One thing he did more responsibly than almost any Fellow I remember. We had a practice then of having the current Fellows act as preliminary readers on the applications of people wanting to come the next year. Among the manuscripts that he got to read was one by Ken Kesey, then still at Oregon. The manuscript was a football novel all about homosexual quarterbacks and corrupt coaches. Ed’s comment (we asked only for a rating: Good, possible, or impossible) was one sentence: “Football has found its James Jones.”
And that’s about all I know. I never saw Ed Abbey after he left here, though I read his books with pleasure and we had some correspondence, reviewed each other, wrote blurbs for each other’s books. I couldn’t attend his funeral service in Moab; all I could do was send a letter that Wendell Berry read for me at the “ceremony.”
I hope this helps a comma’s worth. And I’m sorry I’m not up to an interview.
Sincerely, Wallace Stegner
The “ideology of a cancer cell” quote comes from Abbey’s essay “Arizona: How Big Is Big Enough?” in One Life at a Time, Please.
CHAPTER 2: FIRST SIGHT
Abbey’s comparison of seeing the West to being like seeing a naked girl for the first time is on page 2 of “Hallelujah on the Bum” in the essay collection The Journey Home. The poetic quotations from his first hitchhiking trip west also come from this essay.
As I mentioned above, James Cahalan was more than generous during my trip to Home, Pennsylvania, showing me the cemetery where earlier Abbeys were buried and the Washington Presbyterian Church that Mildred Abbey “ran.”
The description of Stegner’s childhood and first return west is taken from several sources, including interviews (Etulain’s Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature was a big help) and his own unpublished autobiography, from which the “savage innocence” sentences were lifted. The description of the fictional return of Bruce Mason occurs at the conclusion of the major novel of Stegner’s early years, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. The comments on scale and color in the West come from “Thoughts in a Dry Land” in Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.
Maybe nobody better exemplifies the myth of the effete easterner who goes west and is transformed than our twenty-sixth president, and I took a brief break from Stegner and Abbey to reread The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris. I first wrote of my own move west after an operation for testicular cancer in a book called Under the Devil’s Thumb. I was twenty-eight years old when I first read Desert Solitaire in Lassen Volcanic National Park in 1988, the same year that Abbey died.
Nobody does a better job of smashing apart western myths, and revealing the sheer silliness of ideas like “rain follows the plow,” than Stegner himself in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which seems to me a must-read for westerners. But Bernard DeVoto’s words are equally important and the articles he wrote from the 1930s through the ’50s, when he was fighting against the boomers as the “Lone Ranger,” remain relevant and still make for bracing reading. We are lucky they have been collected in a book called The Western Paradox: A Conservation Reader, edited by Douglas Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick, which is where most of the DeVoto quotes in this chapter are taken from.
I write regularly for OnEarth and OnEarth.org, the publications of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and for my updating of the big-picture ideas about the aridity of the West I relied on the up-to-the-minute reporting of my colleagues at that magazine, particularly that of Michael Kodas on the western fires. For a larger synthesis of current and coming climate changes I looked toward Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century and, especially, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys, a writer who calmly but convincingly presents a terrifying picture of the current and future West.
Reg Saner’s nonfiction books, which record his explorations of southwestern history and nature, and of course his ruminations on these, include The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene, Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo & the Anasazi, and The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World.
CHAPTER 3: LIGHTING THE WAY
You can hear Wallace Stegner speak on this interview from the old TV show Day at Night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFj2EID6u4w.
The primary source for the first part of this chapter is a long conversation I had with Wendell and Tanya Berry at their dining-room table at their home in Port Royal, Kentucky. With Wendell’s permission, I taped the conversation, but due to the needs of the book only a small part of it made it into the pages. “I loved him but never felt equal to him,” Wendell said of his old teacher. We talked for a long while about Ken Kesey and his relationship with Wallace Stegner. Wendell told a story about a poetry reading he had given at Stanford where one of the poems he read was about Kesey. Afterward Stegner said of the poems, “I liked them all except one.”
My description of the myth of Berry’s return to Kentucky is based on the essays “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill” in his book The Long-Legged House.
Wendell Berry’s notion of “lighting the way” corresponded almost exactly to the ideas that my former teacher Walter Jackson Bate put forth in his biographies and in his book The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Bate’s ideas, it should be noted, permeate the whole project, and it was his books and lectures that made me first love the art of biography, and come to see that part of its greatness was that we could apply it to our own lives.
