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

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All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 30

by David Gessner


  My next stop was in St. Louis, where I stayed at the home of Tom Beattie, who took me down to the Missouri River, bought me drinks, and set me up with contacts for the rest of my trip out west. In Denver, I stayed with Randy Ricks, who has always been a great friend and a big supporter of my work, and in Paonia I spent two nights in the cabin of Adam Petry, writer, scientist, former student, present friend. During my time in that delightful mountain town, I also attended a party at the home of the brilliant environmental writer Michelle Nijhuis, and it was there that Cally Carswell, a contributing editor at High Country News, pointed me toward Vernal, Utah.

  In Moab, Andy Nettell of Back of Beyond Books took time out to speak to me about his encounters with Abbey, and Ken Sleight invited me up to his bunker of an office, where we picked up a conversation from four years before. That earlier trip to Ken’s Pack Creek was made possible by Susan Zakin and made more fun by Dave Smith, who let me try to keep up with him on the Slickrock trail. During that trip, Jane Sleight was a generous hostess, cooking us dinner and refereeing as Ken, Susan, and I yelled at the TV during the first Sarah Palin–Joe Biden debate. During my more recent trip to Pack Creek, Bob and Cady Aspinwall were kind enough to show me the small cabin where Abbey wrote.

  My thinking about the economies of western towns owes much to Thomas Michael Power, a professor in the economics department at the University of Montana, and to Ben Alexander of Headwaters Economics, who was always ready to answer my questions. I also need to thank Dave Earley, Liz Thomas of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, all of whom I interviewed on my earlier trip.

  In Vernal, Utah, I relied on the guidance of legendary river runner and provocateur Herm Hoops. Bruce and Jane Gordon of EcoFlight, a nonprofit organization that sponsors flights all over the western landscape, helped me see with my own eyes what all that drilling was doing to the land, and during our flight, Ray Bloxham and Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance provided commentary as I took notes. In addition, Bloxham and Bloch were extremely helpful in the months after our flight, and I owe them many thanks for allowing me to pester them with e-mails. The filmmaker John McChesney also added insightful comments during the flight.

  I need to pause here and thank the writer and editor George Black for putting me in touch with the Gordons and EcoFlight, and for six years ago first nudging me toward and then guiding me into what was then the unfamiliar world of environmental journalism. If not for George and the magazine he edited, OnEarth, I would not have been in Vernal in the first place, and I owe him and his colleagues at OnEarth, Scott Dodd and Douglas Barasch, a world of thanks.

  From Vernal I traveled to Salt Lake City, where Stephen Trimble, who served as the 2008–2009 Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah, took time out to talk and to bring me up to the cemetery where Wallace’s brother and parents are buried. He also reminded me of the key scenes in Stegner’s novel Recapitulation, scenes that provide a structure for the Salt Lake chapter. I am equally indebted to Ken Sanders of Ken Sanders Rare Books, who regaled me with stories of Abbey and Stegner, providing some of the smartest and sharpest commentary I heard during my travels. From Salt Lake I pushed off to points south, eventually stopping at the Santa Fe airport to pick up my old traveling companion and friend, Mark Honerkamp, who now has taken to describing himself as a “professional literary sidekick.” Together we drove to Jack Loeffler’s home in the hills outside Santa Fe. Jack made us feel as if we were at home and treated us like old friends, generously sitting down for a taped conversation that lasted over two hours.

  Next I headed to the San Juan River, where we were in the more than capable hands of Kristen McKinnon and Wild River Expeditions, which, for my money (or in this case, thanks to Kristen, non-money) is the best rafting company in the West. Many thanks to Greg Lameman and all the other guides. I am also thankful to Luis Urrea, whose musings about Ed Abbey I reread on the trip and who helped me think about what we might call, perhaps too politely, Abbey’s “warts.”

  Thanks to Jane Quimby in Grand Junction for her honesty and insights. And thanks to Tim DeChristopher, whom I interviewed in the fall of 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was attending Harvard Divinity School after his release from prison.

