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

by David Gessner

  The physical courage that held Powell in good stead rafting through the canyons translated into intellectual and political courage when he emerged. The late 1800s were a time of gung-ho expansion and the irrational belief of ideas like “rain follows the plow,” the asinine notion put forth by boosters that annual rainfall would naturally increase once the ground was cultivated. The governor of Colorado, William Gilpin, whom Stegner skewers in Beyond, was a particularly passionate believer in this theory, giving speeches that painted the West as a kind of Garden of Eden, a land just waiting for anyone with an ounce of gumption to go and claim. Land speculators back east picked up on this idea of adjustable climate, which fit like a puzzle piece with the notion of manifest destiny. The railroads, too, would later use it as part of their advertising for the westward drive.

  In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical consequences: while a cow might properly graze on a half-acre in the lush East, it would require fifty times that amount of land in most of the West. It followed that the standard acreage of settlement should be different, and it followed that settlement should take into account sources of water. Powell’s goal with his survey was to clearly map out the western lands, to determine what land could be realistically used for agriculture, which meant also determining where irrigation dams should be placed for best effect. In other words, his goal, to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, was to think about “land use” and to do so on a massive scale. Specifically, Powell wanted to think out the uses of land that would be the most beneficial and fruitful for the human beings living there, and for the entire ecosystem (though that word did not yet exist). From the Mormons, Powell learned how “salutary co-operation could be as a way of life, how much less wasteful than competition.” In the late 1880s, Powell wrote a General Plan for land use in the West that “reached to embrace the related problems of land, water, erosion, floods, soil conservation, even the new one of hydroelectric power” that was based on “the settled belief in the worth of the small farmer and the necessity of protecting him both from speculators and from natural conditions he did not understand and could not combat.” It was a methodical, sensible, scientific approach, essentially a declaration of interdependence between the people and their land, and the miracle is that it came very close to passing into law. But of course it met with fierce opposition from those who stood to profit from exploitation, from the boosters and boomers and politicians who thought it “unpatriotic” to describe the West as dry. After all, how dare he call their garden a desert? What right did he have to come in and determine what only free individuals should? Powell was attacked in the papers, slandered in Congress. According to Stegner, Congressman Thomas M. Patterson of Colorado referred to Powell as “this revolutionist,” and the overall attack on Powell “distinguished itself for bombast and ignorance and bad faith.”

  If the story was the perfect one for Stegner to tell, it didn’t hurt that the yahoos whom Powell opposed, and who opposed him, espoused something that sounded a whole lot like the irrational strike-it-rich philosophy of George Stegner. Of course that view prevailed. Congress defunded Powell before he could achieve even his first goal of fully mapping the West. Given the legislative body’s behavior in recent years, we may think that we have a monopoly on venality and corruption in Congress, but the gang Powell was fighting could teach ours a few dirty lessons. Our current climate deniers have a long, proud history. In describing that Congress of the late 1800s, Stegner quotes Mark Twain, who saw the prototypical congressman as having “the smallest mind and the selfishest soul and the cowardliest heart that God makes.”

  But if Powell was going down, he would go down swinging. Those on the Right love to accuse those on the Left of being soft, but Powell, who today would be called a liberal or even a radical, was as tough and as real as you can get, whether climbing up to the rim of the Grand Canyon with one arm or fighting for his annual allocation of funds. When his enemies finally ambushed him it was only after decades of forcing them to acknowledge, for the first time in American history, really, that science was a force to be reckoned with in politics. Powell stayed committed to the facts and “devoted himself to a region and attempted to bring it into focus” right up until his death in 1902. And while he ultimately failed to translate his biggest ideas into law, he provided a model of a large thinker not giving in to smaller ones, a reasonable mind fighting the superstitious.

