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The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on The Big Dry
The Mountain and The Fathers explores the life of boys and men in the unforgiving, harsh world north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana in a drought afflicted area called the Big Dry, a land that chews up old and young alike. Joe Wilkins was born into this world, raised by a young mother and elderly grandfather following the untimely death of his father. That early loss stretches out across the Big Dry, and Wilkins uses his own story and those of the young boys and men growing up around him to examine the violence, confusion, and rural poverty found in this distinctly American landscape. Ultimately, these lives put forth a new examination of myth and manhood in the American west and cast a journalistic eye on how young men seek to transcend their surroundings in the search for a better life. Rather than dwell on grief or ruin, Wilkins’ memoir posits that it is our stories that sustain us, and The Mountain and The Fathers, much like the work of Norman MacClean or Jim Harrison, heralds the arrival of an instant literary classic.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
22 people are currently reading
424 people want to read
About the author
Joe Wilkins
37 books153 followersJoe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon. He is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the High Plains Book Award and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994, and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His second novel, The Entire Sky, is out now with Little, Brown. Wilkins directs the creative writing program at Linfield University and is a member of the low-residency MFA faculty at Eastern Oregon University.
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August 5, 2013My father promised me a shotgun for my 12th birthday, which was not at all unusual for a Montana kid. Certainly not back in 1966. That was the year my Dad and I logged the most flight time together in the Cessnas he sold for a living.
We’d swoop low at the sight of antelope for a fun chase across the mesas. I was itching to bag a pronghorn – anything with antlers, actually. I wanted to mount a pair on the knotty pine walls of my bedroom. There I would hang our bamboo fly-fishing rods, canvass creels and the fluorescent pink caps we wore in the field so hunters wouldn’t mistake us for game.
The Mountains and the Fathers rekindled sweet memories of my own father and I. The new book is a memoir by Joe Wilkins, a gifted writer 24 years my junior who grew up 85 miles north of my childhood home in Billings. This is the Big Dry, a drought-punished country in the vast plains of east central Montana.
Wilkins nails the sense of this place dead-on with poet’s eyes that see the landscape as “one part grass and two parts sky” and musician’s ears for the “grass that cracks beneath your steps.” The snap shirts, feed store ball caps, Rainier beer cans, antelope breakfast steaks, Chinook winds and the opaque plastic sheets covering windows in the winter evoked the romance of the interior West that I cherished as a boy.
However, unlike my short-lived Big Sky adventure (We moved to the Bay Area just as I turned 12, ruling out the shotgun), Wilkins’ nostalgia for the Big Dry is bittersweet. Writing in his early 30s, Wilkins reflects on his youth as a story of survival. His father died when he was 9, leaving his mother to raise him and two siblings on a 300-acre sheep and hay farm in a gritty dot of a community called Melstone. They survived on the whims of rainfall and a coal-fired furnace in a drafty house “cobbled together from the ruins of homesteader shacks.”
“You couldn’t call it a living. It was a kind of ritualized dying,” Wilkins writes.
More than a memoir, the book is an indictment of the ideology of rugged individualism so deeply rooted in the arid American West. The success-through-hard-work religion no doubt makes for rugged individuals. However, this book shows that it also turns individuals against their land and, ultimately, themselves.
Wilkins’ portrays a dismal array of childhood peers, including an overgrown bully named Rooster. Several are abandoned or abused by their parents or relatives. By his mid-teens, Wilkins joins his lot in drinking hard, driving fast and doping on nicotine. But he stops short of throwing punches and smoking marijuana. He has boundaries because he has hope.
That hope springs from his rancher grandfather who gifts him a vision for some better life beyond Melstone and from the stories told of his esteemed father whom Wilkins has subconsciously erased from memory. The author was also blessed with imagination, thanks to his college-educated mother, Olive, who gifts him a love for reading.
This book brings to mind novelist Wallace Stegner’s stories of those like his father who fell victim to the rain-follows-the-plow myth. (The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.)
The Mountains and the Fathers is another poignant lesson in reconciling ourselves with our natural environment. Working the land in the Big Dry yields riches, but they are marginal and ephemeral.
Blaming failure not on the elements but on the character of the participants is a recipe for self-destruction. Working the land harder through overgrazing and other brute force only brings impoverishment to the land and its people.
“We need to remember how it really was and is out West, and we need to tell those true new stories,” Wilkins writes.
The Mountains and the Fathers is one of “true new stories,” well told.
