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

by David Gessner

  3. None for the historian’s omniscient point of view.

  4. As for invention—use the subjunctive.

  It is worth pausing here to consider that at the time he wrote these words Stegner had just completed his own biography of Bernard DeVoto, who was, by all accounts, an immensely flawed human being. Combative, defensive, always ready to pick a fight. A man who felt bullied and so bullied others back. The perfect subject for a “tell-all,” in a way. For a tearing-down sort of bio. But that was not what Stegner was after, and not just because DeVoto was a friend. His notes continued: “Malcolm (Cowley) says I made DeVoto the hero of a novel. That’s not far from truth. The subject of a biography should be the hero of a sort of novel, the best sort.”

  And: “Heroism—if not heroes, at least representative men (yes, this is what most biogs miss), models of a sort, rarely warnings. The natural tendency of biography is positive, not negative, and it appeals to me. It is otherwise with contemporary fiction.

  “What I suppose I mean to say is that I wish biographies were more like the sort of novels I like, and novels were more like the sort of biographies I like.”

  A little farther down the page, he wrote: “Biography must not reform truth—that much it owes to its ancestry as history—but there is more than one kind of truth, and that [illegible] it owes to its other parent, story-telling.”

  According to Stegner, then, the subject must be representative to be worth writing about. And what did DeVoto represent? A difficult, ornery, troubled, anxious man, who, though often afraid of the world, struggles through work and a great effort of mind to become more than his limited self. Who fights, in Freud’s words, “to discipline a primitive inheritance.” A small man who willfully strives toward largeness.

  It doesn’t take a particularly astute reader to see that there is a whole lot of autobiography in the DeVoto biography. That what this particular biographer valued, and found in his subject, was the constant, daily effort to expand, and to keep the demons of smallness at bay. To take that raw material and will it in a direction, a “positive direction.” Largeness may be a lifelong matter, but it is also a daily grind. It requires effort above all, that unfashionable virtue.

  BERNARD DEVOTO.

  The flaws of character are not and cannot be ignored. The flaws were real. Of course they were.

  But so was the lifelong effort to overcome them.

  ON THE WAY out of Salt Lake I made one last stop. I pulled up at the address where the seedy hotel had once stood. The hotel itself was gone and I couldn’t be sure which of the two buildings stood in its place, the shiny bank or the one with the brick front and the old-time advertisement for bikes. Maybe neither. But for ambience I walked up to the brick building, a preferable object for the requisite imagining.

  If you know of George Stegner at all—and if you do it is likely as the fictional Bo Mason—you know he was resilient. A kind of Jean de Florette of the American West. The failed wheat crop in 1920 was a disaster, no doubt, but soon hope was bubbling up for the next adventure, the move to Great Falls, the man newly excited about all the money that could be made from bootlegging. In his books the son made much of the fool’s gold that was his father’s false hope, but there was always real hope and resilience too. Until this place. This is the place where the hope and resilience ended.

  I tried to picture the final scene. The lobby, the shouting. The gunshot through the pane of glass, the blood on the poor woman’s coat. George Stegner, the winner of sharpshooting contests—one of his few worldly successes, the state champ—shooting two bullets, one breaking through the plate-glass door before piercing Dorothy LeRoy’s heart. Then turning the gun on himself. The man, once a dynamo of energy and ambition and ideas, deciding that it was time to put an end to all that. No more imagining, no more last chances, no more big rock.

  It is all over for him, though it will be a beginning of sorts for his son, who will later report his first thoughts upon hearing the news: “So now I know how that damn book ends.”

  7

  HOW TO FIGHT

  DO YOU HAVE DEFENSIBLE SPACE?

  The looming billboard posed this enigmatic question after I’d sped through the glories of Zion National Park, having paused only once to watch an old bighorn sheep pick his way along the road.

