Crossing to Safety (37 page)

But of course she is going, as surely as Charity is though not quite so soon. The sentence is handed down and recorded and understood; some shadow of it was in Sally’s voice just now on the telephone. You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me— that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn’t either. But what he doesn’t understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally’s crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude. Sid can take his guilty satisfaction in my bad luck if he pleases. I will go on pitying him for what his addiction has failed to give him.

But where
is
he? Out in the woods somewhere debating between what he has lost and what he can’t give up, wandering without her guidance in a freedom he has never learned to use.

Perhaps, in some obscure desk drawer in his mind, is that list she left him. Assuming he is all right, and will come back, will he ever take it out and ponder it, and act on it? It could be the saving of him—as she undoubtedly knew when she lay in bed with her notebook making it out. She is often right.

She is also capable of a noble generosity, and of cramming it down on the head of the recipient like a crown of thorns. She wept, Sally said, going in the station wagon to the hospital. Was she already thinking ahead for him, breaking him away from her by an act of cruelty and preparing him for healing and the list?

If we could have foreseen the future during those good days in Madison where all this began, we might not have had the nerve to venture into it. I find myself wondering whatever happened to the people, friends and otherwise, with whom we started out. Whatever happened to poor Mr. Hagler, who had only his salary? Whatever happened to Marvin and Wanda Ehrlich, and the Abbots, and the Stones? How much would they understand, from their own experience, of what has happened to us?

I hope they have done more than survive. I hope they have found ways to impose some sort of order on their chaos. I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don’t want it ended, as Sid may right now be trying to persuade himself he does.

There is a car, or more than one, coming down the hay road. In the stillness I can hear the growl of low gear, the creaking and bouncing in rough ruts. Lights grope through the highest treetops, turn, are lost, reappear. I stand up readying my tongue for what it must tell them, my mind for more uncertainty, and my legs for more walking.

And now I see the figure, dusty-gold in the moonlight, coming steadily up the road from the stable. It is blurred, its shadow encumbers its feet, but it comes without pause, as if timing itself to meet the family coming down from the hill.

“Sid?” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

AFTERWORD

T. H. Watkins

In the prologue to his biography of Wallace Stegner, Jackson Benson wrote of his conversations with his subject, “Although he was very candid and forthright, he did project a sense of reserve, friendly and kind, but never too close.”

That reserve would not have surprised anyone who knew Stegner. He was a man of rectitude, with regard to himself as well as others. In the twenty-seven years I knew him, I never heard him succumb to common gossip, and in responding to inquiries about his personal history he would, as often as not, refer the questioner to his fiction as the best guide to his origins and experiences. But even in
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
and
Recapitulation
—the two novels most closely tied to his own life—his fiction is not always a particularly reliable guide to the man, as Stegner knew perfectly well. “You break experience up into pieces,” he told an interviewer, Richard Etulain, “and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined. . . . It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true.”

This is some of what we know to be true: Born in Iowa in 1909, he grew up poor in a rootless and spectacularly dysfunctional family in which learning was hit-or-miss and stability never more than a vague dream. His childhood was a hegira that took the family from Iowa to a North Dakota farm town, out to the lumber camps of Washington State, back to Iowa, up to a futile homestead in southern Saskatchewan, then down to the wrong side of town in both Great Falls, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, where the family moved from house to house but never moved up. His father, George Stegner, a handyman, erstwhile entrepreneur, and sometime bootlegger, was an erratic provider and a physically and emotionally abusive man who seemed to single out his somewhat delicate son for special cruelties. Stegner would spend much of his life trying to exorcise the pain his father had caused him by using literature as therapy—“writing him out of my system,” as he once put it. By the end of his life, he thought he had managed to do it; I’m not so sure he had.

