Stephen Trimble
While serving as a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, with financial support from Dan Johnson at the Chevron Corporation and the ongoing support of the Utah Humanities Council, Stephen Trimble is leading conversations about Stegner’s work in communities across Utah. Trimble has received a broad range of awards, including: The Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation, The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College, honoring his efforts to increase our understanding of Western landscapes and peoples and his choice to remain a stubborn generalist. As writer, editor and photographer Trimble has published 22 books, including Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America; Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography; The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (with Gary Paul Nabhan); The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin; The People: Indians of the American Southwest; and Talking With the Clay: The Art of Pueblo Pottery in the 21st Century. Trimble makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock canyon country of Torrey, Utah. Trimble’s website is www.stephentrimble.net.
Participating in Home: Following Wallace Stegner Into the Heart of the West
Wallace Stegner’s sturdy words often sound simple, but if you worry them, if you do your best to tease out their meaning, they pull away in long and nuanced threads.
In 1991, two years before his death, Stegner—novelist and essayist, our wise elder of the Desert West—responded to an invitation to join a gathering of western writers. He couldn’t attend, but he answered our request by sending a few words of guidance. I had the privilege of receiving these words by return mail. At the gathering, I read them to a room full of writers who shared Stegner’s devotion to both scenery and community.
“All I can do,” Stegner wrote, “is to wish you all well, to urge you all that the object is not to be native or regional but to be good, and that the best way to be good is to be true to what you know and have lived.”
I’ve always considered Wallace Stegner my mentor. When I look in the mirror of that writerly advice he sent to us in 1991, I find I am native and regional to my toenails—lastingly rooted in place. To be good and to be true defines my aspirations. Stegner’s dedication to the land, to craft and to citizenship stands as my model.
As a Stegner Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah in 2008-2009, I have the challenge of communicating his gifts to a wide audience and the pleasure of immersing myself in his words as we celebrate the centennial of his birth. As I drive home to Salt Lake City from Logan through Sardine Canyon at midnight, braking for mule deer frozen in my headlights, I’m listening to Lyman Ward tell me the story of Angle of Repose on my truck’s tape player. As I look for excerpts in Stegner’s vast lifework, pretty soon the whole state is alive and illuminated by his words.
One example: from his bicentennial book, American Places. Stegner retells the visit of his aunt, fresh from Iowa, to southern Utah. She couldn’t get a sense of the scale of the High Plateaus, which “loom without asserting themselves.” She looked at the 5,600-foot western face of the Sevier Plateau rearing above Richfield and said that she “was reminded of the bluffs in the county park in Fort Dodge.” Stegner, shaped by the West, “enriched by geology, history and memory,” smiled: “Nothing now reminds me of Fort Dodge.”
Wallace Stegner was born in 1909, in Iowa, but he was raised in the West—Utah, North Dakota, Washington, Montana and on the last homestead frontier, in Saskatchewan. He lived in 20 towns in eight different states, a couple of places in Canada and “in some of these places we lived in anywhere from two to 10 different houses and neighborhoods,” as his bootlegger father kept moving the family, to stay just ahead of any unwelcome county sheriff arriving at the front door.
As Stegner blew “tumbleweed-fashion around the continent,” he became a citizen of the West. He didn’t discover who he was until he was 21, when he boarded a train out of Utah to teach at the University of Iowa for two years. “Homesickness,” he wrote years later, “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.”
With his wife, Mary, Stegner eventually made his home in the California coast ranges—where he taught at Stanford for 25 years and created and directed the university’s writing program. The family summered in Vermont. But when he felt the need to select a hometown and sifted through the many places he had lived, to his surprise he chose Salt Lake City.
Stegner keeps circling with some wonderment around this choice, playing his own devil’s advocate, examining the heart of this odd and lovely place. He finds that what made Salt Lake City home was living there with “complete participation.” His concluding words, in his 1950 essay, “At Home in the Fields of the Lord:” “Home is what you can take away with you.”
When we live with complete participation, we become part of a place. The more we know about that place, the deeper our participation. The place becomes home. We sense a similar connection if we wander in wild country for an hour’s hike or a week’s camping, hunting or river trip—accumulating memories that have an intensity to which writers pay special attention.
Stegner wrote: “No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.” Wallace Stegner’s words go with us as guides to those wild places.
I come to Stegner’s work with a relationship that began many years ago, simply as a reader of his books. I have mined ideas from his writing and depended on his sensibilities. When I photograph, I strive to let Stegner’s articulation of the multilayered and unfiltered West direct my eye. When I grappled with the fate of beloved places in my new book, Bargaining for Eden, Stegner reminded me of the complexities of our struggles. A quote from his Wolf Willow became the epigraph for my last chapter: “Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world.”