  Stegner had always been a confident writer, but there is a new sense of mastery in the pages of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. The book changed its writer. It did so technically, particularly in his uses of compressed time and synecdoche, learned in part from DeVoto but also from the writing of his own earlier books, techniques that would see their full flowering in experimental nonfiction like Wolf Willow and in the late fiction, where time is always working on at least two levels, pulled in and out like an accordion by the author.

  Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner’s thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell’s beautiful mind. Powell was, according to Stegner, “incorrigibly sane,” a man who tried to dispense with fable and “dispel the mists,” a man who saw the facts and not the romance. The real enemies were not just greedy and stubborn congressmen but “credulity, superstition, habit.” In many ways Stegner subsumed Powell’s own thinking and brought it into a new century. Ideas that were before then half-formed for Stegner became habitual. Like Powell himself, Stegner had a “bolder, generalizing imagination” than most who struggle to think historically, and, like Powell, he liked to apply his mind to actual problems in the actual world. Both men believed that through hard thought and focused clarity we can get at certain truths. That our minds, uncultivated, go where they will, to the till or trough, but that trained and focused, they can be put to good, and even selfless, purpose. It was an old-fashioned value and one shared by both biographer and subject.

  WHEN I GOT back from the plane ride there was no room at the inn. At any of the inns. I had planned on spending one more night in Vernal and then driving farther west to Salt Lake City, but the white-truck people had commandeered all of the rooms, and my search for a place to put up my tent led me east rather than west.

  Soon I was driving back into Colorado and I was also driving up. Ten miles over the border I turned left and north, ascending into Dinosaur National Monument, land that, not incidentally, Wallace Stegner had played a large role in saving.

  I was learning that Abbey’s and Stegner’s footprints were everywhere in this corner of the world. Especially Stegner’s. Before I’d left the little Vernal airport, I had even gotten an unexpected Stegnerian bonus. I asked John McChesney, the documentarian who had flown with us, about his next project, which turned out to be a documentary on the western fracking boom. Then he asked me about mine.

  He laughed out loud when I told him.

  “I lived in the cottage behind Stegner’s house in the 1960s,” he said.

  “No fucking way,” I said.

  Before I left he told me a story from that time. John was a student activist at Stanford, and was part of a group that occupied University Hall. It was pretty tense for a while; the police were called in and it looked like the situation would turn violent, but the faculty senate granted the protesters amnesty and the students went home after two or three days.

  “When I got home, Wally was sweeping off his patio. That was my regular job, part of my rent. He wouldn’t look at me. But I did hear him mutter one phrase: ‘Ruined a great university.’”

  That Stegner could be stubborn, old-fashioned, even ornery was no longer much of a surprise to me. But that the same man could also be capable of generosity and passion was also obvious. After leaving Vernal and climbing upward and eastward into Colorado, I would be spending my afternoon in one of the wild places that had been sav
ed in large part due to that buttoned-down man. I parked near Harpers Corner and hiked out to the overlook of the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers. For the second time that day I got to see the Green from above—not quite as high up as in the plane but plenty high—standing on top of the canyon wall, a thousand or so feet above the place where it was joined by the Yampa. Far below a dusty wind kicked up silver waves on the water. I knew I might have been looking down at a dam had it not been for Wallace Stegner.

  It was Bernard DeVoto who first dragged Wallace Stegner into the eco-wars. At the older writer’s urging, Stegner began to write a series of environmental articles in the early ’50s, and those articles were read by David Brower, the charismatic single-minded executive director of the Sierra Club. Brower recruited Stegner to edit a book that would describe the wonders that would be lost if a dam were built within the borders of Dinosaur. In their successful campaign to stop the dam the two men would not just help win a battle but would revolutionize the way environmental fights were waged. Until the effort to save Dinosaur there had been something upper-crust and musty about the Sierra Club and the other environmental organizations, but with Dinosaur they would go from fuddy-duddies to fighters. Over the next decade great gains would be made and a new style forged: full-page ads would be taken out in major papers comparing the damming and drowning of the Grand Canyon to the flooding of the Sistine Chapel, beautifully photographed books would help change our national consciousness, and park land would be purchased as it hadn’t been since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, culminating with the Wilderness Act of 1964.