His mother, with whom he was very close, did her best to protect him, though she was all but helpless in the face of the father’s relentless personality. Still, her attempts to soften the harshness of the boy’s environment were a legacy he carried in his heart for the rest of his life and gave him, I am convinced, an uncanny sensitivity to the needs and feelings of women in general; this is certainly reflected in his fiction, in which women play a larger and more central role than in the work of any other male writer I know about. Her death from breast cancer while Stegner was a graduate student at Iowa was an almost unendurable blow. It was Wallace who nursed her in her final days, since the father could not abide the presence of death. The experience fed the fire of the young Stegner’s anger at his father and at the same time gave him an understanding of the bitter implacability of fate that never really left him. This was echoed again and again in his later life, as cancer seemed to haunt many of the women closest to him, including his wife, Mary. This, too, he dealt with in his writing, most notably in
All the Little Live
Things
and in his final novel,
Crossing to Safety.

His mother’s death left him with a shrinking family circle. His older married brother, Cecil, had died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-three. He did keep in touch with his aunt Min Heggen, his mother’s sister, who lived in Minnesota with her family. He was particularly close to her son Tom, who would eventually write
Mister Roberts
under his guidance. The possibility that Wallace and his father could ever have reconciled was slim at best, and that possibility vanished when, not long after his mother’s death, George died by his own hand.

Out of this wreckage, Stegner built a life fired by his determination to overcome his bleak and often lonely upbringing—not by pursuing the main chance, like his father, but through learning. Learning was a ladder to respectability and stability, to all that his childhood and youth had lacked, and it must be said that he succeeded magnificently. The boy who had learned to read almost in spite of his childhood education, who had once been trapped in a seemingly inescapable vortex of poverty and instability, scrabbled his way through two universities and achieved three degrees (this in the heart of the Great Depression). He became one of the most respected writers and thinkers of the twentieth century—and in the American West, which he did as much to define and defend as any writer in that century, he was nothing less than an icon.

He would teach at the Universities of Utah and Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program in 1946 and headed it up until his retirement in 1971. Many of the more than one hundred writers who passed through that program went on to produce enduring and even important work: Eugene Burdick, N. Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and Harriet Doerr, among many others. He taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference every summer, beginning in the late 1930s and continuing throughout his Harvard years, cheek by jowl with such luminaries as Robert Frost (who became a close friend), Bernard DeVoto (who became an even closer friend), Archibald MacLeish, and Louis Untermeyer.

His twenty-eight books would include three short-story collections, three collections of essays, thirteen novels, two biographies, three histories, and one historical commentary; he was the editor of an artful and effective conservation polemic,
This Is Dinosaur,
of John Wesley Powell’s classic
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of
the United States, and of DeVoto’s Letters; as World War II was drawing to a close he wrote
One Nation,
a groundbreaking investigative report on race and religious prejudice in America, and thirty-six years later, he published
American Places,
a collection of essays on the natural human landscapes of the country written with his son, Page. His short stories were selected for inclusion in seven annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories and four O. Henry Awards anthologies—and he and his wife, Mary, served as editors of one O. Henry volume. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction for most of the major magazines of his time; he was the editor in chief of one magazine
(The American West
) and contributed in one editorial capacity or another to several more, including
Saturday Review.
He and Mary were for many years the West Coast editors for Houghton Mifflin. He won both the Pulitzer Prize (for
Angle of Repose,
also selected by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best novels of the century) and the National Book Award (for
The
Spectator Bird
). He received three Guggenheim fellowships; was a Fulbright lecturer in Europe and the Middle East; taught a session at the University of Toronto; had a collection of honorary degrees; and was a card-carrying member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Phi Beta Kappa.

In short, as a man of letters, Stegner was himself a significant contributor to what he called “the great community of recorded human experience” and one of this country’s few genuine “belletrists,” as his Stanford friend and colleague Nancy Packer described him. It was a career, said his friend the critic Malcolm Cowley, that was “unequaled in this century,” and for that alone his story is worth the telling.

