All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

by David Gessner

  Jim and I climbed into the car and drove about a mile down the road to the Washington Presbyterian Church. The minister there had once admitted to Jim that Mildred was the most important member of the church, himself included. While Mildred attended church every week, Paul Abbey never went. An atheist as well as a Socialist, Paul enjoyed boldly stating his opinions no matter the company. In other words, Ed Abbey’s instinct to offend, to tweak, to go against the grain, and to state the bold and controversial was learned at his father’s knee.

  “But not only his father,” Jim said when I suggested this. “In the 1960s, Mildred came out in favor of having gay and lesbian ministers. In the 1960s! Around here! At the time it was like coming out and suggesting that space aliens could be ministers.”

  We walked up to the old cemetery. Like everything else there, it existed on a slant; even the gravestones were propped up below with rocks against the slope of the hill. I imagined farming that tilted land, how having one leg shorter than the other might come in handy. The gravestone nearest to the Abbey plot had the name “Lightcap” on it, the same surname that Abbey gave to the title character in his autobiographical novel, The Fool’s Progress. On the way to the cemetery we had driven under a train trestle, and I remembered a scene from that novel in which the young Henry Lightcap, Abbey’s fictional stand-in, was instructed by his father on how to steal coal from the train. It was on that same train that Henry hitched his very first ride west, making it all of seven miles to the town of Sawmill.

  This was just a warm-up for the epic western trip to come. Throughout his childhood, the West beckoned Abbey, and if Wallace Stegner lived the western reality, Abbey dreamed the western dream. He watched countless cowboy movies, read Zane Grey, and listened to his father tell stories of his own hitchhiking trip west, stories that glowed like legend. These stories also sparked a family tradition, a rite of passage that Ed and his brothers would all follow. Ed’s first attempt came in July of 1943, when he was sixteen, the same month American boys not much older than he was were landing in Sicily. On that attempt he didn’t get very far before running out of money and returning home to Pennsylvania. Then, the next summer, Edward Abbey finally broke free of the East, traveling for three months across the Rockies and to the Pacific, then back through the Southwest. It is not going too far to say that for Abbey that trip changed everything.

  That trip west gave hints of the type of westerner Abbey would become. In the Pacific Northwest he got a ride with a Gary Cooper look-alike named Fern. Fern taught the boy how to siphon gas, let him fire his revolver, gave him his first taste of hard liquor, and then, finally, drove off with his wallet and all of his belongings. Undeterred, Abbey got a job canning peaches, saved up forty dollars, and this time was smart enough to stow his money in his shoe. In Arizona he found “a land that filled me with strange excitement: crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds.” He felt he was “close to the West of my deepest imaginings—the place where the tangible and mythical become the same.”

  At the Grand Canyon he walked to the edge where the land fell off and stared down, then celebrated his arrival by urinating over the rim onto a juniper protruding from the cliffside. Roaming the streets of Flagstaff, he was picked up and arrested for vagrancy and spent the night in jail. The next morning he was released after paying a one-dollar fine. That day the view through the open door of a Pullman car on the freight he’d hopped was dazzling. He saw for the first time “the high rangelands of the Navajos, the fringes of the Painted Desert, the faraway mesas and buttes of Hopi country.” And then came New Mexico. He “stared, like a starving man, at the burnt, barren, bold bright landscape,” a land that seemed to him “full of a powerful, mysterious promise.”

  For Ed Abbey, that first sight of the mountains was something he could never forget. He would write about it during his senior year of high school, prompted by his English teacher, and publish it in serial fashion in the school paper. And he would hold on to the dream of that landscape after graduating and enlisting in the Army, and hold on to it still while in Europe on mop-up duty after the war, serving as an MP in occupied Italy. Those dreams would continue upon his return home, where he passed a year at the local college, until they would finally be realized when he headed out to enroll, with the help of the GI Bill, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1948.

  Abbey’s education would far exceed that of his parents. But he wasn’t in New Mexico for school, not really. He was there to fall in love, which he did with great frequency, marrying twice in six years. Of course the place itself was the real reason he’d come, and, you could argue, his truer love. He roamed the red rocks and deserts in his old Chevy, living out his dream of exploring a still-wild West. These adventures culminated in 1949, with his five-week solo trip into Havasu Canyon in the Grand Canyon, where he slept next to a turquoise waterfall and wandered naked, and where he almost lost his life high up on the canyon walls.

  It was love at first sight. And this became his topic in the main: the falling in love with the place and the fight to protect the threatened loved one.

  His journal notes from this time reflect an expansiveness and intoxication.

  “Love flowers best in openness and freedom,” he wrote, a line that would later make its way into Desert Solitaire.

  Clearly he had discovered his subject and, in his journal at least, the beginnings of his mature voice. Though it would take a few years for that voice to make its way onto the published page, and though there were battles ahead with depression, divorce, and the publishing world, it could at least be said that he had found his place.

  EDWARD ABBEY’S FIRST trip west was about romance, novelty, surprise. Wallace Stegner’s first trip from east to west as a young man was different. He was twenty-one and driving back after a year of graduate school in Iowa, so that, unlike Abbey, he was not heading into novelty but heading home.

