The larger point, however, was not the quality of the thing but that he managed to complete an actual book. It might, as Abbey himself said, be “juvenile, naïve, clumsy, pretentious” with “all the obvious faults of the beginner,” but for all but a few writers there is no other way to get beyond those faults than to travel through them. At the very least momentum was gained, and by the time the book was published he had already written a good part of the next novel, which, in its cinematic sparseness and external, nonautobiographical plot, seems a clear reaction against what had come before. The Brave Cowboy, and the book that followed it two years later, Fire on the Mountain, pit anachronistic cowboy heroes against the banal but destructive forces of modern life. It is fitting that Cowboy’s hero, Jack Burns, is killed on his horse when hit by a truck carrying a load of toilet seats down the interstate. Both of these next books are taut, full of action, scene-driven. Themes that will become recognizably Abbey’s, in very different forms, are here: a preference for the old ways, an anger at what progress has wrought, a willingness to fight against ridiculous odds, the need to die a good death.
There is a hint of screenplay to these books—they are boy books, action books—and it is not entirely shocking that The Brave Cowboy was made into a movie starring Kirk Douglas, who would later say it was the favorite of all his more than a hundred films. You can’t help but think that this taste of success influenced the direction of Abbey’s fiction, and he admitted that he had half an eye toward film when he wrote Fire on the Mountain (which was, in fact, later made into a TV movie starring Buddy Ebsen). This tendency would get its full airing in the action-packed, cartoonish The Monkey Wrench Gang, which while not yet made into a film seems built for it.
Abbey was learning his chops as he crafted these tight, short books. But something else was going on at the same time that would ultimately prove even more important. All that roaming through the West had brought him into contact with some of the most beautiful places on the planet. And new words and sentences were coming, words and sentences that seemed to spring directly from the land. In 1956, the same year that The Brave Cowboy was published, he spent his first season as a ranger at Arches. On August 26 of that summer he wrote: “This is the thing. The desert is a good place—clean, honest, dangerous, uncluttered, strong, open, big, vibrant with legend.” In his journals, and in his subsequent nonfiction, he retains some of his early sensual romanticism: “The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I want and appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of sun, good wine and rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with guitar and lousy old cowboy songs.” Counterbalancing this is something harder, something leaner. He is learning this leanness in part from the craft of fiction, but also from the desert itself, which seems to be offering up its own aesthetic. Three years later, on August 15, 1959, Abbey, now living in Albuquerque, described what it would mean to “write like the desert”:
Conrad. To write of—no, to do for the desert what he did for—of—the sea. But I must avoid his rich flowing organ-valved almost lush (tropical) style. Emulate his passion for the exact. My style: something almost harsh, bitter, ugly. The rough compressed, asymmetrical, laconic, cryptic. Cactus. Old Juniper. Rock, dry, heat, the stark contour.
NO FOG. NO GODDAMED FOG.
Combine intensity (not density) with clarity. Clear and intense. Like the desert landscape, the desert light, the desert atmosphere—clear, intense and infinitely suggestive. Hard distinctions, precise outlines—but each thing, suggesting, somehow, everything else. As in truth each thing does.
This was a beautiful, and incredibly self-aware, description of one of the effects that Abbey would create in his coming work. He would gain the clean intensity he was looking for, but would also retain some of the remnant romanticism, including a little lushness and even, despite his intentions, a few shreds of fog. Sparseness and abundance would both come into play. The key would be the counterpoise of these elements, the contradictory dancing back and forth that could never be contained within third-person boy action novels. The key in fact would be the embracing of the first-person voice, the voice he had long been sharpening in the journals.
From a distance an artist’s life can have the cleanness of pattern, and we can see how the “subject” is developing in ways that please us, in part because we know the end result. It’s not so easy for the artist him- or herself, trapped as they are in their own lives. The big prize for Abbey, as it was for Stegner and Wolfe and most every writer of the twentieth century, was The Novel, and when he scrawled down his desert notes he was still almost ten years away from making his breakthrough and turning to nonfiction. The scribblings in the journal were just that: scribblings. What might seem like success to some—three published books with one made into a movie—was not success to him. Kirk Douglas might be a new fan, and might say upon meeting Abbey that he looked like Gary Cooper, but otherwise he was virtually unknown. And he was poor, struggling to pay rent and alimony. Heading into his forties, he still had the worries, and the reactions to those worries, of an adolescent. This, too, is endemic to the writer’s life, where any kind of monetary success, if it comes at all, usually comes late. He knew he loved the spare, brilliant light of the desert and he dreamed of writing like the place itself. But he wasn’t sure of much else.
THERE IS A different feel to Wallace Stegner’s early years as an artist. One of his favorite quotations, and one that he repeats over and over in his books, is from Henry James: “Order is the dream of man, but chaos is the law of nature.” While he admits to the world’s chaos, order remains the dream. The quotation has more than a little biographical significance: it was out of the chaos of his own childhood that Stegner created the order of his adult life.
