ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS
EDWARD ABBEY, WALLACE STEGNER,
AND THE AMERICAN WEST
DAVID GESSNER
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
FOR REG SANER,
Teacher and Friend
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
—WALLACE STEGNER, “Wilderness Letter”
Most of the formerly primitive road from Blanding west has been improved beyond recognition. All of this, the engineers and politicians and bankers will tell you, makes the region easily accessible to everybody, no matter how fat, feeble or flaccid. That is a lie.
It is a lie. For those who go there now, smooth, comfortable, quick and easy, sliding through slick as grease, will never be able to see what we saw. They will never feel what we felt. They will never know what we knew, or understand what we cannot forget.
—EDWARD ABBEY, “How It Was”
CONTENTS
1. GOING WEST
2. FIRST SIGHT
3. LIGHTING THE WAY
4. PARADISE, LOST AND FOUND
5. OIL AND WATER
6. MAKING A NAME
7. HOW TO FIGHT
8. DOWN THE RIVER WITH ED AND WALLY
9. THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MONKEYWRENCHING
10. PROPERLY WILD
11. GOING HOME AGAIN
12. TEACHERS
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sources
Image Credits
Index
ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS
1
GOING WEST
It was a summer of fires and fracking. The hottest summer on record, they said, with Midwest cornfields burnt crisp and the whole West aflame, a summer when the last thing a card-carrying environmentalist would want to be caught dead doing was going on a nine-thousand-mile road trip through those parched lands.
I was going anyway. For almost a decade I had dreamed of getting back out west, where I had lived during my early and mid-thirties, and as it happened the summer I picked was the one when the region caught fire. Drought was the word on everyone’s dry lips, and there was another phrase too—“the new normal”—that scientists applied to what was happening, the implication being that this sort of weather would be sticking around for a while. Though I hadn’t planned it that way, I would be driving out of the frying pan of my new home in North Carolina and into the fire of the American West. In Carolina, I had been studying the way hurricanes wracked the coast, but now I would be studying something different. Though my hometown’s problem was too much water, not too little, I had the sense these things were connected.
I loved the West when I lived there, finding it beautiful and inspiring in the way so many others have before me, and at the time I thought I might live there for the rest of my life. But circumstances, and jobs, led me elsewhere. It nagged me that the years were passing and I was spending them on the wrong side of the Mississippi. But I followed the region from afar, the way you might your hometown football team, and the news I heard was not good. A unique land had become less so, due to an influx of people that surpassed even the Sunbelt’s. The cries of “Drill, Baby, Drill!” might be loudest in the Dakotas, but they echoed throughout the West. The country’s great release valve suddenly seemed a place one might long to be released from. And now the fires, biblical fires, wild and unchecked, were swallowing up acreage comparable to whole eastern states.
The plan was to leave sometime in early summer and aim my Toyota Scion for Eldorado Springs, Colorado, the place that had served as my first western home and a place that at the moment just happened to be around the midpoint between the historic fires to the north in Fort Collins and the historic fires to the south in Colorado Springs. Though there would be no one else in the car, I would not be traveling alone. Along with my atlases and gazetteers, I would carry a box filled with a couple dozen books. Over the previous year, knowing I would be returning to the West, I had also returned to the two writers who had helped me make sense of the region. When I mentioned the names of these writers in the East, I sometimes got befuddled looks. More than once I had been asked: “Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?” No, I would patiently explain. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.
It was kind of funny, really. Stegner and Abbey were both so firmly entrenched in the pantheon of writers of the American West that if the region had a literary Mount Rushmore their faces would be chiseled on it. But back east their names, as often as not, elicited puzzlement. When this happened, I would always rush to their defense. Wallace Stegner, I would explain, won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel one year and the National Book Award for another the next, and singlehandedly corrected many of the facile myths about the American West, earning him the role of intellectual godfather, not just of the region but of generations of environmental writers. As for Ed Abbey, I would say, he wrote a novel that sparked an entire environmental movement—have you heard of monkeywrenching or Earth First!?—and a work of nonfiction that some consider the closest thing to a modern Walden, a book that many describe as life-changing.
But for all that, I wasn’t sure at first how relevant Abbey and Stegner would be to my current life when I returned to their work a year ago. My goal was to read everything the two men had written, and I came pretty close. I did my reading in the small writing shack behind my house, a place that I’d nailed together out of plywood and two-by-fours. The shack sat on a marsh, hidden by trees and sometimes flooded during moon tides, and it was as close as I got to daily wildness. During my ordinary life I would head down there in the evening, maybe drink a beer or three, read a little, watch birds. But during the year before my trip, I was all but camped out there. I sat amid a growing pile of Abbey’s and Stegner’s books, biographies of the men, their letters, journals, photographs, and a gerbil’s nest of my own notes.
