ABSTRACT
When I went to Idaho after finishing college, without knowing what I would do there except work as a fire lookout during the summer, I began hearing old people talk about what had happened in their country, and what had happened to them, in the past. They told stories with an ease and directness that made the early days seem real and compelling, as if they were still in the air. I was struck by a sense that somehow these people were drawing their recollections from one another, that, even though it would never be possible to recover the actual paths by which the stories had developed, they had grown out of a conversation that has been going on since the very beginnings of settlement and that continues whenever there is talk about the memorable past. Whatever gets recalled after all this time stands for a piece of truth that remains about a world that is gone. There are complicated kinds of agreement and disagreement about the nature of this truth, and it gets probed from many angles of vision. But there is no choice about being inside or outside the dialogue. Everyone is part of it, invested with a participant’s responsibility for sifting through what he or she has lived.
