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

by David Gessner

  The only confluence of the lives of the two men came in California at Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Wallace Stegner returned from the East to found in 1946. Too busy teaching writing to involve himself in the even-then stale debate over whether or not writing could be taught, Stegner brought his usual level of commitment to the job. “It was like playing football under Vince Lombardi,” said Ken Kesey, who began One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while at Stanford. Among Stegner’s other students were Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, Nancy Parker, Robert Stone, William Kittredge, and a scraggly hillbilly with a master’s in philosophy named Edward Abbey.

  Abbey attended Stanford briefly, for just two semesters, starting in 1957, driving over the hills from Half-Moon Bay to attend classes. Stegner, a year before he died in 1992, had this to say about Abbey’s time at Stanford: “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. . . . 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.”

  Stegner added that one of Abbey’s responsibilities was to help in reading the materials of applicants for the next year, and that in that role he had come upon a novel focused on football by an applicant named Ken Kesey. Though not required to comment on the manuscript, only to rank it, Abbey couldn’t help himself and wrote: “Football has found its James Jones.”

  Stegner ended his letter: “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.’ ”

  This was written well after the fact, however, when Abbey was already well established as an environmental icon. The truth is that for two writers who shared so many of the same loves and so much of the same subject matter, the two men didn’t seem to make much of an impression on each other. “He has the most distinguished-looking bags under his eyes,” was the only mention Abbey made of his professor in his journal. Later, in a book review in the New York Times, Abbey would say that Stegner suffered from “an excess of moderation,” and that perhaps begins to get at the differences between the two. Stegner, born on a cultureless frontier, spent a lifetime making himself into a person of culture, and valued restraint and reason as virtues. Abbey valued something else.

  Stegner remained generous about his ex-student throughout the rest of their lives, publicly praising his books and regretting that he had not offered more financial aid to help Abbey stay at Stanford longer. But one has to wonder if privately Stegner didn’t find in Abbey that excess of excess that marked the ’60s, which Stegner called “that mangled decade.” The split between the two men was right there in their haircuts: the one sporting a neat, coifed, ever-whitening mane, not a hair out of place, while the other’s hair grew ever longer, his shaggy beard ever shaggier. As the ’60s began, the older writer found himself at odds with some of the young mavericks in the Creative Writing Program, notably with Kesey, who said of their split: “I took LSD and he stayed with Jack Daniel’s.” But it wasn’t the superficial differences that increasingly irritated Stegner. He believed that the hippie philosophy was essentially phony, a false and easy view of life that ignored its hard realities and responsibilities, and when he sorted through the fruit he knew it to be a particularly rotten orange.

  At core one man believed in culture while the other, in a very deep and ingrained sense, was countercultural. But for all their differences they shared common ground. While neither liked to be considered regional, their region deeply concerned them. “The geography of hope” was how Stegner described the western landscape, but as the years passed he felt a growing sense of hopelessness. Abbey also grew more frustrated, and angrier, as he saw the place he loved being despoiled. He came to believe that the proponents of growth were insane men who thought themselves normal but who didn’t understand that growth for growth’s sake was really the rapacious “ideology of the cancer cell.” He wrote: “They would never understand that an economic system that can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.” Both men fought until the end of their lives to preserve the land they loved, but for both it was an increasingly desperate fight.

  Would they be surprised at what the West has become? I doubt it. The region was already heading the way it has gone and they were among the first to point this out. True, they couldn’t have known the full extent of man’s capacity to alter climate and make the region an even hotter and drier place. But today’s West is a kind of fulfillment of their darker prophecies, and if they died too soon to know the role that climate change would play, they were acutely aware of the way that the West’s aridity made it more vulnerable than the rest of the country. Indeed, drought has helped aid massive fires and bark-beetle infestations that have already destroyed close to 20 percent of the region’s trees. As for the boom in fracking and other mining, it would not have surprised them one whit. The West had always been a resource colony, there to be exploited.

  That is the West I was headed toward. A place of startling beauty and jaw-dropping sights. But also a place in a world of trouble. It seems to me that anyone who cares to really think about the planet today has to hold both of these things in mind, to remember to see the beauty, and to still take joy in that beauty but not shy away from the hard and often ugly reality. And it seems to me that Stegner and Abbey, who after all walked this same path before us, are well suited to help guide us in this difficult task.

  Robert Frost, whom Stegner got to know at Bread Loaf, wrote in “The Oven Bird”: “The question that he frames in all but words / is what to make of a diminished thing?”

  That is my question too.

  IN LATE SPRING I began to spend even more time out in my writing shack, surrounded by books, mostly reading but also checking in with the abandoned wren’s nest above my window and staring out at the marsh where the secretive birds called clapper rails hid and let loose their sporadic, riotous songs. Samuel Johnson once said that the most important element of biography is that which we can “put to use” in our own lives. I agree. I have always been a selfish reader, and as the year went on I read more and more selfishly. As it happened, I too was a writer, a teacher, a father, an environmentalist, and so was greedy for what Abbey and Stegner could offer.

