“The West was nothing to me and then after it was everything,” he said.
His reading kept apace with his hiking, and when he moved into my rental cabin in Boulder in 1993 he filled up the living-room bookshelves with the work of Wallace Stegner. For a while I left those books unread, but eventually I picked one up. That was the accidental beginning of a deeper education about my new home.
I had last visited Rob in 2008, when I traveled to Grand Junction to write an article on the latest oil boom. The town was then spilling over with oil workers and I paid $220 for my hotel room. “Exxon rates,” the locals called them. Everywhere you looked you saw young men in big trucks, though Rob cautioned me when I said that I was pretty sure I was the only guest in the hotel without a tattoo and a four-by-four.
“What would you do if you had the choice? You’re a kid with a high school education. Do you work at Burger King or make a hundred grand a year in the oil fields?”
He shook his head.
“The case for not selling out gets harder and harder. I see it every day. We work with ranchers to keep the land in their families. The tools are complicated and it takes a long time to get things done. It’s the opposite of instant gratification.”
“We aren’t just fighting the lure of money,” he added. “We’re fighting a society that teaches us we should get what we want and get it right now.”
Rob was an old friend and I was therefore allowed to tease him at will. But I decided not to tell him that his Stegner was showing.
We reached the Flagstaff summit and took the bikes off the back of my car. Though it was the summit of that particular mountain, there was plenty of up left. We pedaled the steep section above the summit that we used to call Old Bill. Rob seemed to get some slight sadistic pleasure in seeing me gasping for air like a landed fish. I made it to the top, just barely, and only after Chris pedaled up and shouted encouragement, finally pushing my bike from behind during the steepest section.
After we reached the top we rode down the mountain’s other side so we could get a good look at the area that had burned. A charred ridgeline greeted us. Chris told me that all June Boulderites had stared up at the smoke, praying that winds wouldn’t blow toward town.
“It’s so dry that the mountain houses would be like kindling,” Rob said.
Of course, what went unsaid is that Boulder had been lucky, at least compared to other front range towns. Less than two weeks before, the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs had leapt over two lines of containment to torch houses in the city proper. It became the most destructive fire in the state’s history, destroying 350 homes, surpassing the record of 259 set only nine days earlier by the High Park fire in Fort Collins (which would be surpassed again the next summer). A decade earlier, when Colorado experienced a similar if less destructive fire season, those in the firefighting community were skeptical of the role that climate change played in the fires. No longer. With record temperatures and light snowpack the fire season now regularly starts almost two months earlier than it did just a decade ago. A century of fire suppression has led to forests unpurged by smaller fires, and therefore packed with deadfall and groundcover that helps light up the drought-dried wood like torches. And with more people building houses in fire-prone areas there is plenty of added fuel. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the trophy homes that line the beaches in the Outer Banks in coastal North Carolina, houses that have been set up like bowling pins to be knocked down by the next hurricane. In both places it is most often the wealthy who build homes that are endangered, and frequently these are second homes. I thought of how, back in Carolina, summer is always an anxious time, with people awaiting the beginning of hurricane season. Here they awaited fire. There was also another similarity. The same fervent belief in rebuilding infects both the homeowners who have seen their homes burned down and those who have seen theirs slammed by the sea.
“Rebuild!” they all shout. But there are other voices too, and more than there used to be, voices that suggest that perhaps it would be better not to rebuild. You could argue that, with the embers barely cooled and whole towns engulfed in tragedy, this wasn’t the right moment to question the wisdom of rebuilding in the dry Colorado hills. Or maybe it was the exact right moment. In the fervor after a disaster there is always talk first of loss, then of hope and rebuilding. What there is not a lot of is cold-eyed clarity.
Which is where DeVoto and Stegner help. In this burning summer, these two dead writers couldn’t be more alive. In a time of drought and fires it is hard not to return to their central contention: that this land that we are treating like the land of any other region is in fact quite different, a near desert, and that its life depends on that not-always-reliable snowpack. Much more reliable are the cycles of drought, which have been a part of the West forever. As it happens we are now in the midst of one of those cycles. It would be wise to acknowledge this and deal accordingly.
What would that mean? For starters, acknowledging that there is a reason that the West has always been relatively unpeopled. Large stretches of it are simply not fit for human habitation. The booster says, “Well, let’s make them fit!” The Stegnerian realist says, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t live there.” Don’t move to a place where your houses are likely to serve as kindling. There are some places that are better left alone.
But what’s the point of saying this now, when the houses are already built and when those burned will surely be rebuilt, the genie already out of the bottle? Because we are at this moment seeing many of the things that Stegner and DeVoto warned about coming home to roost. And because even if warnings are not heeded, they still must be given.
Stegner understood well the necessity of hope, but in the end knew that cold-eyed clarity was more important. Today cold-eyed clarity tells us this: the world is warming and some of the places that are least ready to adapt to that warming are places that are already, as Stegner called them, “subhumid and arid lands.” In a place already on the edge, a slight tip puts you over. In a place where drought is already commonplace, more heat and less rain are killers.
