Oprah Winfrey’s embrace of a new novel about friendship, fate and love almost guarantees an increase in visitors to the Flathead Valley this summer, flocking no less to Woods Bay.
Picture girls’ getaway trips and married couples with children in tow, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Margolis family’s musty old house overlooking Flathead Lake, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, an ancient apple orchard, and raspberry bushes that magically replenish every season.
“And the cherries!” writes bestselling author Eric Puchner in his new novel Dream State, which has risen like wildfire to the most prestigious shelf of Oprah’s Book Club. “Somehow there always seemed to be a tree within reach. Fingers stained red, bloated with fruit, you’d run across [Highway] 35 and jump into the lake to clean off … ”
Once the sightseers have gotten their feel for Woods Bay — pinpointing the Margolis’ dock with its Adirondack chairs and swim ladder that melts into water so clear you “see straight down to the rocks, picking out minnows and lost lures as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool” — they’ll head to Bigfork, “one of those western towns caught in a strange moment of transition.
“It had begun as a Native American trading post, then had reinvented itself for many years as a logging center, and recently had reinvented itself once again as a thriving tourist destination for outdoor recreators,” describes the author, spotlighting the Swan River’s rushing “Wild Mile,” renowned summer “playhouse,” a “microbrewery and a sushi place … espresso bar … gun store … you could go to Margarita Monday and find a sales consultant and a fishing guide or two and occasionally even an actual cowboy.”
Readers are told upfront that Dream State’s paradise setting — “like something in a fairy tale” —i s a blend of “real and imagined geography,” albeit to the book’s credit much less of the latter.
Its 433 beautifully written pages — spanning 50 years in the Flathead Valley, with a peek into its future (if you think the wildfires and smoke are bad now, and Whitefish’s ski seasons too short, just wait) — perfectly capture the “pre-digital” atmosphere of Woods Bay, its characters contemplating the shimmering blue waters and stunning Mission Mountains “bristling with pines” as much as the constant stream of traffic barreling down its two-lane highway. There’s even a mention of the curious “concrete teepee.”
Also as in real life one takes the Swan Highway to reach Jewel Basin and snowcapped Mount Aeneas; while further north is Kalispell’s international airport, where one of the novel’s main characters laboriously loads luggage into the bellies of airplanes before strapping into Nordic skis to track wolverines in the Bob Marshall and Glacier National Park for the rest of his life.
(“I owe a big debt of gratitude to biologist and author Doug Chadwick, who was nice enough to meet with me back when Dream State was merely an idea, and whose work inspired Garrett’s vocation in the novel,” Puchner writes in his acknowledgements.)
The novel nails the summertime ritual of waiting behind strings of cars to enter West Glacier, the urgent bathroom breaks at Lake McDonald Lodge, and upon passing beneath the Weeping Wall spending twenty minutes sharking the parking lot of Logan Pass until finally escaping onto the precarious Highline Trail — which isn’t “a trail so much as a bas-relief.”
None of which is to suggest that our aforementioned local landmarks — God-given, manmade, or as with the valley’s “chartreuse fields of canola” a combination of the two — haven’t sufficiently been trampled upon by travel writers and Instagram posters alike. In fact, the publisher makes clear on the dust cover that the book isn’t intended to be a “love letter and elegy to the American West.”
Dream State rather is celebrated as “a thrilling ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.” Think of a love triangle with a breathtaking backdrop.
And by combining the two, the book worms will come.
“A couple of friends of mine who’ve been to the [Woods Bay] house said we’re going to have tourists stopping out in front,” concedes Dr. Gordon Noel, owner of the home that was built long ago by his grandfather (if the good doctor’s name rings a bell, he is author of the elegantly composed 2018 memoir, Out of Montana).
Dr. Noel’s daughter is none other than novelist Katharine Noel, who happens to be married to Puchner, Dream State’s author, and the Baltimore couple has spent countless family vacations in the Woods Bay house. Thus the inspiration for the novel’s setting.
So is the appearance of the house as his son-in-law portrays it in the book?
“Almost everything that he describes in terms of a physical object on the property is accurate,” Dr. Noel tells me. “When our whole family is there there’s seventeen of us. So we created a couple of rooms up on the upper floor that can be used as twin-bed bedrooms and so on, replaced the old kitchen with a new one …
“There’s still not a right angle anyplace in the house,” he adds. “You can just look at [the chimney] and wonder how the hell it’s stood all these years. If it were in an earthquake zone it would be condemned!”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.