The weathered log buildings on a hillside with yellow grass would own me. From my first sight of the place, I was hooked. I started to invent a new life. Some country family lived in the mud-chinked house with sun glinting off its tin roof, but the ranch seemed abandoned, no sounds except the humming of yellow jackets, dry grass rustling as we passed. A few leghorns pecked at the last grasshoppers of summer. Home. If I lived here who would I be?
- from "Homestead"
As she moves into her sixth decade, Annick Smith finds she likes her life. She lives on 160 acres of meadow in Montana. Her land is paid for and so is her house. Her four sons are grown, taking care of themselves.
Now she has only herself to support. This she does by writing and film-making. Smith says, "I'd rather scratch together a living as a freelancer than hold a steady job."
She has loads of magazine articles and several books to her credit, including a collection she edited with William Kittredge. It's called "The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology." Smith also got a national award for her fiction. She was also executive producer of the movie "Heartland" and co-producer of Robert Redford's "A River Runs Through It," which was based on the book by her friend Norman Maclean. And she helped found the Sun-dance Film Institute.
In short, Smith is one of the West's more well-known women. It is becoming easier to scratch together that living. Editors call her, now, asking her to write something. She heads one writing workshop, is invited to teach at others and at universities. She and Kittredge, her long-time companion, often get calls asking them to read a script or a novel in progress.
Lately, the main problems in her life are all the distractions from writing.
"I'm traveling too much," she told the Deseret News in a recent telephone interview. She was at home at the time, on her ranch near Missoula, but she was getting ready to leave again for another book tour to promote her newest work, "Homestead" (Milkweed, $19.95)
This tour includes a stop in Salt Lake City. Smith will be reading at A Woman's Place Bookstore in Foot-hill Village on Monday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m.
The book she'll read from, "Homestead," is a series of essays about the landscape of Smith's life.
Annick Deutch was born in France, where her Jewish Hungarian parents had immigrated to be part of the artistic life. As World War II loomed, they moved again, taking their young family with them.
This time they settled in Chicago. Her father was a photographer and she and her mother and five sisters helped in the darkroom. Through photography, Ann-ick learned to make films.
At 19, she married David Smith. In 1964, he got a job teaching English at the University of Montana. Buying a ranch was his idea. An-nick Smith's friends thought she was too much of a city girl to be much help.
But Dave died at 41 of heart disease, and Smith ended up raising their sons alone on the ranch they all loved. At the time, Smith felt like she was charting new territory.
Now she looks back on her life and writes, "It shocks me to recognize that I am not the individualist I thought I was. By choosing to live my adult life in Montana I have aped my parents in spite of myself. Like them I emigrated to a land of greater freedom. Like them I rooted my life in art and rooted my art to a chosen place. Like them I valued family to the detriment of career. Looking toward their deaths and my old age, I am compelled to come to terms with the bitter and the sweet of our shared past."
In "Homestead" she comes to terms with the bitter and the sweet. This book came from her own experience, as has everything she's written.
This summer she is working on something new, a book commissioned by the Nature Conservancy about the tall-grass prairies of central Oklahoma. On a 36,000-acre preserve, scientists are using bison and fire to try to restore the prairie ecosystem. Says Smith, "The story will expand from that place into discussions of Native American connections and settlement patterns of the southeastern Southwest."
This is new territory for Smith. She's had to travel to Oklahoma several times, do more research than she's ever done before, submit detailed outlines to the local and national conservancy boards and to the publisher.
But now she is doing the actual writing and she is back in familiar territory. At home in Montana, her work finds its natural rhythm. She wakes and either goes for a walk or reads for awhile before sitting down to four or five hours of uninterrupted writing. Often she gets so absorbed she forgets to eat lunch.
In the afternoons she walks, or in cold weather goes cross-country skiing on her property. In the evenings she visits Bill Kittredge and other friends in Missoula. Or he comes to see her.
Smith says they live together, but in fact they usually write alone, she at the ranch, he at his apartment in town. They know they can work side-by-side - "dueling typewriters," Smith calls it - but they've also learned they have different work patterns. "We are old enough so it doesn't seem imperative to be together all the time."
They do edit each other's important work, she says. He was the first to read the story of her life.
"Homestead" is about rivers and grass, trout and horses. It is about how much Annick Smith needs Mon-tana, with its harsh winters, and summers too short for the vegetables she tries to raise. "Homestead" is also a book about the effects of nature on children. Smith would have been a different woman had she not had a wild place to escape to when she was 11 and needed to figure out who she was. Many of the landscapes of her youth are gone now.
Smith's memories are of people as well as landscapes. But people pass, and landscapes need not. "Homestead" is a poignant testimony of what will be lost if Montana, Smith's last best place, goes the way of the Midwest.
As Smith says:
You can fall in love with space and sky. A girl from Chicago can go west and find mountains. These days I live surrounded by grass in a high Montana meadow. There is no water in sight, and yet the wind blows. The grass undulates in sunshine. A humming-bird, iridescent, green-throated, plunges the needle of his tongue into a common red petunia.