We’d swoop low at the sight of antelope for a fun chase across the mesas. I was itching to bag a pronghorn – anything with antlers, actually. I wanted to mount a pair on the knotty pine walls of my bedroom. There I would hang our bamboo fly-fishing rods, canvass creels and the fluorescent pink caps we wore in the field so hunters wouldn’t mistake us for game.
The Mountains and the Fathers rekindled sweet memories of my own father and I. The new book is a memoir by Joe Wilkins, a gifted writer 24 years my junior who grew up 85 miles north of my childhood home in Billings. This is the Big Dry, a drought-punished country in the vast plains of east central Montana.
Wilkins nails the sense of this place dead-on with poet’s eyes that see the landscape as “one part grass and two parts sky” and musician’s ears for the “grass that cracks beneath your steps.” The snap shirts, feed store ball caps, Rainier beer cans, antelope breakfast steaks, Chinook winds and the opaque plastic sheets covering windows in the winter evoked the romance of the interior West that I cherished as a boy.
However, unlike my short-lived Big Sky adventure (We moved to the Bay Area just as I turned 12, ruling out the shotgun), Wilkins’ nostalgia for the Big Dry is bittersweet. Writing in his early 30s, Wilkins reflects on his youth as a story of survival. His father died when he was 9, leaving his mother to raise him and two siblings on a 300-acre sheep and hay farm in a gritty dot of a community called Melstone. They survived on the whims of rainfall and a coal-fired furnace in a drafty house “cobbled together from the ruins of homesteader shacks.”
“You couldn’t call it a living. It was a kind of ritualized dying,” Wilkins writes.
More than a memoir, the book is an indictment of the ideology of rugged individualism so deeply rooted in the arid American West. The success-through-hard-work religion no doubt makes for rugged individuals. However, this book shows that it also turns individuals against their land and, ultimately, themselves.
Wilkins’ portrays a dismal array of childhood peers, including an overgrown bully named Rooster. Several are abandoned or abused by their parents or relatives. By his mid-teens, Wilkins joins his lot in drinking hard, driving fast and doping on nicotine. But he stops short of throwing punches and smoking marijuana. He has boundaries because he has hope.
That hope springs from his rancher grandfather who gifts him a vision for some better life beyond Melstone and from the stories told of his esteemed father whom Wilkins has subconsciously erased from memory. The author was also blessed with imagination, thanks to his college-educated mother, Olive, who gifts him a love for reading.
This book brings to mind novelist Wallace Stegner’s stories of those like his father who fell victim to the rain-follows-the-plow myth. (The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.)
The Mountains and the Fathers is another poignant lesson in reconciling ourselves with our natural environment. Working the land in the Big Dry yields riches, but they are marginal and ephemeral.
Blaming failure not on the elements but on the character of the participants is a recipe for self-destruction. Working the land harder through overgrazing and other brute force only brings impoverishment to the land and its people.
“We need to remember how it really was and is out West, and we need to tell those true new stories,” Wilkins writes.
The Mountains and the Fathers is one of “true new stories,” well told.
April 28, 2013
Joe Wilkins writes in beautiful prose of his life in Eastern Montana. He tells a story in each chapter as if a certain subject Lake Water, Sky, Slow Breath or person his mother, Bruce Wheatry, Kelly Dempsey, each brought to his mind pictures and lessons learned. Wilkins writing is almost like reading poetry. It is descriptive, poignant, sometime sad and sometimes hilarious. Life on the Big Dry was certainly hard, but from all of it he gained a knowledge of self, family, those who treated him like family. This is a must read for all who seek to find something important in their own lives. Sometimes the smallest most mundane things are important. In the retelling of his life on the Big Dry, Joe Wilkins finds his father, finds himself.
I rated this book with 5 stars because I came away changed by Mr. Wilkins' stories.
May 13, 2023
How does a poet's sensibility and a poet's soul spring from the hard, unforgiving landscape of The Big Dry?
Wilkins shows us: through moments lived with extraordinary people who carry on with unnoticed lives in solitude, in courageous steadfastness to a disappearing vocation, with stubborn faith in all the intangibles of creating one's own sense of place in the world.
It is astonishing to me that he can look back on his youth and its context with such an alchemy of clarity and absolution. So often we just turn away from anything in memory that is unlovely, rejecting its formative power in our nature. Or, those with a dramatist bent might turn such into "Misery Lit", seeking validation through the shock value and victimization.
There is none of that here. There is language both heart-breaking and soaring. There is ambivalence, expressed in wrenching and conflicted feeling. There is honest perspective and genuine transparency that contributes to our ongoing revision of the stereotypes of the settling of the American West.
