It was in Eastend that Stegner’s ideas about the frontier developed by living a life about as close to frontier life as you still could in 1912. Stegner wrote: “The exacerbated personal freedom of the frontier left us with myths, a folklore, a set of illusions, that are often comically at odds with the facts of life.” This was where he saw the way the “folklore of hope” led people to plant crops in a dry land, and the way the land itself, through drought and winters filled with blizzards, seemed to try to shed people off it, like a dog shaking off fleas. He watched as his father threw himself into taming the land, trying to make it yield its fruits up to him, and in George Stegner’s failure in Saskatchewan, the son saw that an individual, no matter how energetic or determined, could only do so much against the vast land and extreme climate of the West. In the end the true result of George’s heroic efforts was to help create a dustbowl. In Wolf Willow, his son wrote: “How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared in the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of progress?” And: “The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild.”
We now dream of a wilder time, while those living then dreamed of a tamer one. We secretly worship the mountain men because they were so wild, but the end result of their labors was the extinction of the beaver and the taming of the West. We love the frontiersmen who finished off the frontier. Huge expenditures of energy are required to tame a place, to make it even marginally profitable. But what does one do with that energy, those habits learned, once the place is tamed? Can we just turn these things off? Of course not. We have never been content to merely marvel at these lands and live with them in sustainable and moderate ways. We need to get something out of them. Put them to use. We turn to them with our usual chronic restlessness and rapacity.
YESTERDAY I HAD thought this place birdless, but Stegner’s river proved me wrong. In the course of Hadley’s twenty-minute bout of stick throwing, I saw a yellow warbler, a mountain bluebird, and some chickadees and mourning doves. Up above us spread the gentle yellow-domed hills of the old Whitemud Mine where George Stegner had sometimes worked. You could see how the mine got its name: pale streaks slanted through the green-and-yellow color scheme of the surrounding hills.
The trees that we stood among, and that clustered along the river, were not here when Stegner was growing up. That was the thing he’d noticed most when he returned as an adult. That the landscape that he’d used as material for his whole career no longer matched the actual landscape. “This is all very strange,” he wrote to his good friends the Grays, “because I’ve written about this town until I think I’ve imagined it. Now I have to imagine it all over.”
This morning, when Bryson had mentioned Stegner’s return, she also said it had become something of a town myth.
“He stayed at our campground and didn’t tell anyone who he was until he left,” she said. “He was embarrassed to admit he was a Stegner due to his father, who still owed money in town.”
It was June of 1953 when Wallace and Mary parked their trailer in the Eastend campground. Wallace went by the name of “Mr. Page” as he walked around town. He visited his old gabled house but refused to try to find the homestead on the border: he didn’t like to imagine the place, with all its associated memories of work and family, swallowed up by the grasslands as if it had never existed.
When the woman who supplied the Stegners’ trailer with electricity found out that they wanted to learn more about the town’s history, she gave them some advice. She told them they should read a book by a local writer. The book was called The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Maybe Bryson was right. Maybe the reason Stegner was nervous about returning was that his father owed money. But if he was, Wallace himself never mentioned it. Taking the alias was partly about a more general embarrassment over being a Stegner, over the ne’er-do-well father who supplemented his income with bootlegging. And it was partly about something else: as a writer, Stegner was there as a spy, coming back to gather materials and make something out of them.
Wolf Willow, the book that grew out of the visit, is extraordinary. Radical, even. Read it and you can laugh at the way we seem to think that our current debates about forms in creative nonfiction, about the mixing of fiction and nonfiction, are somehow new. In the pages of Wolf Willow you find memoir, history, social theory, and then, plop in the middle, you come upon a two-part short story. Perhaps after the arduous work of building Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Stegner was ready to play. There is an easy freedom to the book, as if its author were at once a great, respected scholar and a kid throwing mud balls along the Frenchman. Partly a simple autobiographical story of Stegner coming home again to Eastend, it is also a history of the frontier. As for the fiction dropped in the middle of the nonfiction narrative, these were stories that had appeared elsewhere and would appear again in a couple of books, including Stegner’s Collected Short Stories. But Stegner made no apologies for reusing material. It was another lesson the frontier (and his mother) had taught him: reuse everything. Recycle, re-can, use every scrap.
In Wolf Willow, Stegner manipulates time as he never had before. Later, in his biography of DeVoto, he would remark upon DeVoto’s use of simultaneous chronology in his histories—that is, of the way he could write of a mountain man heading up the Missouri and then of James Polk addressing Congress, and it all seemed to be going on at once. DeVoto wrote somewhat in the manner of our contemporary narrative television, with jump cuts and threading plots. Stegner would master something similar that he would put to use not just in his nonfiction but in the later fiction, often establishing a present-moment through-line and a separate but connected past-tense narrative. Time on the move, back and forth and sideways. Stegner learned to play with time like clay, and one of the pleasures of reading a novel like Angle of Repose is that the narrative present and the past are at once fused and distinct. But it all started with Wolf Willow. With walking down the Eastend streets in 1953 while his mind traveled back to those same streets in 1910 or back further to when there were no streets at all and the Blackfeet Indians roamed the Cypress Hills.
