A Love Song For Marias Coulee
Ivan Doig's 2006 novel "The Whistling Season" portrays a small rural area in Montana in 1909, late in the homesteading period. Settlers came to Montana lured by free land and the promise of a new life. Doig takes a long, affectionate look at people and places. The primary group of homesteaders in his novel are the Millirons consisting of a husband, wife and two sons who migrated from Manitowoc, Wisconsin where Oliver Milliron was a drayman. After settling in Marias Coulee, Oliver continued as a hauler and also became a farmer on dry land and the president of the local school board. The school board supervised a one-room schoolhouse with scholars from the first through the eighth grades. The Millirons had another son before the wife, Florence, died. Oliver and his three sons, Paul, Damon, and Toby, struggled to get by and keep house as males will.
Oliver responds to an ad placed by a woman from Minneapolis offering housekeeping services. This response leads to the second group of homesteaders featured in the story: Rose, a lovely, housekeeper and young widow, and her dapper, mustachioed, and highly educated brother Morrie. Rose is a skilled housekeeper but can't cook. She whistles while she works and sings as well. The stories of the Millirons and the Morgans, Rose and Morrie, intertwine in this book under the course of the stars and of Halley's Comet, frequently under the heading of destiny.
Paul Milliron, the oldest son, narrates the story. In 1909, when the action takes place, Paul is a precocious 13-year old in seventh grade in the Marias Coulee school. He narrates the tale in 1957, age about 61, when he is the Superintendent of the Montana Public Schools, a position he has held for many years. In 1957, the USSR had launched Sputnik. Americans panicked fearing they had fallen behind the Russians in science. The Montana school system was looking toward eliminating the one-room schools of the sort in which Paul had learned in Marias Coulee, on grounds that they did not offer a sufficiently demanding program in science and mathematics.
Paul narrates his tale of family, homesteading, learning, farming, and whistling in a poetic, loving, nostalgic way. Paul was a brilliant child and retains his way with words and thought. He tells his story in a manner that is also orderly, organized, and slowly developing which captures the Millirons' life and the arrival of the Morgans. The story gradually expands to include the other homesteaders in the area, the growth of irrigation farming, as opposed to dry land farming, the forming community, and, perhaps most of all, the school and the early life of the mind. Paul has an understanding of people and their different quirks and characters, and he describes the homesteaders that peopled Montana in indelible detail.
When the teacher at Marias Coulee leaves mid-term to get married, the redoubtable Morrie Morgan is pressed into service as teacher. He is able to inspire most of his young charges, Paul in particular, who becomes a student of Latin. In 1910, Halley's Comet made its appointed appearance, (it is on a 75 year cycle). Morrie teaches his charges many things about the cosmos and about the comet as he and his scholars prepare a program replete with music and stories for the community on the night when the comet is in its full glory. Halley's Comet, with it light, regularity, and spirit of vision and unity of life becomes one of the key symbols in Paul's tale and in this book.
The other key symbol is the Marais Coulee one-room schoolhouse. Paul, in 1957, looks back on his youthful education and recalls how the school and its students managed to do much with little in a single classroom with children of widely different backgrounds and interests in study. The old schoolhouse itself opens up in Paul's mind to the homesteading years and to a love and sense of place for the community, the state and the nation where Paul has spent his life. The book tells the story of love on a personal and communal level.
In 2010, Doig wrote a sequel to this book, the novel "Work Song". It features Morrie, ten years removed from this book, and living in Butte Montana. The Butte Public Library comes to take a role similar to the role of the humble schoolhouse in "The Whistling Season" in helping the reader understand the American West.
In its obituary for Doig, (1939-2015), the "New York Times" quoted the words of Wright Morris reviewing another book of the author that apply with equal force to "The Whistling Season". Morris wrote: ""Mr. Doig's story reinforces our diminishing conviction that there is something special in American earth, in American experience and in the harrowing terms of American survival,"
In times of divisiveness in our country and a certain lack of faith in its ideals, it is a tonic to read "The Whistling Season". I am grateful to have found this author.
Robin Friedman
