The purpose was also spiritual, and he believed that many of our basic spiritual archetypes grew out of observing bears. After all, what better animal to embody resurrection, the death of a winter’s hibernation followed by the rebirth of spring’s emergence from the den?
Before he was done talking bears, I remembered to ask him something for Hones.
“My friend wants to know what you really thought of Timothy Treadwell.”
I expected outrage, since Treadwell, the subject of Herzog’s documentary, seemed like such a phony to me. But Peacock’s reply was calm and considered.
“He came to me after one summer of living with the bears. But I don’t think he really wanted any advice. By then he had his own ideas about how to do it.”
He took a sip of his beer.
“The thing about Tim is that he had a big personality.” He paused before adding, “You really don’t want to have a big personality around grizzly bears.”
I was reminded of something that Jack Turner had said about Peacock in his essay. He wrote: “His manners, as a guest in the wild, are impeccable.” That too would be a result of the necessary humility of living near bears. It struck me as funny that Hayduke, one of the most famously rude of fictional characters, had learned his manners in the wild.
When we finally said good night, Hadley and I made our way through the starry night out to the trailer. It was cramped inside but we each had beds built into the walls and Andrea had made them with sheets and blankets. Hadley was so excited about the accommodations that it took a while for her to calm down, despite the late hour. Eventually I heard her breathing slow, and then I followed her, drifting off into a deep sleep.
The next morning I got up early and, remembering the story of Susie Abbey, left Hadley a big note before going on a bike ride down the hill. Hadley was up when I got back, but Doug and Andrea were not. We decided to leave them a note, thanking them. We tucked it under the “Come Back with a Warrant” doormat.
We drove back into Yellowstone and went for a hike in the woods. Hadley pointed out the signs warning of bears, but we saw only elk and a gray jay, who was interested in our trail mix. When I’d complained to Doug about the touristy traffic jams in the park, he said that that was true, but then added: “Just go a hundred feet off the road and it’s all still there.” After our hike, we explored the unearthly hot springs of Mammoth. I told Hadley the story of how Peacock once was lost and frozen and had saved his life by stripping off his clothes and soaking in one of the steaming pools in the backcountry.
We were already back on the road, heading north, when I realized I had forgotten my binoculars at Peacock’s house. We called and he said come by and before I knew it we were back in the house and then, before long, were back at the kitchen table cracking beers.
He told me that he had always been a migrant, never a settler.
“I have no homing instinct,” he said.
I talked for a minute about my own troubles with finding a home, my sense of geographic uncertainty, how strange it was living in the South.
“We all need different-size territories,” he said. “For some it might just be their backyard. For me I require a slightly bigger backyard.”
Of course. That made perfect sense. Most of us are content with our little plots. But for Peacock, the backcountry of Yellowstone had served as his territory. As had, to some extent, the whole American West.
“One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way,” he said. “That’s a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don’t look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness.”
High-flown talk, and inspiring, but Hadley was bored—as she had every right to be. At our next stop, the home of a friend of a friend in Big Sky, there would be kids. She tugged at my shirt.
Hadley and Doug hugged good-bye and I walked over to shake his hand. But he moved in for another hug instead, one that squeezed the air out of me.
I DON’T KNOW why, exactly, and I don’t know how to describe it, but sleeping in an old trailer behind Doug Peacock’s house, with my daughter in the other bunk, did me a world of good. Better than good. I felt great.
My life, like almost anyone’s, is tame compared to Peacock’s. I once spent a year or two observing ospreys on Cape Cod, but they weren’t grizzlies and, despite their impressive talons, I never had to worry too much about the birds suddenly turning on and devouring me. Back at home in North Carolina, my relatively domestic wildness consisted of daily walks in the woods, bird-watching, kayaking, and two or three beers out in my writing shack in the evenings. Peacock said that we all have different-size territories and I would argue that one of the more important things that he and Abbey offer is that they make us uncomfortable with the size of the plots we have settled on. They push us, and inspire us to move beyond our comfortable cells. “It depends on how you are yarded,” wrote Thoreau. In an age of cell phones and computers and little contact with the elemental earth, most of us are yarded pretty tightly.
It isn’t just pronghorns who live in a diminished territory. Most modern humans know exactly how those ungulates feel. With each generation we settle for less wildness, less freedom, less space. We begin to accept things we would have previously deemed unacceptable. That our e-mails will be read, that we will stare down at screens for hours, that it’s okay for drones to look down on us, that only crazy or dangerous individuals seek solace by going alone into the wilderness. We shrug, half-accepting our limited lives and damaged land. What can we do about it after all?
Abbey wrote of the way that the dogs in Tucson react with both fear and a kind of primal jealousy when they hear coyotes howling on the edge of town:
They yip, yap, yelp, howl, and holler, teasing the dogs, taunting them, enticing them with the old-time call of the wild. And the dogs stand and tremble, shaking with indecision, furious, hating themselves. Tempted to join the coyotes, run off with them to the hills, but—afraid. Afraid to give up the comfort, security, and safety of their housebound existence. Afraid of the unknown and dangerous.
