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

by David Gessner

  Now, as I drove up into that world of thin air and aspen, I wanted to simply take in the sights. That is, I wanted to keep reveling. And the strange thing was that I could, despite my brain and its ideas. I constantly marvel at my, and most of our, ability to both delight in the world and bemoan its fate. Reg Saner has written: “Perhaps resistance to what geological time implies has been instilled by DNA to nudge us aside from that kind of reality.” In other words, we might be able to intellectually understand that the West has lost 18 percent of its trees over the last twenty years, and at the same time be overcome by the quaking of a single aspen leaf. It’s a strange world, and I pulled the car over to step out into it. A whole mountainside of quivering aspen greeted me, untroubled by the loss of their brethren. It was quiet except for the wind in the trees, and there was no one around, no cars coming, so I took a celebratory leak by the side of the road.

  Perhaps in times ahead, reveling, or at least sustained reveling, will get harder. Perhaps it will become more difficult to ignore darker truths, to stop ourselves from seeing things, ugly things, that deflate us. Some of these are the very same ones that Wallace Stegner warned of, but some are things he never had to worry about during his lifetime. For instance, he did not have to worry about those millions—did I say millions? Sorry, billions—of pine bark beetles chewing up the innards of pines and spruce throughout the West. He did have to worry about dust—any westerner did—but he did not have to worry about winter regularly ending earlier, and massive clouds of man-created dust covering the thinning snowpack and transforming it from a reflective white shield into a darkened heat absorber, heat that, along with the beetles, abetted the massive die-off of western trees. And finally, while he might have been saddened by the loss of those trees, his sadness would not likely have focused on seeing that loss as part of the cycle of increased atmospheric CO2—the loss not just of beauty but of storehouses of carbon.

  Of course Stegner knew the basics—more than the basics, he knew the fundamentals—and he had an uncanny knack for putting those fundamentals together to see the big picture. But he didn’t have our fundamentals. The puzzle might be the same but some of the pieces are brand-new. And these days the few who can really put things together the way Stegner could are frankly scared stiff. The picture is as simple as it is scary. One equation goes like this: high temps + beetles + less snow + darker snow + more fires + more carbon in the air = Well, equals what? No one knows exactly.

  Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that most scientists currently studying this landscape say that the recent rash of fires and floods, drought and dust bowls, are not aberrational. That they were common enough before climate change ratcheted things up another couple of degrees. Which means that rather than treat these events as freaks, it is better to consider them the cyclical norm. It is now foolish to regard a “normal year” as one without disaster.

  It would be wrong to see a silver lining in the current cycle of drought in the West—there is none—but at least drought can sometimes force us to see things as they are. In flusher times there are parts of the West that can whistle along and ignore reality, pretending to be something they’re not. But that will soon be impossible. We will be forced to strip away our illusions, to prepare ourselves, as much as possible, for what is to come.

  AFTER THE MOUNTAIN pass, I followed the north branch of the Gunnison River down into the town of Paonia, then up again on a dirt road called Dry Gulch Creek to a small wooden cabin in the hills. So often on trips like this I have found that my already high expectations are exceeded. All I had wanted to do after my cross-country drive was find a place to rest, maybe a hotel in Grand Junction. Instead I was driving into a mountain-rung cabin, my fantasy of a western rest place.

  I ended up staying at the cabin for two nights. That first evening Adam and I drank beer at the dining-room table. Adam was a former student of mine who moved to North Carolina to study with me and who eventually became the managing editor of Ecotone, the magazine that I founded. He was born in Missouri but had been living in the West after he graduated from college, working in the Wyoming oil fields as a geologist. He never quite adapted to coastal North Carolina: it was too flat, too humid, too eastern. I remember that he wore a cowboy hat to the final reading he gave before graduating, and if there was something a tiny bit corny about this, there was also something right. Now, in jeans and T-shirt, and having grown out his sideburns in Wolverine fashion, he looked more comfortable, like his clothes fit him better. And I swore that as we talked, I could hear a slight western twang in his voice that I’d never heard before.

