Wallace Stegner's "geography of hope."

When I was growing up in the steel towns of western Pennsylvania, I heard a soft but constant refrain from my father -- a refrain of not belonging. We were not made for the East, he told me again and again; we were Westerners, transplanted to foreign soil, and as soon as we could, we were going Home.

On our vacation trips West, we would drive for three days and nights with hardly any stops. When my father couldn't motor safely any longer, he'd turn the wheel over to my mother, who must have hated driving under the glare of this lunatic master of the automobile. When they both tired after a couple days of ceaseless motion, we'd pull off into a little makeshift campground somewhere in Iowa or Missouri or Oklahoma and sleep on the car's reclining seats for a few furtive hours. Then the assault would begin anew. At the end of the road was Utah, that Promised Land, where the trout were always bigger, the streets ran to hilarious widths, and my Aunt Hannah and Uncle Charlie knew the meaning of hospitality.

To my young eyes, there was nothing wrong with Pennsylvania. Its tender, forested hills were the only ones I knew; I loved them, and love them still. I didn't feel cramped in the little valley-bottom towns we inhabited, but now when I return to them, I can feel what my father must have felt for all of the dozen years we were indentured to the East. And I still hear his voice in my ear -- those dry accents of a Sanpete County farmboy who always said "carn" for "corn," and had no use for any contract beyond a handshake.

I thought for a long time that my father was simply a man possessed by a landscape; he needed dry, clear air and the long views that came with open spaces just to feel whole. But as I grew up alongside him, I came to realize that it was more than that. It was a society as much as a landscape that possessed him, but since he was never a gregarious sort -- more of a taciturn loner whose few friends found him enigmatic -- I underestimated his love for the people of his place. And I knew from his stories that the place of his heart, the place of his obsession, was not limited to Utah. He loved the Madison River valley in Montana, and the towering neversummer peaks above Denver. He loved the Painted Desert of Arizona, and the broken old cinder cone craters around Idaho Falls. In fact, you couldn't name a place in the West where he would not live. But you could name no place in the East where he would.

I came to realize that it was the West's social contract that he loved most. To him, that contract and the landscape that contained and somehow had engendered it were inseparable. It was a way of looking after things, an agreement among men and women to take the full responsibility for their actions, to speak plain and unpretentious thoughts, and to try to get along. He had grown up in the close-knit society of Brigham Young's agricultural colonies in southern Utah, but it was not religion or religious society that interested him. A Jack Mormon from the age of eighteen, he had left the agricultural settlements of his childhood and wandered up to the coal mining camps that lay nestled on the lowest flanks of the Wasatch Range. There, working shoulder to shoulder with Italians, Greeks, Finns, Serbs, Mexicans, and even a few stray Blacks who somehow found their way to the West's blue-eyed "Zion," my father had extended his creed a very long step. He had taken the communalism learned from his Mormon ancestors and -- on his own, as far as I can tell -- blended with it a large portion of toleration and inquisitiveness. The result: he got along, learned the customs of the rank-and-file workers in Utah's underground mines, learned the needs of their families in the simple coal-camp society they maintained, and did his part for the common good. Maybe they were company towns, but they were still the places where we lived, and our job was to treat them like our own.

In ways I could not possibly understand until in my thirties when I had a child of my own, this was the backdrop to my intellectual life. My father had branded into me a keen appreciation of place, not by taking me to see the scenery (which he hardly seemed to notice), but by teaching me to pay attention to local custom. The place I was raised to adore was the American West -- all of it. I was to love it, oddly enough, for its social virtues. And love the West I did, but more importantly, I learned from my father how to love any place, how to see beyond and beneath the obvious -- the scenery and clutter and foibles -- and down into the soil of both society and land.

I think that's why Wallace Stegner has always made such extraordinarily good sense to me, and why, in my adult years, even though I never met him, he has become a mentor to me. When I ran across his writing, more than two decades ago, I thought I heard my father talking. I knew I had come Home.

