At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago.
Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a change in the way Americans enjoy and exploit America. But I wonder if being quiet does the trick. As Wallace writes in one chapter, “Last Exit to America,”
The unexamined life is not worth living, but it is precisely the life toward which Americans as a people desparately yearn. (page 53)
Without a jolt, stasis rules. Coming up on thirty years after these essays were written, all is recognizable, for better and for worse.
The first chapter sets the historical stage for how Americans use America, scanning many stages of exploration and exploitation over more than 500 years. The final chapter gazes slightly forward in time, with hope (albeit) faint for change. Each of the 11 chapters along the way narrows to a single place.
The chapter about the Great Salt Lake, “Dead Heart of the West,” taught me a lot about a anomalous fixture I’ve only skirted once, late at night on Interstate 80. It also reminded me that I want to read Stegner’s history of the Mormons (Mormon Country and, later, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail).
The Stegners live in these words: both writers use personal history in their work. Their human relationships serve as a lens to focus attention on landscapes and environments. I wonder if their friends and colleagues accepted being grist for the mill. Not that the authors diminish these people in any way, but their lives become symbols, small and large.