THE HORSEHEAD PUMPS are everywhere in southern Saskatchewan. What was once farmland is now oil land. As Hadley and I drove east to Shaunavon (the town that Stegner’s Eastend hometown team played baseball against) and north to Gull Lake, then west to Moose Jaw and southeast to Weyburn, weaving through southern Saskatchewan, we barely went a minute without seeing an oil pump. They bobbed like crazy rocking horses, thirsty horses that dipped, drank, and rose; dipped, drank, and rose. They had invaded those farmlands like equine aliens, and we saw them next to barns, next to silos, in the fields. Dipping and sipping. It was as bad as Vernal—worse, really—or maybe just easier to see from the road. The whole countryside appeared to be involved in a mass slurping, sucking up what was left of the land’s blood. An occasional well rose like a rocket launch among the smaller pumps.
We passed a billboard that read, TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO PRAY. IT PAYS. The sign provided a new image. Looking out at the pumps I now saw a great communal prayer service. A thousand machines bowing down and lifting up again and again, praising Allah or Jesus or whomever. Maybe it is the simplest and truest thing to say they were bowing down to the great modern god of Oil.
I remembered that Stegner had ended Wolf Willow optimistically, thinking the town of Eastend safe from future booms: “It has had its land rush and recovered.” Less than a decade before Hadley’s and my visit, Stegner’s biographer Philip Fradkin made a trip up here and found the region’s “relative lack of change” reassuring. That has all gone out the window now. This is the new boom, the fracking boom, son, and you had better get on board or get out of the way. Wendell Berry had told me to notice land use, and here it wasn’t too hard to see how the land was being used.
This was the densest concentration of drilling I had yet seen on my trip.
By late afternoon Hadley and I were exhausted, but while the hotel signs said Welcome, we clearly were not. We stopped a half dozen times with no luck. It wasn’t fathers and daughters—it wasn’t tourists of any stripe—who were filling these hotels these days. It was this generation’s George Stegners—young men come to make their fortune. This new society was a male society, a smoky society, a slightly scary society. These were men who would come here, change these towns, and then leave.
Near Weyburn we finally found a hotel with a single room left. There was a sign on the door that read: $200 FINE FOR SMOKING. We barricaded ourselves in, ordered room service, and called it an early night.
THREE DAYS LATER we had left Stegner’s childhood home long behind and were awakening in a hotel in Beckley, West Virginia, to a landscape like the one Ed Abbey knew as a child. Stegner had called his home “the bald-assed prairie,” but there was nothing bald about this shaggy, bearded place. The mountains, while beautiful, gave none of the lift I always felt upon seeing the Rockies. This was the land of hills and hollers, the landscape Ed Abbey knew in his bones.
Three years before his death, in April of 1986, Edward Abbey went home again, embarking on a road trip back east to the hills of Home, where his parents, Paul and Mildred, still lived. Even in her eighties, Mildred was a dynamo, basically running the local church and taking night classes at the nearby college. Over the years Paul had visited Ed at many of his fire-lookout and national-park jobs, and though the father drove the son a little nuts, they remained close. Ed admired his father as a man from another time, a jack-of-all-trades who was immensely capable with tools and animals and who was, like George Stegner, a crack shot. Ed had gone back east to visit the family a few times over the years, but this trip was different. His goal was to research the novel that would become The Fool’s Progress, in which the Abbey-based protagonist, Henry Lightcap, is a hillbilly Ulysses, and his final destination is Stump Creek, West Virginia.
While his friend Dick Kirkpatrick drove, Abbey took notes and recorded his impressions on a tape recorder.
“The longer we drove, the sicker he got,” Kirkpatrick said later. “We had planned on seeing Wendell Berry in Kentucky, but he didn’t feel up to it.”
Abbey had great ambitions for the story of Henry Lightcap. “A Fat Masterpiece,” he’d hopefully called it. Henry, living in the West, had led a life of divorce, dissolution, and drinking, and the book opens with his final breakup with his wife, culminating in the shooting of their TV. It is one of the funniest set pieces that Abbey ever wrote, and one of the few times in his fiction that Abbey was able to re-create the drama of his own troubled mind in a way that he did so easily in his nonfiction. The book employs an alternating chronology, with present-tense scenes detailing the narrator’s long journey from west to east, and past-tense scenes basically telling the story of his life. Unfortunately, the book grows clunkier as it proceeds, and many of the characters that Lightcap meets on the road are little more than cartoons.
