to explain why. Author Doris Pulis and I are about the same age and both grew up and came of age in the 1950s. But other similarities are hard to find. She was a girl, of course, and I was not - although, as a girl who was more interested in riding horses and shooting rifles than in clothes, cooking or other feminine interests, she would certainly qualify as a tomboy. And she grew up in the Montana woods - in the Yaak River valley - while I grew up in a small town in Michigan. For the several years Pulis's book covers (1949-55) her family lived not only without TV or radio, but without basic amenities we all took for granted, indoor plumbing and running water, electricity and decent roads. The Yaak was - is? - so closed in and cut off from towns and civilization for several months of the year that you could call it one of the last frontiers in the lower forty-eight states. I was familiar with the Yaak from having read a few books by Rick Bass, who is perhaps one of the Yaak Valley's most famous residents. But Pulis's homespun memoir of how her city-folks parents coped with this whole new way of life after moving to Montana from San Diego is rich in details, anecdotes and, perhaps most of all, in examples of a family rich in love, who pulled together and made their new life work. Doris, who had been a sickly child in California, thrived in Montana, and even became over time something of a "wild child," roaming the woods with her younger sister "Bob," to the extent that her mother nearly despaired at her ever becoming a "lady." Her father, the largely self-educated Darwin Knowles, comes across as an extremely resourceful and intelligent man, who makes everything work for his family in their suddenly primitive circumstances. Some of the details Doris provides were another link for me: her summer neighbors, actor John McIntire and wife Jeanette Nolan, for example. I remember McIntire well from his role as wagonmaster on the TV series Wagon Train (after Ward Bond's death in 1960). Comic books mentioned that I hadn't thought of in years: Mary Jane and Sniffles, and Little Lulu. The one-room schoolhouse that brought back memories of my own first year of school. Outhouses and slop jars and coleman lanterns. Here is a book rich in detail about a time and a place and a way of life that has pretty much disappeared forever. Perhaps Pulis put it best in the introduction to her story, when she said:

"To me, Montana is where I wallowed in childhood. I was part of a family that most of the time was the only thing that really mattered to any of us. It was a cozy, scary, painful, hilarious, dangerous, interesting, and grand time, and the most fun I ever had."

Yup. All those experiences and emotions are in there. Encounters with coyote packs, bears, moose, wasp nests, forest fires and swarms of gnats - ALL this stuff is in there. And it's all told with a gentle sense of self-deprecating humor in a natural storyteller's voice. This is simply one terrific read! I'm gonna loan it to my mom now. Thanks for writing it all down, Doris.… (mais)