NONFICTION - June 18, 1995

HOMESTEAD by Annick Smith (Milkweed Editions: $19.95; 226 pp.). In 1964, when Annick Smith moved from Seattle to Montana with her husband and two young sons, friends predicted they wouldn’t last more than a year or two. They were wrong; for a decade the family thrived, and to this day Smith remains on her ranch outside Missoula, 20 years a widow. In this essay collection Smith meditates on her Chicago youth and immigrant Jewish heritage, writes of travel to Alaska and Spain, but the best parts of “Homestead” concern her chosen state, which she loves as only a convert can. The space; the sky; the snow; the wildlife; the rivers; the land known to natives as “one neighborly town with six hundred-mile streets.” Smith is taken with Montana’s refusal to be domesticated, its reality being “better than myth.” One of Smith’s best essays is on state cattle inspectors, who keep track of the 57,000 brands now recorded in Montana; another good one describes life on the Big Blackfoot, made famous in Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” which Smith helped to adapt for the screen. In this last essay, too, there’s a minor bit of Montaniana, one perhaps emblematic of the state’s self-assurance. When William Hurt came to the Big Blackfoot in 1983 to fly fish with Maclean and talk about making a film of the book, the actor was quickly sent back to town, Maclean having learned that Hurt didn’t have a valid fishing license.