  From Grand Junction I headed to Denver and then to Fort Collins, where Todd Simmons of Wolverine Farm Bookstore and Publishing took time to talk with me about Abbey and his power to convert. Many thanks are owed to Emily Hammond, Steven Schwartz, and Elena Schwartz for their great generosity in hosting my daughter, Hadley, and me, giving us a tour of the fire damage, offering insights into Abbey’s first term teaching, and finally slipping me the envelope with a hundred bucks in it to keep us going. That money helped us make it all the way to Montana, where Doug and Andrea Peacock generously gave of their time and their trailer. I had always regarded Doug as an environmental hero but was not aware that he is also, no matter his wild reputation, a very nice guy. And thanks to David Quammen for putting me in touch with him. After we left the Peacocks we spent two nights at the beautiful river home of Karen and Scott Amero, who, along with their sons, Xander and Jake, treated us like visiting royalty. From there it was north into Alberta and Saskatchewan, where thanks are due to Wendy at Riverside Motel in Eastend and Bryson LaBoissiere, for her insights into the Stegner family.

  It was a long way home from there, and here I must give my heartfelt thanks to my intrepid traveling companion Hadley Gessner and to Joss Wheedon, whose CD of the Buffy musical episode helped us make it home. We stopped in Minnesota for dinner with Patrick Thomas, a good friend whose initial enthusiasm for the project is part of why it came to life in the first place. Our next stop was in Wisconsin, where Jim and Elizabeth Campbell and their beautiful girls, Aiden, Rachel, and Willa, gave us a place to rest, play, eat, and drink before pushing on for the next thousand miles.

  The trip over, it was time to write the book. Two students aided me with the logistics of bookmaking, Carson Vaughan in the early stages and Liz Granger, who later helped with permissions. Doug Diesenhaus was, as usual, invaluable, this time under tough circumstances as no one seemed to be replying to our queries for photographic permissions. My colleague Emily Smith, the publisher of Lookout Books, helped by chiming in on design choices. Then, in the late stages of pulling the book together I received invaluable help from Eric Temple, Jim Hepworth, and Dick Kirkpatrick. Clarke Abbey also came through in a big way, granting permission for the use of quotes and photos and waiving any fee.

  Thanks to my agent Russ Galen for swinging the deal. At Norton, Remy Cawley and Anna Mageras brilliantly shepherded the book toward reality. Meanwhile Rachelle Mandik as a copyeditor was a dream come true—with a great ear and keen eye.

  As for my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, this wouldn’t have been close to the book it has become without her. She pushed me in some ways that I didn’t always want to go at first, but that were always in the direction of expansion, that is toward what Stegner called “largeness,” and which were, I can see now, just what I, and the book, needed. My gratitude is deep to her for having the initial vision to see what the book could be and for nudging me out of my comfort zone and toward something more.

  Finally, as always, it comes back to family. My mother Barbara and sister Heidi have been forever supporters, and my second parents, George and Carol de Gramont, never waver in their interest and seeming pleasure in my work. They also happened to have produced a daughter who is my best friend in the world and who, as my fellow writer, keeps me from getting lost in the hall of mirrors that the writing life can become. Which means once again that my final and deepest thanks go to my wife, Nina de Gramont.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  This book, as I said in the text, was an adventure in reading. The main task was reacquainting myself with the words that Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey put on the page, to try to read all, or almost all, that they had written, and to see if those words s
till held the power to unlock potentials and energies in myself that they had twenty years before. While I admit that I grumbled occasionally about rereading some of Abbey’s fiction and was completely stymied by Stegner’s Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, I am happy to report that for the most part the experience was not just pleasurable but stirring. Later, studying Stegner’s papers in the special collections room at the University of Utah, I came across a small journal of his that held these words about writing biography: “If one has known his biographee personally, he is lucky. If he has to get him from reading, he has an act of imagination to perform—he has to bring paper to life.”