It is a tricky business trying to retrace how a personality develops, imagining a little nurture here, a dash of nature there. With Stegner some things were there right from the start: his love of books, his assiduousness in poisoning gophers. But it seems clear that so much of the man was forged during his difficult early years. It was against the image of himself as the family runt that he would create the respected, responsible man. And if he was fashioned by those years, then so was something else: his belief that individuals have a hand in their own fashioning. He would hold on to this conviction his entire life, frequently using what would come to seem dated words like will and determination.
A tough-minded view of life seems almost inevitable, given the circumstances. The transition from boyhood to manhood was not a gradual one for Wallace Stegner. His brother Cecil died of pneumonia soon after high school, and two years later his beloved mother died from cancer. And as his family in Salt Lake unraveled, his mother and brother dead and his father broke and increasingly desperate, he began to create his own family, marrying Mary Page, who would be his companion for the next sixty years.
The young family headed east, if not exactly fleeing the West then perhaps not minding putting some distance between themselves and their troubles. I have described Wallace Stegner as someone who charged through life, but there is one odd detail that complicates this picture. For such a willful and determined man, it was remarkable what a role that luck played in Wally Stegner’s fate. He was finishing his degree at Utah in Salt Lake City, contemplating taking a full-time job selling carpets and linoleum at his friend’s father’s shop, when a professor at the university pulled on an old contact to get him a position as a grad student at the University of Iowa. He had not set out to be a writer, or at least had not yet fully admitted that ambition, though he’d already won a contest at a local paper that led to the publication of a short story, but he arrived in Iowa at the moment that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was born. This was the Depression, and there were no jobs to be found, so he stayed within academia after graduating.
The next stop on the family’s eastern migration wa
s Madison, Wisconsin, where Wallace took an untenured job as a teacher. In Madison, Stegner was let go after one year, but during that year he and Mary met the couple who would become their closest friends, Peg and Phil Gray. The well-connected Grays would lead them farther east, to Vermont and then to Cambridge, and once again Stegner’s luck—as if in counterbalance to the ill luck of the family he left behind—held. A former roommate from Iowa, Wilbur Schramm, managed to get him a position on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the young westerner was soon hobnobbing with Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and perhaps most important of all, Bernard DeVoto. Connections made there—more luck!—led to him being one of the first group of Briggs-Copeland lecturers at Harvard.
But settled in the exotic East, Stegner’s mind roamed west, and on top of his heavy teaching load he worked obsessively on The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the autobiographical account of his wandering childhood. He would later write that he had a “good part of it done when my father made it imperative, and gave it its fated ending” with the murder and suicide in 1940. This was the forever-imprinting event: his father, who had written his son increasingly desperate letters begging for money, shooting himself in a shabby hotel room in downtown Salt Lake City. But not before killing Dorothy LeRoy, a woman he was in a relationship with. In this way—brutally, unceremoniously—Wallace Stegner was cast out into the world.
Stegner admitted later that the novel in which he tried to capture this event was not “a literary effort but an act of exorcism.” The book was published in 1943, and two years later the young Stegner family moved back west, leaving Harvard for California, where he would start the Stanford Writing Program.
If he had not burned to write at first, had almost backed into it really, once he got rolling, and especially once Page was born, he applied himself to his own pages with a startling ferocity. Work and production were the watchwords of those years. In the five years from 1937 to 1942 he published four novels and a work of nonfiction called Mormon Country while also teaching four classes per term. Not everything went as planned and the novels didn’t sell very well, but he didn’t have time for complaining. There was work to do, dammit.
AFTER A NIGHT at the Sleep Inn, I got up early and dressed in Lycra. It was hard to imagine either Abbey or Stegner approving. I looked ridiculous, I suppose, especially given my current girthy profile. A middle-aged man in black, skintight clothes.
My destination was Slickrock, the world-famous mountain-biking trail that crawls over the land above Moab. Before it was a sandstone playground, of course, it was something else. “Abbey’s Country,” perhaps, but Stegner’s Country too, and Stegner’s next book after Big Rock would in fact be Mormon Country, a historical account of Utah and the Mormon religion.
What it wasn’t was Gessner Country, and I found I was gasping for air within a hundred yards of starting to pedal. I had been younger when I last rode here, and braver apparently, since the prospect of climbing up the Slickrock walls, and trusting that the tires would stick as I climbed, unnerved me now as it hadn’t then.
My last visit had come four years before, during the dying days of the Bush administration. Around the time I was boarding my plane west, in November of 2008, a 1,235-page manuscript landed with a thud on the desks of environmentalists all over southeast Utah. This was an eleventh-hour surprise from Bush and company, courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a plan to open up millions of acres of public land, not just to the extractive industries but to off-road vehicles. As a comic capstone to this episode, Bush, calling himself “the mountain biker in chief,” also proposed opening up hiking trails in national parks to mountain biking.
