Geography of Hope – the Stegner Legacy
A child walks away from the kitchen door, through weeds trampled grey to the edge of the garden where the wind and grass waits. Beyond the rhubarb and into the endless sage-pocked green, the sound of his father’s cursing fades and is gone. He enters easily into a solitude held together by meadowlark song. There are gophers and small, bobbing owls that live in their burrows and now and then a badger looking back at him.
Far enough out now, he slips down into the coulee he is heading for: his own burrow, a declivity in the peneplain with just enough shadow to hold him, womb-like, out of the sky-hurled wind and sun. The draw, curving east toward the creek, is a wound in the earth that has healed over the millennia and become as lovely as the cleft in his mother’s chin.
Though he dreams of horses and adventures farther across the sage, he does not yet see – will not see until he is thirty years away from that homesteading prairie and his mother, dead by exhausted spirit, and his father by self-loathing – that he was formed there in that coulee, the clay of him pressed into the ice-dimpled floodplain of grass freshly stripped of its bison and hunters.
He would grow up to spin narratives out of that place and its “vast geometry,” defend it and other beloved places and then die, this continent’s last great writer to witness the frontier of settlement on the western plains.
And in one of those narratives he would write, “How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank?"
* * *
First the order, then the disorder; the imprint, then the disturbance. "You get imprinted very early,” Wallace Stegner once said, “Those savannas, prairies, were where people first became human. There's certainly something in all the people that I've ever known who grew up in short grass country that simplifies the world. I think it's useful to grow up where people have the dignity of rareness.”1
Some of that dignity was lost for Stegner the day his father packed the family up and crossed the 49th parallel back into the States. "I left Saskatchewan mourning what I had left behind and scared of what we were going toward, and one look at my mother told me she was feeling the same way.”2
George Stegner, an abusive man given to bouts of violent rage, tried his best to settle and be a farmer during those years on the homestead bordering Montana, but by the time they left, his crops were so poor he was feeding his family on what he could win at poker. Across the border, he moved his wife and two sons more than fifteen times during the following years, sometimes abandoning them for long stretches before returning. In 1939, he killed a woman who was his mistress and then shot himself.
The rootless and abusive men looking for Eldorado in Wallace Stegner’s novels were based on his father, while his mother Hilda lives in the strength and grace of women in his fiction. The land is always there too. Forbidding in its mountains, exposing in its plains, but receptive, even merciful in its declivities, Stegner’s western landscapes hold the masculine and the feminine in poetic tension.
Thirty years after leaving Saskatchewan, Stegner wrote that while the prairie gave him an identity, the bottomland taught him about safety: “In a jumpy and insecure childhood where all masculine elements are painful or dangerous, sanctuary matters. That sunken bottom sheltered from the total sky and the untrammeled wind was my hibernating ground, my place of snugness . . . . As the prairie taught me identity by exposing me, the river valley (Eastend) taught me about safety . . . . When I feel a need to return to the womb, this is the place toward which my unconscious turns like an old horse heading for the barn.”3
* * *
The prairie that Stegner imprinted on, like all grassland, needs to be burned or grazed to retain its full identity. Most ecologies need forms of what biologists refer to as “disturbance” to remain healthy, but the disturbance must stop short of outright destruction. By the mid-1930s, in places all over the dry Canadian plains where men like George Stegner had ploughed up native prairie to grow crops, years of destruction caught up with prairie settlers as black clouds of airborne soil carried their dreams away on blowtorch winds.
In 1935, the Federal Government stepped in to help prairie landscapes and settlers recover from the ecological damage. Reclaiming abandoned homesteads and overgrazed pastures, a new program called the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) created public grazing lands to be managed for soil conservation and local cattle production throughout southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Over the decades of the twentieth century as farmers continued to plough up more of the ancient grasslands, these grazing commons became some of the last refuges of functioning prairie ecosystems.