  It is a question Ed Abbey would have liked. His was a wilderness made not just for sniffing flowers but for a last refuge and hideout from the government. It was all in all a messier wilderness, a more complicated and resilient one. As a young man, Abbey rolled a car tire down into the Grand Canyon, just to see what would happen. Modern environmentalists gasp at the desecration, and perhaps they should. But I understand it. We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can’t completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.

  As for me, I had been doing an awful lot of driving.

  Wendell Berry had defined himself as a placed person.

  I, for the summer at least, was that other thing, a wheeled person.

  This was undeniable. My odometer indicted me, told me I was bad. Reminded me that gasoline, especially the burning of it, is what is destroying our world.

  One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one’s society is doing—driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight—we are bringing about the end of the world. Part of Abbey’s appeal is that, even as he lectures us about our failings, he simultaneously washes away some of the guilt. He is a big fat hypocrite and he admits it, and there is something cleansing about this.

  Here is man who bought a red Eldorado Cadillac convertible in his later years and happily drove it down the streets of Moab smoking a cigar. A man who famously tossed his beer cans out the window of his truck and said that it was the highway, not the cans, that were ugly. A man who bombed over the desert in his truck like some pioneer ORVer, and who, as much as he claimed to hate the automobile, celebrated it in his books.

  But here also is a man who, for all his failings, fought.

  “We are all hypocrites,” my environmentalist friend from Boston, Dan Driscoll, said. “But we need more hypocrites who fight.”

  What Dan meant, I think, is that too many of us, noting our own eco-flaws, throw up our hands and say, “What’s the point?” But if only those with a spotless environmental record fight for change, then we will have very few fighters.

  Abbey’s behavior does not get me, or anyone else, off the hook. On the hook we belong and on the hook we will stay. But it does offer the hope that one does not have to be pure to fight. He does not absolve us of our eco wrongdoings, but we can take some small comfort in his imperfections. Somehow, despite the excoriating rants, the frontal assaults, the tireless moralizing, Abbey seems the least pious of environmentalists.

  AFTER ANOTHER DAY’S drive, I arrived at the dam.

  This was the place where so many of the stories I had been reading converged, a confluence of Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner and Major John Wesley Powell, and of the current dried-out, water-starved state of the West.

  The damnation of a canyon.

  That’s what Abbey called it. The damming of Lake Powell and the flooding of the beautiful Glen Canyon below.

  As I drove, my first indication that the Glen Canyon Dam was near came in the form of three huge smokestacks jutting up into the sky, my first sight of Lake Powell a low, glassy haze of blue, wildly out of place in the desert and yet undeniably beautiful. Tropical blue against orange rock.

  Just short of the dam, I stopped at Lone Rock and got to witness firsthand the sort of recreation that Abbey so often grumbled about. A line of forty campers, trailers, and trucks were parked on the edge of the water. Jet Skis patrolled the lake, shooting up their rooster tails of spray while their land-bound twins, the ATVs, whined and snarled up in the dunes. The machines seemed to be competing to see who was louder, and y
ou got the feeling the owners liked it that way. A hundred feet out in the water stood the great, once-proud monolithic rock that gave the area its name.

  The water-skiers circled the rock, and about halfway up the rock’s side you could see the famous bathtub ring. The water level had dropped over the last decade but left behind evidence of its high-water mark from earlier wet years in the form of a stain created by the minerals deposited on the rock and on the rock walls all around Lake Powell. On other parts of the lake there were boat ramps that no longer reached the water. Evaporation is a huge problem here, with millions of gallons going not down the river or into the hydroelectric pumps but up into the air. Silt is an even bigger problem. Fill a tub with dirt in the bottom and soon the mud will rise, or appear to as the water sinks into it. For decades silt has filled the reservoir from below, and it is in the process of gradually changing this into a lake of mud and muck.

  I could feel my own outrage building, as if by reflex. Say the words “the Glen Canyon Dam” and the environmental team all nod their heads and shake their fists. They have been properly schooled and know that it’s evil, a great canyon-killing villain. I have been schooled too.