Wallace Stegner is as amazing and improbable as a geyser basin. His childhood in south Saskatchewan and various locations across the American West reads like a long series of trips in an early motor home. His father, a dreamer and drifter, tried every get-rich-quick scheme in sight, uprooting the family -- Wallace, Cece and their mother -- and lighting out at the drop of a dollar for Washington logging camps, North Dakota wheatlands, Canadian homesteads, the booming little cities of the young West -- Great Falls, Salt Lake, Seattle, Hollywood, Reno -- and points in between. Young Wally, small and sickly to begin with, unwittingly set his own social life back about ten years by skipping two grades in school, so that every place they moved, he was the littlest guy in sight. Neither of his parents had furnished high school, and no one in his family had ever set foot in a university classroom. His early education should have qualified him to become an itinerant combine operator, not a writer. Certainly not the finest writer yet to emerge from the American West. But that's exactly what he did.

His 1971 novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize. The Spectator Bird (1976) walked away with the National Book Award. His 1992 collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs,(1) along with two earlier works, Crossing to Safety (1987) and Collected Stories (1990), were selected as finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over the years, three of his stories won the coveted O. Henry Award. In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts tried to pin him with its National Medal for the Arts, a lifetime achievement award, but Stegner declined. He would not accept an award from an agency under such strict and unappealing political controls.

Near the end of his life, even the self-effacing, ironic Stegner could appreciate his own accomplishment: "I was a western boy who came hungrily toward civilization from the profound barbarism of the frontier, and was confronted by the fairly common task assigned would-be American writers -- that of encompassing in one lifetime, from scratch, the total achievement of the race."

His artistic awards and honors, though, do not begin to reach into the heart of Stegner's work. They are a lovely dressing richly deserved, but to my way of thinking they stand rather beside the point, and in any case were a belated recognition by the Eastern literary establishment of the accomplishments of America's finest writer of place. The point, it has always seemed to me, was Stegner's lifelong struggle with the destiny of the American West, the region of his heart. It isn't what he received that catches our attention, but what he gave.

His synthetic biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1953), stands as one of the landmark books about the West, and it is the centerpiece of Stegner's oeuvre. What captivates us most about it is the author's passion for his subject, his affinity for the broad mind of the Major himself. Thanks to Stegner, Powell's story is familiar to us by now: How through a ten-year study of aridity in the West, Powell understood better than anyone the implications of the region's climate and topography. How he quickly formed a general theory about agriculture in arid environments, then leapt beyond the sober confines of descriptive science, and suggested, breathtakingly, a new pattern of social organization that he felt matched the imperatives of the land. How the commercial interests, eager to get on with the rapid settlement of the West, defeated all of Powell's ideas but one: to have the federal government build large irrigation projects wherever they were demanded.

It was Stegner, writing from the middle of the twentieth century, who showed us the consequences of ignoring Powell. Stripped of the intimate knowledge of place -- by which the Major meant the local watershed -- Powell's plan for a "drylands democracy" degenerated into the pork barrel. Western politicians merely grabbed what they could by way of make-work dams, subsidized irrigation projects, and needless hydropower generators. Where Powell envisioned local councils making decisions based on an intimate knowledge of land and water, the boosters were more than happy to turn federally subsidized industrialization loose upon the West. Faraway bureaucracies with fabulous budgets would dictate the future of the West, and all the while Western politicians, while making rich careers out of fed-bashing, would see to it that the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the federal land agencies remained true to the twin causes of urbanization and industrialization across the developing West. The results were ecocide and, at least as troubling to Stegner, monoculture:

Physically, the West could only be itself. Its scale, colors,

landforms, its plants and animals, tell a traveller what country he is

in, and a native that he is home .... Albuquerque with its mudcolored

houses spreading like clay banks along the valley of the Rio

Grande could only be New Mexico. Denver's ringworm suburbs on

the apron of the Front Range could only be boom-time Colorado.

