Distinctly Montana Magazine

70 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 5 Grady also does a deep dive into how isolated life was in Montana at the time, and how that impacted peoples' view of themselves and of the rest of the world. There are Native characters in the book, particularly Marin, one of Lucas Ross's best friends, and Grady want- ed to show how disturbing the racist attitudes were during that period. "It was a shock to me that [the real life] Marin and some of his other friends had to deal with. When I saw the racism that came their way, I felt like a pool ball that had been knocked onto another table or something. It was stunning to me." The impact of this kind of isolation is also conveyed by the main source of information for the characters in these books. "Until I was about twelve, most of the homes in our town didn't have TVs. So before that, we really didn't have a sense of the outside world except through radio and books, and then finally the movies, which was why my job working in the projector room for the movie the- ater my father managed became such an important part of my upbringing. Sometimes I got to see five or six new movies a week! "So those movies, and books, gave me the idea that there was an outside world out there that I wanted to know more about, even as I was watching the mysteries around me unfold. Watching both tragedies and victories happen. So in the first novel, there's a scene, and I'm going to try not to cry when I tell you about this. In the late 1970s, a farmer died in mid-Au- gust, and it was right about the time the crops were about to come in. And you know that when it gets to that point, you have maybe two weeks to get those crops harvested. So one morning… this is hard…. about fifty combines, followed by trucks…the widow came running out, wondering what the hell was going on. All the farmers risked their own crops to save this widow's crops. So you'd see stuff like that. "So I want to make sure people around the country, and even in Europe, see this side of America. We hear all this talk about making America like it used to be. Well…I'd like to see America like it should be." Grady was so motivated by the experience in that cemetery that he cranked out three fairly substantial, and very personal, novels in five years, which is not easy. "So there's a moment, as you know, when the characters stand up and say 'No, I'm not five foot three and my name is not Joe.' So that came fairly quickly, plus a lot of the people that I was checking in with to make sure I was getting it right kept telling me to hurry up and start writing this thing, and once I started, it flowed like a river. In fact, I thought it would just be one book, but it soon became clear that I needed to break this into three parts, to explore the three different periods of this kid's life, as well as America's past. "So the first novel, The Smoke in Our Eyes, starts with the day the music died… the Buddy Holly plane crash, and it was also the end of the Eisenhower era, and it was the first year that we had official Killed in Action soldiers in Vietnam. Lucas is ten, so he's still a kid. He's still a child, even. But he's starting to hear and feel things that he didn't the first nine years of his life." "The second novel… the first half of the American Sky volume, Somethin's Happening Here, and of course that's from the song by that amazing band, Buffalo Springfield. I re- member seeing them play that song on TV when I was in high school, and thinking these guys are on to something, So I used that title as an indication that Lucas is starting to think about what's happening in the rest of the world, and I start that book with the Kennedy as- sassination. But there was so much going on then. We started to get news of kids we knew dying in Vietnam. But there were also funny things, because teenagers do stupid things." "I WANTED TO CAPTURE THE REALITY OF WHAT HAPPENED HERE, IN A WAY THAT MONTANANS NOW — WHETHER OR NOT THEY GREW UP IN IT, OR WHETHER THEY CAME HERE —THAT THEY GET A PICTURE OF WHERE THIS GREAT STATE CAME FROM."

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