This quotation is from “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” and Abbey goes on to compare Thoreau to a coyote. Thoreau’s job, like Abbey’s and Peacock’s, is to howl wildly and make the rest of us uneasy. And to maybe stir in us the desire to push outward. To make our lives wilder. To enlarge our turf and territory.
Abbey and Peacock demonstrate through their wilder existences just how tame our own lives are. And make no bones about it, our lives are tame. Just seven years before my western trip I had followed some radio-collared ospreys down through Cuba. It was the first time in my life I was carrying a cell phone as I traveled, and I soon realized that my location could be tracked almost as easily as the birds’. Now we all carry our own personal tracking devices. We are, most of us, town dogs, leashed by our daily obligations, the things to check off our lists and the many oh-so-urgent e-mails to answer.
What does it really mean to live a wilder life? And what does it mean to lead that life now, at a time when our virtual lives seem to have taken over our actual?
One thing I think it means, simply put, is getting into the wilderness, or what wilderness is left.
“We need wilderness because we are wild animals,” Ed Abbey said.
But it is more than that. For me being wild doesn’t mean being savage or extreme. It certainly doesn’t mean being frat-boy wild. And it isn’t just vague nature-writing shorthand for occasional spasms of Whitmanesque ecstasy, either. It is more complicated.
For me there is no wild life without a moral life. But we also have to be careful with a word like goodness. “If I repent anything it is my good behavior,” said Thoreau, a thought that Abbey would have seconded. Neither of them had much use for do-gooders, and neither were joiners, despite the fact that their work stirred armies of followers and started many a cause. Part of this was having particular and individualistic notions of what being good meant. Emerson understood this when he wrote
: “Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.”
The question I now ask myself is whether it is possible to live responsibly, to have a Stegnerian commitment to wife and child, family and friends, while still having real wildness in my life. Is it possible to be properly wild?
It would be easy to say that we all outgrow our inner Abbeys. But growing up can also mean hiding out. Work and responsibility can swallow everything else like the incoming tide. We become so absorbed in our own lives that we can’t see beyond them. In his essay on Peacock, Jack Turner writes of “our fundamentally Puritan focus on work and family at the expense of all else.” One of the pleasures of workaholism is, as Donald Hall reminds us in his book Life Work, the sense of being a good boy or girl, of pleasing one’s parents, of getting a gold star. Making work and career our supreme virtues, as many of us have these days, neatens up our lives, gives us a simple narrative, offers us a sense of control. And of course our effort is often rewarded by the work-driven society we just happen to live in.
What Abbey offers complicates this simple formula. He helps to pull our heads out of the sand and shows us, through his life and work, that a counterlife is still possible. A life against the prevailing current. He believed that so much of what we think right is emphatically wrong and that therefore we must live according to our own dictates. And just as important: he believed that a life with some sort of freedom from the usual dictates can still be lived. As Thoreau said: “The life that men praise and call successful is but one kind.” Abbey showed us another kind. A life that doesn’t value fame, efficiency, money, safety, success. A life where freedom, wildness, wilderness, and independence remain the truer priorities.
One of the pleasures of Abbey’s work, particularly Desert Solitaire and the best essays, is that he shows us just what a counterlife might look like, what it means to live a life apart from “the cultural apparatus.” He understands that it isn’t only wilderness that is being threatened but human wildness. Without models for a wilder life, the sort of models that Abbey and Peacock can help provide, we forget that certain possibilities exist. But they still do. If you read Abbey carefully, you can see that he shows, very practically, what one might do if one held values contrary to the society one lived in. For one thing, you might care for and about the natural world while also getting out into it, watching the birds and beasts. For another, go down the river with others but also spend more time alone. Walk alone in the desert for ten days or go live on a barrier island for a while or even camp in the backcountry with bears. Not because you are going to film it or make a YouTube video about it but because of the experience itself. It goes without saying that bravery, at the expense of personal safety and career advancement, is also part of Abbey’s wilder life, as are sex and comedy.
Finally, Abbey tells us that we can’t expect to be rewarded, let alone celebrated, by a society we are acting in opposition to. In other words, if you choose to go against the world, you can’t expect the world to heap praise on you. Choosing to go against will not make you comfortable. It will not make you rich. It will not make you famous (usually). And you might just go to jail.
To be truly countercultural, then, is difficult. It requires boldness and belief. It requires commitment. And it requires accepting consequences.
Let’s be honest, though. Some of Abbey’s bad personal behavior was brave. But some was simply bad. Stegner, meanwhile, is miscast in the role of company man; to lead a life like he did, of reading and writing and teaching, is hardly a conformist’s life; it is in fact the opposite in a country that hardly celebrates its intellectuals. But as poles in our thinking, Stegner and Abbey work well enough. Read their lives deeply and they point as surely as road signs, even if they occasionally point in different directions. What they point to for me, and for anyone else who cares to look closely, are creative possibilities for living a life both good and wild.
11
GOING HOME AGAIN
“This is lonely country,” Hadley said.
