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

by David Gessner

  All his life Abbey made the domestic and the wild into opposite poles, pitting them against each other. He took Thoreau to task for sticking too close to the cabin. The Abbey dream was never about home and hearth. It was about breaking away from the domestic constraints of normal life.

  I understand this. But it seems an adolescent way to divvy up the world. For me, any definition of wildness has to include my family. And, thinking of Terry Tempest Williams’s koan, I wonder: does it qualify as radical in our times to make a promise to one person and keep it for a lifetime?

  I need to believe that the domestic and the wild can coexist. This idea, this possibility, seems more complicated, messier, more true to life. I think again of the final scene of The Spectator Bird. Where a married couple, in their seventies, meet under a moon on a wind-blown midsummer’s night. With a husband crying over a forbidden kiss twenty years before, and a hurt wife finally forgiving. It is a drama of hard-won fidelity, and at the risk of overstating, there is something primal about it too. Something visceral, something pagan, something real. Mate staying loyal to mate. Two decided people deciding. Could there be something wild about commitment? Could there be a wildness of union?

  AS IT TURNED out, Nina and I had a practical matter of domestic wildness to hash out on our drive back to the Denver airport. Nina had bought round-trip tickets from our home in Wilmington to Denver for both Hadley and herself, but she had done so with the knowledge that Hadley might not use hers.

  Nina is a writer and she had a book due by the end of summer. So our question today was: did Hadley fly home and go to camp while Nina tried to write, or did she stay with me as I continued my adventures in the West? Nina trusted me with our offspring, to some extent, but she had never been away from Hadley for more than a couple of days. She also knew that I tended to push things on these trips. While I doubt she thought I’d pull an Abbey and go wandering off into the desert without my child, she still had memories of a younger, less responsible me.

  We remained undecided until the very last moment. Then, at the airport, both Hadley and I kissed Nina good-bye.

  My daughter and I became a team, Lewis and Clark, or maybe closer to Moze and Addie of Paper Moon, with Hadley jammed in the back of the Scion, surrounded by her handy books and electronic screens, and me driving, yelling back to her over my shoulder, both of us giddy for a while with the idea of being on an adventure together.

  Our first stop was in Fort Collins at the home of my old friends Emily Hammond and Steven Schwartz. When Nina and I had last visited them in Fort Collins, Hadley was not yet born and their daughter, Elena, was Hadley’s age. Now Elena was in college, though, lucky for us, home on break. Both Hadley and Elena were dog lovers and soon they were next door playing with Canyon, the neighbor’s collie. The girls also took a trip up to the nearby prairie-dog town, and later over dinner Hadley regaled Emily and Steven with tales of using the Groover, which in the end turned out to be the most fascinating aspect of the river trip for her.

  We were there to visit friends, but also because Steven had been a student in the very first writing class Ed Abbey taught at the University of Arizona.

  “Man, was he tough on us,” he said after dinner.

  He told me that, as a teacher, Abbey was not a performer or praiser. Not a nervous void-filler, as both Steven and I admitted to being, but quiet and spare with words. With a deep, deadpan voice.

  “He was very intimidating. Not big on meting out kind words.”

  What did he think? the students naturally wondered. There was no telling.

  It occurred to me that for prolific, word-loving men, both Abbey and Stegner could be surprisingly taciturn.

  “Abbey didn’t care what people thought of him,” Steven said.

  And he also did something that is inherently appalling to any graduate student: he actually gave grades less than A’s.

  In Tucson, I’d studied the notes Abbey made for his syllabus and it contained the names Montaigne, Emerson, Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wendell Berry, Tom Wolfe (he meant Thomas), Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, and Edward Hoagland. The assignments he gave his class were creative enough that I scribbled down a couple of them for use in my own classes. In one he asked students to visit with “transient or homeless types,” or go to a biker’s bar, some “sleazy strip joint” or other example of, as he delicately put it, “Tucson lowlife,” and then write about it. Another exercise was simpler: “A walk in the desert.”

  At his worst, according to Steven, Abbey displayed “a combination of seeming apathy and vulturish criticism.” But he was quick to add that the class that he took was Abbey’s very first, and it was “entirely possible that Ed got better at teaching.”

  After getting a B on his first story and not hearing even a faint word of praise, Steven decided he’d had enough. Abbey was hunched over a little school desk in his office when Steven went in to quit. Abbey looked up at him, suddenly engaged.

  “You are one of the best writers in the class,” he said.

  Usually a sentence like that would be followed by something like “You should stick it out.”

  Not with Abbey. He just let it sit there.

  “That was it,” Steven said. “He shut down. His eyes went cold. He went back to work.”

  But looking back, Steven felt that he had learned something valuable. Abbey was a model in one important way.