This book belongs on the special shelf.
Wilkins shows us: through moments lived with extraordinary people who carry on with unnoticed lives in solitude, in courageous steadfastness to a disappearing vocation, with stubborn faith in all the intangibles of creating one's own sense of place in the world.
It is astonishing to me that he can look back on his youth and its context with such an alchemy of clarity and absolution. So often we just turn away from anything in memory that is unlovely, rejecting its formative power in our nature. Or, those with a dramatist bent might turn such into "Misery Lit", seeking validation through the shock value and victimization.
There is none of that here. There is language both heart-breaking and soaring. There is ambivalence, expressed in wrenching and conflicted feeling. There is honest perspective and genuine transparency that contributes to our ongoing revision of the stereotypes of the settling of the American West.
This book belongs on the special shelf.
December 8, 2012
Wilkins is a poet and each short chapter delivers the rhythms and song of the best writing. What is even more remarkable is that these chapter/prose poems subtly construct a remarkable narrative that gathers momentum and delivers both hope and tragedy in the same breath. Brilliant stuff.
June 6, 2017
The language. Oh the language. Swoon.
October 6, 2021
Prose that is ecstatically alive with poetry, each of these short vignettes resonates.
There are lessons in "The Mountain and the Fathers," about who we are and who we can become, the strength and delicacy of life, and perhaps most importantly, it isn't that life isn't meant to make us tough, but for us to be tough enough to keep the wallops of life at a stiff-arm so that we can also become more.
I started reading this book on the river, after long days of rowing, but it read best this fall when I was back in my classroom; read like a book of poetry, in small chunks over the course of days. Joe Wilkins is one of the great lyricists of life.
There are lessons in "The Mountain and the Fathers," about who we are and who we can become, the strength and delicacy of life, and perhaps most importantly, it isn't that life isn't meant to make us tough, but for us to be tough enough to keep the wallops of life at a stiff-arm so that we can also become more.
I started reading this book on the river, after long days of rowing, but it read best this fall when I was back in my classroom; read like a book of poetry, in small chunks over the course of days. Joe Wilkins is one of the great lyricists of life.
August 28, 2022
"This is the Big Dry - the railroads gone, the oil gone, the rain never falling - yet like most any place of deep poverty and latent violence, the worst of it is that slow erosion of imagination, of any hope for something better."
I stumbled across Joe Wilkins's debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, and so enjoyed it that I wanted to know more about him.
The Mountain and The Fathers is Wilkins's story, growing up in drought-afflicted eastern Montana. When he writes about the wind-swept, unforgiving landscape, it reminded me of the saying, "Tough times don't last, tough people do." Unfortunately, in the Big Dry, tough times do last, and even the toughest Montanan doesn't always. As Wilkins illustrates, "Out on the far prairie, bad luck and bad choices were one and the same, failure the only unforgivable sin, for we had to believe we could abide in that bad land. We had to believe that it was possible, that it was not folly."
Wilkins was raised by his mother and grandfather, following the death of his father due to cancer. While the Big Dry was home, it was uncomfortably clear to him at an early age that he was destined for a life unlike the Montanans before him. Violence, poverty, and the harshness of the land are significant themes spanning Wilkins's memoir, one in which you can't help but suspect he wrote for himself as some form of cathartic poetry. For, in his own words, "Remembering is the opposite of pretending, it is the beginning of telling the truth to yourself about yourself."
4 out of 5.
I stumbled across Joe Wilkins's debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, and so enjoyed it that I wanted to know more about him.
The Mountain and The Fathers is Wilkins's story, growing up in drought-afflicted eastern Montana. When he writes about the wind-swept, unforgiving landscape, it reminded me of the saying, "Tough times don't last, tough people do." Unfortunately, in the Big Dry, tough times do last, and even the toughest Montanan doesn't always. As Wilkins illustrates, "Out on the far prairie, bad luck and bad choices were one and the same, failure the only unforgivable sin, for we had to believe we could abide in that bad land. We had to believe that it was possible, that it was not folly."
Wilkins was raised by his mother and grandfather, following the death of his father due to cancer. While the Big Dry was home, it was uncomfortably clear to him at an early age that he was destined for a life unlike the Montanans before him. Violence, poverty, and the harshness of the land are significant themes spanning Wilkins's memoir, one in which you can't help but suspect he wrote for himself as some form of cathartic poetry. For, in his own words, "Remembering is the opposite of pretending, it is the beginning of telling the truth to yourself about yourself."