  In late May I bought several maps, maps of the West in general and of the Colorado Plateau in particular. I daydreamed and doodled over the maps, planning out routes, circling places I had to see. And then in June, before launching my larger journey, I took a couple of preliminary trips. In Vermont, I visited Wallace’s only child, Page Stegner, on the lush green land where his father once summered and where Crossing to Safety, his final novel, takes place. In Pennsylvania, I was given a tour of Abbey’s childhood haunts by Jim Cahalan, Abbey’s biographer.

  THE VIEW WEST FROM THE WRITING SHACK.

  These trips were nice, but by summer solstice I was growing restless. There was an obvious missing ingredient in what I was learning about the two writers. “I may not know who I am but I know where I am from,” wrote Stegner. Exactly. If any two people grew directly out of the places they loved it was these two. Vermont and Pennsylvania were fine, helpful. But neither of these were the landscapes that truly defined the men.

  It is westward, of course, that you go to find Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner.

  And so in early July, I finally packed up my books and maps and headed west.

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  FIRST SIGHT

  The land buckles and rises.

  For a thousand miles it rolls out, sometimes up and down and sometimes flat like a carpet, all the way from the old crumbling eastern mountains. But then comes a kink in the carpet. A big kink. The continent lifts itself up, its back rising, and most Homo sapiens who are seeing that lift for the first or second or even the fifty-third time feel a corresponding lift in their chests. A feeling of possibility, of risk, of excitement.

  That was what I felt, at least, as the West announced itself. What had been a sometimes imperceptible rise for the last few hundred miles suddenly became an undeniable one. The continent convulsed and lifted, mountains thrusting into the sky.

  It is an inherently American moment. The same moment that trappers and early pioneers wrote about in their diaries. That mystical moment when East becomes West. The place where the country finally gets bored with itself and reaches for the sky.

  Here is the seventeen-year-old Ed Abbey’s reaction upon first seeing the sight he had dreamed of: “There on the western horizon, under a hot, clear sky, sixty miles away, crowned with snow (in July), was a magical vision, a legend come true: the front range of the Rocky Mountains. An impossible beauty, like a boy’s first sight of an undressed girl, the image of those mountains struck a fundamental chord in my imagination that has sounded ever since.”

  My first sight came at about 130 miles out. A hazy blue outline like a whale half submerged. I would hate to argue with Abbey, but the mountains I was seeing were not really the front range, or at least not the front line of the front range, but the mountains behind them, mountains that, as I got closer, would be foreshortened out of sight by the view of those in front. These farther mountains loomed, bald for the most part after the weak winter but a few tiger-striped with snow. For someone coming toward them from the plains they stood as a clear statement of change, serving notice you were entering a different realm. They shimmered like a mirage but they were not a mirage. Ledge after ledge, ridge after ridge.

  I rolled down the window and it was cool. A godshaft of dying light slanted toward me, coming from behind Longs Peak. The weather had broken, but all summer the mountains had been on fire, and those fires, the most destructive in the state’s history, had scarred the hills both to the north and south of Denver. In June the mountains had been hidden behind a veil of smoke. And yet there they were, and, despite the fires, despite the drought, despite myself, I was feeling that old feeling and getting excited.

  Most of us who were born in the East have stories about our first time seeing the western mountains. My initial sighting came when I drove out here after college with two good friends, and from the far back of a Toyota Tercel, where I had been banished after falling asleep behind the wheel in Alabama, felt my jaw drop upon seeing the hazy, trippy mountains of New Mexico. The next time I visited the interior West I came from San Francisco and the next on a train trip from Massachusetts to Denver, where I pulled in at night. But it was the fourth trip, my third from east to west, that stands out and retains something of personal myth. I was thirty years old and had spent the previous year back in my depressed and depressing hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. I was there because my girlfriend of seven years had, with my support, chosen to attend medical school in Worcester, and I’d thought myself mentally strong enough to withstand a return to that dying place. I was wrong. The first few months I sunk into a morass of depression and unemployment, and that was before I found out I had testicular cancer. My operation occurred the week of my thirtieth birthday, followed by a month of radiation treatment, which sapped me of energy and hope. But it was in the midst of radiation that I was delivered from Worcester through a kind of deus ex machina. The December before I’d applied to graduate schools, but in keeping with the overall failure of that year I had been rejected by all of them. All except one. That one was in Boulder, Colorado, and by the following August, recovering now from radiation and growing stronger, I found myself heading there.

