Some Thoughts about Jack Nisbet's "Purple Flat Top"

I should always remember rule number one when it comes to starting a new book:  BE RESTED. 

My life is littered with books I tried to read when I was fatigued and that I set aside to return to and the return never happened.

I don't remember exactly when IEG gave me Jack Nisbet's  Purple Flat Top nor whether it was a Christmas or birthday gift.  Almost immediately, I set out to read it, but I was too tired to start it and set it aside,  and didn't get back to it until last week when Doug, Class of '70, Kellogg High School, posted a Facebook note about Jack Nisbet books he'd just finished reading and enjoying deeply. 

Am I ever glad he did.  Am I ever glad I returned to this book.

Sixteen stories comprise Purple Flat Top.   Each story stands on its own, not dependent upon the others to make sense or be enjoyed.  At the same time, the stories connect with each other.  They are all stories taking place in northeastern Washington, mostly in the immediate vicinity of Chewelah, but some of the action stretches across the Colville Reservation and into the Spokane Reservation, some sneaks into British Columbia, and one story leaves the state of Washington entirely when Nisbet writes about visiting Professor Charles J. Smiley at the University of Idaho to learn more about his study of botanical fossils unearthed in the Clarkia area of North Idaho. 

For over fifteen years, my sister (IEG) has lived in part of the world Nisbet tells his stories about.  I love driving to visit her, usually in the summer, sometimes at Thanksgiving or over Christmas.  In the summer,  during the day it's dry and hot.  The air parches my throat.  With the setting of the sun, the air cools, the stars dazzle the clear nights, the moon lingers over Lake Roosevelt, and the quiet settles in, sometimes interrupted by dogs howling up a draw nearby or unmuffled cars or motorcycles racing up the county road.

When the Bunker Hill Mining Company shut down in 1982, some guys in the Silver Valley chased jobs in northeastern Washington.  One family friend worked at Addy.  Others from the Kellogg area went to Republic.  Even knowing this, I hadn't thought of the region Nisbet explores as a mining district, as a dying mining district, as a place, much like Kellogg, where mining and milling had thrived, made the area prosperous, and then died.

But, Chewelah is just such a town.  Magnesite helped Chewelah thrive from about World War I until the operations shut down in 1968.

Jack Nisbet arrived in Chewelah soon after the magnesite industry went out.  As a result, his stories, each focused on a different person he came to know in the area, explore this place through the experiences, jobs, avocations, sense of service, histories, and voices of a variety of people who work to make ends meet, pursue their passions, and who even work hard to make this part of the world a better place to live.

Nisbet does what I most enjoy in writing:  he brings these persons alive through physical detail, the clothes they wear, the texture of their skin, the cadence of their speech, their various vocabularies, and by the work they do, whether working to keep Indian languages alive, collecting treasures at the town dump, or demolishing what's left of the magnesite mining machinery to sell as scrap.  We meet people playing music, an elderly Seventh Day Adventist from Russia who starts a thriving health food business, as well as water dowsers who try to help Nisbet find a reliable water source for the cabin he and a friend construct on Purple Flat Top.

For Nisbet, exploring what makes northeastern Washington the place it is only begins with these terrific stories and the fascinating people who inhabit them.  Nisbet loves the natural world.  He's a natural historian.  As he tells these stories, he takes his readers into the flowers, weeds, fish, birds, mammals, streams, smells, sensations, and other natural details of the Chewelah area.  Nisbet loves people.  He loves the natural world.  The natural and human details enrich his stories, demonstrating how the spirit of a place, how its soul, is grounded in the particular details of voices, plants, sounds, weather patterns, industry, water, creatures, as well as music, vehicles of transportation, and people's domiciles.  The spirit of place rises out of the physical world, out of what, in a place, we experience with our ears, eyes, fingers, noses, and tongues.  As a naturalist and a storyteller, Nisbet masterfully conveys and evokes the spirit of this particular place in Washington.

I've read a fair number of books and essays situated in the Inland Northwest and, more broadly, in the Pacific Northwest.

Some of these books seem too precious to me.  They seem self-consciously poetic; sometimes the writers seem  too self-aware of not only writing about our part of the USA, but seem bent on making it holy, mystical, more than it is, possibly.

Not Jack Nisbet.  This is not a precious book.  It's straightforward, seemingly effortlessly beautiful.  It's my favorite kind of writing.  I know the writing took a lot of work, but it never seems like it.  It never strains to be profound or calls attention to its own genius. 

In other words, the book is never about Jack Nisbet as a writer.  It's about Jack Nisbet, yes, but about the way he came to love northeastern Washington through the landscape, botany, creatures, history, and, above all, the people of this place.