  Stegner spent almost his entire childhood wandering the West. Born during a visit to his mother’s parents in Lake Mills, Iowa, he soon moved to North Dakota, where his father managed a hotel in Grand Forks, and then on to Seattle when he was three. Stegner’s childhood was filled with rough years, but Seattle was a low point: Wally and his older brother Cecil were deposited in an orphanage so that their mother, Hilda, could work. The reason Hilda needed to work was that George Stegner had ditched the family, off as always in pursuit of the big strike.

  By that relatively late date the frontier had been proclaimed dead, but George didn’t buy it. He was determined to find the frontier, or what was left of it, hungry equally for its wildness and the riches it promised. The search to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain defined him, in his son’s eyes at least. But while he fantasized about the big strike, Hilda Stegner hoped to find a place and make a living—as opposed to a killing—and settle.

  The closest she would come was Eastend, Saskatchewan. In a way it was the closest they both would come. It was to Eastend that the Stegners, after reuniting and rescuing the boys from the orphanage, moved in 1914. Wally was five and they would stay there until 1920, when he was eleven. George went up first to stake their claim and then the boys came later with their mother. They arrived on a stagecoach driven by a man named Buck Murphy, who, as Stegner would never forget, wore a gun in a holster.

  Eastend itself was still barely a town, born the same year Wallace was, and the Stegners at first lived in a derailed dining car. It was a place full of immigrants, of cowboys who had migrated up from the States, and of French-Indian half-breeds. There was still possibility in a place like that, and George smelled it. The early results were good. From their dining car the family moved into a rented shack and from there into a “four-gabled, two-story” house in the center of the growing town. While George Stegner would come to represent the antithesis of home in his son’s writing, th
e house that he built with his own hands still stands and is one of the finest in Eastend.

  Living there was a paradise of sorts for young Wally and his brother. The Frenchman River curled right behind their backyard, an easy stone’s throw away, and they swam in it in spring and skated on it in winter. They also roamed unsupervised with a pack of boys, built forts, had “shit fights” with cow manure, put blasting caps on the railway tracks, and generally behaved in ways that would send today’s parents into shock.

  When the school year ended, the Stegner family would take the daylong trek south to their farmland, snuggled right up against the unmarked American border, where for three months they would live in a shack, sleep on the shack’s screened-in porch, and attempt to bring in a wheat crop. Stegner later remembered those summers as a time of “savage innocence” and his and Cecil’s lives were as “isolated, lonely, wild, and free as the life of hawks.” The first couple of years the wheat crops were good ones, with Hilda’s hopes rising that they had really found a home. Stegner remembered experiencing an “incomparable intimacy with the earth, for the ferrets and burrowing owls and magpies and coyote pups that we captured and tamed, or rather kept prisoner, and for the sunstruck afternoons when we lay in the sleeping porch listening to the lonesome wind in the screens, and dreamed of buying all the marvels pictured in the Sears Roebuck catalog.” That life “had a wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals.”

  As it turned out, the young Wally had a gift for killing. By the age of eight he owned a gun, but poison and drowning were his preferred means and he would soon win the county award for most gophers exterminated. He killed prairie dogs and ferrets, too. Tiny compared to his burly, athletic brother, Wally would at a young age display a thoroughness and determination that would never leave him. He was driven in part by a desire to impress his hard-to-impress father, who, though happier in Eastend, was still restless and prone to bursts of violence. Stegner later bemoaned the fact that experiencing the remnant frontier had given him not just an intimacy with wild animals and a wild place, but guilt for his role in taming the place. On a larger scale this was being acted out by his father and their neighbors: they were farming untenable land and unknowingly creating a dustbowl. After two wet crops, the Stegners faced three years of hot winds and drought. But George kept putting in more acreage. As his son later wrote: “It was a gambler’s system—double your bets when you lose.”

  WALLACE STEGNER ON THE TENNIS TEAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH.

  When his final crop was burnt to a crisp by the rainless summer of 1920, George Stegner gave up and moved the family south of the border to Great Falls, Montana. Great Falls was remarkable to Wally Stegner for having previously unheard-of things like lawns and sidewalks and, even more remarkable, flush toilets. There Wally was ridiculed for his half-Canadian manners and clothes. It didn’t help that he skipped two grades ahead, or that he was a self-described “runt.” Books became a solace, and he memorized passages that he could still quote fifty years later. Despite finding some peace when lost in a book’s pages, he would continue to feel intensely out of place until the family left Great Falls and settled in Salt Lake City during his teenage years. “Settled” might be something of an overstatement, since they moved more than twenty times from house to house within the city, as George, now running illegal drinking parlors in the various houses, tried to stay one step ahead of the law. Still, Wally felt that Salt Lake was his real hometown: it was there he began to excel in school, and there that he for the first time made lifelong friends. In his senior year of high school the runt suddenly shot up, growing six inches. Finally having found a place where he fit in, he had no interest in going anywhere else, and for college he attended the University of Utah. Belonging to a place, after a life of movement, was something to covet.