This was a theme to which Stegner kept returning. Near the end of his life, he made a quick list in longhand to aid a filmmaker working on a Stegner documentary. Under the heading “What I learned,” Stegner wrote in reference to the West:
—respect for the land and its history
—contrition for my part in spoiling it
—some sense of responsibility, as a citizen at last of the whole country, for trying to repair and preserve
Citizen. That word is key—and those are my italics in Stegner’s quote. Stegner is the model citizen/writer—more than a novelist living in isolation in a literary world or an outraged environmentalist ranting from the sidelines of society. He is a fully engaged citizen, sensitive to the lives and tragedies of his neighbors, willing to speak strongly when he felt strongly, rooted in place and community.
My relationship with Stegner deepened whenever I moved anywhere in the West because he had been there before me. As a fresh immigrant, I always found a book on the Stegner bookshelf to explain how to live without ignorance in these new homelands.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Stegner’s unorthodox biography of John Wesley Powell. I feel the same way Bruce Babbitt did when he compared his first reading of the book to having a rock thrown through the windowpane of his awareness, leaving him standing wide-eyed among the shards of old ideas scattered at his feet. The book didn’t just follow the details of Powell’s life but interpreted our evolving relationship with the Colorado Plateau and its history. When Stegner described Powell’s work, he described his own: “There was a thick crust of fable over this region, and as the country was lifted slowly into knowledge the layers of fable lifted with it, bending upward at the flanks like sedimentary strata along the axis of a great earth-flexure.”
Stegner learned to write history from his mentor, Bernard DeVoto, and that meant living up to DeVoto’s insistence that a writer visit the landscapes where history happened before placing characters in context on the great American continent. Before Stegner wrote of the Colorado River, he floated it himself. Before he ventured to describe the land explored by Powell and his cohorts, he traveled the canyons himself. These backcountry experiences color and layer his words. He isn’t so much trying to write history as to decipher and articulate the backstory for anyone new to Powell’s “Plateau Province.”
Stegner first saw this startling and perplexing country in his Salt Lake City youth in the 1920s. Those childhood trips to Fish Lake and the High Plateaus led directly to his Ph.D. dissertation on Clarence Dutton, the pioneer geologist whose gorgeous prose still forms a touchstone. Stegner’s explorations of the redrock wilderness with his Boy Scout troop led directly to his interest in John Wesley Powell. The land led to his books, and research for Stegner’s books educated him and radicalized him and led to his stance as an activist on behalf of the land.
In 1975, my relationship with Stegner moved from books to experience. When I was a young ranger working behind the desk at the Capitol Reef National Park Visitor Center, Stegner kept appearing at the edges of my life, and I savored every encounter. Bates Wilson, the much-loved founding superintendent of Canyonlands National Park, walked in one day with his trademark Will Rogers grin, striding into the dim exhibit space from the sunstruck midsummer canyon outside. He proudly told me stories of how he and “Wally,” working as advisors to Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, had managed to help to establish Canyonlands, upgrade Arches to a national park and to enlarge Capitol Reef and boost it from the little national monument surrounding the village of Fruita to a full-blown national park about 10 years before. Bates clearly wanted any ranger working that desk to know this history.
Another chance meeting that summer led to my tenuous claim of collaboration with Stegner, a distant partnership, but a story I love. One hot afternoon humming with gnats, vibrating with silence and sun, the master landscape photographer Eliot Porter and his assistant walked through the Visitor Center door, grateful for the shade and freshly astonished by the rough roads in Cathedral Valley. They asked the ranger—me—for ideas for photo locations. Eliot was working on a book to celebrate the bicentennial, a book with text to be written by Wallace and Page Stegner, father and son. Porter, with his patrician roots, wire-rimmed glasses and field khakis, came across as organized, intense and intellectual. He had trained as a bacteriologist at Harvard before dedicating himself to photography.
I tried to be mature and matter-of-fact. Professional. But these were my heroes. I was thrilled. Eliot, to his credit, treated me with more respect than I deserved—deferring to my local knowledge though I had booked only a couple of months in the park at that point. Over the course of a week, I encountered him again in the backcountry and continued to steer him toward my favorite places.
When I discovered the book newly published in 1981, I thumbed quickly through the pages, looking for the photographic harvest from those days in Capitol Reef. Plate 74 in American Places is a picture of cottonwoods at the humble waterhole of Fountain Tanks—a classic Porter composition framed by curves of golden sandstone. I like to believe that Eliot took that picture because one searing June day I sent him and his assistant hiking in that very direction from The Post.
In the mid-70s, a simple sign marked The Post—a junction along a dirt road in the southern reaches of the Waterpocket Fold canyons, 35 miles from pavement, more than 100 miles from an Interstate. Where else was I going to run into Eliot Porter?