What I came to believe over the course of the year, and what I suspected all along if I am honest, is that Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, far from being regional or outdated, have never been more relevant. What I came to believe is that, in this overheated and overcrowded world, their books can serve as guides, as surely as any gazetteer, and as maps, as surely as any atlas. It was thrilling, really, if you are allowed to use that word for reading. To see that as far back as fifty years ago Stegner and Abbey were predicting, facing, digesting, and wrestling with the problems that we now think uniquely our own. And that wasn’t all. If the two men had just tackled problems and laid out plans, they might as well have been politicians. In fact, they were a lot more than that: artists who labored to make something great, and human beings who lived vibrant, rich, and often contradictory lives.
AS I READ my way through the year, I noticed a fundamental difference in the pleasure of reading Edward Abbey and that of reading Wallace Stegner. With Abbey it was the pleasure of being in the company of a man who accepted himself as he was (with the hidden invitation to do the same ourselves). With Stegner, for all his honesty about the way we can’t shake our own pasts, there was a vigorous sense of trying to be more.
Reading multiple biographies of Stegner, you got the sense that he charged, or at least marched briskly, through his life. Of the two writers, his career was the more monumental, stretching from his first book in 1937 to his last in 1992, his reputation built by accretion over the decades through essays and biographies and short stories a
nd novels, including the brilliant Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose, written at the age of sixty-two and kicking off the sort of late-life burst we have recently seen from Philip Roth. But while Roth’s turf was the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, Stegner’s was the whole Wild West, and his considerable energy was directed toward both making art and trying to protect the land he loved. He did this in a style that was both inspired and no-nonsense. In The Uneasy Chair, his biography of his friend and fellow western writer Bernard DeVoto, Stegner wrote of DeVoto: “He marshaled facts with great swiftness and made them into generalizations, and he discriminated among ideas with the positiveness of one discriminating between sound and rotten oranges.” There was something of the same briskness, the same intellectual vigor and sweeping aside of the inessential, about Stegner. He was an unrepentant workaholic, and delighted in crossing items off his lists, always working at the multiple tasks of writing, teaching, and environmental advocacy.
WALLACE STEGNER.
He saw the West as clearly distinct from the East due to its aridity and vulnerability to human incursion, but also because the land could be so hostile to those who tried to settle it. Many of his ideas grew directly out of his own childhood, a childhood spent migrating from the Dakotas to Washington State to a frontier homestead in Saskatchewan and then down through Montana before landing in Utah. The man driving the Stegner family’s constant movement was his father, George, whose motivation was one well known in the West: he was looking to strike it rich. His father embodied a type of western character that Stegner would write about all his life, the “boomer” who searched for the quick strike whether in oil, gold, land, or tourism. In contrast to the boomer, Stegner idealized his mother as a “sticker,” one who tried to settle, learn a place, and commit to it. From these latter qualities the writer built the platform from which he both wrote and preached: commitment to place, respect for wild and human communities, responsibility for and to the land. Having grown up with a man who was the classic western “rugged individualist,” Stegner spent a lifetime debunking that myth. And having spent a good deal of his youth in Utah, he was one of the few to see in Mormon culture an overlooked quality that made them one of the only communities to thrive in the West. That quality, surprisingly, was sharing. It’s easy to laugh and note that this notion can get a little twisted when applied to, say, marriage, but it turned out that it worked quite well when it came to sustaining agriculture in what was, despite the insistence of many boomers, a desert. Stegner understood, and put forcefully, the fact that the West’s greatest resource wasn’t gold or oil or uranium or even land, but water. In 1920 drought drove his family from Saskatchewan, the place where the young Wally felt most at home, and he saw in his own past his region’s future. He would have been saddened, but not surprised, by this summer’s conflagrations. Nor would he be surprised that a dry place has become drier.
If there is a sense that Stegner’s career was one vigorous upward march, Abbey’s was, at first, more tentative. As a young man, Abbey read aggressively and compulsively kept journals, mostly morose things through which great streaks of light occasionally flashed. His temperament was depressive, though he preferred the old-fashioned term “melancholic.” In the end he both blazed and stumbled through his career, exciting a cult following with books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang before dying at the young (some would say immature) age of sixty-two in 1989, and being buried illegally in the desert wilderness that he celebrated. While one always had the feeling that the writer behind Stegner’s work had good manners, this could not be said of Abbey. Once, after trying to adhere to the more proper standards of National Geographic, he complained that writing for the magazine was “like trying to jerk off while wearing ski mitts.” And here he is after waking and climbing out of his sleeping bag in the essay “A Walk in the Desert Hills”:
EDWARD ABBEY.
