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

by David Gessner

  All in all, it would be hard to exaggerate how transformed I felt. It was not just being healthy again or the new life I found there. I felt, rather, like I had become a new person. A kind of giddiness about where I lived came over me, a definite sense of liberation. Edward Abbey spoke of a chord being rung, as if he’d found a match for something inside him in his new landscape. It would not be going too far to say that I knew a little of how he felt. I was coming back from the dead after all, and playing out an essential American trope: heading west to remake myself.

  Now, returning to Eldorado Springs, I felt memories flood back in, the memories aided by the weather. We were in the midst of the hottest summer on record, and just a week before the residents of Denver had experienced an unheard-of five consecutive 100-degree days. But a cold front had preceded my arrival, sweeping out the heat, and for one day at least it felt just like that long-ago fall, cool almost cold air blowing down the canyon. The smells and the nap of the air were familiar: the lack of humidity, the dryness, the smell of sage, the crumbly plants all around. Everything so clear in the dry air. I do not pretend to Stegner’s perspicacity, and I can’t claim that I had any immediate revelations about the landscapes of the East and West when I arrived two decades before. But I did notice that something was different about my new home. The air, for one. My nose had never been so dry, my hair so flat, and my heart, not accustomed to the altitude, never so ready to trill off into palpitation.

  Eldorado Springs is a town of dirt roads and maybe a hundred cottages. It is also home to a state park, which I now pulled into. The dirt road—and the roaring creek—run down through a canyon of salmon-streaked rock, and when I climbed out of the car the rocks rose so high above me that I had to bend my head all the way back to see their tops. I took a short walk, stopping on the shaky wooden bridge that spanned the water. Because dryness so defines the West, so does the water that flows through that dryness like lifeblood. Tree swallows shot out over the creek, feasting on insects and exposing their white bellies. This was the same creek where I saw the water ouzels dip, the creek where I took my daily baths that long-ago fall. Swollen by the recent rains, it spilled over the sides, cold and clear. I had the park to myself except for the rock climbers, two hundred feet up, doing their insane death-defying thing, wedging fingers into cracks before hefting their bodies upward.

  I pulled my bike off the back of the car and pedaled out of the park to the middle of the tiny town. Eldorado’s famous spring water used to come straight out of a hose in the side of the wall of an old building in the town center. Now it had been rigged up as a kind of self-service device where you needed to pay twenty-five cents. I dropped in my quarter and filled my water bottle and then started the climb back into the park. The road headed up, parallel to the creek, and I climbed with it, breathing heavily. Up is where everything seems to head in this landscape, unless of course it is heading down. So many of my memories of this place were of climbing, of sweating to gain elevation. I was not a father yet, nor a teacher, was barely a writer, really. But I was after something and I think I knew, even then, what that something was.

  “Transcendence,” Abbey wrote in his journal. “It is this which haunts me night and day. The desire to transcend my own limits, to exceed myself, to become more than I am. Why? I don’t know. To transcend this job, this work, this place, this kind of life—for the sake of something superlative, supreme, exalting.”

  I stared up at the purple rock faces streaked yellow with lichen from bird dung. A small ponderosa pine clung to the steep wall, growing almost horizontally out of the sheer fountain sandstone. Near the top of the road the creek flattened out and the water, no longer descending and gushing over rock, turned a copper color. I leaned my bike against the visitor center and watched two ruby-throated hummingbirds chase each other: the green backs, the zigzag speed, the blur of the wings. One stopped to drink and hovered, entirely still except for the wings, leaning its head back like a kingfisher. I went inside and soon was talking to a woman behind the desk, a ranger named Chelsea, about the recent fires and record heat, and then, abruptly, found myself laughing out loud when I saw the book behind her on her desk. It was, of course, Desert Solitaire.