  Now, fifty years later, I reaped the benefits of that fight. I edged out close to the side of the cliff, partly terrified, partly thrilled. A gray jay landed in the twisted juniper over my head, cackling hello. If I walked to one side of the cliff I could see the Yampa snaking in, looking dried-up and shriveled, and then the Green winding to meet it. The actual joining of the two rivers was hidden from my view, modestly taking place behind a boulder. But when I walked across to the other side of my cliff, I could see the revived Green, renewed by fresh waters, a transfusion of sorts, flowing on out west, down, down, down to where I would later be sleeping by its side in my tent.

  This is what we’re fighting for, I found myself thinking. If rec centers and golf tournaments are important, this is important too. This was why Stegner famously called our national parks “the best idea we ever had.” He was right. What could be better? To do something beyond ourselves—our species, even—that just happens to provide for the highest of needs of both species and self.

  ABBEY WITH THE TV HE SHOT.

  The boosters and boomers have their song about the West, a song that started long ago and continues to this day. This is a place of excess, of resources, a place to strike it rich! Come and get it! Powell sang another song, one that DeVoto and Stegner took up and that Ed Abbey reprised in his own warbling way. Taken together theirs is a chorus that creates a counternarrative for the West.

  Back in Kentucky, Wendell Berry had said that the future of environmental thinking would stress “land use” and that wilderness preservationists would not be the relevant people. This does not mean he does not believe in wilderness. On his own farm, in fact, Berry likes to let wild woods stand next to cultivated fields. Putting land aside, like this land, is one clear use for it, and creating wilderness remains a key part of the environmental fight in the West. When Powell made his first maps he knew that the region demanded that some of the land simply had to be left alone. If we are looking at a big picture—a puzzle, even—then we need as much land as possible that shows us what the land would do without us. It is a key to adaptation, one clear way we can ready ourselves for the vast uncertainties of a changing climate. These wild places serve as a counterbalance, a reminder, a baseline, a template for recovery.

  Much of the land I stared down at from the plane that morning and that I now stared down at from the overlook was disputed land, land that had been involved in battles to save or exploit it. For those who could never see beyond the economic argument, it made no sense to just leave it alone. At a time when we are desperate for resources, why put resources out of reach?

  The same battle rages on. Why should anyone actually stop coring out the last of our lands, sucking up the last of the gas, damming the rivers? It’s what we’ve always done. We came upon this country of plenty and took everything we could get our hands on. We didn’t care what got in our way: native people, geography, climate, logic, whatever. We rationalized this as a kind of brave, bold, can-do way of being, and in some cases it really was. But in many cases it was, and remains, about greed. In many cases we came as raiders, pure and simple, and raiders we remain.

  It is hard to argue against self-interest. Against human nature. But human nature also involves training oneself to think beyond oneself. And places like this help make their own case, their own counterargument. Abbey said our highest need was for transcendence. Well, if it’s transcendence you’re after, this is where you’ll find it. Up in places like this.

  The overlook created something in me, some feeling or sensation, that even the experience of seeing the ocean couldn’t match. It was almost chemical: I saw the landscape and then something bubbled up, rising unbidden. I stood in a place that was almost desecrated and drowned but was not. A place that was saved.

  The religious wording is intentional. Standing there, overwhelmed by sheer space, by the fact that I was within a vast landscape that at the moment was devoid of any other human being, the word awesome, in its old usage, came to mind. My hyperactive brain for once stopped its querulous wishing that it were somewhere else. The place both emptied and filled me. Sunlight hit the river, which became mirrored glass, blinding.

  6

  MAKING A NAME

  Here are Wallace Stegner’s words upon deciding to leave his papers at the University of Utah, rather than at Stanford: “Any scholar who has to go to Salt Lake to study Stegner will get a bonus by being lured into good country.”