Within a couple of years, I had reason to write to Wallace Stegner, asking for permission to use his words on oversized postcards, pairing my photographs with quotations from the likes of Stegner, Abbey, Muir, Dutton. His responses were warm, immediate and encouraging. He recalled working to upgrade Capitol Reef to national park status, but cautioned me: “Don’t tell any of the local ranchers, or they’d send me letter bombs.”
He wrote to ask for leads on local people when he came to Fruita to renew his boyhood memories of the little oasis in the slickrock for American Places, “just to see how the present has intruded on their serene isolation.” He signed off as “Wally.”
I now realize that when I wrote to Stegner from Capitol Reef, I had already won him over. He and Mary made a point of returning to this favorite place. When Stegner wrote in Recapitulation of the consummation of his first great love, he set the courtship scene in the orchards of Fruita, by moonlight. When my note from Capitol Reef reached him, I didn’t know that we were already members of a small band of devotees of this obscure refuge tucked away in the redrock wilderness. Though he didn’t know me from Adam, my return address warmed his heart.
I first saw Wallace Stegner in the flesh when I returned to graduate school at the University of Arizona. I had felt compelled to study ecology, to give my natural history writing more academic depth, but soon felt out of my element in all that theoretical science. When Stegner came to campus in 1977 to read from Recapitulation as a work-in-progress and to submit graciously to interviews by English graduate students, I spent as much time as I could, hovering and listening. It was a release and a relief from my immersion in evolutionary theory. In person, Wally Stegner was just as kind and straight and clear-eyed as he had been in his letters.
Soon afterward I broke free from the constraints of pure science and spent a couple of years editing Plateau Magazine for the Museum of Northern Arizona. Stegner consented to write an introduction for an issue about water on the Colorado Plateau. He had to dash off the piece quickly (this was hardly high-priority work), and gave me carte blanche to edit it. I remember his typescript lying on my desk in my little office in the ponderosa pine woods on the outskirts of Flagstaff. I shake my head in wonder to think how blithely I reordered his paragraphs.
I kept moving across the West. After each move, I searched for the relevant Stegner book to guide me into the heart of the place. I spent a summer in North Dakota, and to understand the northern plains, I read Stegner’s stories from his earliest childhood on the Saskatchewan frontier, Wolf Willow—his handbook for anyone ready to “discover the beauty of the geometric earth and the enormous sky brimming with weather” and to “learn the passion of loneliness and the mystery of a prairie wind.”
When my book projects took me to the Great Basin Desert, Stegner’s essay, “The Land Nobody Wanted,” in Mormon Country, was my introduction to this ocean of sagebrush. I trusted his definition of the essence of the place in all its “flamboyant and bizarre” beauty.
As a photographer working in wild places, I inevitably found myself involved in books that carried a conservation message beneath the splashy color. And the prototype for all those “battle books?” This Is Dinosaur, which Wallace Stegner edited for Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower—to stop the dams proposed in the heart of Dinosaur National Monument in the 50s.
To save Dinosaur, “one of the last almost ‘unspoiled’ wildernesses”—a place that Stegner also described as a “palimpsest of human history, speculation, rumor, fantasy, ambition, science, controversy and conflicting plans for use”—Stegner and Brower invented the coffee table book, with landscape photography and nature essays combined with perfect pitch. The ideal of their intentional politics enlivened every one of my books of photographs.
When I moved to Salt Lake City, the first book I read was Stegner’s Recapitulation, the story of his alter-ego Bruce Mason’s nostalgic return to Salt Lake City as an adult—after growing up there in Stegner’s huge fictionalized story of his childhood, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. In Mason’s memories as a character lie all of Stegner’s affection for this place—as a man.
Recapitulation concludes in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, where Bruce Mason buries the last survivor of his family—just as Stegner buried his mother, father and brother there before he was 30. Bruce Mason looks across this sweep of green space perched on the terrace of the urban valley—“where new raw houses were being erected on new raw streets for the living of new raw lives”—watching the storms whirl through, just as Stegner did, and just as I do, for I’ve lived three blocks from those graves in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood for 20 years.
The graves are still there—brother Cecil, who died shortly after he married, leaving behind both wife and child. Mother, Hilda, gone from cancer just two years later, and finally, the father, George, too—a suicide after murdering his girlfriend in a sordid downtown hotel tragedy. Though Stegner himself chose never to place a marker over his father, his character Bruce Mason was able to write that gravestone into fictional reality at the end of Recapitulation.
I know Stegner had a temper. He could hold a grudge. He never left behind the emotional complications of his chaotic relationship with his alternately charming and abusive father. He laid out his life challenge in The Big Rock Candy Mountain: “If a man could understand himself and his own family… he’d have a good start toward understanding everything he’d ever need to know.” Throughout that journey toward understanding, as “you carried your dead unquietly within you,” Stegner never failed to speak with clarity and consistency about what mattered most. Community, relationship, learning, the land.