But is anything except their setting distinctive? The people in them

live on streets named Main and State, Elm and Poplar ... like

Americans elsewhere. They eat the same Wheaties and Wonder

Bread and Big Macs, watch the same ballgames and soaps and sitcoms

on TV ..., work the same industrial or service jobs ..., and

in general behave and misbehave much as they would in Omaha or

Chicago or East Orange. The homogenizing media have certainly

been at work on them, perhaps with more effect than the arid spaciousness

of the region itself, and while making them more like

everybody else have also given them misleading clues about who

they are.

Or who they could have been. You can see in such lines (often dropped portentously at the ends of his best paragraphs) Stegner's continuing struggle with the ideas of Powell. You can see his mind always closing on the tantalizing question, "What if?" Hidden an inch behind those lines is the Westerner's creed at work -- his realization that he has come from a landscape that is unique upon the earth, that his native home is somehow blessed with a natural endowment that calls forth and deserves something better than the crass hand it has been dealt by the Euroamerican culture of commerce. In these, his most famous lines, we see the idea again: "When [the West] fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the pattern that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery."

You cannot belong to the culture of the Big Mac, Stegner tells us in language as clear as desert air. It is spiritually and emotionally unsatisfying, bad for your health, offensive to the dark, artistic unconscious. No wonder these things cause heart attacks -- they make us literally and figuratively heartsick. It's that spiritual thirst we feel most strongly in Stegner, and if we can be nakedly honest with ourselves, many of us in the West and elsewhere can admit that we read him because he has the power to connect us with our own longing. I learned that longing from my father who, like Stegner as a young man, found himself stranded by his own volition in the alien East and yearned for years to come Home.

In his most poignant and personal essay, "Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood," Stegner puts a finger on the pulse of his own spiritual longing. He describes the moment of his family's flight from the Sasketchewan homestead where he lived and grew from ages four through nine -- describes how his brother and father leaned out of the fleeing car, "exhilarated by how the fenceposts flew by on the smooth dirt road along the South Bench." But not Wallace, or his mother. They sat in shared, numb silence, saddened by what they knew was the end of a private harmony. The Place had closed behind them, and it would never be reopened. "I was at heart a nester, like my mother," he writes. "I loved the place I was losing, the place that years of our lives had worn smooth."

There in that sputtering old Stegner family car, there was the microcosm, and fatal dilemma, of the American West. The boosters and the nesters. The exploiters and the caretakers. The tourists and the natives. One half of the population sticks its collective head out of the window and loves the whoosh of the wind that keeps it from hearing; the other half sits in the back seat and cries over the loss of Home. Stegner had it right: we have made of the great West a mere economy. We all get to be tourists now, visitors in our own lives, our own instant, teleconnected "communities."

In his brilliant lecture, "Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur," Stegner coolly pinpoints the heart of the Homing problem:

One reason why it is so difficult to isolate any definitely western

culture is that so many Westerners, like other Americans only more

so, shy away from commitment. Mobility of every sort -- physical,

familial, social, corporate, occupational, religious, sexual -- confirms

and reinforces the illusion of independence.

But in fact, there never was any Western independence, and there never will be. The lack of commitment Stegner decries is finally a lack of commitment to place. Not livelihood, or the self, or religion, or even art, but a keen, firm desire to occupy and live well together in a mutually valued place. Call it Home. He must have caught glimpses of that same desire among the Mormons of his youth in Salt Lake; he must have seen the social architecture for living well together in the design for settlement and governance proposed by Powell. But he never did see it in practice. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Mormons had turned fully corporate; their old agrarianism was now a relic contained in the institution of church-owned farms where members were encouraged to put in a day's work now and then, while administration of the church was being performed in a worldwide headquarters indistinguishable from the skyscraper housing Delta Air Lines. The benign federal hand, envisioned by Powell, that could have guided careful economic and societal development through the blending of good science with Jeffersonian republicanism -- well, that hand had become the heavy grip of the federal land and water agencies operating in cooperation with multinational mining, engineering, timbering and transportation firms. Stegner, better than anyone, saw the perversion of Powell's dream for a benign federal presence in the West:

