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

by David Gessner

  Wendell Berry greeted me at the door, wearing khakis, a long-sleeved blue-and-white striped shirt (despite the heat), and a wide smile. He introduced me to Tanya, his wife, and to his guests, a minister from Texas and his wife, who had dropped in for a visit. Sunday, I had been told in the letter he’d sent, was visiting day. A necessary day of rest, or at least of variety, for a man who had produced more than thirty works of nonfiction, twenty books of poetry, and a dozen novels over the past fifty years. I presented him with a bottle of Maker’s Mark, which I’d heard he favored, and he thanked me.

  WENDELL AND TANYA BERRY AT THEIR HOME.

  We sat at the dining-room table and talked. For hours. Wendell Berry is many things on the pages of his books—prophetic, confident, lyric, meditative—but one thing he isn’t very often, at least in the nonfiction, is funny. In person it was different. Berry’s loud and infectious laughter punctuated the conversation.

  The first story he told was about attending a conference of the Modern Language Association. He came upon two janitors, one leaning on the mop in his bucket, who were looking up at a TV monitor that displayed the titles of the different sessions that the conference offered. The titles were typical for that sort of conference, with names like “The Linguistic Construction of Narrative Space” and “Post-Colonial Structuralist Theory.”

  “The janitors were just staring up as the titles streamed by,” he said. “And they were pointing and saying the names out loud and laughing their heads off.”

  Though I was there to talk about Abbey and Stegner, we spent the better part of the first hour discussing Ken Kesey, who was both Stegner’s student and Wendell’s friend. Wendell, as he insisted I call him, told me a story about arriving at Kesey’s house, exhausted after a cross-country trip, to find everyone sitting in a circle passing a joint around. What impressed Wendell was how solicitous Kesey had been, understanding his exhaustion and his desire not to join in, and so ushering him off to a well-made bed in a guest room.

  Wendell Berry pointed out a similarity between Kesey and his old teacher.

  “Ken stayed married to the same woman his whole life,” he said. “He was a curiously devoted man.”

  I asked what it was like having Wallace Stegner as a teacher.

  “I never felt comfortable calling him anything but Mr. Stegner,” Wendell said. “It took many, many years for me to address him as Wally.”

  Then Wendell used another term to describe the individual he had for so long called Mr. Stegner.

  “He was a decided man,” he said.

  Wendell told me that he shared with Wallace Stegner the belief that writers are part of a “great community of recorded human experience,” and that no writer, no man or woman, ever accomplishes very much on their own. Stegner was a great teacher, and he had, as Wendell put it, lighted the way for him.

  “I never felt anxiety of influence,” he said. “I always knew how much I owed to other people. You need the way lighted.”

  And, he added, we don’t always know who is lighting our way.

  “It is your personal ecosystem,” Wendell said. “An ecosystem is full of dependencies, and nothing in it knows what it is dependent on.”

  “Ed Abbey,” he added, “also lighted my way.”

  I pointed out that Abbey had not always been virtuous, in the traditional sense.

  “But you can’t argue with the end product,” Wendell said. “He wrote books that will last.”

  He meant, first and foremost, Desert Solitaire. It was Wendell who, in his essay “A Few Words in Defense of Ed Abbey,” most clearly defined what it was that Abbey was doing in that book, what he was really best at. “He is, I think, at least in the essays, an autobiographer,” Wendell wrote. And Desert Solitaire is autobiography, though autobiography elevated into art.

  “You need the way lighted,” he continued. “If you think you know all the ones who have lighted your way, you’re nuts. You don’t know, because you can’t. But of course you can know some who have. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey are two who have lighted my way.”

  It pleased me to think of writers, dead and alive, as members of a community. Not as competitors or “influences,” but as part of what Keats called “the immortal freemasonry.” Or, put more simply, one big club.

  When talk turned to the environmental state of the West, Wendell challenged me. If I really wanted to think deeply about the meaning of Wallace Stegner as I traveled, then I needed to think about how we use the land.

  “Land use,” he said. “I think the people who confront it are the relevant people today. And the specialists—the preservationists and the literary specialists—are becoming less relevant.”

  By preservationists I assumed he meant environmentalists who only fought for “wilderness” and by literary specialists I assumed he meant those writers who restricted themselves to poetically celebrating the same. My own work, and thinking, had started with a focus on the lyric celebration of nature but had grown more muddied and complex in recent years. I knew that for both Wendell Berry and Wallace Stegner, abstract notions of nature and wilderness were not enough. To think deeply also meant to think practically.

  As the afternoon deepened, we began to hear a deep rumbling outside. Gray thunderheads were rolling in. After a while, Wendell said he had to head down to the barn to get the sheep in, and he invited me to join him. We climbed into his truck and drove to the barn with Maggie, his border collie, in the truck bed. When we arrived at the barn, Wendell asked me to hold open the metal gate, but then, glancing up at the lightning, said, “On second thought, you better not.”

