Category: Wallace Stegner

Tour Of The Mountain West

Karen

We took a long weekend to drive our nephew over to the Air Force Academy for a leadership camp, maybe the last time we’ll have to drive him anywhere since he has his learner’s permit now.

We split the drive there into two days–SLC to Moab, then Moab to Colorado Springs on I-70–but we went north on the way home and took 40 through Steamboat and Vernal in one long day. Both routes were just gorgeous and I kept thinking, “I bet Wallace Stegner has something to say about this country.”

Boy does he–I looked up the source of this quote from another adventure with Skyler and found an article Stegner wrote in 1981 that’s most of the Sierra Club magazine:

Brought here blindfolded, I would know I was in the desert West by the smell of sage and dust and brittle weeds. Given a glimpse of the ground. I would know from the raw earth and the tufted, clumpy vegetation… that I was west of the 100th meridian. Allowed to see the sky, I might guess from the darkness of its blue and the whiteness of the cumuli that float across it that I was in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico or Arizona. But give me the briefest look at the horizons and I would know I was in Utah, in the high plateaus.

 

Tall red cliffs with blue mountains in the distance in Garden of the Gods

Red cliffs and clear blue sky with the Colorado River in the foreground in Moab

A tall teenage boy with a camo duffel bag stands in front of an aircraft display

Museum Day

Karen

We took our nephew to the Utah Museum of Natural History yesterday and had a good time poking around the giant building, wondering how the dioramas were made, and checking out the skyline from the roof terrace:
(He whipped out a spyglass to check things out; I don’t know where he was keeping it but clearly he was prepared for the trip.)

The museum is the very model of a modern major attraction, with lots (and lots) of interpretive text—even Wallace Stegner:


He might have stolen most of Angle of Repose from Mary Foote’s journals but that thief sure could describe the West.

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

Karen

I have a soft spot for “writers of the West” because that’s what I want to be someday, too. Here he is talking about being just that:

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me.”

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

Karen1 Comment

Here’s my favorite quote from him (last posted in 2009; this blog is getting old):

“Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors–tan, rusty red, toned white–and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground.”

The Writer’s Almanac told me today that he started the creative writing program at Stanford, something I did not know. His students there included Larry McMurtry and Ed Abbey.

 

 

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

Karen

He would have been 101 today!

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.”

Wallace Stegner Apparently Liked Cars

Karen3 Comments

I’m making myself read new books this summer, not just re-reading The Hobbit and Dune and other things on my shelf. I started with Crossing to Safety, in which I noticed uncomfortable similarities between the bossy wife and myself, and found this quote. [Set up: It’s about two couples. One of the couples is rich and has this fancy old touring car, a Marmon.]:

Looking in under the propped hood, I could see that the engine was not twelve in line, as I had always half believed, but a V-16. It would have pulled a fire truck. At every stroke a stream of gasoline as thick as my finger must be pulsing through the carburetor. She panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager. “Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar,” the Marmon said.

That quote is probably the funniest part of the book, which deals with polio, thwarted ambition, stomach cancer, etc., but I do recommend it. I think it’s something I’ll have to revisit in the future. Because re-reading is really where it’s at.

Why I Still Live Here, Despite The Legislature

Karen3 Comments

“Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors–tan, rusty red, toned white–and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground.”

Wallace Stegner, from the essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. (The title’s from the Big Rock Candy Mountain song!)