The wisest man and best writer
the West has produced was born this week 94 years ago. He died in
1993, but left us a massive inheritance, including Beyond the
Hundredth Meridian, Angle of Repose, Wolf Willow and From the
Uneasy Chair. You can celebrate his Feb. 18 birthday by reading one
of these books or recalling the phrase in which he asked us to rise
to the level of our landscape by building “a society to match the
scenery.”
One day in 1988, I had the good fortune to
follow Stegner as he went from classroom to classroom at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. He would say a few opening words,
but mostly this son of homesteaders on the harsh Northern Plains
fielded questions.
Many were about water. The West was in
the wet 1980s. Colorado River floods in the spring of1983 had
almost ripped Glen Canyon Dam out by its sandstone roots. Water had
raced between sandbag banks down Salt Lake City’s main
street. A rising Great Salt Lake came close to flooding I-80 and
the Salt Lake Airport.
Stegner ignored this momentary
moistness. He knew aridity was at the heart of the West, and he
wasn’t fooled by a few years of wet. He also knew that even
massive reservoirs like Lake Powell were of the moment.
“We’ll get the river back,” he said, “but with a waterfall,”
as silt fills in Lake Powell and turns it into a valley.
Though he mourned the loss of Glen Canyon, he did not despise Lake
Powell or call it, as some do, Lake Foul. He knew it gives pleasure
to millions, and is beautiful in its way. Still, he said, “In
gaining the lovely and usable, we have given up the incomparable.”
Civility and a broad view were part of his greatness. His
New York Times obituary on April 15, 1993, said that he left
Stanford University, where he taught a famed writing course,
because of a sour feeling over 1960s campus turmoil. He later told
a reporter, “Those times were not a good time to be an aging
professor.”
He didn’t preach civility to the
students at Boulder — he simply was civil. But in his hands, it
didn’t mean softness. Stegner had edges as hard as the
country he grew up in. He said that the most arid states — Nevada,
Utah, Arizona — had the sorriest politics because their leaders
cared only about federal dollars for dams.
Were he alive
today, he might add Colorado to his list. Its state Legislature
wants to spend $10 billion to build more dams, even though Western
reservoirs are half-empty or worse. Lake Powell alone could swallow
a normal year’s flow of the Colorado River — 14 million
acre-feet — and not spill a drop. Colorado needs seven more feet
of snow this year to even attain a normal snowpack.
Political reaction to this latest manifestation of the West’s
essential dryness shows we are true to our heritage. Almost a
century ago, Stegner said, he was living on the Great Plains, the
child of homesteaders lured there by slogans invented by boosters.
Stegner said of his father: “He was a dupe of the people who
invented ‘rain follows the plow.’”
I
couldn’t tell if he were angriest at the railroads and
politicians who promoted land that couldn’t be farmed, or at
his father for trying to farm it.
Stegner told students
there was another way. “Don’t deny or make over aridity;
adapt to it, like the plains animals, with their good eyesight and
mobility.” Such adaptation, he said, “gives people the virtue of
(living with) scarcity.”
To develop that virtue, he said,
we must become patient, instead of thrashing about, squandering our
energy and exhausting our land. You might think, listening to
Stegner and reading his books, that he had said all there was to
say about the West, and had said it better than anyone else ever
would.
But Stegner wouldn’t allow anyone to think
he couldn’t be surpassed. After his first writing phase, in
which he used up his autobiographical material, he said he had to
“quit writing or to grow.” He grew, he said, thanks in part to his
students at Stanford, who included Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry and
Edward Abbey.
Nor would he let the University of Colorado
students leave thinking he had achieved it all. I heard him say
that Westerners had to learn to be patient: “Patience is a hard
lesson for me to learn. I’m not sure I have learned it. But I
can talk it.”
Ed Marston is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He published the paper for 19 years and is now
on a writing sabbatical.
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