In the mid-1990s, I found direct inspiration in Wally’s activism as Terry Tempest Williams and I set out to collect the essays that became Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness. We aimed to influence Congressional policy, and we decided to do so with the passionate words of writers. Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter” was our touchstone.
Nudged by The Sierra Club’s David Brower to write something for the bureaucratic record being assembled by David Pesonen of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, Stegner crafted this small masterpiece of personal testimony and concise philosophy in 1960. Seated at his desk in the hills above Palo Alto, he imagined the view across his boyhood haunts in southern Utah, ranging out from the family cabin at Fish Lake, setting out to address “the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself.”
As he wrote his way to the end of the letter, he accelerated into the crystalline paragraphs that close with his most widely quoted four words. He called these lands “the geography of hope.”
Stegner used the word “hope” often. He called the west the native home of hope. And then, in his last book, after decades of frustrating conservation battles, he took back his vision. In his 80s, he feared that the native home of hope wasn’t going to deliver, that we are incapable of building what he called “a society to match this scenery.”
I think his despair was real but I also think he meant to throw down the gauntlet—to challenge us to get to work and create the home of hope as we grow into this land, as we map our community geography together. Our success depends on good conversation—on valuing each other in the same way Stegner valued both his friends from Harvard and his friends from Fruita.
I have had the opportunity to participate in some of these conversations. During my Stegner Fellowship, I’ve taken Stegner’s work on the road across Utah under the auspices of the Utah Humanities Council Public Square community discussion program.
Here in Salt Lake City, I’ve brought The Gathering of Zion and Stegner’s tribute to “Mormon Trees” from Mormon Country to the Sons of the Utah Pioneers. A wife of one of those sons came up to me afterwards and latched onto my hands. She told me how much she loved those Lombardy poplars in her childhood backyard, how—more than 60 years ago—she climbed into them as her secret place of solitude. She misses the refuge of those “Mormon trees” that Stegner believed “give a quality to the land so definite that it is almost possible to mark the limits of the Mormon Country by the trees.”
In Delta, I read a passage from the nearly-forgotten One Nation in which Stegner writes of the World War II Japanese-American concentration camps in a book published in 1945 while good American citizens were still imprisoned and living in those camps. In our discussion at Delta, we talked of the neighboring internment camp at Topaz and of how the Delta residents moved from initial fear when the internees arrived to something close to friendship.
In Kanab, a rancher challenged me to take care not to overstate Stegner’s stance as an environmentalist. Hers was a savvy reminder; Stegner did acknowledge ranchers. Just three paragraphs up from the “geography of hope” in the “Wilderness Letter,” we find this line: “I have known enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness...”
In St. George, I talked the audience through Stegner’s life and career. Religion surfaced in our discussion. I know Stegner felt a warm welcome in Salt Lake’s Mormon ward houses as a boy. Though he never considered conversion, I believe his friends in the LDS Church shaped his belief in community and cooperation.
My year as a Stegner Fellow coincided with the election of Barack Obama, and I couldn’t help but notice that Stegner shared a suite of values with our new president, a stunning combination of civic engagement and citizenship, of scholarship and thoughtfulness, a fondness for the word “responsibility.” Stegner found his solace in the here-and-now, in the threads of history, in the reassuring universals—what he called “the great community of recorded human experience.”
In his “This I Believe” essay, written for the original “This I Believe” series created by Edward R. Murrow in the 50s, Stegner talks not of God but of citizenship:
I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do… I believe in conscience.
… in the essential outlines of what constitutes human decency, we vary amazingly little. The Chinese and Indian know as well as I do what kindness is, what generosity is, what fortitude is. They can define justice quite as accurately. It is only when they and I are blinded by tribal and denominational narrowness that we insist upon our differences and can recognize goodness only in the robes of our own crowd.
As a thoroughly American thinker, Stegner understood the links between ethics and landscape, between home and heart. His roots in the arid West made this possible. If he were alive and writing today, he would see connections that run from this precarious moment as a society back through culture to the land itself. He wrote: “Land gave Americans their freedom. It also gave them their egalitarianism, their democracy, their optimism, their free-enterprise capitalism, their greed and their carelessness. It is an ambiguous and troubling legacy.”
Our unambiguous connection to land will sustain us. The troubling ambiguity of what we do with that relationship will give us plenty to talk about on the occasion of Stegner’s bicentennial.
This is why Stegner matters and will continue to matter. As his daughter-in-law Lynn Stegner said of him: “He was unalterably and gladly placed.” We strive to be placed. In a body of work filled with yearning, searching and consolation, Stegner teaches us how to come home.