In the 1950s, a middle-aged Wallace Stegner found his way back to the womb by returning to Saskatchewan to work on a book blending memoir, history, and fiction. By then, his homestead and the piece of prairie he imprinted on had become part of one of those federal community pastures, named after Battle Creek, which drained its miles of sage and blue grama grass. In the opening of the book, which we now know as Wolf Willow, he decides not to look for remnants of the homestead: “I am afraid to. In the Dust Bowl years all that country was returned to range by the [Prairie] Farm Rehabilitation Administration.” He does not want to find that his family’s tenure there had “vanished without trace like a boat sunk in mid-ocean . . . . That would be to reduce my family, myself, the hard effort of years, to solipsism, to make us as fictive as a dream.”4
Those words, “the hard effort of years,” contain his mother’s noble, silent suffering, but they point in particular to the pathos of his father’s bootless anger at the prairie for failing to make him prosperous.
After deciding he cannot face the erasure of that life, Stegner’s narrative descends into the history of the land and its cultural passages. He goes down in memory from the exposure of the high benchland into the Frenchman (“Whitemud”) Valley, with its clapboard facsimile of civilization and “muddy little river” offering sanctuary and safety. As a boy he experienced that downward journey each fall when the family left their summer place on the open prairie to winter in the town of Eastend. But this descent is different from his solitary boyhood walks down into the coulee on their homestead. This one is textual as well as geographical, drawing the adult Stegner down through the human effort to shelter in bottomlands to waypoints in history where he considers the deeper wounds the land and its people suffered in becoming what he calls the “last plains frontier.”
* * *
It is the disturbance in our lives that breaks us open, sends us back into the shadows of the cave and womb. For Stegner, as a boy safe in the dual embrace of mother and motherland, the disturbance that would later fire his art and advocacy seems to have been patrilineal.
In Wallace Stegner and the American West, Phillip Fradkin says Stegner’s “anger was implacable . . . . he was captive to the guilt and anger that had its roots in childhood.” Stegner, according to Fradkin, inherited his father’s temper, and in old age he would admit that his own rage often frightened him.
Stegner biographer, Jackson Benson wrote, “[T]he very ethic espoused by his mother of charity and concern for all is at the root of Stegner's concern for the earth, and his hatred of his father's opportunism and greed is at the root of his resistance to the forces of exploitation.”5
Shortly after the trip to Saskatchewan, Stegner started to write his essays in defense of wild places and public lands. It was anger that fueled him. Once in an interview he was asked why he did the environmental advocacy writing. “Somebody has to do it,” he replied, “and generally I have to get sort of mad before I do.”6
* * *
Stegner’s downward journey through history and memory into the land taught him two things that stood in opposition to one another throughout his life as an artist and activist: one, that the prairie earth, with its winds, solitude, dangers, and wild creatures, has a moral and spiritual weight that feeds the soul, and, two, that there are men like his father who will dedicate themselves to taking the gifts of the land and exploiting them without thought for tomorrow.
For the rest of his life, Stegner's effort to carry these two lessons in his imagination fostered not only some great novels (including the Pulitzer-prize winning Angle of Repose), but a Western environmental movement that successfully defended wildness on public lands, including public grazing lands that are the American counterpart to the PFRA community pastures in Canada.
In the 1950s he wrote a barrage of advocacy books and articles, including a piece for Harper's Magazine about the threats to public lands in the West, a book telling the story of John Wesley Powell and the Colorado River, and a book celebrating and defending Dinosaur National Monument. The latter, This is Dinosaur (1955), is widely credited with saving both the park and the Green River from proposed dams.
But Stegner's triumph as an artist-activist was a 2400 word letter he wrote that led to the passing of The Wilderness Act of 1964, a single piece of federal legislation in the United States that continues to this day to defend more than 100 million acres of Federal public lands from any activity or development that would destroy it.
When Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall spoke at a 1960 conference on the need for legislation to protect and preserve wild places, he scrapped his own speech in favor of simply reading Stegner’s Wilderness Letter. The language Stegner used is reflected in the wording of the final act. The day it was passed in '64 with only one dissenting vote, Stegner's letter was read aloud in its entirety in the House.
At the heart of the Wilderness Letter is this evocative passage clearly tracing his "idea of wilderness" to Stegner’s time on the Saskatchewan prairie:
Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth preserving. Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country. For all the usual recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest wildernesses are obviously the most important, both as genetic banks and as beauty spots. But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps, because they are less friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better. On our Saskatchewan prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two lights on all the dark rounding earth. The earth was full of animals – field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea. It is as good a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.
Wallace Stegner closed the Wilderness Letter with some words that are often quoted in defense of public conservation lands:
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.
* * *
It is early April and the first meadowlarks of spring are lifting their voices into Stegner’s “bell-jar sky.” A friend and I have driven to the edge of the great Canadian grassland that includes Battle Creek Community Pasture – more than 800 square kilometers of native grass running along the Montana border. Somewhere to the south of us, the unmarked homestead site rests in its century of solitude, more remote and unknown today than it was when that boy stepped out of his mother’s garden.
I walk to the fence line and look in, thinking about Stegner’s injunction and the sanity we will need in the next few hours. In the town of Consul seven miles north, there are twenty-six ranchers waiting for us in the Senior’s Hall. Good men and women – some of them descendants of homesteaders who were sturdier than George Stegner. They have a lot on their minds today. They are worried about losing the kind of grazing management that the federal pasture system offered, and they are worried that they are going to be left holding the bag for all of the endangered species now making their last stand on pastures they graze.
As volunteers with a small grassland advocacy group called Public Pastures – Public Interest, there is little we can do to reassure them, but we will try. We will promise to stand with them to demand that policy makers and conservation groups do the right and just thing by them and by the wild creatures who have until recently been able to survive together on native prairie. We will apologize for the upheaval that the Federal government’s Sage-Grouse Emergency Protection Order has brought down upon them, and we will promise to help them gain a voice in the discussion of how the order will be applied.
As for the pastures, many of the ranchers agree they should remain in the public domain. Some are beginning to consider the possibility that “public ownership” might extend to First Nation ownership too, as long as there is a process to make the nation accountable to the whole public constituted under treaty.
The men and women who run cattle on government land don’t expect much from the rest of the world, apart from their purchased lease rights. For the most part, they want to be left alone. If they are to be noticed at all, they want some recognition for choosing to work with grassland rather than destroy it with a plough. They want conservationists and environmentalists to see the irony and injustice in regulations that penalize ranchers for being the ones who chose a form of agriculture that, when it is done right, protects the oases of prairie remaining in the ecological desert of cropland.
The place to start getting this right is just over the fence: the seven-thousand-year-old grasslands that inspired Stegner’s narratives and his fierce advocacy for the protection of public lands. The Greater Sage-Grouse, common in his childhood, is now Canada’s most endangered bird. It has been many years since any were seen in these pastures. We may or may not be able to restore the sage-grouse, but there are many other grassland creatures declining now and they all need the long-term protection and conservation management that public lands can offer.
* * *
Walk alone through the yard site of any abandoned prairie homestead and you will feel the wounds left by human agency and then covered over in the accretions of time and culture. The artist’s effort to unearth what has been buried in myth and nostalgia, particularly when it overlaps with his own refracted history, is what deepens the map of home.
Burrow, cellar, coulee, cave, valley, buffalo wallow, draw: the evocative bottomlands pressed into the prairie invite a closer imagining of ourselves again where the earth’s sub-strata intersects with human consciousness.
The work of artists, scientists, and mystics can lead us there, begin the dreaming, the story-telling and the image-making, but that is only the first kind of work. The long and honoured task of aligning our culture to the gifts in the land belongs to everyone. Here on the sunlit plains, there is no work more important or meaningful.