  I was glad not to be electrocuted by Wendell Berry. I watched Maggie herd the sheep directly into the barn, marveling at the way she snapped to and followed Wendell’s orders.

  With electricity crackling in the clouds, I looked out over the fields and green woods above the Kentucky River, where Wendell Berry had tried out and lived many of the same concepts of home that Wallace Stegner advocated. After he left Stanford and returned to this place, Wendell laid out his agenda, if anything so artful can be called an agenda, in two striking and beautiful essays, “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill.” The “plot” of these essays is the central myth of Wendell’s life, which goes this way: he was born in a rural community, where his family had lived for many generations. As he grew up in the land it grew up in him: he paddled its rivers, farmed its fields, learned its people. But with the dawning of college and career he began to enact the traditional American exodus, leaving the small town behind to become “bigger.” For Wendell Berry this meant a career in literature that led him west to Stanford, overseas to Europe, and finally landed him in New York City. He was teaching there, clearly on an upward trajectory, when a radical notion occurred to him. What if he, and his young bride, were to return to Kentucky? What if he were to stake his claim not in some big city but on his native ground? His fellow writers and professors scoffed, don’t be ridiculous. They quoted Thomas Wolfe, telling him he couldn’t go home again.

  But he did just that. And his return to Kentucky, his return to his hometown and family land, proved to be not a regression but a stroke of genius.

  When I had brought this up earlier at the table, he had smiled and said: “You make us sound too foresightful and knowing. We came because we wanted to.”

  He added: “One day I realized I could be perfectly happy if I never wrote anything.”

  Upon his return home he became a farmer, but crops were not the only thing his fields yielded. Though he might not have needed to write anything to be happy, it turned out that out of his home ground, where he would settle and remains settled today almost fifty years later, grew words and sentences—a true profusion of stories, novels, essays, and poems. With his return he began to learn his place. And to worry and grieve over it. The land he had romped through as a child he now studied, deepening his knowledge of the birds and trees and reacquainting himself with the fields and woods and people. Wendell Berry believ
ed that most Americans are displaced people. He defined himself, in contrast, as a “placed person.”

  There is little doubt that his evolving philosophy of home owed much to his old teacher, and that this was an example of Wallace Stegner lighting Wendell Berry’s way. I thought of Stegner’s book Wolf Willow, a nonfiction account of his return to his own childhood prairie home in Saskatchewan. “I was trying to be the Herodotus of Cypress Hills,” Stegner would later say of the book. “Because I didn’t want to be a man from nowhere.”

  The book wasn’t strictly history; this was Herodotus joined at the hip to Montaigne, a kind of historic memoir. The knowledge of home was deep, the historic research vast, but what drove the book was the quest for personal identity, and that identity was tied directly to place. It is in the first chapter of Wolf Willow that Stegner wrote his famous line: “I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”

  The influence of this idea was great. Going home again, the drive to find a community and a place where he belonged, would remain a recurrent theme in Stegner’s work and one he would hand down to a new generation of writers.

  After reading Wolf Willow, Wendell Berry sent Mr. Stegner a letter in October 1963:

  “I would like to do as well, sometime, with the facts of my own little neck of the woods,” he wrote.

  Which is exactly what Wendell proceeded to do in his own work over the next several decades. As it turned out, his neck of the woods provided a fount of stories and ideas.

  In fact, you could make a fairly good argument that the next big movement in the field generally called nature writing was a return to home, to region. That in the time since, hundreds of capable writers, with Wendell Berry perhaps foremost among them, have tried to make something of the facts of their little necks of the woods. In their celebration of a particular place, in their seeing the world in their backyard, all of these writers are children of Thoreau. But they are also children of Stegner.

  There was one crucial difference between the teacher and the student, however. Wendell Berry came from a tradition of rootedness, generations of people who farmed the same land. Wallace Stegner came to the idea of rootedness through its opposite.

  Later, back at the table, I asked Wendell about this.

  His answer surprised me. I had been focused on the negative example of Stegner’s father, George, who could never settle, but Wendell mentioned the positive one of Hilda, his mother.

  “In her he managed to see someone who planted perennial flowers in the yard and who tried to stick around to see them bloom. That’s very tender.”

  It occurred to me that if you believe, as Wendell Berry does, that literature is a vast ecosystem, a tangled mass of roots where we never know exactly who is influencing whom, then more writers than know it have been influenced by the fact that George Stegner rarely let Hilda stick around to see those flowers bloom.

  AFTER I SAID good-bye to Reg Saner and left Boulder behind, I headed south past Rocky Flats, the radioactive nuclear trigger plant turned park. Rocky Flats has an ugly history of plutonium leaks, and while it has been twenty years since it shut its gates, you never really close when your soil holds particles of a material with a half-life of 24,360 years. I passed the still-eerie, long-contaminated ground where Ed Abbey linked arms with a thousand other protesters, Reg Saner included, who were trying to get the leaky plant shut down before it turned Colorado a different sort of green. From there I drove down to Golden, taking the big turn up toward the divide, deeper west into the real Rockies—mountains that Abbey, always poking and teasing, called “overrated.”

