How It Looks Going Back: Growing Up in the Montana Woods

In 1949, taking a break from San Diego’s post–World War II bustle, the Knowles family went camping in Canada. Heading home through northwest Montana’s Yaak River country, they found a two-bedroom, story-and-half log cabin on a small lake.

There was neither electricity nor plumbing. Access was via dirt road, slow at best and iffy during the long, hard winters. Darwin Knowles saw a peaceful life, and adventurous wife Marilyn agreed. Third-grader daughter, Dee (for Doris), could attend the one-room school, and three-year-old Bob (Barbara) have a safe place to play. Enthusiastic but ignorant of wilderness living, the family moved in that fall—working together to cook and heat with wood, hunt and fish for food, haul water, and wash clothes by hand.

They stayed for six years, during which son Stevie was born. Dee’s reminiscence of her childhood in “the Yaak” presents quirky neighbors, growing girls’ adventures, wildlife huge and tiny, and especially one loving family. As she writes, “It was a cozy, scary, painful, hilarious, dangerous, interesting, and grand time, and the most fun I ever had.”