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.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
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2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1987 by Wallace Stegner
Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Terry Tempest Williams
Afterword copyright © 2002 by the Estate of T. H. Watkins
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Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from “I Could Give All to Time” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright © 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC, and The Society of Authors: Excerpt from “Easter Hymn” from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman. Copyright © 1936 by Barclays Bank Ltd. Copyright © 1964 by Robert E. Symons. Rights outside of the United States are controlled by The Society of Authors.
A. P. Watt Ltd.: Excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran, 1983. . P. Watt Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stegner, Wallace Earle.
Crossing to safety / Wallace Stegner; introduction by Terry Tempest Williams;
afterword by T. H. Watkins.—Modern Library paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Novelists—Fiction.
4. Vermont—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3537.T316 C76 2002
813’.52—dc21
2001057942
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43086-1
v3.0
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
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