4 out of 5.
March 9, 2013
I thought this was a sad book about growing up fatherless in a tough world of poverty, isolation and manual labor in Eastern Montana.
I liked the lyrical writing. Many of the passages seemed dream like, or like a free-writing assignment. It read more like a collection of short stories than a memoir.
It also seemed so sad and bleak. I wanted a little more hope, a little more sense of loving something or taking something away when the writer escaped the world.
I liked the lyrical writing. Many of the passages seemed dream like, or like a free-writing assignment. It read more like a collection of short stories than a memoir.
It also seemed so sad and bleak. I wanted a little more hope, a little more sense of loving something or taking something away when the writer escaped the world.
February 18, 2015
One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. My heart!
July 25, 2025
Rural stories are often swept aside, whittled-down, or sensationalized. Gasp! Look at that poverty! Look at that lack of education! Look at who’s ruining our country! Can you believe how those people live! Often rural folks don’t see their own stories on the walls of museums, the stories in books, the lyrics of popular songs, or the Oscar winning movies. We exist in the outskirts sharing our stories amongst our rural communities.
But when rural folks express their love for the land, their loyalty to their way of life, and the pain they’ve endured, the true essence of rural life becomes poetry. Joe Wilkins gets into the virtues and sins of trying to make it on the big dry with stunning honesty. There’s no black and white. But instead he shows true love and conflict for the place that raised him.
The book is a coming of age tale of a boy who struggled to get raised with a father dead by the time he turned 9, a whole lotta poverty, and a mess of complex father figures. Joe is trying to explain how something gets missing in a boy who grows up without a father especially in a rural place where fathers pass down the legacies of farm and rural ways of life. There’s an ache and a rage that’ll never leave you. A longing of what could’ve been. The days in the barn, the early mornings in the fields, and the long hunts meant to be done as father and son all vanished with nothing but grief as a replacement.
This book tore at my soul picking and pulling at my own grief. It made me think of my long hours with my father. The legacy he left and the rural sensibility he instilled that I can’t shake off. Made me think of the sacrifices of Joe’s mother and my mother. It made me think of all of the lost souls who got wore down by the grind of rural life. But most of all it made me think of my brother. The solitude of trying to become a man with the blurry vision of a great but troubled man to look up to.
This is the only book about grief I’ve ever read that truly got at my grief, at my family’s grief, in a way that felt truer than true. Thank you Joe for telling your story for your people. It spoke to me and mine a whole lot.
But when rural folks express their love for the land, their loyalty to their way of life, and the pain they’ve endured, the true essence of rural life becomes poetry. Joe Wilkins gets into the virtues and sins of trying to make it on the big dry with stunning honesty. There’s no black and white. But instead he shows true love and conflict for the place that raised him.
The book is a coming of age tale of a boy who struggled to get raised with a father dead by the time he turned 9, a whole lotta poverty, and a mess of complex father figures. Joe is trying to explain how something gets missing in a boy who grows up without a father especially in a rural place where fathers pass down the legacies of farm and rural ways of life. There’s an ache and a rage that’ll never leave you. A longing of what could’ve been. The days in the barn, the early mornings in the fields, and the long hunts meant to be done as father and son all vanished with nothing but grief as a replacement.
This book tore at my soul picking and pulling at my own grief. It made me think of my long hours with my father. The legacy he left and the rural sensibility he instilled that I can’t shake off. Made me think of the sacrifices of Joe’s mother and my mother. It made me think of all of the lost souls who got wore down by the grind of rural life. But most of all it made me think of my brother. The solitude of trying to become a man with the blurry vision of a great but troubled man to look up to.
This is the only book about grief I’ve ever read that truly got at my grief, at my family’s grief, in a way that felt truer than true. Thank you Joe for telling your story for your people. It spoke to me and mine a whole lot.
June 2, 2025
A memoir of this man's early life in that big dry country of central/eastern Montana. As an import to Montana who lives on the western side of the state, I find myself wondering out on the dry plains. But for me it's a hunting trip, or some summer adventure. I'm just a guest. I don't know the people or the hardships. This memoir was a windows into that world. The author seems conflicted. He throws out some well versed criticism of the area and the lifestyle of the people. Yet, deep down it sounds like he misses the life in some way. I knocked one star off because the narrative bounces around different periods of time haphazardly. Overall I did enjoy this book.