The majority of climatologists believe that, along with low-lying coastal areas, it will be the water-stressed areas of the world that will be most affected by climate change. At first this sounds simple to the point of being a tautology. It isn’t. They are not merely saying that the dry places will be hardest hit. They are saying that the driest places, like the American Southwest, will change the most compared with their baseline. And how will they change? The predictions are consistent. Drought is, by definition, an anomalous word, but what we now call drought will become the norm. And with that as a new baseline, the droughts will be of a sort the region hasn’t seen since the Middle Ages, when so-called megadroughts drove the Puebloan people from the region.
For Wallace Stegner, real knowledge of a place, and science, trumped myth. And what science is now telling us is straightforward: that a place that historically had little water will have less.
“WE WATCHED THE fire for days,” Reg Saner told me an hour later, over lunch.
Rob and Chris had biked home, while I rode back to my car at the Flagstaff summit. There was no time for a shower before racing to meet Reg for lunch in town.
“There was a voluntary evacuation but I wasn’t going to leave,” he continued. “I’d calculated that there wasn’t enough vegetation to burn between the mountains and our house.”
Reg is one of the few people who can speak a sentence like that and not sound ridiculous. “Calculated,” when he says it, really means something. He is the smartest man I know. At almost eighty years old, he still looks like Marcus Aurelius—noble brow and Roman nose—and sounds like him too, come to think about it.
Reg was my first and best teacher in the West. If reading the books that Rob Bleiberg had left on my shelves proved the accidental beginning of my deeper education, then with Reg the accidental became intentional. During my third year in the West, I began taking classes with him, including a
n independent study that required that I read one book a week by Wallace Stegner. Most of the professors who taught at the writing school I attended in Boulder seemed like they could have come from anywhere and been writing about anyplace. Not Reg. He’d spent his entire adult life studying the West, its landscape and people.
When I told him about my new project he feigned interest, but I knew he was skeptical. Abbey was not his type, a tad too flamboyant for his refined tastes. As for Stegner, I remembered what Reg said to me back during our independent study: “He was a man who knew a lot. And who knew he knew a lot.” It’s hard to deny this. Some saw Stegner’s confidence as overconfidence or worse. Stegner knew it too. In Crossing to Safety, his stand-in character’s wife compares his character to their imperious friend Charity, and then says of them both: “Neither of you would win any prizes for self-doubt.”
While Reg may be somewhat critical of Stegner, you could make an argument that he has as valid a claim as anyone to being Stegner’s heir, at least in terms of large-scale thinking about the West. Both a mountaineer and a philosopher (he would deny the second), he has spent six decades roaming the West, climbing its mountains and talking to its people and exploring the haunts of its ancient indigenous cultures. After these explorations he heads back home to Boulder and takes what he has learned and turns it into poems and essays. To my mind these essays are brilliant—brilliant in the old-fashioned sense: glittering mosaics full of light. But they are also filled with facts that, taken together, provide a geologic and human history of the West. Those facts do not make for a pretty picture.
When I brought this up, Reg shook his head.
“I’m afraid I don’t see too much reason for optimism,” he said. “The problem is simple enough: too many humans.”
I nodded. In just the time since I’d lived here, the western population had boomed. The 2010 census revealed that four of the five fastest-growing states were all in the West (with Texas, its own country, the fifth), and that for the first time in United States history, the population of the West exceeded that of the Midwest.
Twenty years ago, when I was his student, Reg was already fairly pessimistic about the fate of the region. But in the time since, new reasons for pessimism have arisen, with climate joining population as a central, seemingly ineradicable factor of the western crisis. While I didn’t know it at the time, the years I was here were wet ones, full of false promise, but the years since have been ones of historic dryness and temperature rise. While most scientists agree that this is due to anthropogenic, or human-caused, factors, in some ways it doesn’t really matter what is causing the change. The point is that it is here. The moisture, always precious, has been sucked out of the region.
If climate ends up having a radical effect on human culture, and it’s pretty hard to see how it won’t, then Reg for one can say that the West has seen it all before. He is a man who thinks big, and both the cosmos and geological time weave through his mediations, daydreams, and resultant writings. In particular, he has spent many years exploring the ancient ruins of the Anasazi and other Pueblo cultures, and like anyone else who has thought deeply about those southwestern cultures he has ended up considering a central question: why did these people, who had so long and so well inhabited the dry lands, suddenly leave? To ask this question among sophisticated westerners is to open an interesting and of course speculative can of worms. But no discussion can avoid certain facts. These facts, revealed to scientists by the rings of trees, tell us that in the year 1130 a great drought began, and that it is around this time that we see a desertion of flourishing communities like those at Chaco Canyon. That drought paled when compared to the Great Drought of 1276 to 1299, which seems to have driven the last of the Puebloans out of the region. In other words, climate had its way.