  Mission accomplished, Wally.

  I had never set foot in Salt Lake City before July 19, 2012, but within an hour of arriving in the town I was already kind of in love. The wide, clean streets; the mountain ranges above the valley; the passes you had to cross to get to the town, at least from the east, as if entering a great fortress. All that and the fact that the whole city was atilt, like one of the villain’s lairs on the old TV version of Batman.

  As I drove into town dark clouds broiled up over the Wasatch Range. I checked in at the University Guest House, but had no time to waste. The university itself sits perched above the town, and after throwing my bags in my room, I climbed onto my bike and headed downhill. The wide roads ran straight and no pedaling was required. It was like skiing, and hard not to yell, “Whee!”

  I found the small café where I was to meet Stephen Trimble, a photographer, editor, writer, and environmentalist who taught at the University of Utah, and who served as the Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow there during the 2008–9 academic year. Only minutes after I arrived so did Stephen, also by bike. He is thin, bespectacled, smart, intense, and as it turned out he was in a bit of a hurry, generously cramming in a last-minute meeting with me before a trip out of town the next day.

  Readers of Edward Abbey are often converts, people from elsewhere who read his books and move to the Colorado Plateau and call it their own. But Stephen was born here, and has spent his whole life exploring the canyon country. He attended Colorado College, which operates on the block system, with three and a half weeks of studying one subject followed by four days off, and he spent almost all of his time off exploring the nooks and red-rock crannies of his expansive home turf. Desert Solitaire came out while he was still in college and for Stephen the life it described wasn’t the exotic, wild alternative that it is for so many people but a confirmation of the life he was already living.

  “The guy took what I was doing on break and made it into literature,” he told me. “Until
then I had never thought of using the skills I had been developing in a profession. But now I saw an opportunity. A personal opportunity but also a professional one: ‘Wow, this place I’ve loved for so long. I could make this my job.’ And I saw I had everything I needed right in my backyard.”

  The book was a vivid reintroduction to a place he already knew, and in the most direct and literal sense it changed his life. Right after he graduated he volunteered at Olympic National Park for the summer, and the next fall, when a position suddenly came open, he was offered a full-time job at Arches. Two years after reading Desert Solitaire, he found himself working at the same park that Abbey had celebrated.

  “By the time I was twenty-two I had cemented my relationship with my home landscape,” he said.

  We finished our beers and it seemed that that would be it. But despite his rush, Stephen had something he needed to show me. Luckily, it was on his way home, or rather a little past his home. We climbed onto our bikes and began our ascent. It was skiing no longer but slogging, the sweaty effort to get back up the hill. Breathing heavily, I, the out-of-towner, attempted to keep up.

  Ten minutes later we arrived at our destination. A grassy cemetery that, like everything else on this side of town, existed on a slant.

  “It’s by those two spruce trees,” Stephen said, and we got off of our bikes and walked them up a path between the graves.

  “I have my students read Stegner’s Recapitulation and then bring them here,” he told me.

  Recapitulation, a novel published in 1979, is a sequel to The Big Rock Candy Mountain, in which the Stegner-like protagonist, Bruce Mason, now an adult, returns to Salt Lake City to bury his aunt. He has not been back to the city in decades, and the place releases a flood of memories. Bruce is now an ambassador—an interesting choice, really—both a politician and balancer, the sort of man with the “excess of moderation” that Abbey abhorred. Competent and powerful, he returns to a place where he was once powerless and weak, and at the mercy of a volatile, angry, capricious father. The father’s fictional fate was similar to that of Stegner’s actual father: he had shot his mistress in a seedy downtown hotel, then turned the gun on himself and took his own life. The novel ends at this very cemetery, where, after the aunt’s funeral, Bruce finally decides to buy a headstone for his father’s unmarked grave. It is, the reader imagines, an act of forgiveness, catharsis, and reconciliation.