  Wallace Stegner later wrote that he would have been quite content staying in Salt Lake for the rest of his life, rising up through the ranks of the linoleum and floor-covering’s store where he worked and marrying his local sweetheart. Perhaps he would have. Instead a generous professor saw promise in him and finagled a teaching assistantship in the English Department at the University of Iowa. It was that move eastward that let Stegner begin to understand how much the West defined him. His first fall in Iowa was a rainy one, and there, in that green, wet place he began to miss “earth colors—tan, rusty, red, toned white . . .” Away from the region he grew up in, he saw that it had created him. He might not yet know who he was, but he knew where he was from. Furthermore, as a budding writer, he began to recognize the West as his subject.

  It was on the drive back from Iowa that his eyes began to open. The fictional portrayal of that return home is one of the climactic scenes of his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain. As he leaves Iowa behind, the young Bruce Mason, modeled on the young Wallace Stegner, finds himself questioning the whole idea of home. He curses his father’s vagabond instincts and wishes he was “going home to a place where the associations of twenty-two years were collected together.” Bruce envies those who have lived in only one place, and as he drives he ties himself into knots, all but convincing himself that the notion of home doesn’t really exist. But then, suddenly, the land rises and starts to take on a familiar look. The air grows drier, the towns farther apart, the colors more sere and less green. It is then that it occurs to Stegner that for him home is not a particular house or town but an entire region. He settles on a new definition of himself: “He was a westerner, whatever that was.”

  What did that mean, exactly? Different things to different people, of course. But it would fall to Stegner, and in many ways was his life’s work, to clarify what it meant to most. “Scale is the first and easiest of the West’s lessons,” he would write, and by that he meant getting used to the larger, less cozy, “inhuman” scale of the natural world in the West. Similar to this idea, but slightly different, is the concept of space: “In the West it is impossible to be unconscious of or indifferent to space,” he wrote. Space “continues to suggest unrestricted freedom, unlimited opportunity for testings and heroism, a continuing need for self-reliance and physical competence.” By space he meant the distance between things: people, buildings, towns. Space lent people “the dignity of rareness.”

  Then there was the look of the place, a look that could take a while for a non-westerner to appreciate. “Colors and form are harder,” he said, and they are for those raised to see comfort in green. Of course, the reason things aren’t green is because they are dry, and dryness was a note Stegner played over and over in defining his home region.

  He also realized something else about the West: a lot of the living took place outdoors. The home he was returning to was a place of constant physical challenge, of hardship. It rose up, Stegner often said, like a dare.

  DROUGHT HAD BEEN one of Wallace Stegner’s great themes, and that theme was playing out over much of the country in the summer of 2012. I had seen evidence of it in the burnt Midwestern cornfields, and more when I arrived in St. Louis. There I stayed at the home of my friend Tom, and he took me out to a park near his house where we walked through the woods down to a spur of the Missouri River. Or rather what was left of the spur: it looked more riverbed than river. In fact the Missouri, the waterway that had been the gateway to the West, that had been the path that Lewis and Clark traveled on, was, as it neared St. Louis, at a historic low.

  The next morning I got up at dawn and drove through the long, interminable flat to the west of St. Louis, a flat that is in reality a barely noticeable rise. I breathed the slaughterhouse stink and passed the miles of wind turbines that weren’t there when I’d last made this trip and looked up at a looming billboard that hollered down: IF YOU DIE TODAY WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? (“In the ground,” I answered out loud.) In the middle of Kansas, I was pulled over for speeding (which didn’t stop me from speeding again as I raced toward the mountains after hitting the Colorado line). After my drive from St. Louis, I spen
t the night at my friend Randy’s house in Denver, but I was out of the house before he woke, beating the morning traffic north, eager to get back to the small mountain town of Eldorado Springs, ten miles south of Boulder. This was the town where I had settled in a blue gingerbread cabin after my escape from Worcester. For me it was a necessary first stop in the West.

  I can’t claim that I felt quite Abbey’s level of intoxication as I drove back into Eldorado Springs on my first morning. But some of the old sensations came back from that distant fall when I’d moved there, over twenty years before, a time that was in many ways the most exciting—the most alive—of my life.

  The canyons and mountains loomed above me. Eldorado. I used to laugh about the name. It was perfect. The anti-Worcester. I had spent my twenties trying to be a writer but before that fall my writing had come in fits and starts. Then suddenly, living below those canyon walls, I wrote a draft of a book straight through. As it poured off my pen I was half-convinced that it was the place itself that had done it.

  It had been a glorious fall. When I was done with those long writing sessions at my desk, I would hike into the great cleaved canyon of the park, not a hundred yards from my front door, and study the trees and birds and rocks. I wanted to know everything about my new home. I watched swifts carve the air above the mountain meadows and water ouzels, called dippers, do deep knee bends in the creek, and once I saw a ringtail scramble up a scree pile. I hiked the squiggly red trail that led almost from my door up into the mountains, gasping for air from the altitude at first but with each day getting stronger and more acclimated. Before long I was running the trails instead of walking them. In the afternoons I took baptismal baths in South Boulder Creek, stripping down to my boxers, parting two tamarisk bushes like a curtain, and dipping into my tub behind a pink-purple rock. When I climbed out of the water I trembled with cold.