We were driving out of southern Alberta into southern Saskatchewan, the place that young Wally Stegner—just about Hadley’s age at the time he moved here, come to think of it—first called home. We hadn’t passed any other cars as we drove up through the endless albino wheat fields into Canada, and when we turned east on a dirt and gravel road toward Saskatchewan, rocks started kicking up under the car. It had been already almost six by the time we crossed the border, and by the time we were ten minutes down the dirt road I started feeling uneasy. As the road went on and on, I began to worry we wouldn’t get to a town until after dark. And uglier worries: what if the car broke down out here? We were far out of cell-phone range. I had the bike on the back, but how far could I ride, my daughter jiggling on the handlebars or perched on the seat behind me?
“No wonder he became a writer,” the border officer said when I told him that Stegner grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. You could see why Salt Lake City would later seem such a place of thrills and novelty. Being a boy here you would long for civilization, for other people. You didn’t need to long for wide-open spaces, that was for sure. Over the next forty miles we passed only one sign with a name on it. Ravenscrag Road. We saw no houses. I was also surprised by how relatively birdless the country seemed, though we did see a big, black Swainson’s hawk lifting off through the wheat, and some swallows carving the air after insects.
My mood rose when I spotted a sign for Eastend. But the next two small towns we passed through did not have hotels. At last we curved down with the cleave of a hill, and saw the trees that meant we had finally come to Stegner’s river, the Frenchman (or, as he called it in his fiction, and sometimes in his nonfiction, the Whitemud). Lights, too, which were a good sign. We pulled into the lot of the Riverside Hotel, a rambling one-story affair, and relief turned to unease when I noted all the large white trucks parked in front of the rooms.
“We only have one room,” said Wendy, who stood behind the reception desk. “And it’s smoking.”
“We’ll take it,” I said.
Then I asked her if they were always this busy.
“My husband talked me into coming up here to retire,” she said. “‘It’ll be only a few tourists now and then,’ he told me. And then the drilling started.”
I asked what kind of drilling.
“Horizontal fracturing,” she said. “For oil.”
Perfect. If George Stegner were alive he would no longer have to run elsewhere to find a boom. This time it would have come to him. The Big Rock Candy Mountain, right here in Eastend.
HADLEY AND I planned on touring the Stegner house first thing in the morning. But before we left for the house, the hotel’s self-described “laundry lady,” a woman named Bryson LaBoissiere, gave us her two cents about the Stegners. She told us she had a friend who used to play in the Stegner house as a child in the ’50s, and that the house had trapdoors leading down to where George Stegner stashed his rum. Another friend told her that her father had been buddies with George Stegner and had seen the bullet holes in George’s car. This didn’t bother Bryson, not a bit. She was impressed by George’s energy, his chutzpah, by the fact that he smuggled booze from Canada into the United States and then, when the laws reversed, simply carried on the same business in the opposite direction. She felt that most people didn’t understand that the son had more than a little of the father in him.
“Wallace was a bit of a gay blade too,” she said.
According to Bryson, George was not such a bad husband and father after all. Exhibit A, she explained, was the Stegner house itself, which George had built with his own hands in the summer of 1917.
“It was the only four-gabled house in town,” she said. “There were a couple other gabled houses, but they were made from kits. I haven’t seen a house anywhere hereabouts that had gables and was brand-new built.”
“So he was trying to do the right thing?” I asked.
“More than the right thing. You don’t build a house li
ke that if you don’t love your family.”
When Hadley and I toured it later we didn’t see any trapdoors, but we agreed that it was a fine house, and must have been hard for the family to leave behind. The rooms were small but comfortable and the boys’ bedroom faced out back toward the Frenchman River, which took a sinuous turn right behind the house. After the tour we walked out back to the river and Hadley threw sticks into the current while I tried to imagine it as Stegner saw it. He would often say of Eastend that while it was a hard place to be a man, it was a great place to be a boy. He loved swimming in and skating on the river and building forts and roaming with a pack of boys, led by Cecil, his strong, athletic brother. He also loved starting mudfights and throwing rocks and causing mischief. He later described it as a Huckleberry Finn existence.
“Eastend was a failure place, ultimately,” he wrote in his autobiography, but “it imprinted me, indelibly, with the perceptions, images, memories, behavior codes, and attitudes that have controlled my life and writing ever since.” While the Stegners lived here their lives turned in seasonal cycles, from winter in town in the house along the river to isolated summers when the family farmed their wheat fields to the south, down by the US border, where Wallace lived the life of a “sensuous little savage.”
But Stegner wasn’t merely a little savage. It was here he learned to love books, too. “If you have only three books, books mean a good deal to you,” he once said. For most of the other boys the imprisonment of school, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, was pure misery, but Wally gobbled up any news he could get from the outer world. He quickly discovered that most of what the children studied seemed to have nothing to do with their lives, imported as it was from Europe, which meant they suffered “not only from the rawest forms of deculturation but the most slavish respect for borrowed elegances.” But that didn’t stop Wally. He was hungry to learn and he was good at it, a natural, just the way Cecil was with sports. He had his father’s appetite for huge, challenging work but he found that this applied to the life of the mind as well as it did to clearing fields.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 26
