Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig Review

...Over the course of a 36-year literary career, Doig, who died at age 75 last April, painted as detailed and complete a picture of the American West as any writer of the last century. Though he’s known best for the visual and pastoral quality of his writing, Doig remained, at heart, an old-fashioned storyteller. He populated his vision of the West not with gunslingers but with workaday ranch hands and dam builders and miners, frontier-town bartenders, itinerant schoolteachers, newspaper editors and Rocky Mountain Front kids from cobbled-together families like his own. Doig wrote about Scottish immigrants homesteading and sheep-ranching in Montana in the 1880s; teaching in a one-room schoolhouse during a miners’ strike in 1919; catching on with the Fort Peck Dam Public Works Administration project in the 1930s; growing up in a Rocky Mountain Front barroom in the 1950s; and a grandfather traveling Montana with his journalist granddaughter to celebrate and editorialize the state’s centennial in 1979. Doig didn’t live through all those times, of course, and (as he described memorably in his 1978 memoir, This House of Sky) he chose to leave behind sheep ranching at a young age. But Doig grew up among people who built the West, and witnessed decades of growth and dramatic changes in the land and economy of the region. His death marked the passing of a vital connection to the people and the world and times he wrote about. Fortunately, he bequeathed to us all a bountiful body of work that’s not just Doig’s own legacy, but an evocative and definitive document of the world he came from. Ivan Doig’s last book, the appropriately titled Last Bus to Wisdom, is an unpredictable and boisterous road novel about 11-year-old boy in the summer of 1951, cast adrift on the Greyhound “dog bus.” Last Bus to Wisdom offers a fresh take on several familiar Doig themes: nontraditional families, deep connection to the land, the West as a hardscrabble world of work and the profoundly (and often humorously) interwoven nature of everyday individual lives and political and social history. As the book begins, adolescent Donal Cameron’s grandmother and guardian, a ranch cook in the Two Medicine country of Montana, packs him off to Manitowoc, Wisconsin to spend the summer at her sister’s house while she undergoes an operation. Donal makes a last-minute plea to arrogant ranch owner Wendell Williamson (who appears in a number of Doig books) to keep him on to drive the stacker team to no avail. Thus begin Donal’s adventures on the Greyhound bus...more