While the now ex-president may have pushed things to the point of the absurd, his agenda brought up some interesting questions. When we look at the present-day West it’s easy to wag a finger and say, “Bad drillers,” but, as a sometimes Lycra-clad mountain biker myself, I wonder: where does our recreation culture fit into the West’s overall economic and environmental picture? Are we helping or hurting? Is the beauty of our public lands just another resource to exploit—like natural gas, gold, silver, oil, or uranium? In “Thoughts on a Dry Land,” Wallace Stegner wrote: “We are in danger of becoming scenery sellers—and scenery is subject to as much enthusiastic overuse and overdevelopment as grass and water.”
During that trip I talked with Rob Bleiberg about the boom in recreation. While Rob has loads of respect and sympathy with the ranchers and farmers he worked with, he also warned me not to be too hard on the Lycra set. He pointed to the town of Fruita, which neighbored his home in Grand Junction, and which had become a mountain-biking hot spot.
“Well, they come here to play but then maybe some of them decide to stay. And then maybe they get involved in the town. They come here because they love the land and more than a few of them end up fighting for it.”
It was an interesting thought. The possibility that recreators could become citizens, that some of the Lycra-clad could be numbered among the stickers. It even made a kind of sense. Being outdoors has always defined being western, and who says that outdoorsmen can’t straddle a Stumpjumper instead of a stallion? Stegner, speculating on how a western town might move from temporary to permanent—that is, how it might fight to “make itself into a place and . . . likely remain one”—suggested that it would help for the town to have, on top of the traditional enterprises, a university and a writer or two who actually comes from and writes about that place. In updating this equation, was it so crazy to suggest adding a few hikers or mountain bikers to the mix?
Thomas Michael Power, a professor and former chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, doesn’t think so. One of the arguments against wilderness areas in the West is that they take potentially lucrative lands out of the hands of those who might use them for economic gain, thereby stymieing the local economies. But Power’s studies suggest that preserved wilderness lands actually spur the creation of nearby businesses and services, from bike shops to restaurants to rafting tours—what has come to be called the “amenities economy.” More recent studies suggest it goes beyond mere amenities. People tend to move to beautiful places, and money tends to follow people. This, of course, happens even more in our current computer economy, where companies often consider beauty when they decide where to locate. “Thus it cannot be said that environmental quality is only an aesthetic concern to be pursued if a community feels prosperous enough to afford it,” writes Power in Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies.
It is worth pausing on this point as we consider the relative “wildness” of the West. The fact that beauty can be an economic benefit, even when we are not ripping things out of the earth. That we can make hard-nosed, practical gains by leaving something alone. Before I left on my trip, I talked to Ben Alexander, a friend of Rob Bleiberg’s and the associate director of Headwater Economics, based in Bozeman, Montana. He pointed me toward a fascinating study that found that, in recent years, human service jobs had grown by 345 percent in non-metro counties that had more than 30 percent of their nearby lands protected as federal lands. These are mainly human-resource, not natural-resource, jobs, which provide a potentially more reliable and steady model for economic growth, less given to the extractive industry’s highs and lows. And there is also this: a community that depends on the beauty of its environment, while in danger of becoming scenery stealers, will also be less likely to allow the exploiters and extractors to soil that beauty. Of course, Power and Alexander are not advocating a complete shift from a goods to services economy and acknowledge that the amenities economy has “to be maintained at an appropriate scale.” But perhaps a bike shop and a coffee shop, as well as jobs in education, health care, and other professions, could be added to more traditional businesses, and to that potential university, to fill out Stegner’s list of what might bring long-term viability to a western town. A larger question, of course, is whether such a formula will prove durable enough, particularly during t
roubled times, to withstand the short-term temptations of the extractive industries.
IT WAS TIME to get away from Slickrock, and also to get away from that famous and mythical creature, “It All.” While Moab is a fine town, it is also an example of Dr. Power’s “amenities economy” run wild, seen through a funhouse mirror, with little regard for “appropriate scale.” Moab, at its best, is a jumping-off point.
Dark, ragged clouds threatened up above the La Sal range as I drove south on Route 191 and then west on 211 toward Canyonlands National Park. Not long after the turn west the bottom dropped out of the world and I headed down, down into it, into the heart of the canyons. The flash-flood signs in the wash took on more than the usual urgency given the rain of the night before, but the weather also excited me: in the American West, the sudden introduction of that missing element, water, changes everything, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. These arroyos I crossed through might look like wide and gentle paths to most easterners, but were in fact fallow creek beds, looking docile but waiting for water. When it finally came they could show off their true nature and roar like a train.
The one ranch I passed, which Rob Bleiberg had once told me belonged to the Redd family, relied on acreage of a magnitude that would be preposterous by eastern standards. Heidi Redd had sold it to the Nature Conservancy at a large discount to preserve and protect it, and so that she could stay on (though no longer the owner). The ranch itself held over 5,000 acres, but its cattle grazed on the 250,000 acres of grassland leased from the government. It was good luck for the Redds to have Indian Creek running through their land, though what today looked like a gentle stream could in other moods turn angry. To understand why this land is so vulnerable you have to understand the fundamental lack, a lack of water that alternates with a sudden, occasional overabundance, like a dehydrated man choking on his first gulp from a canteen.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 9