All Americans, but especially Westerners, whose backyards are at

stake, need to ask themselves whose [federal] bureaus these should

be. Half of the West is in their hands. Do they exist to provide bargain-basement

grass to favored stockmen ... ? Are they hired exterminators

of wildlife? Is their function to negotiate loss-leader coal

leases with energy conglomerates, and to sell timber below cost to

Louisiana Pacific? Or is there a ... higher duty -- to maintain the

health and beauty of the lands they manage, protecting ... the

watersheds and spawning streams, forests and grasslands ..., air

and water and serene space, that once led me, in a reckless moment,

to call the western public lands part of the geography of

hope?

The cooperation was there all along, but it was not of the sort valued by Stegner. It was a cunning cooperation of economic convenience, a collusion among governmental, corporate and individual interests, all in the name of securing the vaunted natural resource economy of the West and the hardbitten one-industry towns that depended upon it. The region's land-grant universities that ought to have been pointing out the implications of this glaring collusion were all bought off -- accepting corporate hand-outs and federal grants, and cycling their students as fast as they could into corporate and federal jobs. It took writers like Wallace Stegner and Marc Reisner (Cadillac Desert) and a handful of courageous leaders of the region's non-profit community (chiefly local and regional environmental groups, like Randall O'Toole's Cascade Consultants) to expose the insidious grip of economic collusion across the West. Independence? No, what we had in the West was dependency without commitment. It is the strangest political mix in America: socialism for the rugged individualists. The Marlboro Man meets Marx.

Stegner helped to expose and examine this dilemma of the West without name-calling. His tone is never desperate or severe, his language never super-heated. The West he loved was made of people, as well as mountains, rivers, deserts and plains. He spoke as one Westerner to others, in a calm voice all could hear. The words were insistent, direct and true. We listened, but we have yet to act.

When I despair of writing, when I wonder what good can possibly come of the making of books in an increasingly illiterate society, I turn first to Wallace Stegner. More than anyone -- any writer, politician, scientist, or culture hero -- he framed our thinking about the American West; he taught us to see the West as a Place, the entire "dry core" of the country as a continuous whole that demanded our attention and protection. And he never gave up hope that the West, sooner or later, would learn to live well with itself, would find a way to blend livelihood and preservation so that there would still be a West for the coming generations to enjoy.

Stegner was more than a writer; he was a citizen. You can feel, vibrating there beneath his words, an ardent desire to do better, to repair institutions that have failed us, to make things work both for nature and for man. His most outstanding virtue, to my reading, was a rock-solid honesty. You never expect verbal pyrotechnics from him, and look as you may, you never find them. In his steadfast refusal to be fashionable, he became classic. Long after we've set aside the lycra-clad writings of the "New West," we'll be studying Wallace Stegner to learn how to write novels and essays, short stories and effective letters to the Authorities. And we'll continue to recognize his voice. It will ring softly in our ear like the voice of a kind father who wanted so much for his sons and daughters to enjoy the places he loved, and to teach them always to be true. (1.) For a review of Wallace Stegner's Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, see Janet C. Newman and Pamela G. Wiley, Hope's Native Home: Living and Reading in the West, infra this volume, 24 Envtl. L. 293 (1994).

Donald Snow, Executive Director of the Northern Lights Research & Education Institute in Missoula, Montana, and co-editor of Northern Lights Magazine. In 1991, his work as director of the national Conservation Leadership Project resulted in two books: Inside the Environmental Movement: Meeting the Leadership Challenge, and Voices From the Environmental Movement. Mr. Snow is currently at work on a book of personal essays entitled The Cabin of No Fishing.