April 27, 2023
The Mountain and the Fathers is a great book about a guy who loses his father and finds father figures along the way. It describes his stories and life lessons that he learns along the way of trying to remember his dad. The book is kinda all over the place, but once you accept that, the story ties in all together and ends up being a really good book.
My favorite stories were the one of his grandfather. His grandfather teaches him many lessons and helps raise him. I can relate to this because my grandpa has taught me a lot and the bond we have is amazing. This book is a great book and i believe that many more people should read it.
My favorite stories were the one of his grandfather. His grandfather teaches him many lessons and helps raise him. I can relate to this because my grandpa has taught me a lot and the bond we have is amazing. This book is a great book and i believe that many more people should read it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 5, 2019
I enjoyed this very much. I personally know the author and live close to the setting of the book. Several places brought tears to my eyes. Well done, Joe!
July 17, 2025
It took a second read for me to be able to review this book. When a story reflects on your own life so much it makes it difficult to review honestly. The issues are different between Central Iowa and Eastern Montana. The issues a stark when comparing soil health but socially are the same. Rural communities are put down no matter if you have soil or dirt. Fathers are lost and boys will yearn for one. Escape seems oblivious. The writer escaped his doomed community; Should I? I have no claim besides community. I do understand that is not the point of the book though. The book tells the story of a very niche group and I am that niche; representation should feel nice but in the end all that is left is pain.
September 19, 2017
Book recommended to me by a classmate, and is mainly composed of short flashbacks. The human elements in this book are stirring, and, to me, the message delivered is in the same vein as Cather's classic, "O Pioneers," and many of Steinbeck's works. Easily one of the best books I've ever read. If you grew up in a place where it never rains and everyone tries to get out, most failing, then don't hesitate to read this book. This author is haunted by so many western elements it is almost unbearably relatable. This book left me crying, suddenly, about every thirty pages. I will check out this author's collections of poetry in the future. Wonderful!
March 20, 2012
Joe Wilkins grew up in a water-starved stretch of eastern Montana known as the Big Dry. With his new book, he returns to the unforgiving landscape of his youth in a series of wistful vignettes culled from vivid, often violent childhood memories. The Mountain and the Fathers is a wonderfully rendered portrait of starkly beautiful rural life and a haunting search for what it means to be a man in the American West. Wilkins is a poet; his eye for detail is clear and he writes with the narrative grace of high lonesome prairie wind.
July 13, 2023
When I am nine my father dies, leaving my mother with three hundred acres of farm land along the Musselshell River and three young children. My grandfather is an old man, but he does what he can for us. Tonight, he is teaching my brother and me to play poker.
******
The farm is located in what people call the Big Dry, “the driest, loneliest country in all Montana, a wide, wind-blown, light-shot high plain bounded on the north by the Missouri, on the south and east by the Yellowstone, and on the west by the Musselshell – yet the vast interior of the stretch of land is riverless."
It is called the Big Dry “after the Big Dry River to the north, which Meriwether Lewis called ‘the most extraordinary river that I ever beheld. [I]t is as wide as the Missouri is at this place – and not containing a single drop of running water.’”
The high plains of the Big Dry were once the home to the last large herds of buffalo to be found in Montana. As a result the area was at one time or the other an important hunting ground for several native tribes. That all ended in the winter of 1883-84 when hunters wiped out the last herds.
The nearest community to the farm and ranch that Wilkins grew up on was Melstone, which was founded as a railroad town in 1908, and is located nearly two hours north of the city of Billings, which is where the nearest city supermarket is located. Wilkins writes that had it been closer it would not have mattered because his family couldn’t afford to shop there.
Because Melstone was located on the railroad and oil was discovered nearby the community prospered for a few years, but as Wilkins writes, “this is the Big Dry – the railroad gone, the oil gone, the rain never falling ….” The community is located in a county with only “a single paved road laid right through its heart, out in the great and perfect isolation of the Montana plains.”
As I read Wilkins’ memoir I was reminded of Charles Dodd White’s book of essays, A Year without Months, which he describes as a “fragmented memoir,” which I thought was a perfect description. I think the same could be applied to The Mountain and the Fathers.
I should mention that besides this memoir, Wilkins has written a novel, a collection of short fiction, and five poetry collections, including the first two books that he published.
It was only after I finished the memoir that I read that he was a poet, but I was not surprised for his prose gave him away as he wrote about the climate and landscape of the Big Dry.