  “He used his non-writing energy sparingly,” he told me. “He cared about writing more than anything else.”

  AFTER WE CLEARED the plates, Elena volunteered her babysitting services, and Emily and I drove up into the foothills above Fort Collins to see the scars from the recent fires. The fires had just died down, after raging for a month, and would have ended up being the most costly fires in the state’s history were it not for the almost simultaneous conflagration down in Colorado Springs. It was a summer for the history books with the Front Range ablaze and often blanketed in smoke.

  We drove following the river up into the hills, the river so dry it seemed no more than a red stain of itself. Soon we were staring up at miles of charred ridgeline. In Soldier Canyon we saw an entire charcoal hillside of blackened trees, the spindly remains looking like black skeletons. Emily told me that the high winds had caused the fire to jump from tree to tree, at one point actually jumping the river. She related the story of an acquaintance who was carefully evacuating, knowing the fire was miles away, when suddenly his house was aflame.

  We drove past the Rist Canyon Volunteer Fire Department and to another charred ridge of forest. Dark, gnarled hands grasped at the sky. About 70 percent of the homes in the area had burned.

  I asked Emily if I could get out of the car and walk up the ridge a bit. The land smelled of ash, the trees blackened. My footfalls made a sibilant hiss as I moved through the crisp, ashen landscape. The ridge above looked like a porcupine’s back, the spikes consisting of black trees with only the slightest color from dead yellow foliage.

  I knew that as historic and tragic as that summer’s fires were, there was a very good chance they were just a preview. I thought of the way that the fight to tell the truth, and to get westerners to see the facts about their land, ultimately wore Wallace Stegner down. It isn’t hard to see why. Stegner understood the necessity of hope, but in the end the facts painted a less than hopeful picture.

  The facts have grown still more depressing. Over the last decade the cost of fighting fires has gone from making up 14 percent to 50 percent of the Forest Service’s budget, and both firefighters and scientists tell us that we have entered a new era of fire in the American West. These recent fires, called “megafires” by some, are certainly exacerbated by climate change, but they are also aided by historic factors apart from rising temperatures and increased aridity. Primary among these is the long history of fire suppression in the West.

  Fire suppression, of course, was supposed to be a good thing. Like the introduction of erosion-aiding tamarisk on the banks of western rivers
, it was meant to help with an existing problem. In this case the problem was the “Big Blowup” fires that ravaged the West in 1910 and that gave weight to Bernard DeVoto’s idea that in the West catastrophe might destroy half a region. During that historic summer millions of acres were burned and the flames eventually ignited not just forests but the country’s imagination. Firefighters became national heroes, and fighting fires, all fires, became the driving purpose, the idée fixe, of the Forest Service. But as often happens when we intrude on natural processes, this created a problem. It turned out that by suppressing fires, we stamped out even the smaller fires that had beneficially rid forests of excess fuel in the form of scrub growth, deadfall, and other organic debris. The end result, after many years of suppression, was as if a giant had come along and arranged things perfectly in the fireplace of our forests, with plenty of kindling and paper below the big logs.

  The trees have changed in another way. The altered climate is effectively turning the West into a powder keg by reducing snowpack and lifting temperatures, with temperatures effectively sucking the moisture out of trunks and branches. This means that the trees are perfectly built for ignition, the wood so dry that they are always a spark away from burning. The result has been that in recent years we have had our own Big Blowups, and have witnessed the largest and hottest fires that have ever been recorded in the West.

  Over the last few decades the Forest Service and other organizations have begun to understand the combination of factors that aid these fires, and have tried to reduce the fuels that feed them by clearing the forests of excessive deadfall. Policies of fire suppression have also loosened, though in the current climate of understandable fear, there have been renewed cries for the old ways of stamping out every spark. Of course, in places like this hillside the houses themselves help provide the fuel, going up like torches.

  Wendell Berry had urged me to consider land use as I explored the West. This meant understanding which places are fit for farming, for building homes, for mining, for recreation. To begin, we must question some basic assumptions. In this summer of fires, one of those questions is simple enough: is it wise to build wooden homes, or any homes, near national forests or in the fire-prone foothills above mountain towns? Then there is a larger question of land use, one unique, in our country at least, to the West. When you build a house in the western wilderness you are not building a cabin in the Berkshires. You are laying claim to land that is at once vulnerable to human incursion and often inherently risky to settle.

  Homeowners will soon be rebuilding in these burnt hills, but, while they don’t want to hear it, there is little question that the land would be better off left alone. When people do build near forest land, they wisely fear the slightest sign of fire. Which means that they have little tolerance for even small fires, those beneficial blazes that have been a historic part of the cycles of western forests. And more people always means one more thing: a greater chance of sparking a fire.