  Declared clean from cancer, I was so excited that I drove across the country in little more than two days. My car, a Buick Electra, was overdue for inspection, but it seemed to make no sense to register it in Massachusetts when I would soon be living in a whole new state. The unregistered car lent a western outlaw element to the trip, as did the fact that each day, after my coffee buzz wore off, I turned to sipping beer. I drove through almost the entire second night in that manner, grabbing a hotel for a few hours near the Colorado line. Seeing the Rockies the next morning at dawn—the peaks white and full and completely unexpected—was one of the most elevated moments I have ever experienced. It hit me with a jolt: my new life! Had John Denver himself come on the radio I would have started weeping, and whatever did come on I assure you I warbled along. I felt real joy then, and hope. It was a feeling of coming back from the dead, a feeling of renewal, and it is a feeling that I will forever associate with going west.

  WALLACE STEGNER SPENT his formative years in the West on what he called “the bald-assed prairie.” Not so Ed Abbey, who grew up in the green skunky hills of western Pennsylvania, a lopsided land of hollers and thick vegetation. If our childhood homes imprint on us, then the place that first formed Abbey couldn’t have been more different from the one that formed Stegner. One was closed-in enough to leave you feeling claustrophobic, the other open enough to make you feel both small and singular. One hunched up its shoulders and blocked the view of neighbors, the other laid the land open. One was, for all intents and purposes, a rain forest while on the other drought always threatened.

  I knew Abbey’s hills a little thanks to his biographer, Jim Cahalan. A month before my trip west, in early June, I’d visited him in the town of Home, where Abbey spent what he considered the best years of his childhood. I was immediately struck by the slant of the place, the sheer green, the lushness, the shade of the hills. Up that far north, the word Appalachia is not used much, but Appalachia it is.

  This was the landscape that Abbey knew as a child, the place where he grew up without running water or electricity. Abbey would gain fame for celebrating a southwestern landscape that was sere, strange, red, and haunting, but he would not see that landscape until he was seventeen. The landscape he first knew was verdant, overgrown, and hilly, a place where farms always seemed ready to slide sideways off of the hills.

  As we drove toward the old Abbey farm, Jim pointed out that while Abbey liked to claim he was born in Home, he was in fact born in the larger nearby town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and his early years had been almost as migratory as Wallace Stegner’s, his family moving constantly as his parents tried to make ends meet.

  Abbey would remain close to his parents his whole life. Paul Revere Abbey, his iconoclastic father, was an unrepentant Socialist who cried when the Soviet Union fell and fearlessly spouted his political opinions, which imprinted themselves on young Ned Abbey as surely as the landscape. His mother was better educated and more refined, but equally tough. He would always think of her as “saintly,” and Mildred Abbey didn’t fall too short of that mark: a tiny ball of energy, she taught first grade, raised five children, and essentially ran the Presbyterian church down the road. In her spare time she took walks over hill and dale, played Chopin on the family piano after the kids were tucked in, and studied at the local college until she was eighty. Her own father looked down on the family of her husband. Paul, with little education, was an immensely capable Jack-of-all-trades, though the job he liked best was the solitary one of cutting down trees in the forest. His early years had been spent working in mines, where he picked up the politics of populist fever, and he later worked selling real estate, hawking magazine subscriptions, logging, farming, and driving a school bus on the side.

  “Actually, he did pretty much everything on the side,” Jim said as we pulled up to the old homestead.

  Money was always short and the Abbeys were rootless. Until they moved to this farm when Abbey was fourteen. Wallace Stegner would freque
ntly romanticize his home in Saskatchewan, seeing it as his great childhood idyll, and Abbey romanticized this place, which he called the Old Lonesome Briar Patch. Here Abbey grew up without flush toilets, with a gun sometimes in hand, and with an intimacy with animals both wild and tame. He loved roaming the nearby Big Woods, where the boys trapped and hunted, and he loved books, reading hundreds of them, and baseball, setting up games against nearby neighborhoods. At home he did his best to avoid chores, showing an early gift for indolence. At school he was quiet, something of a loner, but people always suspected he was smart, and he had a gift for words right off the bat.

  ABBEY WITH HIS PARENTS, PAUL AND MILDRED.

  Jim and I didn’t actually get to look inside the house that Abbey loved so, since it had burned down in the early ’70s, but the old pump house remained, and looming above it was a huge gnarled, crooked evergreen, one I remembered seeing a sketch of somewhere in Abbey’s journals. A horse chomped grains in the open cellar below the pump house. While we explored the place, a neighbor strolled down the hill to say hello. Her name was Cathy, and it turned out that hers was the family that had bought the house from the Abbeys in 1967.

  “I remember that Paul was a very smart man,” she said. “Mildred, too, but that was more obvious. Paul hadn’t had much school but he read a lot. In fact they left a bunch of books behind when they moved out. When we first moved in we used their old washtub as our dining-room table for a while and stacked up piles of books as our chairs.”

  I asked her if she remembered anything else.

  “I remember his hands. They were big hands. They could fit over a can of paint.”

  Paul and Mildred had five children, all boys except for Nancy. The boys were thin, rangy, tall, laconic like their dad.