A critique of “Hole in the Sky,” by William Kittredge

Hole in the Sky, by William Kittredge, is a memoir. Everything in it is real, even its omissions. The author was a critic of agribusiness when he died in 2020 at 88. He grew up in southeastern Oregon on MC Ranch, a cattle ranch started by his grandfather and developed by his father.

The memoir traces most acutely the early life of this momma’s boy who was striken at five with polio while living at his maternal gradnparents house in Klamath Falls.

Kittredge grew up revering and mimicking the behaviors and demeanors of the cowboys that worked his family’s ever-growing estate. During its peak, MC Ranch spread over nearly 1 million acres of land and ran upward of 19,000 Hereford cattle.

So much of the writing about his early years is about gaining manhood and understanding the meaning of class while witnessing the disintegration of his parents’ marriage.

During most of the memoir, Kittredge portrays himself as a sad personage — a real hangdog. Life, he writes, is a lonesome work. Through reading and later writing, he discovers the key to his own creation.

The memoir makes no excuses for the author’s excessive drinking, his casual infidelities and absentee parenting. His nervous breakdown only gets a brief mention.

I admired the book’s vivid descriptions of southeastern Oregon. Kittredge paints Lake County and the Warner Valley in technicolor. It’s a region I am somewhat familiar with, having bicycled through it. Here, the writing is at its best.

To read more of Kittredge and appreciate the role he has played in developing writers — he headed the writing program at the University of Montana — readers should sample his many short stories and essays. He also wrote nine novels in the Cord series of Westerns under the pen name Owen Rountree.

His 1996 book Who Owns the West? pleads that we Westerners should “rethink our personal lives and our stewardship of this region to fashion sustainable relationships not just to the land, but to each other.”

AMEN.