It is also apparent in the way he writes about his father, a good man who died all too young; his mother, a "tall woman" who sacrificed all for her husband and her three children; his grandfather, who became the closest to the surrogate father that he searched for; as well as other people of the area, including teachers and acquaintances. And most of all, the extent to which he longed to escape from an area that stifled ambition, and even worse, imagination, an imagination that he was only able to keep alive through his love of books.
With the exception of his mother (and one aunt who gets a brief chapter), the book is about boys and men. He writes about his father, his younger brother, his grandfather, and men, who lived in and around Melstone, but his sister, who is four years older, is mentioned only a few times, while his grandmother receives only one brief mention.
The title, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry, confused me at first. There are mountains in the distance, but he and his family lived on a plain and his father died when Wilkins was nine, but “Fathers” in the title is plural.
It is clear, however, that living in that harsh, isolated area was like trying to climb a mountain in order to survive (and possibly escape) and I felt that he was constantly looking for someone to take his father’s place, and his grandfather did his best to fill that void, but it was never quite enough.
The book is divided into five parts and each is introduced with a quotation. For Part II it is a quote from E.L. Doctorow:
Or are you just looking
for another father?
How many fathers does
one boy need?
It came as no surprise that in the last two chapters he writes about fathers, including his own experience as one, but especially about a father he struggles to remember, a father who died and left him fatherless when he was only nine-years-old.
******
And by the way:
Thank you, Julie, for your beautiful review that introduced me to this book.
******
The farm is located in what people call the Big Dry, “the driest, loneliest country in all Montana, a wide, wind-blown, light-shot high plain bounded on the north by the Missouri, on the south and east by the Yellowstone, and on the west by the Musselshell – yet the vast interior of the stretch of land is riverless."
It is called the Big Dry “after the Big Dry River to the north, which Meriwether Lewis called ‘the most extraordinary river that I ever beheld. [I]t is as wide as the Missouri is at this place – and not containing a single drop of running water.’”
The high plains of the Big Dry were once the home to the last large herds of buffalo to be found in Montana. As a result the area was at one time or the other an important hunting ground for several native tribes. That all ended in the winter of 1883-84 when hunters wiped out the last herds.
The nearest community to the farm and ranch that Wilkins grew up on was Melstone, which was founded as a railroad town in 1908, and is located nearly two hours north of the city of Billings, which is where the nearest city supermarket is located. Wilkins writes that had it been closer it would not have mattered because his family couldn’t afford to shop there.
Because Melstone was located on the railroad and oil was discovered nearby the community prospered for a few years, but as Wilkins writes, “this is the Big Dry – the railroad gone, the oil gone, the rain never falling ….” The community is located in a county with only “a single paved road laid right through its heart, out in the great and perfect isolation of the Montana plains.”
As I read Wilkins’ memoir I was reminded of Charles Dodd White’s book of essays, A Year without Months, which he describes as a “fragmented memoir,” which I thought was a perfect description. I think the same could be applied to The Mountain and the Fathers.
I should mention that besides this memoir, Wilkins has written a novel, a collection of short fiction, and five poetry collections, including the first two books that he published.
It was only after I finished the memoir that I read that he was a poet, but I was not surprised for his prose gave him away as he wrote about the climate and landscape of the Big Dry.
It is also apparent in the way he writes about his father, a good man who died all too young; his mother, a "tall woman" who sacrificed all for her husband and her three children; his grandfather, who became the closest to the surrogate father that he searched for; as well as other people of the area, including teachers and acquaintances. And most of all, the extent to which he longed to escape from an area that stifled ambition, and even worse, imagination, an imagination that he was only able to keep alive through his love of books.
With the exception of his mother (and one aunt who gets a brief chapter), the book is about boys and men. He writes about his father, his younger brother, his grandfather, and men, who lived in and around Melstone, but his sister, who is four years older, is mentioned only a few times, while his grandmother receives only one brief mention.
The title, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry, confused me at first. There are mountains in the distance, but he and his family lived on a plain and his father died when Wilkins was nine, but “Fathers” in the title is plural.
It is clear, however, that living in that harsh, isolated area was like trying to climb a mountain in order to survive (and possibly escape) and I felt that he was constantly looking for someone to take his father’s place, and his grandfather did his best to fill that void, but it was never quite enough.
The book is divided into five parts and each is introduced with a quotation. For Part II it is a quote from E.L. Doctorow:
Or are you just looking
for another father?
How many fathers does
one boy need?
It came as no surprise that in the last two chapters he writes about fathers, including his own experience as one, but especially about a father he struggles to remember, a father who died and left him fatherless when he was only nine-years-old.