So is the story of his role as a citizen agitator in the cause that remained closest to his heart for some forty years—conservation. He never accepted my characterization of him as one of the central figures in the modern conservation movement, but I got no arguments from anyone else. He founded one organization, the Committee for Green Foothills; served for a time as an advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall; sat on the National Parks Advisory Board, the board of the Sierra Club, and the governing council of the Wilderness Society; and was emotionally and often directly involved in most of the major conservation issues from the postwar years until his death. Most important in this context, of course, was his writing. He joined a body of environmental writers whose influence, for the first time in our history, was a major force in shaping public policy across a wide variety of conservation issues, from the building of dams in the Grand Canyon to the threatened disposal of the nation’s public land system, from species preservation to the Wilderness Act of 1964. What is more, he gave voice to the emotional content of the environmental movement as no one else did, particularly in “Wilderness Coda,” in which lies a literary moment, like Thoreau’s “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” whose echoes will reverberate a generation later and will probably be felt for generations to come: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

A good part of who Stegner was, I think, resides in that passion, for the concern was the inevitable by-product of years of searching. Stegner spent much of his life trying to find his place—not so much his intellectual or social place (though that, too, was important to him), but his actual physical and spiritual place in the world, a way to see the world and himself in it. When I first was given a tour of the little plot of land around his and Mary’s home in Los Altos Hills, California, I was struck by the tender sense of intimacy his idle conversation about the place conveyed. Every tree and bush—most of which he had planted forty years before—seemed as real a part of his being as his own internal organs. He had always envied those with their feet and their traditions firmly planted in one place. So he found his hilltop in Los Altos Hills in 1948 and built a house upon it and surrounded it with growing things, the root of each tree and shrub a spike nailing him down. On the other side of the continent, in Greensboro, Vermont, he and Mary did much the same with another house, another plot of ground for the summer months, and while Wally was dead by the time I got to see it, it took no great leap of imagination to sense his presence in the maples and ferns of this bosky dell just as profoundly as in the golden hills dotted with oaks in Los Altos Hills. If you can’t be born to a place where you can stay, then make one—or two.

I think that hunger for place informed his entire life, even when he did not know it. It was what gave his memory its precision and his words their grace in such works as
Wolf Willow,
and it colored almost everything he wrote. The need to know his place in both the natural and the social world gave him an eye for and a sensitivity to all places in which he found himself, even as a transient. There are few novelists or short-story writers in our literature whose work is more completely wedded to natural landscapes, whether the action unfolds deep in the dark, almost claustrophobic forests of New England or under the lidless sky of Montana. It was almost as if he could not imagine writing something without that kind of linkage, and I believe that sense of connectedness is the key to both the man and the work.

Here is an excerpt from one of Wally’s letters, sent to me from Greensboro on September 5, 1989:

Now that Labor Day has passed and the hordes of weekenders have departed, silence begins to fall on these woods, and as silence falls, little flames of red and yellow begin to lick up out of the green. A couple of cold nights like last night and we will be living in the middle of something like the Yellowstone fires—all happily un-fought. . . . We walk a couple of gentle miles a day, and I have built a railing on the porch of my workshack/thinkhouse so that I won’t fall off and break something, and I write little ruminations and introductions and feel autumnal but not bad. They mought of killed us but they ain’t whupped us.

T. H. WATKINS was the first Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University at the time of his death in 2000. He had been an editor at
The American West
and
American Heritage
and, later, vice-president of the Wilderness Society and the editor of its magazine,
Wilderness,
until it was discontinued.

Watkins wrote twenty-eight books on history, the environment, and nature. The best known was
Righteous Pilgrim,
a biography of Harold Ickes, which won a
Los Angeles Times
Book Award.

Watkins loved the red-rock country of the American Southwest and backpacked in the Escalante Wilderness Area almost every fall. Recognition and awards came his way over the years, but he often said that one of his most meaningful achievements was his long and close friendship with Wallace Stegner.