Doris Knowles Pulis | How It Looks Going Back

Published: February 16, 2010

When eight-year-old Doris Knowles and her family embarked from their home in California on a summer vacation to Canada in 1949, little did they expect to wind up moving to a log cabin, perched on a fish-filled lake, in the sparsely populated Yaak Valley.

In her vivid and well-crafted memoir, Pulis tells about the six years her family spent there, minus electricity or running water. She, and eventually her little sister Bob (Barbara), attended a one-room schoolhouse, and the author learned how to split wood, haul water, ride horses and survive through winters that sometimes swallowed most of the year.

The valley is brimming with eccentrics, like Gus, whose nose “was like the Yaak Road: bumpy and crooked,” or the Seventh Day Adventist minister, the Rev. McCoy, who loves nothing more than his ongoing feuds (“flint and steel and sparks flying”) with Dee’s dad, Darwin (named for the father of the theory of evolution).

Remarkably, Knowles describes these experiences as though they happened yesterday instead of six decades ago, with sharp detail and a sense of humor and affection that’s palpable.

Clem Work, a journalism professor at The University of Montana, notes that the author’s “sweet and sassy memoir … shows that spirit, guts, and grit are priceless qualities in any era.”

The author, who now resides in Bend, OR, also spent 25 years in the Bitterroot Valley, where she and her husband raised Christmas trees. Her book sells for $12, and is published by Riverbend Publishing in Helena.

– Kristi Niemeyer