But while the people left, their homes remained, preserved and mummified by the dryness of the desert. In the region where I now live, we have myths of Atlantis, myths that are becoming more relevant as the sea rises. But here you can see and walk through an arid Atlantis. In fact, many of the sites are unmarked and I can’t think of many better moments on Earth than when, after a long desert hike, you see a dwelling that at first seems a part of the stone cliff you are staring up at, like a swallow’s tunnel, and then clarifies itself into the most organic of human homes, made of the stone it grows out of. In his essay “The Pleasure of Ruin,” Reg writes: “When it comes to proto-Pueblos like the Anasazi, the who without the where becomes unimaginable, so fused with their culture were the high deserts they lived in and by means of.”
That such a placed people could be displaced is remarkable, and that climate had a hand in the displacing undeniable. Theirs was a climate change that had nothing to do with the fact that they drove their cars too much. But it was a change that demonstrated climate’s power. And today in thinking about the desertion of Chaco or Mesa Verde, is it such a long jump to thinking about Phoenix or Las Vegas?
I won’t pretend, however, that Reg and I spent our entire forty-five-minute lunch, between bites of our burgers, discussing high matters of the cosmos, climate, and distant culture. Much of it was actually spent talking about how his family was doing, and how, in turn, my wife, Nina, and my daughter, Hadley, were. Geological time was important to Reg, but the present mattered too. He had particular fun with the fact that since leaving Boulder in 1997 I had stored a trunk filled with old manuscripts in his basement.
“The Smithsonian called the other day inquiring about the Gessner papers,” he said.
Reg paid the bill, as always. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that he had appeared in my life at almost the exact moment my father died, the universe providing.
Before I hit the road, I promised I would visit again when Nina and Hadley arrived in a few weeks. For today my goal was to get up over the Continental Divide and into the real mountains by late afternoon. I knew that Reg, for his part, didn’t like good-byes and used to have the habit of paying the bill and ducking out when I went to the bathroom. Now we saw each other so infrequently that saying good-bye was particularly hard, and he told me that he worried that this time would be the last.
Reg knew the western land as well as anyone, but he, like Edward Abbey, wasn’t born here. He grew up in the flatlands of Illinois and first saw real mountains when he was sent to Alaska for officer training for the Korean War. There he learned to cross-country ski, a sport that became a lifelong love. When he returned from the war, he knew he wanted to be close to big mountains, and the job he took as an English professor at the University of Colorado gave him that, as well as a jumping-off point to explore the rest of the West.
In many ways Reg’s first taste of the West, followed by his permanent move to the region, is archetypal. It is Abbey’s migration, Rob Bleiberg’s migration, the migration of so many who fall for the place and leave the East behind.
The move opened up his world. Lifted him. Abbey talked of first seeing the West as being like seeing a naked girl. But there is another way of describing what the West eventually does to some people.
Reg Saner fancies himself a realist, not a romantic, and he is just about the most openly atheistic person I know. For instance, he once wrote in an essay: “God is the single worst idea human beings ever had.”
Which makes how he described what it was like to move west even more powerful.
He said it was as if he had been “born again.”
3
LIGHTING THE WAY
There were plenty of ways I could follow—and learn from—Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner as I drove through the West. I could go to the places that had been important to them, talk to people who knew them, and, of course, continue to read their sentences. I could even, courtesy of YouTube, listen as the men spoke to me from beyond the grave, and, in fact, I got to know the tone and timbre of their voices in this way. I learned that Abbey seemed to talk without moving his lips—a low, garbled baritone that sounded as if he had a mouthful of pebbles. And that Stegner, m
eanwhile, had not a trace of the frontier in his voice, self-trained out of him no doubt, until he ended up sounding a little like William F. Buckley Jr.
In other words, I could learn a lot about the men, but only to a certain point. What I could not do was what I would have most liked to. I could not talk to Edward Abbey or Wallace Stegner. I could not meet them one on one, man to man.
But there was something else I could still do, and something I had already done on the first stop of my trip. I could talk to writers who had known the men, and who in many ways had inherited their ideas and continued their work.
My trip had begun on a Sunday morning, July 8, in the thick, green humid East. Driving out from the coast on Route 40 before dawn, I saw the headlights of early beach traffic coming the other way. And then a sign: BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA—2,554 miles. I headed west toward the Carolina mountains that Thomas Wolfe couldn’t go home to, and then drove out of North Carolina and up through Virginia and West Virginia, entering the Appalachian hills like those where Abbey was raised.
My destination was the home of Wendell Berry, a writer whom I deeply admired. Berry had written the most insightful essay I had read on Ed Abbey, and had been a student and friend of Wallace Stegner’s. I stopped at the small store just short of Berry’s home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where the thermostat outside read 104 degrees. We’d had more rain than the West, but the summer heat had been pressing down on us. I slurped from a bottle of water as I wound along River Road, which followed the twists and turns of the Kentucky River. I arrived early at the address Berry had given me—by letter of course, since he did not use e-mail—and not wanting to bother the Berrys I took a small detour to explore the nearly empty streets of Port Royal, a small town seemingly preserved in a time capsule. I drove past the Port Royal United Methodist Church—“Scripture/Study/Service” were the three words below the church’s name—and Rick’s Farm Center Service Restaurant, and then, having killed enough time, circled back along the river to the white house on the hill.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 5