  Upon first spotting the book it seemed like a great coincidence, a talisman of sorts. But back outside, biking down not up, I understood that it really wasn’t such a big deal. It sometimes seems that it’s required by law for every western ranger to keep Desert Solitaire close by, like having a handy fire extinguisher. It’s a book that has created more than its share of rangers, and certainly has created plenty of nouveau westerners.

  When I’d lived here last I was full, maybe stuffed, with the romance of the place. We’ve all heard the songs and stories of the mythic pull of the American West, and the oft-repeated narratives of the easterners who go west to re-create themselves. It’s there in the histories and the Westerns, in both high culture and low, from Teddy Roosevelt leaving behind what he called “the taint of Eastern effeminacy” to become the most manly of manly men, to John Denver warbling, “He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, coming home to a place he’d never been before.” In all of these accounts there’s a sense of the almost religious conversion that infects so many of those who leave behind their old places and head west to find home.

  I felt it too, though with a particular twist. While those who redefine themselves in the West have been much chronicled by pop singers, historians, moviemakers, and artists, I was part of a less-noted group of migrants. This smaller group finds not just their geographical home in the West, but their literary one. Back then I thought my brand of western awakening unusual, but I now recognize myself as a type. The type I was, the apprentice literary westerner, was as common as sagebrush, and if you were to examine the bedside table of that type, over the last thirty years, you would find, depending on the exact date, reading material like that which soon started piling up on mine: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass’s The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, Charles Bowden’s Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness.

  At the time of my arrival in the West, in August of 1991, I hadn’t yet read any of those books, nor had I read a word of Stegner. But I did already have one such book packed in my luggage in the trunk of the Buick Electra. It was a battered and dog-eared copy of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, an old mass-market paperback with its spine held together by duct tape, and it would prove a fine guide to my new landscape. I had picked it up a couple of years before during an earlier trip west, and its effect was immediate. While car camping in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, I read Desert Solitaire almost straight through, and when the book’s author suggested that car camping was not really camping at all, I took his challenge and headed, for the first time in my life, alone into the backcountry. I spent that uneasy night wide-awake, hearing grizzlies in the footfall of every deer that grazed near my campsite by the lake.

  I came to Ed Abbey relatively late, already twenty-eight when I made that camping trip. In this way I was spared the worst of the cultish emulation that tends to strike first-time Abbey readers: the buying of an old pickup, the entry-level monkeywrenching, the constant over-the-top exhortations about fighting the man. It is true that I began to eat refried beans from a can during my year in Eldorado Springs, a dietary choice directly influenced by reading Abbey. But what attracted me to the man were not the externals but lines like this: “On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand.”

  And this: “I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.”

  And: “Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite.”

  I liked the way the sentences rang out, an anthem, or so it seemed to me at the time, of my own return to
animal health.

  TO SEE THE romance of the West isn’t difficult. Most Americans grow up steeped in it. Indeed, thanks to Hollywood, most humans do.

  To see the reality of the West takes somewhat sharper eyes.

  Wallace Stegner spent a lifetime ripping aside the veils of western myths and rationalizations, starting with the ugly first facts of extinction: “No one who has ever studied western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.” Stegner knew that the same impulse to conquest remained very much alive. “The West does not need to explore its myths much further,” he wrote, “it has already relied on them too long.”

  Behind this sometimes cutting criticism of his home region there lurked a question. The question stayed with Wallace Stegner his whole life: how could human beings best inhabit the massive, challenging, and unique landscape west of the 100th meridian?

  For starters, he knew how we shouldn’t inhabit it. He knew this instinctively, from childhood, but he also knew it from long study and thought. We shouldn’t inhabit it like a bunch of drunken raiders. We shouldn’t come to a place, core it out, and leave behind the husk. Both his experience and his studies had taught him that this had historically been the most common relationship of man to western land, or at least of post-aboriginal man. Men came to the West to get something and get out. At that they had done a fine job, masters of extraction. One of the first things they extracted from the West, for instance, had been beavers, and they had done so at such a startling clip that the trade went from boom to nonexistent in less than a decade. Ditto buffalo, trees, gold, silver, you name it. They approached the new land with a kind of chronic rapacity, a gnawing hunger.