  THE GLEN CANYON DAM.

  But when I arrived at the dam my first thoughts weren’t environmental ones. I wondered: what if you didn’t know you were supposed to hate this place? What if you hadn’t read the right books? Imagine a squeaky-clean American family on a squeaky-clean American road trip, or a fresh-faced college kid driving west for the first time, getting his first look at a big western dam. Imagine they haven’t been environmentally indoctrinated yet, haven’t yet been taught to hate what they see. Assume, too, that they are seeing through eyes uncolored by what the dam is or does, or by what once was and now isn’t below its waters. In other words, they are just taking in the Glen Canyon Dam as a physical thing. A sight to be seen.

  To say that they will be impressed is not enough. Blown away works better. First there is the sheer massiveness. The great hulking size combined with a kind of smoothness, an otherworldly elegance. Did graceful aliens make this thing? And then there’s the unreal, mind-spinning height from the top of the dam to the bottom. If they are like me—that is, not of a practical bent, unable to imagine inventing even, say, the can opener—they will also immediately wonder how the hell the thing was built. Perhaps a skyscraper is equally impressive. Perhaps, but we are used to skyscrapers. This, however . . . this is something else.

  My first dam was Hoover, back on my original road trip west after college, very much that fresh-faced kid and very much without environmental knowledge, particularly of the West, and the sight of that dam is perhaps the most vivid memory I can conjure up from a trip full of vivid memories. But this dam, Glen Canyon, works fine too. If not quite as big as Hoover—a few feet shorter—it is big enough, and the tonnage of turquoise-blue water it holds back on one side—encircled by bright-orange red rock—and the 710-foot drop-off on the other dazzles anyone who looks at it with unclouded eyes. As I mentioned, I come from a tribe of nonengineers, who, if left to our own devices, would still live in mud huts, and as I walked out on the bridge that crossed the dam I found it hard to believe that members of my own species had actually built this structure. I knew I was supposed to be wagging my fist and cursing along with the rest of my squad, and I would get to that. But first I allowed myself a short moment of wonder.

  I stared down at the Colorado, the same river that Major John Wesley Powell first ran. Its flow was now released periodically from the bottom of the dam, but in Powell’s day it had been regulated not by engineers but by weather’s whims. In 1869, the major plunged through these canyons into the unknown in wooden boats with nine other men. He had heard rumors that he might encounter falls the size of Niagara, meaning that every time he heard a rumble around the corner he knew it might be sounding his crew’s doom. Powell was that oxymoronic thing, a cautious adventurer, and for most of the trip he forced his crew to portage the rapids. But near the end, as food and other supplies grew short, and after three of the men had abandoned the mission and hiked up to the canyon floor, he became, of necessity, less cautious. The plunges through the Grand Canyon rapids were no fun ride, but even the stolid Powell could occasionally find them exhilarating, especially when they all survived with minimal damage to the boats.

  Edward Abbey claimed that his favorite western book was Major Powell’s account of that river trip, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. In the spirit of his hero, Abbey paddled through Glen Canyon in 1959, when construction had already begun but the dam had not yet been erected. He and his friend Ralph Newcomb spent ten days and traveled 150 miles on the river. At the end of that trip they came upon a sign that announced YOU ARE APPROACHING GLEN CANYON DAM SITE. ALL BOATS MUST LEAVE RIVER . . .

  Four years after Abbey’s trip, in 1964, Glen Canyon was drowned with the completion of the dam and the creation of the Lake Powell reservoir, which backed up behind the dam for 190 miles, the water submerging hundreds of stunning side canyons and arches and ecosystems unknown now except, as Abbey wrote, to scuba divers. From that day on, Abbey’s love for Glen Canyon and his rage against the dam radiated outward through almost all of his work. He wrote:

  There was a time when, in my search for essences, I concluded that the canyonland country has no heart. I was wrong. The canyonlands did have a heart, a living heart, and that heart was Glen Canyon and the golden, flowing Colorado River.

