About the book:
In Crossing the Plains with Bruno, Annick Smith weaves together a memoir of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love and animal love centering around a two week road trip across the Great Plains she and 95 pound chocolate lab, Bruno, took in the summer of 2003. It is a chain of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how the present can exist seemingly sans past.
Traveling from her rural homestead in Montana to pick up her nearly 100-year-old mother from her senior residence on Chicago’s North Side and bring her to the family’s beach house on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, Smith often gets lost in memory and rambling contemplation. Bruno’s constant companionship and ever present needs force her to return to the actual, reminding her that she, too, is an animal whose existence depends on being alert to the scents, sights, hungers, and emotions of the moment.
Passing through wide open spaces, dying ranch towns, green cornfields, and Midwestern hamlets, Annick is immersed in memories of her immigrant Hungarian Jewish family, her childhood days in Chicago, her early marriage, and ultimate immigration west. Triggered by random encounters along the way, she’s taken back to life as a young mother, her career as a writer and filmmaker who produced the classic A River Runs Through It , the death of her husband, and the thrill of a late romance. A lifetime of reflection played out one mile at a time.
Crossing the Plains with Bruno is a story narrated by a woman beset by the processes of aging, living with the imminent reality of a parent’s death, but it is the dog that rides shotgun, like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, that becomes the reminder of the physical realities outside our own imaginations.
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Annick Smith is a writer and filmmaker. The daughter of Hungarian émigrés, Smith was born in Paris and raised in Chicago, Illinois. In 1964, she moved to Montana, where she and her husband and sons eventually settled on a 163-acre ranch in the Blackfoot River valley. Her husband died from heart failure in 1974, but Smith remained on the land to raise her sons.
Among her books are Homestead, Big Bluestem, and In This We Are Native. She also co-edited an anthology of Montana writing, The Last Best Place. Her travel writing and essays have appeared in journals such as Audubon, Outside, Islands, Travel + Leisure, and National Geographic Traveler.
Smith served as executive producer of the film "Heartland" and co-producer of "A River Runs Through It," directed by Robert Redford. She was also a founding board member of Redford’s Sundance Institute.
Smith lives in Montana with her partner, the writer William Kittredge.