  That was how it was: humans went to a place, took from it, left the place behind. Even western agriculture, to Stegner’s mind, most often fit this bill. He had learned this firsthand from the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. His family had tilled the dry land without any deeper understanding of its ecology, destroying the topsoil and leaving behind their very own dustbowl, just as thousands of other families were creating dustbowls around the West. In his unpublished autobiography, Stegner writes of his own culpability: “While shooting, trapping, drowning out, snaring, and poisoning the gophers, we also did unforgivable damage to the prairie dogs, black footed ferrets, badgers, and other members of the wild community on the prairie, and we helped prepare a future dust bowl by plowing up buffalo grass that should never have been plowed, and that had to be restored to grass, at great provincial expense, in the 1930s.”

  This was not malicious, but it was not intelligent, either. It was certainly not, in the language of the present, sustainable. Topsoil from denuded farms all over the West flowed sludgelike down western rivers and by the 1930s dust from western lands was announcing its own disaster in the great clouds that blew all the way back to Washington, DC.

  This was the West that Stegner knew in his bones, having lived out this essential western drama. He had watched it destroy not just the land but his family. Watched his mother’s desperate attempts to root down, to make a home, as his father, beguiled by his own dreams, moved on in hopes of the next strike. Specifically, he had watched the damage that false hope and illusion could bring to human lives. All the pretending and the myths were, to his eye, no more real than the false fronts of the towns in Hollywood westerns.

  To combat this, one of Stegner’s primary goals was to strip away myth. To see things as they were. The West, Americans had long been told, was the Garden of the World, a kind of American Eden. The West was a Promised Land, a place of new starts and possibilities, a place that may at first seem dry but where, the boosters and their scientist backers told pioneers in the 1800s, “rain follows the plow”—that is, where cultivation of the land would lead naturally to more rainfall. Doozies like this were presented as fact, one of the many dreams sold to entice people. But the reality that settlers found was quite different. They found, with a few exceptions, vast arid and semiarid lands of wildly varying landscapes and violent weather extremes, held together by one thing, what Stegner called “the unity of drouth.”

  Drouth, or drought, defined the West. Stegner wrote: “With local and minor exceptions, the lands beyond the hundredth meridian received less than twenty inches of rainfall, and twenty inches was the minimum for unaided agriculture.” This was the fact, not the myth, but it was a fact that was not acceptable to “the apostles of progress,” both in government and business, who pushed for westward expansion. The critical mistake, in Stegner’s mind, was taking habits and lessons learned in the wet, green East and transplanting them to the dry West. The most basic of those mistakes, born of illusion, was the Homestead Act, which allotted 160 acres for each settler, treating the United States as if its regions were all of a piece: “It took a man to break and hold a homestead of 160 acres even in the subhumid zone. It took a superman to do it on the arid plains.”

  Stegner knew all this instinctively, in a way no easterner could, but it was only years of study that allowed him to take this personal, instinctive feeling and transform it into something universal and artistic. He had been thinking overtly about these issues at least as far back as his college years, when he read Clarence Edward Dutton’s Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (1880), a book that would later spark a PhD dissertation on Dutton. Then, while he was teaching at the University of Wisconsin, he discovered the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the first historians who tried to understand the meaning of the frontier for the United States as a whole. But this was all preamble, and it would take meeting Bernard DeVoto at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1939 to push his thinking to deeper and more universal levels. At that moment Stegner was thirty and DeVoto was forty-two, already famous, opinionated, wildly engaging. They would become good friends and would stay friends as Cambridge neighbors, and, after DeVoto’s death, Stegner would write a biography of DeVoto, at least in part to correct what he saw as the misconceptions and underappreciation of his ornery friend. Like Stegner, DeVoto was a born westerner who thought hard about what the West meant. He was also a cantankerous, brilliant, opinionated, often angry, sometimes charming man who pushed the younger Stegner to defend and broaden his ideas. As Stegner developed intellectually the pushing also went the other way, and there are times it is hard to parse where DeVoto ends and Stegner begins.

