This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

by Ivan Doig

They turned out to be landing sites, quarters to hold people until they were able to scramble away to somewhere else. Quarters, it could be said, that did for that region of rural America what the tenements of the immigrant ghettoes did for city America.

Pete’s rich ration of talk wasn’t done for the business of it. In White Sulphur Springs there was steady thirsty commerce no matter how a bartender behaved. Pete simply had made it a hobby to size up people, and to work out a routine of friendship with those deserving.

I believe that much of what was taken to be my soberness was simply a feeling of being on guard, of carefully watching life flame around me. Of trying not to be surprised at whatever else might happen.

wan tendril

Side by side, the two weathered figures loomed like barn and silo.

Y’know, I’ve found in life that I’d rather make a fast dime than a slow buck.

She was the least likely presence to be found in a small farmtown school: a mysteriously spiced waft of booklore and speculative notions and astonishing languages and . . . oddnesses.

I knew I wanted no part of any worse day.