My sense of what Stegner was like during the late 1950s and early ’60s was greatly enhanced by another interview, in Lexington, Kentucky, with Ed McClanahan, Stegner’s old officemate at Stanford. McClanahan was generous, having to nearly shout stories into my tape recorder over the din of a loud bar, and inviting me over to see his home the next day. The meeting was facilitated by the writer Erik Reece.
For a great discussion of the relationship of Stegner and Kesey, their similarities and differences, and the way they both chafed at and influenced each other, take a look at pages 199–212 of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Interestingly, both men would be criticized for the creation of domineering fictional women, Kesey’s Nurse Ratched and Stegner’s Charity of Crossing to Safety. When I brought up the latter character with Page and Lynn Stegner, they suggested that Peg Gray, the model for Charity, was actually much more domineering than the character she inspired, insisting, for instance, that Mary be called “Molly” around her because she liked the name. Oddly, the name stuck, at least in the Gray family circle.
The quote from Reg Saner about geological time is taken from the essay “Desert River/Different River” in The Dawn Collector. The paragraphs on beetles in the West come from several sources, including the work of Jeffrey Lockwood at the University of Wyoming, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests by Andrew Nikiforuk, and deBuy’s A Great Aridness.
The summary of the fight to save Dinosaur came from several sources, including Stegner’s autobiography and “A Capsule History of Conservation” in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.
Terry Tempest Williams’s koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: “I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways, Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical.”
The story about Ken Kesey, Dolly Kringle, and the apple comes from my interview with Ed McClanahan.
CHAPTER 4: PARADISE, LOST AND FOUND
For the geology of the Utah canyons I was greatly helped by a little book I bought twenty years ago, Canyonlands Country: Geology of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks by Donald L. Baars. Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed by Jim Stiles does a fine job of portraying, in cartoon form, the madness of Moab.
Robinson Jeffers was clearl
y a writer whom Abbey admired, and the two shared an uncompromising attitude and a gift for bluntness. The quotation about the spoiler is from the poem “Carmel Point” in Selected Poems.
The student who asked Abbey if he wrote every day was the writer Steven Schwartz, who took Abbey’s very first class at the University of Arizona.
Abbey’s journals were my main source for his state of mind as a young writer. The movie version of The Brave Cowboy is called Lonely Are the Brave and stars not just Kirk Douglas but Carroll O’Connor and Walter Matthau.
Much of the research on economics and off-road vehicles was done originally for an article for OnEarth magazine called “Loving the West to Death,” published on December 1, 2008. For that article I read all of the books of Thomas Michael Power, a professor of economics at the Economics Department at the University of Montana. I also corresponded with Ben Alexander of Headwaters Economics and interviewed Liz Thomas of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust.
During that earlier trip I also interviewed Ken Sleight and had dinner with Ken and his wife, Jane Sleight. Four years later I sat down with Ken again, and he was as generous and forthcoming as ever.
Most of my thoughts on Desert Solitaire come directly from my own rereadings of that strange, often-unwieldy but wonder-filled book. But some of the ideas were sparked by reading Henry David Thoreau by Joseph Wood Krutch, a book that I initially encountered in the back of a Toyota Tercel during the return trip of my first drive west in 1983. Krutch himself was “reborn” as a westerner when he moved from New York City, where he was a professor at Columbia, to Arizona, where his work turned away from biography and toward natural history. I remember Walter Jackson Bate saying that Krutch had been a fine scholar and biographer until he went west and began writing about “cacti.” One of the last interviews that Krutch gave was to Edward Abbey, who would eventually write it up as “Mr. Krutch,” which he would publish both in magazine form and in One Life at a Time, Please.
CHAPTER 5: OIL AND WATER
Government records provided many of the stats on Vernal, with the Utah Department of Health providing the statistics behind my statements about the incidence of rape. For descriptions of the boom I relied on several articles in the Salt Lake Tribune, High Country News, and on interviews in town. Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) patiently explained to me the various ways that towns benefit from the taxes and other less-direct monies from the oil companies. For the economic breakdown of boom towns I turned to Ben Alexander of Headwaters Economics. Alexander also pointed me toward Headwaters’s recent “West Is Best: Protected Lands Promote Jobs and Higher Incomes” report on how protected public lands positively affect a town’s economy: http://headwaterseconomics.org/land/west-is-best-value-of-public-lands.
In Vernal I interviewed George Burnett of “I Drilling” fame and the river runner and provocateur Herm Hoops. I also recorded my conversations with dozens of other people in town, including an oil worker named Rich who insisted that I not use his last name but took me out on the first ORV ride of my life outside of town.