  They did not seem overrated to me. I felt the usual, expected lift, though it was true that these days if you want to look beyond the mountains’ glory you don’t have to look that hard. I could see significant patches of dead trees, some from fires but more from bark beetles, which had made inroads into the health of Colorado’s ponderosa and other mountain pines. Spruce beetles had also migrated down from the north, while another beetle, the Piñon Ips, was busy killing trees farther south in the Rockies and in the desert. The shorter winters gave both the beetles and fires a head start on the year. More startling, as I looked around, was the almost complete absence of snow in the high country. There had been rain in late winter, which is always appreciated in this arid place, but rain doesn’t do as much good as snow out here. Rain comes and goes, charging off somewhere, sometimes barely sinking into the hard, dry soil. Rain also can become something far from nurturing, as recent floods have made clear. Snow, on the other hand, is its own storage system. Snow is time-released, becoming water in hydrating doses throughout the spring and summer. But snow is now in short supply. Worse, the remaining snow is often darkened by dust, dust from human activity ranging from road building to recreation to mining to home construction. This may not seem like much unless you think about it for a bit and understand that white snow reflects heat while the darker patches pull it in. What this all adds up to is a warmer Earth and less snow and an even shorter winter.

  I turned up the radio and tried to drown out my own spoilsport brain. Ascending one side of the divide and descending the other, I didn’t stop until I entered the steep canyon of Glenwood Springs, where I took a brief break, pulling off the road and dipping into the Colorado River, which was cold though not nearly as icy as the creek in Eldorado. It was then, drying off after my dip in the river, that I received an unexpected gift. I had considered driving on to Utah, or at least to Grand Junction, but there on the riverside I received a phone call from Adam Petry, a former student of mine whom I had contacted a few days before and who now called to tell me that his roommate was out of town. Which meant that he had a spare bedroom in his cabin up above the mountain town of Paonia. I had other plans but this . . . this sounded too good. A cabin in the mountains.

  The drive to Paonia turned out to be one of the most beautiful of my life. First I headed out of the strange horizontal slots and slices of Glenwood Canyon and up Route 133 into the high country, excited by the fact that it was a road I had never traveled on before. Great gray slabs of mountains alternated with intense red rock and green forests. Mount Sopris loomed above it all while below its scree slopes enormous fields of aspen soughed in the wind, their leaves doing the usual dance, flipping from darker green to light. I passed a half dozen magpies and a single Steller’s jay, birds that let me know I was back in the West. I felt preposterously happy. Forty minutes passed and I didn’t see a single house. And then a joyous message appeared on my phone: CELL SERVICE NO LONGER AVAILABLE. I could no longer be tracked!

  To the naked eye this looked like the same West I had left behind fifteen years before, and in some ways it was. Caught up in my surroundings, I was in no mood for talk of the region’s doom. One of the reasons we can still read Abbey and Stegner, it seems to me, is that theirs was not the standard environmental theme of The End of the World. Yes, they understood just how dire the environmental picture was, just how high the stakes were, but they also never failed to take some fundamental joy in the places where they found themselves. This may be more obviously true of Abbey, who excelled in the arts of reveling and exalting. But Stegner was no slouch when it came to celebrating his home landscape. It is why he, for all his hard-eyed realism, called the western landscape “the geography of hope.”

  It still is. It still pulls us in. My exhilaration over being in a beautiful place with few other people around me was not false. But at the same time it was getting harder to ignore the snakes that were squirming through Eden. For one thing, there is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us is what we then ruin. Meanwhile, we can’t seem to get it through our heads that the land can’t support human beings the way other parts of the country can. That’s one of the things that Wallace Stegner spent a lifetime trying to tell us: this is not your green East and you can’t treat it or live in it as if it
were. In the introduction to The Sound of Mountain Water, he writes:

  The history of the West until recently has been the history of the importation of humid-land habits (and carelessness) into a dry land that will not tolerate them; and of the indulgence of an unprecedented personal liberty, an atomic individualism, in a country that experience says can only be successfully tamed and lived in by a high degree of cooperation. Inherited wet-land habits have given us a damaged domain.

  In other words, we come to the West as if it were any other place. It is not. It is fragile, vulnerable, and, as Bernard DeVoto said, disaster-prone. Not just local disasters like a tornado wiping out a Midwestern town, or even a hurricane raking the East Coast. But potentially region-wide disasters. In May, I had flown out to the University of Arizona Library in Tucson to study Abbey’s papers, and as we crossed New Mexico I found myself staring out the right side of the plane down at a dry, cracked moonscape that looked like it could sustain a human population of about 3. Then I saw the cloud, or what I at first thought was a cloud. What it was in fact was smoke that seemed to cover the whole state, smoke from the massive million-acre fire in the Gila National Forest. A fire of that size, which would have set records just a decade before, is now commonplace, fueled by drought and the dense fuel loads resulting from fire suppression.