Beautiful, Harsh Land Inspires Rich History

"All but the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family" by Mary Clearman Blew Viking, $19.95 -----------------------------

Mary Clearman Blew is the author of two fine short-story collections, "Lambing Out" and "Runaway," in which her love of all things Montanan - cowboys and cattle, horses and Big Sky country - comes to life. Her new collection of essays, "All but the Waltz," provides a heartfelt family history as well as a look into the genesis of her fiction.

"Reading Abraham" introduces Blew's great grandfather, who came west from Pennsylvania in 1882. A surveyor, he scrawled diaries, notes, stories, speeches, letters, "remedies for diseases in chickens," mileage reckonings, lines of Shakespeare, and poems on scraps of paper, receipts and used envelopes.

Deciphering these faint scribbles and "compulsive revisions," Blew travels back in time, envisioning how Abe's job was "to transform a thousand square miles of primeval grassland into straight lines and right angles on a map." But the West's robust aspect and colorful settlers also fired his imagination, and he "discovered that writing about the northern plains was another means of transforming them into space he could measure and control."

Controlling such wild land and hard weather was never certain. "Dirt Roads" recounts the eerie disappearance of Blew's father in September 1983, on a routine drive for coal. The "extended family network that had spread over the state . . . turned out, combing country roads and pastures on dirt bikes and on foot." At last he was found, dead from exposure, with no explanation, far beyond his intended destination.

Disappointments have always tempered dreams in such vast territory. "Leaving Montana" contrasts work elsewhere with the tasks performed by her grandmother, who rose at 4 a.m. "to feed her livestock and her chickens and milk cows and then lug down the harnesses for her six head of workhorses and get them hitched to start her day in the field by first light."

For many, Blew realizes, Montana's promise became "scratching not to stay ahead or even to stay abreast but only to keep from sinking for as long as they could."

The essays present life truthfully, without bitterness. Many women struggled for more than marriage and children. In "The Unwanted Child" and in the title essay, Blew reflects on limited opportunities and traditional values in rural society. "Auntie," crafted out of metaphors of trust and support, tells how Blew's grandmother gave her daughters "their chance to stand on their own feet and marry from choice," and how her favorite aunt continued giving encouragement.

"Going to Fort Peck," written with the dialogue and vitality of fiction, describes relatives hiring out to work on a dam in 1934, when giving up being your own boss for a paycheck was still considered demeaning. "Little Jake and the Old Ways" examines the uneasy relations between the close religious community of Hutterites and other settlers.

In these essays, family members' hopes and sorrows interweave. They all learned that the beautiful land is demanding. Blew's clear vision allows us, too, to glean this rich heritage.

Irene Wanner is a Seattle fiction writer.