  Adam certainly wasn’t the first person whose self changed when he changed regions.

  “Our where determines our who,” Reg Saner once wrote.

  I mentioned this to Adam.

  “I guess I just feel so much more comfortable here,” he said.

  I slept like a baby and early the next morning went for a lung-searing bike ride up to the base of the nearest mountain. I splashed creek water on my face and came back to find that Adam had made me a plate of eggs, peppers, sausage, and onions. Without much difficulty, he talked me into staying a second night. I spent the afternoon reading, taking a short hike, and gathering my notes together from the first part of the trip.

  The next morning, after another good night’s sleep, Adam shoveled some more eggs into me and handed me a book. Adam was well versed in Abbey and Stegner—their books lined the shelves of his bookcase—and for him they were essential writers. The book he handed me was his copy of Stegner’s essay collection The Sound of Mountain Water, and he showed me a quote that he had underlined.

  I read:

  These are things one might begin with, but I should rather begin with how it feels to be out on the road again, dry camping in the desert, hitting the road after five years of rationing and restrictions, doing what a good third of America is doing this summer of 1946, if the polls and the prophecies mean anything. For many people—and I sympathize with them—one of the least bearable wartime deprivations was the loss of their mobility. We are a wheeled people; it seems to me sometimes that I must have been born with a steering wheel in my hands, and I realize now that to lose the use of a car is practically equivalent to losing the use of my legs.

  Returning to the road after a layoff of several years is like re-establishing intimacy with a wife or a lover. There are a hundred things once known and long forgotten that crowd forward upon the senses, and there is the sharp thrill of recognition in all of them.

  I thanked Adam for the benediction, and then hit the road.

  As I drove, the quote proved perfect fuel for pondering. It wonderfully scuttled my easy assumptions of Stegner as the patron saint of homebodies. Born with a steering wheel in his hands! Stegner as Springsteen. I thought of Abbey, too, who always had a bit of George Stegner in him, constantly moving from place to place during his adulthood, looking for the Big Rock Candy Mountain not by striking it rich but by finding the perfect place to quiet his restless mind. Abbey never did, of course, unless you count his final rocky grave in the desert. He was fond of Churchill’s phrase “bloody peace,” which referred to the way that despite our longings for peace, our imaginations never seem capable of being content without stimulation.

  Adam’s quotation even relieved me of a little of the guilt I had been feeling about taking a long carbon-fueled road trip during the age of climate change. True, when Stegner was doing all that driving he didn’t know that by burning fuel he just happened to be bringing about the end of the world. But the unavoidable truth is that I love driving. It has always been one of my great pleasures, particularly in the wide-open West. There is something about driving, even driving great distances, that is perfectly suited to the human mind. We can stay still and move at once, quietly thinking while taking down the miles. “We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote Reg Saner. If so, then what better way to be than on the road?

  Now, armed with a large cup of coffee in my right hand, steering
wheel in my left, I pointed my Toyota Scion down into the red-rock landscape of Utah, and soon I was dropping off I-70 and heading south on Route 128. That last phrase may sound like a relatively simple one, but not for anyone who has actually driven that road. If you have not—or if you have (sadly) not been to Utah at all—then there is simply no way to describe it. Coffee-table books won’t do. Neither will all the sci-fi movies or the SUV commercials that this landscape is often featured in. It’s a world that has to be seen, a world of vivid color that for some reason can never entirely be captured on film: a world of oranges and purples and reds. And, of course, it’s a world of rock: strange looming rocks that rise above you, inhuman shapes with inhuman scale.

  Transcendence is a gift, not something consciously sought. But why not go to the places where the gift is most often given? For Stegner and Abbey that meant this particular state above all others. It is about Utah that Abbey wrote his greatest book; about Utah that Stegner wrote many of his.