  As I suggest in the text, both men have been mummified by their reputations, almost to the point where we can imagine tiny versions of the two sitting on our shoulders, giving conflicting advice on most matters not environmental. But if Abbey’s stereotyped role was as the devil, he was a devil who inspired emulation that often danced close to pure hero worship, and that emulation extended not just to people’s lives but to the pages many young writers wrote as they tried on the Wild Ed style. While this sometimes made it hard for me to cut through to the actual man, I insist, as I do in the book, that while hero worship might be a little embarrassing it is not all bad. In some ways it is, if we clean it up and call it “finding a model,” at the heart of much of biography’s appeal. Clearly there is something about Abbey’s words that strikes a chord, and that makes readers see new possibilities, in much the way Thoreau’s sentences did in Walden.

  Since I did not define the book as pure biography but as a hybrid animal—part dueling biography, part travel narrative, part meditation, part criticism, part nature writing—I can admit more freely than most biographers of my reliance on the biographies that came before, which I often read alongside the authors’ works, a happy combination that sparked many ideas. These books included, among others, James M. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life, Jackson J. Benson’s Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work, and Philip L. Fradkin’s Wallace Stegner and the American West. Also vital were Jack Loeffler’s Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey and all of Doug Peacock’s work, most relevantly Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness, as well as Richard W. Etulain’s wonderful interviews in Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature.

  But while the book was not a biography per se, I was determined to do a biographer’s work. In the late spring of 2012 I took a series of trips that started to help me see Stegner and Abbey more fully. The first of these trips was in May to Tucson, Arizona, where Abbey had lived on and off and where the University of Arizona and curator Roger Myers housed the Edward Abbey papers in their special collections. The experience of spending days with Abbey’s journal notes and drafts and letters let me see just how smart and how deadly serious a writer Abbey was. Then I took the notes, or photocopies of them, on the road, down into Havasu Canyon for a camping trip. It was the right way, and the right place, to immerse myself in all things Abbey, and the cellulitus I contracted in the canyon from a cut on my leg gave the right air of intensity to reading the young Abbey’s often melancholic sentences. Poring over the words in my tent, my mind slightly warped by fever, I saw that this man who often celebrated animal moments free of thought was in fact a nearly constant thinker. In those journals I heard the voice that later found its way into the books.

  The next journey was in June to Pennsylvania, to the Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center in Petersburg, in the hills outside of State College. Through the generosity of the center’s director, Mark McLaughlin, and professors Ian Marshall and Bob Burkholder, I was allowed to spend a week in a cabin in the woods around Shaver’s Creek. The dilapidated stone walls and thick woods helped me get a sense of the landscape Abbey grew up in, a sense that was crystallized at the week’s end when I drove an hour west to Home, Pennsylvania, and was given a tour of young Abbey’s stomping grounds by his biographer, the generous James Cahalan. Jim brought me to the homesite that Abbey called the Old Lonesome Briar Patch, and then on to the cemetery and to the other homes where various Abbeys had lived at various times. Finally, he invited me back to his house and, putting the lie to the cliché of scholarly competition, shared Abbey photos and stories as well as tips for Abbey contacts.

  Only a week after my Pennsylvania trip I was scheduled to teach at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, sponsored by Orion magazine, in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. By good luck the conference was only ten minutes down the road from the town of Greensboro, where Wallace and Mary Stegner had spent their summers for over four decades, and where their only child, Page, and his wife, Lynn, still had a summer home. After a few e-mails, the Stegners invited me to visit, but when I showed up one evening, a six-pack of beer in hand, I had no idea what to expect. What I got was a combination of graciousness and good humor, shot through with a dose of honesty about their famous relative who, lo and behold, turned out to be a flawed human being like the rest of us. But this honesty was not of the “tear down” variety, and it gave me a larger sense of what the man (whom I couldn’t quite bring myself to call Wally despite their insistence) was battling against in his efforts to attain “largeness.” We spent three hours talking that night, joined by their daughter, Allison, and the next day they invited me back, showing me the house where Wallace and Mary had lived and the small cabin that was Wallace’s study, and pointing the way to the path up to the mountaintop overlook where Crossing to Safety ended, a path that I hiked up with a friend later that day.