******
And by the way:
Thank you, Julie, for your beautiful review that introduced me to this book.
October 26, 2021
So much to love in this book. The scenery, the short stories, the nostalgia, the anecdotes. It was an easy, comforting read that also allowed for grief.
I loved how Wilkins bounced back and forth in time. it wasn't some linear story. It allowed little details to be learned and realizations to be made about their meaning.
It sort of felt like Perks of being a wallflower at some point. Who has that much fun in high school? He lived this very full, vibrant life. He had so many meaningful people around him. When I think about hs, I think more about being alone. The idea of driving around, talking books, going to bonfires... quite the life.
even though the big dry was supposed to be some lifeless desert, it had its own beauty because of the lives lived there.
I loved how Wilkins bounced back and forth in time. it wasn't some linear story. It allowed little details to be learned and realizations to be made about their meaning.
It sort of felt like Perks of being a wallflower at some point. Who has that much fun in high school? He lived this very full, vibrant life. He had so many meaningful people around him. When I think about hs, I think more about being alone. The idea of driving around, talking books, going to bonfires... quite the life.
even though the big dry was supposed to be some lifeless desert, it had its own beauty because of the lives lived there.
October 27, 2022
La Montagne et les pères est constitué de courts récits autobiographiques retraçant l'enfance de l'auteur. Tout commence alors que Joe Wilkins, âgé de 9 ans, voit mourir son père d'un cancer.
Puis l'auteur restitue l'ambiance du Montana à l'époque de sa jeunesse, la rudesse du climat et des relations humaines parfois, la beauté des paysages. Ses souvenirs apparaissent comme des instantanés, des tranches de sa vie et de celle des siens. L'auteur se livre également à de très beaux portraits de ses proches, sa mère ou son grand-père paternel notamment. Sa mère qui a tout quitté pour suivre son mari assoiffé de grands espaces. Son grand-père, vieux cow-boy du Big Dry, lui a servi de père de substitution et l'a "libéré" en lui offrant un bel avenir.
L'écriture poétique de Joe Wilkins rend un vibrant hommage à ses proches et évoque avec émotion le chagrin et la quête d'identité d'un garçon au père trop tôt disparu.
Un très beau moment de lecture.
Puis l'auteur restitue l'ambiance du Montana à l'époque de sa jeunesse, la rudesse du climat et des relations humaines parfois, la beauté des paysages. Ses souvenirs apparaissent comme des instantanés, des tranches de sa vie et de celle des siens. L'auteur se livre également à de très beaux portraits de ses proches, sa mère ou son grand-père paternel notamment. Sa mère qui a tout quitté pour suivre son mari assoiffé de grands espaces. Son grand-père, vieux cow-boy du Big Dry, lui a servi de père de substitution et l'a "libéré" en lui offrant un bel avenir.
L'écriture poétique de Joe Wilkins rend un vibrant hommage à ses proches et évoque avec émotion le chagrin et la quête d'identité d'un garçon au père trop tôt disparu.
Un très beau moment de lecture.
August 31, 2025
This book made me recall growing up in Colorado. My father was a geologist who worked for the National Geological Survey around Grand Junction and Telluride in the 50’ and 60’s. Rural, cash poor, cowboy country. The environment Wilkins describes in Montana ‘s Big Dry is vivid, harsh, beautiful and not unlike rural Colorado. I almost felt like I would open the door of my own home in Oregon and walk out into the Big Dry.
Powerful descriptions of the cruelties that youthful boys inflict on one another and the ways they cope with their shame.
Powerful descriptions of the cruelties that youthful boys inflict on one another and the ways they cope with their shame.
July 5, 2019
A well-crafted memoir of a young boy raised by his mother and grandfather after the death his father. He structures the book around the men in rural Montana east of the Rockies who he emulated, and others, who he learned to avoid. His desire to always belong led him along paths that he later regretted, but his grandfather's values and his mother's grit brought him through. Definitely a man's book.
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December 19, 2022Qu’est-ce que c’est fragile un homme, mais Joe Wilkins l’a bien (d)écrit. Et puis cette inscription des corps dans les terres du Montana, c’est beau.
(bon on repassera pour avoir un corps de femme décrit autrement que par ses belles courbes sveltes, sa douceur ou sa beauté hein)
(bon on repassera pour avoir un corps de femme décrit autrement que par ses belles courbes sveltes, sa douceur ou sa beauté hein)
April 23, 2019
The use of language was beautiful. The memoir was sad. The author painted a vivid picture of what has been happening to farmers and ranchers for many years.