  I pulled over by the side of the muddy Colorado River, where a lone great blue heron stood guard on the opposite bank, the only other sentient being within view. Above me loomed a row of orange rocks that looked like every figure in a chess set: rooks, queens, kings, bishops—all of them. The thing was that even the pawns in this set were about five hundred feet tall. And it wasn’t as if I were imagining the things I saw, like the way you imagine shapes in clouds or knots of wood; here you couldn’t help but see the shapes. Black stains of desert varnish, the dark coating often found on rocks in this arid environment, ran in smears down the red walls. After I got back in the car and continued down the winding road above the river, that red turned to white-yellow humps and then to a great slag heap of darker red. Meanwhile, the heads of gorgons and the long legs of lounging rock warriors waited around every corner.

  Across the river and about a thousand feet above me, over the ridge to my west, was Arches National Park, where Edward Abbey lived during his season, or seasons, in the wilderness. “Abbey’s country,” the author of Desert Solitaire modestly called it. Abbey’s country it has become.

  I continued south, along the river, and then saw something truly unexpected. Thunderclouds over Moab, and choppy ocean waves in the Colorado, and what even looked like rain falling ahead. The wind whipped through the cottonwoods and tamarisk that lined the river. I had never been there at that time of year before—“monsoon season” the locals called it, when that bone-dry place got a substantial percentage of its annual eight inches of rain.

  I passed the turn-off to Castle Valley on my left. The Castle Valley community, nestled right up against the sheer walls of red rock, was the home of the writer Terry Tempest Williams. In many ways, Tempest Williams was the natural heir to Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner, and she had spent decades both writing about and protecting the land she loved.

  Using Wendell Berry’s terminology, it was clear that Wallace Stegner had lighted the way for Tempest Williams. In many of the battles that she had fought, she had Stegner to look back to as both model and exemplar. For instance, in 1955 Stegner, in an effort to stop the building of a dam in Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, edited a book that described the wonders that would be lost if the dam were built. Working with the publisher Alfred Knopf, who contributed an essay, Stegner organized and edited the contributors’ work and the photographs, wrote his own essay and introduction, and pulled This Is Dinosaur together in two short months, pushed by the urgency of the moment. Stegner wrote in his unpublished autobiography: “That little book, distributed to every member of Congress, had a part in stopping the Upper Colorado River Storage Project in its tracks, and in uniting the previously dispersed and weak environmental organizations into a political force that by the 1970s was formidable. It also confirmed in me an environmental activism that has taken precedence over every interest except writing since that time, and has sometimes taken over the writing too.”

  It would not be going too far to say that that first fight, and victory, provided a template for the battles to come, and the use of This Is Dinosaur as a tool for lobbying was part of that template, one that would be continued and refined over the next decades. Forty years later, in 1995, Terry Tempest Williams, working with the Utah writer Stephen Trimble, put together Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an anthology of the work of twenty writers whose purpose was to help preserve 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah. Just as with This Is Dinosaur, the book was distributed to every member of Congress. It was part of the effort that led to the creation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. At the monument’s dedication on September 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said, “This made a difference.”

  If the Grand Staircase–Escalante was Tempest Williams’s most significant environmental victory, her most significant book was Refuge, which braided together the stories of her Mormon family’s struggles with cancer, the land, the birds of Utah, and the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Soon after I first moved west, Refuge joined the other books on my bedside shelf. Tempest Williams wrote not just about the land but about her own cancer, and that resonated with me. After I read her book, I wrote to her, and, she, generously, wrote back. Since then I’d had the pleasure of meeting her on several occasions, and she had always encouraged me in my work. She had, it would be fair to say, lighted my way.

  Before the trip, I’d e-mailed her to see if I might stop in when I drove through, but it turned out she would be away. She did offer something though—quite a lot of something, actually. She e-mailed back a kind note with a sentence that soon began to take on, for me, the properties of a koan.