  Throughout the West, the human population will increase; that is a given. But even as it does we had better keep in mind the particulars of the place. There are landscapes in the West that are naturally ornery, that ask, in all but words, to be left alone. More specifically, what the land here asks for is a clustered population with large buffers where there are no humans at all. To our credit we have done just that, as a people, in establishing parks and national monuments and forests and other public lands. But as more of us crowd in and put more demands on this land and its water, and as more people attempt to pry away protected land and “put it to use,” we had better remind ourselves of why large sections must remain free of human intrusion.

  If parts of these western lands are really as vulnerable and difficult to inhabit as Stegner and others have suggested, as open to disaster, then perhaps to leave them alone is simply practical. We don’t put land aside only because it makes for a pretty park. We put it aside because it makes sense. It is how it should be. Much of this land is properly wild.

  IN THE MORNING, before we left Fort Collins, we made a quick stop at Wolverine Farm Bookstore to meet with Todd Simmons, whose Wolverine Farm Publishing had just put out a magazine anthology of all things Abbey. Todd testified as to Abbey’s continued ability to create converts.

  “A lot of people come here heading south to Moab,” he said. “I ask them if they have read Desert Solitaire. If they say, ‘Desert what?’ I insist that they buy the book. If you don’t like it, I tell them, I’ll refund you double. So far no one has ever asked for their money back.”

  But Todd was recently back east and was shocked to find that no one in the group he was hanging with had ever heard of Abbey.

  “It showed me what kind of bubble I live in,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe that no one had heard of him. At first I thought they were joking.”

  Hadley and I thanked him and pushed off for points north and west, driving out of Colorado and into Wyoming. We spent hours crossing southern Wyoming. In late afternoon we saw a herd of pronghorn antelopes gliding across the prairie. Pronghorns are the fastest land animals in the West, and the truth is it isn’t even close. I told Hadley a fact I had learned from a friend: the reason pronghorns run so fast, much faster than any predator of theirs, is that they are outrunning a ghost—the long-extinct American cheetah, which centuries ago chased them across these grasslands.

  To see a pronghorn run is to want to run yourself. A more graceful animal is hard to imagine. Delicate and gorgeously bedecked with rich brown-and-white patterns, with small horns and snow-white fur on their stomachs, they glide across the land. As we drove I was worried about all the barbed-wire fences that blocked their way as they roamed, at least until I saw one pronghorn fawn jump a fence like it was nothing, flowing over it like water.

  But there are sterner obstacles to their migrations. Over the course of four recent seasons, a young journalist named Emilene Ostlind followed the migration of the pronghorns on one of their last remaining migratory routes through Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. That 120-mile-long trip now includes “the Pinedale Anticline gas patch—an intensively drilled piece of public land in western Wyoming—a tricky highway crossing and a couple of subdivisions.” This migratory path is one of only two left since “residential and other development has stopped pronghorn from migrating through six of eight historic corridors.” The trail consists of key stopover points and then corridors in between the stopover points. Ostlind compared the paths to a rosary, with “strings of beads with spaces in between, the bulbous stopover locations linked by narrow movement corridors.”

  One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of “connectivity.” It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die.

  That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can
return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.”

  Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens. In other words, without wilderness we cut off not just species but the chance of animals adapting to changing conditions.

  Nature, meanwhile, is already on the move, and as we try to aid species we are facing a moving target. Consider that the Audubon Society not long ago released a study that revealed that more than 305 species of North American birds were already spending their winters farther north, some more than three hundred miles north of their former range. Birds as varied as the golden-cheeked warbler (delicate, private, tiny) and the greater sage grouse (bulky, ground-dwelling, and famously flamboyant in courtship) face a problem that is both new and increasingly common: their futures are uncertain as climate change plays havoc with their habitats. For the sage grouse it means a big squeeze, as their sagebrush habitat, already threatened by development, faces transformation into woodland as the frost line shifts north. The warbler’s troubles are even trickier, since they breed in only one place in the world, the Ashe juniper habitat near the Edwards Plateau of central Texas.

  Which means that scientists now find themselves in the position of trying to predict the future movements of both animals and ecosystems. Habitat preservation, never easy, has become even more difficult. The new circumstances will require new science and a more active style of habitat management. It will no longer be enough to look back at what historically grew or lived in a place; now we will need to anticipate, through modeling, what will be there next. Sam Pearsall, who works with estuarine ecosystems back in North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound, calls this “pre-storing” habitat—a kind of climate forecasting that will allow scientists to predict where different species, and different habitats, will be moving. In the case of North Carolina’s coast, this can mean transporting oysters to areas where it is not presently salty enough, but will be, and doing something similar with bald cypress and salt-marsh grasses. In the West we can often anticipate a movement not just northward but upward in altitude.