  I consciously held off on some of my research for the book until the larger trip itself. My working method over the last seven years or so has been to throw myself into situations, to not overplan my itineraries and let coincidence and chance have their way. I knew I wanted to wait to read certain things until I got to the places that inspired them, and so, for instance, I read the letters that George Stegner wrote his son, begging for money before he committed suicide, in Salt Lake City, only a couple of miles from where that fateful event occurred. Though I will mostly mention books and people in the notes that follow, spending time in the places themselves meant just as much, and helped me in perhaps unnameable ways in my job of bringing paper to life.

  CHAPTER 1: GOING WEST

  The information on the population increase in the West came from the 2010 census.

  Edward Abbey more than once joked about being called Edward Albee, including a reference to a letter written to him under that name in the introduction to his essay collection Abbey’s Road. People I talked to made this same mistake at least a half dozen times, and though the number of times “Stevens” replaced “Stegner” was fewer than that, it was once made, remarkably, by a curator at a California mine-turned-museum. In general, it continues to astound me how two writers so well known in the West can be so relatively obscure in the East, as if we were talking about the literatures of two different countries, not just two different regions.

  Wallace Stegner’s ideas about aridity and the need for community in the West permeate almost all of his nonfiction and a good deal of his fiction, and my synthesis of those ideas is drawn from many different books and interviews. But if you want to get a sense of his big-picture view of the West, the later essay collections, notably Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, are a good place to start. Reading both the Benson and Fradkin biographies was helpful in laying out a basic timeline of Stegner’s life, and the author’s own work, often autobiographical, helped too, though, as Stegner himself cautioned, one shouldn’t read too much fact into the fiction. Luckily Stegner wrote a short and, for me, indispensable autobiography, never published, which is housed in the Special Collections Department of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

  Abbey’s comments about New York City come from his journal. I found many of the journal passages in the Abbey papers in the Special Collections Library at the University of Arizona, but others were taken directly from Confessions of a Barbar
ian, a great collection of selections from Abbey’s journals edited by David Petersen.

  There are many records of Abbey’s influence on monkeywrenching, but the best is Susan Zakin’s Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, which describes the birth, rise, and fall of Earth First! Wendell Berry’s essay “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,” in his collection What Are People For?, is must-reading for those who want to understand Abbey’s appeal. As is Abbey’s own “A Walk in the Desert Hills” in Beyond the Wall, which is where I pulled the “cocky as a rooster” quotation from. This essay provides a fine example of the Abbey style, as we follow him out into the wilderness, and up and down with his moods, from somber to raucous to desperate to joyful, while he spends a week hiking through the desert. If you haven’t read Abbey before, it’s a fine place to start.

  David Quammen’s eulogy, “Bagpipes for Ed,” appeared in the April 1989 issue of Outside magazine and gives a real sense of Abbey’s power to inspire and convert.

  The letter in which Stegner reflects on Abbey’s time at Stanford was mailed to Eric Temple, in response to an interview request. Here is the letter in its entirety:

  Los Altos Hills, CA 94022

  Feb. 23, 1992

  Dear Mr. Temple:

  I’m afraid an interview, at least for the next while, is out. I seem to be both overloaded with obligations and under-supplied with health. But I can tell you all I know about Ed Abbey in a half page letter.

  He came here as a Stegner Fellow sometime in the late fifties or early sixties (before the publication of DESERT SOLITAIRE, in any case), and was here for two quarters before he got lonesome for the desert and went back. He tried to get me to continue his fellowship for the quarter he missed, but I couldn’t do that. While he was here he was working on what later became The Monkey Wrench Gang, though it didn’t then have a title, as far as I remember. He was quiet, reclusive, clean shaven, watchful. He lived over in Half Moon Bay, so that we saw him only at class time twice a week. He attended faithfully, made great sense in class, had all his later attitudes well in place but did not express them quite so forcibly as he did later. The only other person in the workshop who was anywhere near in his class as a writer was Don Moser, now the editor of SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE. I don’t think he was particularly happy at Stanford—indeed he barely broke the surface—and the reason was the reason for his later great success: he yearned to be back in the sagebrush and not hanging around in classrooms. I respected him greatly, both for his environmental views and for his often manic writing ability, and I think he respected me; but the circumstances were not the kind that permitted the growth of real acquaintance.

 

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