In several interviews, Rob Bleiberg, executive director of the Mesa Land Trust, described the impact of booms and busts on his adopted hometown of Grand Junction. I learned about the new computers in the classrooms of Pinedale, Wyoming, from “Gold from the Gas Fields,” an article by Ray Ring that appeared in the November 28, 2005, edition of High Country News.
Bruce 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. During our flight, Ray Bloxham and Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance provided commentary as I took notes.
CHAPTER 6: MAKING A NAME
Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place was my literary introduction to Salt Lake City and its environs, and I read that beautiful book again before writing the material for this chapter.
I am also indebted to Stephen Trimble, who served as the 2008–09 Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah, for taking time out to talk to me and giving me the lay of the land in Salt Lake City. Stephen reminded me of the key scenes in Stegner’s novel Recapitulation, which provide a structure for this chapter. I am equally indebted to Ken Sanders for taking the time to talk about Abbey and Stegner, and for teaching me how to do a great Abbey impression (the trick is to not move your lips).
Here is the complete text of the letter that Wallace Stegner wrote and that Wendell Berry read at Abbey’s wake:
I regret that I am unable to be in Moab on the day when Ed Abbey’s friends gather to see him off. The best I can do is send a hail and farewell note and ask Wendell Berry to deliver it.
By an unfortunate alignment of chance and circumstance, I never saw Ed in the flesh after he left Stanford where, for a while, he was my student. But I have never been far from the sound of his name and never for a moment out of reach of the waves he caused and the influence he radiated.
He squatted in country that I had known and loved since my boyhood, and made it singularly and importantly his own, as Robert Frost made New England his own, and Muir and Ansel Adams made Yosemite [theirs].
His books were burrs under the saddle blanket of complacency. His urgency was a lever under inertia. He had the zeal of a true believer and a stinger like a scorpion when defending the natural, free, unmanaged, unmanhandled wilderness of his chosen country. He was a red hot moment in the conscience of the country. And I suspect that the half-life of his intransigence will turn out to be comparable to that of uranium.
We will miss him. The comfort is that when we need him, he will still be there.
Signed, Wallace Stegner
Stegner wrote the line about “a neat and workmanlike job of murder and suicide” on page 124 of his unpublished autobiography. Page Stegner’s comments about the lack of skeletons in the family closet and his father speaking the “King’s English” occurred during a taped interview in Greensboro, Vermont.
The letter from Wallace to Page Stegner in 1979 is on pages 213–14 of The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, edited by Page Stegner.
I found the letters from George Stegner to his son in the Special Collections Department of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, curated by Liz Rogers. The same collection contains young Allison Stegner’s book report and Wallace Stegner’s small notebook, which I quote from extensively at chapter’s end.
CHAPTER 7: HOW TO FIGHT
Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water is a classic of environmental writing. It was revised in 1993 and still makes for bracing reading, the best overview of the damming of the West. James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West and Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry helped me understand how climate change will worsen the already perilous water situation.
Ed Abbey tells us that Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons is his favorite western book in The Journey Home, in the essay “Down the River with Major Powell.” The sign warning boaters to leave the river is described in the “Down the River” chapter of Desert Solitaire. “Canyonlands did have a heart,” “grottoes,” “decomposing water-skiers,” and “wheelchair ethos” are quotations from “The Damnation of a Canyon” in Beyond the Wall. “Fueled in equal parts by anger and love” is from the preface of The Best of Edward Abbey. “Bashing their way” is from the short essay “Eco-Defense,” in One Life at a Time, Please.
The story of how Wallace Stegner began to write environmental articles comes from his unpublished autobiography. Stegner’s “A Capsule History of Conservation” describes the same period in a less personal manner. The fascinating exchange of letters between Gary Snyder and Wallace Stegner can be found in the Special Collections Department of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University o
f Utah.
Abbey’s description of the “small and imperfect sampling” of the remnant Glen Canyon comes from “The Damnation of a Canyon” in Beyond the Wall. Once again Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry, and deBuys’s A Great Aridness proved invaluable in giving me a big-picture sense of the water crisis in the West. This was supplemented by regular reading of High Country News, which consistently puts out the West’s best eco-journalism.
The “I grew up in a cowboy culture” quotation also comes from Stegner’s letter to Gary Snyder. The description of my meeting with Jack Loeffler is of necessity condensed. He sat down for a taped conversation that lasted more than two hours. The quoted Abbey phrase—“democracy taken seriously”—comes from “Theory of Anarchy” in One Life at a Time, Please.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 31
