Last Bus To Wisdom: A Novel

Content Warning: The source text includes anti-fat bias as well as outdated and insensitive terminology to refer to Indigenous Americans, people without permanent homes, and people with disabilities. The text also features the theft of Indigenous artifacts by non-Indigenous people.

“That near-stranger who was me, with his heart in his throat, I look back on with wonder now that I am as gray-haired as my talking companion on the Chevy bus was. The boy I see is a stocky grade-schooler, freckled as a spotted hyena, big for his age but with a lot of room to grow in other ways. Knowing him to be singled out by fate to live a tale he will never forget […] He has never been out of Montana, barely even out of the Two Medicine country, and now the nation stretches ahead of him […] And he knows from Condensed Books that unexpected things, good about as often as bad, happen to people all the time, which ought to be at least interesting right?”

Narrated at the beginning of Donal’s journey, this quote captures the essence of each of Doig’s themes. The narrator, now an elderly man, reflects upon himself as a child, forced to travel the highway far from the only environment he has known, though armed with a vivid imagination and a little wisdom gained from literature. The passage touches upon The Capriciousness of Luck, predicting that both good and bad will befall the protagonist, then understates the awaiting adventure by predicting that it should “at least be interesting.”

“Eleven going on twelve is a changeable age that way. One minute you are cultish and sappy, and the next you’re throwing a fit because you’re tired or hungry or something else upsetting is going on inside you. Right then my mood turned up like a storm. […] For if I lost the last of my family to the poorfarm or worse, with that went everything connected to the notion of a home as I had known it, and I would be bound for that other terrifying institution, the orphanage.”

Riding alone on the first leg of his trip to Wisconsin, Donal finds himself consumed with thoughts of what might happen if his grandmother does not recover from her operation and reclaim him. Thoughts of ending up on a work farm or in an orphanage plague Donal throughout. Here, those thoughts are reflected as a general but sudden anxiety, reflected in the author’s use of the simile “turned up like a storm.” Whenever events turn negative, as when Aunt Kate tries to send him back to Montana while Gram is still in the hospital, his fears become more acute.