  He had known this place and loved it, and after its drowning he would write about it in fiction and nonfiction, both mourning the canyon in elegiac prose and ranting against the dam in full tirade. Lake Powell, he contended, was not a lake at all but a fetid bathtub constructed, not for the irrigation of nearby towns but for the money procured from the electricity it produced when the water ran through its turbines. Recreation, the great gift that the reservoir supposedly gave the area, consisted of Jet Skiing and powerboating around a tub of water where biodiversity was all but nonexistent, nothing growing on the “near-perpendicular sandstone bluffs” and no plants able to adapt to the constantly shifting water line. Water level was adjusted for the purposes of electricity, so that plant life alternately starved or drowned.

  Meanwhile, what was once below the dam’s impounded waters haunted Abbey. A flowing river, a shoreline teeming with birds—“Living in grottoes in the canyon walls were swallows, swifts, hawks, wrens and owls”—and foxes, coyotes, bobcats, deer, ring-tailed cats. Not to mention the fern-bedecked waterfalls and hidden alcoves and Indian ruins. All drowned.

  Abbey especially hated the argument that the new lake was more accessible to everyone—that, for instance, you could now putter your motorboat right up to the famous Rainbow Bridge.

  “This argument appeals to the wheelchair ethos of the wealthy, upper-middle-class American slob,” he wrote, believing that if the rock bridge was worth seeing, you could easily earn the view with what had been just a six-mile walk. In fact, the older forms of recreation, walking or paddling down the river for free and eating what you brought, were significantly cheaper and more democratic than the renting of motor boats and hotel rooms.

  He often dreamed of a time when the river would run free again, when the lake had finally filled completely with silt and mud, and the dam would become a waterfall. This would briefly “expose a drear and hideous scene: immense mud flats and whole plateaus of sodden garbage strewn with dead trees, sunken boats, the skeletons of long-forgotten, decomposing water-skiers.” But nature would take care of the mess soon enough: the winds and rains would scour the canyon clean and return it to something close to what it had been.

  In his assault on dams, Abbey was to some degree working within a tradition. As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: “These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty
Dollar.” Fifty years later, Robinson Jeffers, whom Abbey read avidly, said he would rather “kill a man than a hawk,” and laid down a misanthropic baseline off which Abbey would riff. But there was something that felt new and direct, almost primal, about the way Abbey wrote about nature. It was simple, really. He wrote from two sources: love and hate. He said as much, claiming that a writer should be “fueled in equal parts by anger and love.” He had fallen in love with a place and he wrote paeans to that place while cursing those who were trying to despoil what he loved.

  ABBEY IN A CHARACTERISTIC POSE.

  He wouldn’t have used the word despoil, of course. He would have chosen, as he often did, the more direct and blunt rape. And why not? The enemy was aggressive, rapacious, never resting. In response he had to be the same. Words were his first line of defense, maybe his last, and he piled them up like a barricade of rubble. Though he could be brutally concise, he was also a hyperbolist, and like Thoreau, varied between these two extremes: both an embracer of excess and a blunt blurter. Either way, the words seem to have been summoned directly from and in defense of the land. He is no stylist.

  If Abbey didn’t despise with such passion his would be just run-of-the-mill curmudgeonly grumbling. In Abbey’s world Lake Mead, Lake Powell’s downstream cousin that was created by the Hoover Dam, is “a stagnant cesspool” and “a placid evaporation tank,” while the cars that tourists drive are “upholstered mechanized wheelchairs.” He wrote: “With bulldozer, earth mover, chainsaw and dynamite the international timber, mining, and beef industries are invading our public lands—bashing their way into our forests, mountains and rangelands and looting them for everything they can get away with.”

  “Mr. Abbey writes as a man who has taken a stand,” was how Wendell Berry once put it.

  This is both instinctive and the result of a thought-out philosophy. “It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives,” is how Abbey begins “A Writer’s Credo.”