New West Book Review

Mountain Men: Carlson’s “Five Skies”

By Jenny Shank, 6-29-07

Five Skies
By Ron Carlson
Viking
244 pages, $23.95

Utah native Ron Carlson has spent over three decades crafting award-winning short stories and teaching at Arizona State and UC Irvine, where he now directs the creative writing program.  Carlson recently published Five Skies, his first novel in 26 years, and it’s a beautiful, haunting book that takes place largely under the wide-open Idaho sky.  Like one of its main characters, Art Key, the novel is careful and takes its time. 

The story begins when a ranch foreman named Darwin Gallegos picks up a couple of itinerant laborers in Pocatello to work on a summer-long construction project on a plateau overlooking a canyon.  Arthur Key is not the journeyman he presents himself to be at first, but a skilled engineer known for his care and safety record who built a career out of constructing complicated Hollywood sets.  ("In a world of laborers who stood back chewing their gum,” Carlson writes, “he was a standout.")

Gallegos wants only one man, but Key insists that he and Ronnie Panelli, a skittish 20-year-old who looks “like Sinatra at nineteen,” are a team, and so the three head out together for the worksite.  From here on, the narrative focuses mainly on these men, but the Idaho landscape plays as big a role, offering the restorative calm of its beauty to these battered souls but also confronting them with the unpredictable dangers of nature.

The men waste no time on getting to know one another, but set right to work on a project that Gallegos is reluctant to name.  Key studies the plans and realizes they are building a ramp leading up to the canyon that will be used by a young stuntwoman trying to break Evel Knievel’s motorcycle jumping record.  Key doesn’t like to be involved in such foolhardy efforts, but he finds in the job the opportunity to escape the wreckage he’s made of his life in California and so he sets to work. 

Carlson makes poetry out of their labor, describing precisely each step of the project and naming the tools they use as though they were a litany of saints: “wooden stakes; heavy twine; steel hinges; two hundred yards of the rope; a one-inch tempered steel drill bit; forty-yard-long dowels, diameter one inch; a basket of steel fittings; boxes of wood screws…” Carlson’s sentences are marvels, each one a square meal, but none distractingly showy.

Like Key, the other men are also scarred by their pasts; Panelli spent time in jail for petty thefts, and Gallegos is in such deep mourning over the recent loss of his wife that he cannot bear to return to the home where they lived together.  All good reasons to live outside under a tent for the summer, and good excuses to feast like kings all the while.  Carlson describes the food the men cook and consume with mouth-watering specificity:

“Darwin could cook a breakfast fry like no one Arthur had ever seen.  He was quick and quiet and before a person had his boots tied right, the sound and smell of bacon was I the morning air and then the skillet eggs with onions and ham, sometimes with the sharp cheddar he bought in the village in a big brick, and the thick fried bread, close to burned the way Darwin had learned the other two men liked it.”

The stories of the men’s past lives come out in time, when each feels compelled to speak of it, and complications ensue when Ronnie is injured and later goes looking for love in town, but for the most part the novel stays with them as they complete the careful, painstaking work on their ridiculous project.  At one point, the daredevil who is to use the ramp, Gabriella Smith, visits the site.  Carlson writes:

“[Key] wanted to read something from her that was careful or afraid, but it wasn’t there.  Talking to this person on the real road magnified the summer for Arthur Key; it affected his stomach.  Here it was and he saw the panorama just like every project he’d turned down for reality television.”

Five Skies raises a number of questions, such as whether it is possible for a man to maintain his dignity when his occupation requires him to work for fools, wasteful people, and publicity hounds.  And is there any honor in hard work if the results of that work are of little practical benefit to the world?  In the case of these men, the careful completion of this work seems to repair some of the psychic damage of their past decisions. 

In the company of the others, Darwin is drawn out of his shell a bit, but Carlson wisely offers no easy salve for his grief.  Key serves as a mentor for Ronnie, who is a lovable character, feeding rabbits around the construction site, enjoying the task of shooing some open range cattle from the road (He asks, “What are they, wild?"), and relishing relieving himself outdoors. ("He’ll get used to pissing out in the world,” Art tells Darwin about Ronnie, “and find himself unable to go east again.”

The ending of the book works well, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t read it over a few times, hoping things would turn out differently. Five Skies is a quiet triumph, a moving tale of men who have fled the stifling, closed-in places of their past lives to seek redemption under the wide Western sky.

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