Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief (Credo)

William Kittredge, the distinguished writer of the American West, revisits the ranch life of his youth, set in the remote Warner Valley, "a hidden world" in which "landlocked waters flow from snowy mountains to the west but don't find a way out to the sea." In that rugged landscape, won by violence against both humankind and nature, Kittredge's family constructed myths, stories of how they came to be in that faraway place. Through those stories, he learned that accepted notions of patriotism and loyalty were less important than the values of community and generosity, and that, as Emerson observed, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Kittredge turns from personal memoir to a consideration of a subject to which he has devoted much time since the 1960s: the reigning myths of the American West, myths of rugged individualism in a land governed by corporations, myths of wide-open spaces in a region ravaged by the economy of extraction. Against those myths he poses the West's realities, and what he finds is not comforting: Kittredge offers an antitextbook history, a narrative in which "endless ruination was visited on the land, indigenous people were left to lives of impossible poverty, and the money and power went off to the East."

Kittredge's essay seamlessly joins environmental polemic, history, literature, and autobiography to offer an ultimately hopeful view of a troubled region in search of itself. Editor Scott Slovic, a scholar of Western American and environmental literature, adds to it a bibliography of Kittredge's published work. --Gregory McNamee