Ed Kemmick is a writer for the
Billings Gazette. He was seduced to Montana from the midwest by A.B. Guthrie’s novel
Big Sky. Last week my cousin Shane Moe told me that Big Sky is his favorite western novel as well. The book describes relationships between men and land and while I suspect Guthrie was not referring to mankind in the broad sense, I think it may be true that men and women’s relationships to land are what the west is about. Guthrie wrote about the land in the words of his character Jim Deakins,
…what did it care about a man or his hankerings or what happened to him? There would be other men after him and others after them, all wondering and all wishful and after a while all dead. I don't think this is about hopelessness; it is about the place we each hold in the larger picture. And it reminds us that it is the land that remains.