One of the best characters in the book is Henry’s brother, Will. While Henry Lightcap had spent his life as Abbey had, roaming the West, moving from place to place, brother Will’s path was different. He had taken over the old family farm and settled there, never moving. Jim Cahalan, Abbey’s biographer, notes that Will is at least partly based on Wendell Berry and his reclaiming of his own family farm in Kentucky. I find this fascinating. Both Abbey and Berry were students of Stegner’s, of course, but only Berry truly saw Stegner as a model. Abbey understood the appeal of the return to home, of rooting down in a place, but also finally came to understand that for him this was not the way. Longing for home might be part of his makeup, but actually building one and staying put was not. Like George Stegner, he was always looking hopefully (and lustfully) around the next corner. Abbey was not one for waxing poetic about his home, unless you defined that home as the greater West, and perhaps one reason that Abbey, while caring deeply about his region, did not preach the gospel of home is that it has always had a hint of piousness to it. That hint was there at the very beginning, with Thoreau at Walden looking down on his neighbors, and it remains there still. Look at me, it says, this is where I belong. This is the only place on Earth for me. You poor placeless suckers don’t know what it’s like! The idea of commitment to home has in fact become a kind of gospel of the nature writing world, and it should be no surprise that Abbey responded to it as he did to any other piety: by thumbing his nose at it.
As for Paul Abbey, he for one wasn’t too pleased with how the family was portrayed in the novel.
When Ed went home again after the publication of The Fool’s Progress, father greeted son in the front yard waving the book in his hand.
“Why? Why?” he yelled.
12
TEACHERS
During the fall, between the cracks of my teaching schedule, I continued to try to read everything that Abbey and Stegner had written. Then, at the end of the fall term, I headed back out west.
On a sunny December morning I met Lynn Stegner and her daughter, Allison, at the Main Quad of Stanford. They were happy to see me, which made me happy. They would be heading back later in the day for Christmas in Vermont, so our meeting would have to be relatively quick. Allison had graduated from Stanford and Lynn still taught there, so I was in good hands. We parked in front of the quad and walked back to the classrooms where Wally had taught. (I still couldn’t bring myself to say “Wally” out loud without cringing, but Wallace sounded too stiff in Lynn’s company and Mr. Stegner too formal, so I tried.) We walked through the golden Mediterranean campus with its red roofs, Allison pointing to the palm trees where the woodpeckers kept their caches of stored acorns. She had spent the summer working as a paleoecologist in canyonlands in Utah, following, in her own way, in her grandfather’s footsteps.
We pushed through some bushes at the corner of a yellow building and peeked in the windows.
“This was his office,” Lynn said.
The view inside was not particularly exciting—the room was now a classroom—but the view out back from the office was of a beautiful shaded garden and a gnarled live oak, which, Lynn told me, had been alive when Wally was there. Was this the office he shared with Ed McClanahan? Lynn wasn’t sure.
I wandered the garden for a minute and took it all in. This was where Wallace Stegner had spent his other working life, his life outside of writing. I knew he took his job seriously. He had little patience with the never-ending question that nonwriters seem to love, that of whether writing could be taught. “Nobody asks that question about painting or architecture or music,” he said, and nobody “questions the neighborhood piano teacher.” Of course it could be taught, and he had done so for forty years. A big part of the job was simply recognizing talent, and then nudging without pushing. If you didn’t have talent, it made no sense to go into the field, and Stegner was impatient with indulgent teachers who found everything they read wonderful. Writing was hard work, and laziness was unacceptable. On the other hand, he understood that there were things he didn’t understand, and was open to innovation to a degree. He wrote: “Tension, dynamic equilibrium between innovation and tradition, liberty and restraint, is what seems to me to make a writing class worthy of its possibilities.”
His method was Socratic. For those who have never experienced a creative-writing workshop, they usually go a little like this: For homework the class reads a piece of creative writing composed by one or more of their classmates. In class the group sits around and discusses the writing without the participation of the writers themselves. In most classes, and certainly in Stegner’s classes, the instructor listens more than lectures, facilitating a conversation that usually begins with positive remarks and moves toward the more critical. It is a delicate business, with student feelings always easily bruised, and there are many ways it can go badly. But one of the ways it can go well is if students start to focus less obsessiv
ely on their own work and start to see in the work of others—in ways they can’t quite yet see in their own—mistakes made, possibilities to explore, techniques that might be tried.
As much as Wallace Stegner was a lifelong writer and environmentalist, he was also a lifelong teacher. His own academic life grew right alongside the growth of the modern creative-writing workshop method, beginning at Iowa, where he was in the first class to submit a creative thesis, to the early days of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and then as one of the first group of Briggs-Copeland lecturers at Harvard. He took what he learned in these places and applied them to the program he founded at Stanford in 1946. In keeping with the philosophies of the places where he had taught, his approach was both artistic and practical. He believed that the first goal of becoming a writer was to make something fine, but once that happened he was not so highbrow as to ignore the fact that the fine thing had to be sold.
Stegner was also a member of the first generation to experience the tension that can rise between writing and teaching, but at times he pooh-poohed the whole idea that there even was a conflict. A product of the Depression, he had solved the great and ever-pressing economic question of the writing life with a simple answer: he got a job. Though he wasn’t above griping (and Stegner admitted that griping was one of the pleasures of being a workaholic), the job, in his eyes, was a good one, allowing him to support a family while cranking out a steady stream of novels, stories, essays, and histories. Stegner wrote fast and he wrote well, with a journalist’s facility and toughness. When faced with the problem of completing long books while also teaching, he always replied briskly with some variant of “That’s what summers are for.”
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 27
