The novels of Don Berry
The Oregon landscape is front and center in these three books from the 1960s
I think it must be a
thing that happens only
in a country like Oregon,
where the winter crushes
you into the ground and
makes you something
only half alive. The rush
of summer makes you
ten feet tall, and you can
stand in the morning and
feel the strength roll up out of your belly,
drawn by the power of the sun.”
Don Berry wrote these sentences. They
originate from one of his trilogy of histor-
ical novels published in the early 1960s.
1961 to 1963 saw the publication of
three Berry novels, “Trask,” “Moontrap”
and “To Build a Ship,” all set in pio-
neer-era Oregon. Later a critic would call
the output, “a spasm of sustained creativi-
ty unequaled in Oregon literature.”
The novels sold well and Berry re-
ceived critical praise, including a National
Book Award nomination for “Mooontrap.”
Berry never published another novel, and
when he died in 2001 at age 70, none of his
novels were in print. They could, howev-
er, occasionally be found as decomposing
mass-market paperbacks in used book-
stores across the Pacific Northwest.
In 2004, Oregon State University Press
performed an invaluable literary service
by reprinting Berry’s three novels. They
are now available at all coastal bookstores.
“Trask,” Berry’s first novel tells the
story of a former mountain man who has
settled near Astoria, too close to the “Bos-
ton men,” who “saw no more than the sur-
face of the world.”
Troubled by a restlessness, Trask makes
a perilous journey to the south, over Neah-
kahnie Mountain. Arriving at Tillamook
Bay, he is instantly seized by its grandeur
and hungers to homestead there. In places,
Berry’s writing on the philosophical futil-
ity of this typical human hunger borders
on scripture: “The taking possession of the
land is the first — and the final — grasp-
ing of a man toward permanence; toward
what he has occasionally called immortal-
“
Coastal Life
Story by MATT LOVE
4 | January 14, 2016 | coastweekend.com
Submitted photo
Submitted photo
“Trask” by Don Berry was first published in 1961 and reprinted
in 2004 by Oregon State University Press.
Oregon author Don Berry takes in the view of Tillamook Head in Seaside in this historic photo. Berry, who died in 2001, wrote three
novels in the early 1960s that were set in pioneer-era Oregon.
ity for want of a word that means more.”
At Tillamook Bay, Trask meets Kilchis,
the chief of the Tillamooks, and in the
novel’s soaring Zen-Buddhist-meets-Na-
tive-American-shamanism denouement,
he goes on a Searching, a quest for a vi-
sion. He succeeds in his quest and in the
end, “Trask rose to his knees and listened
in fascination until a door within him
opened and he begin to laugh.”
Many of us would love to open Trask’s
door, walk through, and laugh in accep-
tance of something Berry wrote in Trask:
“What moves a man — and ultimately, the
only thing that moves him deeply — is the
finding of his own image, the solid con-
figuration of himself, worked in materials
of better staying quality than bone and
blood.”
“Moontrap” followed “Trask,” and Or-
egon City near the Willamette Falls is the
primary setting of the novel, which takes
place in the aftermath of the Whitman
Massacre and white-hot racial prejudice
against Native Americans. Once again,
the plot involves a restless former moun-
tain man: Johnson Monday is married to
a Native American woman and struggling
to find a satisfying role in a changing Or-
egon Territory society where, “Things had
changed so much. Seed wheat and mis-
sionaries.”
When an old friend from Monday’s days
in the mountains shows up, various cultur-
al clashes ensue, and Monday is compelled
to reconsider who he is and what he be-
lieves in. “Moontrap” ends tragically and
suggests that Berry felt that a person who
wanted to live in concord with the land
and not exploit it or its native inhabitants
didn’t have a chance against relentless and
ruthless commercial and racist forces.
“To Build a Ship,” the story of pioneers
living near Tillamook Bay trying to con-
struct a schooner, completed the trilogy.
It stands as my favorite because of its de-
piction of racial tolerance and statements
from the narrator like, “After a lifetime
which it sometimes seems I devoted to
cutting down trees, I am convinced that
they were not meant to be cut down. God
intended forests to stand eternally…”
Today, some might dismiss Berry as
an environmentalist, but his writing about
landscape, which predated the profession-
al environmental movement by two de-
cades, should not be so easily reduced. In
these novels, all his protagonists exhibit
a fully formed ecology with their natural
surroundings. They exist in harmony with
the land. Achieving that enlightened state
is arguably the most pressing political and
cultural challenge facing Oregon today.
Many older Oregonians read Don Berry
once, but probably have forgotten the ex-
perience. The best way to describe reading
Berry is that his stories exist as an organic
and native species. They grow inside you.
They are religious. To read these books
today is to experience a feeling like walk-
ing in rain without an umbrella, eating out
of the garden, climbing Saddle Mountain
in tennis shoes, or playing tennis with a
wood racket. There is slowness in them.
Try them out again this winter, or for
the first time, and let Berry introduce you
to his muse, Oregon, and particularly the
Oregon Coast. He will make you feel for it
in a new old way.
Matt Love is the author/editor of 14
books about Oregon. His books are
available through coastal bookstores
or his website, nestuccaspitpress.com