Book Report: Little Things in a Big Country

22. Hannah Hinchman, Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front (2004) (10/12/19)

This gorgeous book is part artist journal and part natural history, of a spot in western Montana—or really, simply life well lived, in a land that I, for one, wish I had some sort of access to. I bought this book used, and on the flyleaf is this inscription:

Fall 2004
Dear Anne Stine,
I hope you will enjoy this book as much as I did. It picked me up and put me in a very special place.
Love,
Ellen

Indeed: it put me, too, in a very special place. (And I wonder about Anne Stine: Did she not appreciate the gift, and donate the book to a local library? Did she die? Why did this book float into my possession?)

The magic in this book is wrought by the lovely writing (hand-lettered) —all the senses in play, a genuine love of place—recounting the author's ramblings with her dog, Sisu, over an expanse of wild territory, and especially by the gorgeous paintings (watercolor, pastel) and pen drawings, close up and from afar, capturing the beauty. It is a song, a celebration, of place.

The illustrations feature maps, footprints, details of grasses, Sisu asleep or falling through ice, the Front Range, various birds, various plants, a cowboy's butt, cleavage planes of rocks, stacks of bubbles frozen into pond ice. Every spread is a work of art. And an education.

Surprisingly, I found no images online from this book, so I shot a few iPhone snaps, just to give an idea of the beautiful composition and art. Also, here are a couple of passages I flagged for the lovely writing. One gets at her ability to observe; the other, at a more philosophical side.

One bank of the slough is a grassy sward, easy to navigate even for a bumbler. The principal beaver dam is old enough to be reedgrass-grown and wide enough to stroll across. From a perch in the middle of the dam, you have a privileged view of hundreds of nesting blackbirds, elusive ducks like cinnamon teal and shovelers, working muskrats, basking turtles, hunting herons and nest-setting sandhill cranes. Audible but rarely visible (unless they fly) are snipe, wee sora rails and the deeply mysterious bittern. At this season, there's never a duckless, hawkless or gull-less interval in the sky. Sound extends my habitat range—I can hear curlews and meadowlarks on the distant prairie uplands.

Workaday sadness is diluted and absorbed outdoors in the "more than human" world. Spirits are revived by the constancy of the real. And what do we really know of all this—the substance of light, the inner lives of creatures, the forming and dissolving of clouds and mountains, the countless events playing out simultaneously, ceaselessly? I find it soothing to be rendered insignificant. And am cheered just to be at home on the planet, upright and walking around, in the midst of the vast unknowable.