December 31, 2021
Beautifully written memoir of growing up in difficult circumstances. And his mother is a saint!!!!
April 13, 2025
"It is when we recognize how stories fail us and how stories save us. It is when we have heard them both and tell, in the moment of our greatest need, the story that will save us."
October 16, 2016
Beautifully written memories of parents, family and growing up in a poverty stricken place. Fast paced book that oftentimes reads like poetry. Looking forward to meeting the author in a few weeks!
January 31, 2016
This impressive memoir by Joe Wilkins is about his childhood in Melstone, Montana, which is a tiny ranching community on the dry eastern plains just north of Billings. I have a personal connection to this memoir. Wilkins is a professor at Linfield College where Eve and I went to school and my best friend here in Montana grew up not far from Melstone and has connections to some of the people mentioned in the book.
When Wilkins was nine years old his father, admired and respected by the entire community, died of cancer. The book traces Wilkins’ life in the years following his dad’s passing and provides a profound look at the struggles of those experiencing rural poverty and the lack of opportunities to escape from it. Like most boys in his community, Wilkins grows up working on ranches, including his grandfather’s huge ranch before it was sold. But Wilkins is an intellectually minded person and he chafes at the narrow constraints of conservative rural America. He witnesses all the scourges of poverty such as alcohol abuse, violence and cruelty. He also comments on the unsustainability of farming and ranching in the western high desert. It is a narrative that reveals his struggles to find identity, to know something of his father, and to escape the clutches of this small community.
The Mountain and The Fathers is a beautifully written memoir and it deserves a big national readership.
When Wilkins was nine years old his father, admired and respected by the entire community, died of cancer. The book traces Wilkins’ life in the years following his dad’s passing and provides a profound look at the struggles of those experiencing rural poverty and the lack of opportunities to escape from it. Like most boys in his community, Wilkins grows up working on ranches, including his grandfather’s huge ranch before it was sold. But Wilkins is an intellectually minded person and he chafes at the narrow constraints of conservative rural America. He witnesses all the scourges of poverty such as alcohol abuse, violence and cruelty. He also comments on the unsustainability of farming and ranching in the western high desert. It is a narrative that reveals his struggles to find identity, to know something of his father, and to escape the clutches of this small community.
The Mountain and The Fathers is a beautifully written memoir and it deserves a big national readership.
August 22, 2014
"It is late July, haying season, and he is waiting for the sun to dry the dew from the field. He is happy just waiting, happy because in this dry country too much moisture is a fine problem to have, because a meadowlark is calling, because the air this morning is sweet and sharp with clover and sage.". 4.5 really stars are so crass...
Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden.
• Did Joe have a happy childhood?
• How does he process his father’s death -- or not?
• What was your favorite landscape interaction that Joe had?
• Is the landscape an adversary?
• Was the transition to the harrowing adolescence inevitable?
• How does the fathering (or his search for fathering) affect his adult life?
• Does his poetic language help the story; hinder; hide; sanitize?
• Who was your favorite father figure?
• How did the end fit with the rest of the story; or not?
• What is the “mountain” of the title?
• How did Joe's Catholicism influence his journey?
Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden.
• Did Joe have a happy childhood?
• How does he process his father’s death -- or not?
• What was your favorite landscape interaction that Joe had?
• Is the landscape an adversary?
• Was the transition to the harrowing adolescence inevitable?
• How does the fathering (or his search for fathering) affect his adult life?
• Does his poetic language help the story; hinder; hide; sanitize?
• Who was your favorite father figure?
• How did the end fit with the rest of the story; or not?
• What is the “mountain” of the title?
• How did Joe's Catholicism influence his journey?
September 4, 2016
Joe Wilkins begins his fine memoir, "What I remember without qualification is the dark." He is a young boy being pulled from sleep on the night of his father's death. Over and over again he recounts, "What I remember" spooling out the details of a night that haunts him still. "We leave and never leave. We grow up and never grow up. We grieve and grieve and grieve."
Wide open and desolate, Montana's Big Dry is a place of hard times and hard luck. Wilkins and his family have seen plenty of both. The Mountains and Fathers is a powerful coming of age story; it is also beautifully written. A poet first, Wilkins cadence and imagery are what make this such a fine read.
Wide open and desolate, Montana's Big Dry is a place of hard times and hard luck. Wilkins and his family have seen plenty of both. The Mountains and Fathers is a powerful coming of age story; it is also beautifully written. A poet first, Wilkins cadence and imagery are what make this such a fine read.
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