  “In so many ways Ed was the conservative,” she wrote, “Wally, forever the radical.”

  I turned this over in my mind for a while. Was she simply being playful and contradictory? Or did she mean it? Had she mistyped? I wrote her back and asked.

  “I meant it,” she replied.

  On the ride out, I’d started thinking about this idea fairly obsessively—treating it like a riddle to ponder. After a year of reading the two men, I had begun to regard them as, in some respects, polar figures. I saw myself as flitting between the two poles. In many ways I saw all of us as flitting between the two poles. At one end is Wallace Stegner, the man of order, the man of culture, indeed The Man. At the other end is Edward Abbey, the man of wildness, the counterculturalist, the fighter of The Man. These labels are true, to some extent, but as Terry Tempest Williams was perhaps reminding me, they were too simple. If we accept them, we start to worry that the reasonable man is not passionate enough, and that the passionate man is unreasonable. I was greedy and had returned to Stegner and Abbey to see if it was possible to have the best of both.

  Of course, it could have been that Terry Tempest Williams was just having some fun. After all, Abbey, the supposed conservative, was serious about his anarchism, having studied the works of Kropotkin and written a thesis called “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.” He then set about putting those principles to use by practicing, and writing about, environmental sabotage, which eventually inspired Earth First!, a truly radical organization. Paul Abbey had taught his son to not be afraid of holding unpopular political stances, and he had taught him well. Ed Abbey often stated that he had a deep belief in absolute freedom: freedom from government, rules, laws. It was a young man’s belief that Abbey held on to until he was old.

  Abbey was also an advocate of free love, husband of five wives and father of five children. In the 1950s, by the time Stegner briefly became his teacher, Abbey’s lifestyle could perhaps be best described as “cowboy bohemian,” and in the older pictures he actually looks more beatnik than cowboy. He fit the bill, right down to the jugs of wine and many women, and clung to the idea of sex, free and unrestricted, with the passion of principle. “A priapatic,” he called himself. A sex addict, we would call him now (and he would snicker at us). For someone so trigger happy about marriage, it was odd that he could hardly conceive of the
idea of loyalty to one woman. In fact, he couldn’t suppress a laugh when he repeated the first of his five wedding vows. In his journal he wrote:

  How boring is monogamy. How can any honest man deny it? Never get enough. More than anything else, one desires variety. Variety. Novelty. Fresh young stuff everywhere and none available. Maddening, maddening.

  As for Stegner the radical, after leaving Salt Lake City he married Mary Page and stayed married to her for the next sixty years, and was known to all as a model of old-fashioned propriety. It was the same with work: he got a job and kept it. True, there was some movement, mostly upward, during his early adult years, when he taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, but by the age of thirty-seven he had taken the job at Stanford, and would soon after build the house in the nearby hills where he would live until the end of his life.

  “Radical,” in fact, was a word he came to despise. He believed, along with his fellow hard-nosed realist Samuel Johnson, that most of the cures for humanity are palliative, not radical. He had little patience for anything extreme. The poet and essayist John Daniel called him “a liberal of conservative temperament.” Back in Kentucky, Wendell Berry had described Stegner’s antipathetic relationship with Ken Kesey, who embodied the ’60s for him. Stegner disliked writing that “throbbed rather than thought.” Indeed, his lowest point at Stanford came in the mid-’60s with the rise of the hippies and campus radicals, which he saw as the downfall of a great university.

  Back in Kentucky, the night after I talked to Wendell Berry, I sat down in a bar in Lexington with Ed McClanahan, who was one of the original Merry Pranksters. At about the same time that McClanahan had begun to experiment with LSD and cavort with soon-to-be Prankster leader Ken Kesey, he also became officemates with Wallace Stegner.

  “Stegner was a buttoned-down fellow,” McClanahan said. “A very tightly controlled person. Which is not to say he was not a kind man.”