  DeVoto decried “the economy of liquidation” that had prevailed in the West since it was first settled, a philosophy that applied to aquifers and farms as well as mines. In the West “the miner’s right to exploit transcends all other rights whatsoever.” As for agriculture, it soon became clear that it was impossible without irrigation, and that irrigation itself was impossible without the massive dams that only the federal government could build. Which, combined with the fact that much grazing and mining occurred on public land, made westerners chronically dependent on government help. In fact, contrary to the image of rugged individualism, westerners were more dependent on help and community than any other region. Dams, irrigation, free private use of public land. It all amounted to a rugged, beautiful, and wild welfare state.

  For Bernard DeVoto, it was key that for many coming from the East the first sight of the West began with “an illusion and a misconception.” Upon first seeing the Rockies many travelers thought they saw clouds, not mountains. This illusion was important to DeVoto, because if the West spoke of hope it also spoke of fear, of vast places where terrible things could happen, and those heading there “traveled toward paradise and frequently arrived at inferno.” If the West was a promise, it was a promise often left unfulfilled.

  The promise still draws people to the West—in droves, actually. In recent years, the West has boomed like no other area in the country. Those who travel here now come by car and plane, not by stagecoach, and they often forget that the old dangers remain. But computers and cell phones can’t hide this more primal reality, and during the summer of my trip the country was relearning the truth of DeVoto’s line about
the region: “A light winter means a hard summer.” It is a truth that had hit particularly hard with last winter’s snowpack reaching only 50 percent of its norm, with much of the precipitation falling as rain, which, unlike snow, doesn’t stick around. DeVoto also warned that due to the West’s dryness it is less resilient than other places, and that the snowpack is the only thing that keeps the West from being as empty as the Sahara.

  He wrote: “Catastrophe might destroy half the region.”

  During the summer of 2012, the hottest on record to that point, that catastrophe was playing out in the form of historic fires.

  I SPENT MY SECOND night in the West in a hotel in Boulder, and the next morning got up early to bike up Flagstaff Mountain to see the scars from the recent Bear Peak fire. Joining me for the climb were two old friends, Chris Brooks and Rob Bleiberg. Chris, a lifelong Coloradan, had been an Ultimate Frisbee teammate of mine. Rob had too, and we had become roommates after I moved from Eldorado Springs to Boulder during my second year in Colorado.

  In deference to the out-of-shape easterner, Chris and Rob agreed to cheat a little and use the car to get up to the summit parking lot of Flagstaff. Rob was visiting from the western slope, where he directed the Mesa County Land Conservancy in Grand Junction. His main job there was to try to convince western slope ranchers to put their vast acreage into conservation trust, and not to sell out to those who wanted to develop or drill on the land.

  “People come to Grand Junction and take stuff out of the ground and then take the money back to Houston,” Rob said as we drove to the summit. “It’s 2012 and they still regard this place as a resource colony.”

  Rob is a strong, square-shouldered man who in many ways embodies a certain western myth. Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Rob came from a family where his grandfather, great-grandfather, and two uncles were all rabbis. He had little interest in the West, or wilderness, until his sophomore year at Wesleyan, when his teacher, Bill “Brutus” Lester, took ten students on a twenty-one-day hiking trip through the high Sierras. They hiked and camped, reading John Muir and Edward Abbey at night. “It was a transformative experience,” Rob said. By the next summer he had finagled an internship with the National Park Service working in North Cascade National Park, where he would spend five nights at a time alone in the backcountry collecting bear scat for scientific analysis. A year later he had become a wilderness ranger in Eagles Nest Wilderness in Colorado. After graduation he left the East behind and never looked back.