Cocky as a rooster I told myself: you are an artist. An adventurer. A human man. Not some shoe store clerk, kneejerk liberal or kneepad Tory, insurance adjuster or group-encounter therapist or assistant professor of data processing at your Vocational Tech. No androgyne with retracted balls and frightened pizzle. So I told myself; and so I believe right now, and so it has to be.
Arise. Piss. Pull on pants and boots. Build a fire.
Though often poetic and high-minded, Abbey seemed always ready to embrace his own id: his persona was lecherous, combative, unpredictable, contradictory. He was free with insults, too, and with boasts and challenges. All who knew him said he was actually quiet and reserved in person. Not on the page, where he could sometimes be as subtle as a whoopee cushion.
But he could describe nature like no one else. If he was often tagged with that much-overused encomium “a modern Thoreau,” there was some truth to it. Thoreau said he spoke loudly because those he addressed were hard of hearing; if he crowed like a chanticleer, it was to rouse the sleeping. What stirs people? What wakes them up? These were questions that concerned Thoreau, and that concerned Abbey, too. Perhaps the greatest resemblance is between the shapely shapelessness of each man’s greatest books. Abbey’s Desert Solitaire tells the story of a year in the wild in the tradition of Walden, recounting the time Abbey spent as a ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. There were many of these types of pastoral books before Abbey’s and have been many, many since. But there was something different about this one. For one thing it was full of bliss and rage, evoking visceral responses in its readers. It had the ability, as the writer David Quammen put it in his appreciation after Abbey’s death, to “change lives.” It could make a salesman in Ohio buy hiking boots and head west. It was a book about spending a year alone in a government trailer out in a place full of giant twisting red rocks, a book about the rawness of the desert, a book about paradise found and paradise threatened, a book about wedging downward through the bullshit of modern, industrial life in an attempt to find the hard rock of reality. And it was a book largely about Abbey, or the Abbey character, through whom the reader vicariously luxuriates, lounges, rages, and delights. Built in part out of his journals, the Abbey on the pages of the book excited the imaginations of thousands of readers.
Abbey, like Stegner, defined himself as a novelist, and he dismissed Desert Solitaire as mere “journalism.” But as the writer Wendell Berry once said of him, his finest invented character was his nonfiction self, and that self, like Thoreau’s, was a “man with the bark on him.” It is the fun of seeing this contradiction-filled self play out on the page that for most readers overwhelms that self’s occasional idiocies (though quite honestly the idiocy was part of the fun). Abbey claimed the only journalist he admired was Hunter S. Thompson, and it showed. Like Thompson, he attracted groupies and wannabes, and like Thompson he sometimes devolved into shtick. Come see the hairy barbarian and watch what he does next. Too often his jokes came off like bumper stickers (which he admitted a fondness for) and too often his later essay collections seem slapdash, as if to cash in on his fame. But those who neglect Abbey’s brains, or art, do so at their own risk.
Even at its silliest, Abbey’s work, like Stegner’s, never neglected that element that had gone missing in the writing of so many of their East Coast contemporaries: wilderness. And during the ’70s, when plotlessness and metafiction ran amok, the work of both Stegner and Abbey was political in the broadest sense of the word. Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell:
When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land.
Both Stegner and Abbey would eventually be described by their biographers as “reluctant environmentalists,” the reluctant part du
e mostly to their commitment to writing, but reluctant or not, they would become in very distinct ways two of the most effective environmental fighters of the twentieth century. And in their passion for the fight they showed their core kinship, even as their manner of fighting revealed wide personal and stylistic differences. While Stegner’s political thinking was more sophisticated and restrained, Abbey’s words had a rare attribute: they made people act. Monkeywrenching, or environmental sabotage, has recently been lumped together with terrorism, but Abbey could make it seem glorious. After finishing a chapter or two, readers would want to join his band of merry men, fighting the despoiling of the West by cutting down billboards and pulling up surveyors’ stakes and pouring sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers, all of this providing a rare example of true literary influence at work.
It is worth noting that both famously western men were secret easterners. Stegner, well connected through his stint in the ’30s at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, was among the first Briggs-Copeland lecturers at Harvard, and later spent almost all of his summers in Vermont. Abbey, the prototypical western wild man, was born in the East, near the town of Home, Pennsylvania, and didn’t see the West until after high school when he hitchhiked cross-country. Both men were understandably unhappy about the career-deflating tag of “regional writer,” but the tags have stuck to some extent. Like a few of the easterners I’ve talked to, Abbey once jokingly referred to himself as Edward Albee. “Never make the New Yorker’s mistake of taking New York for America,” Stegner warned. Abbey, as usual, was more confrontational about his geographic inferiority complex. He railed against being ignored in print and person. When a friend from New York City suggested that the problem was that Abbey was a big fish in a small pond while he, the New York friend, was a small fish in a big pond, Abbey wrote in his journal: “Perfect. This guy thinks New York is the big pond and the American West the small one.”
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 1