A certain special kind of irony exists in Richard Ford titling his short story collection Rock Springs. The story begins with the theft of a cranberry-red Mercedes in Whitefish, Montana. That theft begins with the highest of expectations as it inexorably leads to the titular town of Rock Springs, Wyoming. That is an expedition gone south, both literally and metaphorically. The other nine stories in this collection stay in Wyoming’s neighbor to the north, but the opening story leaves Montana in a whirl of great expectations to wind up in Rock Springs: “a lowdown city full of crimes and whores and disappointment.”
The irony, of course, is that the narrator of “Rock Springs” actually moves his narrative out of Montana. The other nine narrators tell stories that do not leave Montana, but nevertheless take place in locations full of crimes and whores and disappointment. Under normal circumstances, one would expect the outlier here to be different in some way: either Wyoming becomes a place where disappointment ends or Montana becomes a place where dreams can rein free. In Ford’s hands, however, Whitefish and Rock Springs are only locations that, as the narrator of “Optimists” asserts: “situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved.’’
The problem with the men of Ford’s collection of stories is that possibilities are limited not because of the situation in which they find themselves or the location in which those situations arise, but because the men who are present. The real irony at work in Rock Springs—the collection as well as the story—is that location means nothing. Ford sets all but one of his stories in Montana and then titles the collection after the one story that actually leaves Big Sky Country. So the special kind of irony is that the title is not ironic at all.
Rock Springs. Whitefish. Great Falls. The Hi-Line. All these places are essential to the book because the stories take place there, but they are all inessential because those who are present cannot take possibilities of the situations because they are always on the move. These are the stories of men on the move; drifters and aimless wanderers incapable of calling any one place home for any grand length of time. What is not ironic at all is that the Mercedes thief tells a story about being in transit. In one way or another, all the major players here are in transit. The narrator of “Children” implicates the remote border area known as the Hi-Line as being every bit as responsible for the memorable events he describes as the time in which it occurred. It is this melding of time and place which resonates throughout the stories.
“Communist” is a story about a memory of a geese-hunting trip grown man recalls from his youth. “Great Falls” is another recollection about a singular event from the narrator’s youth. Time passes and the setting of both those stories to the father-figures at the time become meaningless as they move on an out of the lives of the narrator. Ford could have titled his collection “Fathers and Sons” or “Lives in Transit” or even “Life in the Hi-Line” and all three would have been much more appropriately to the point, but each would have lacked the resonance of irony. A strange sort of irony that both is and is not at the same time.
Only one of the stories here actually takes place in Rock Springs. And yet it is perfectly logical to insist that they all take place in that city filled with disappointment.
