Stegner - The Sound of Mountain Water : The Changing American West

FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2015

Copyright 1946, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1980 by Wallace Stegner

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Portions of this book have previously appeared in the following publications: Saturday Review; The Atlantic Monthly; Holiday; The American West; The American Novel, published by Basic Books, Inc.; The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Other Tales, published by Signet; Teaching the Short Story, published by University of California, Davis; Library Journal; The Romance of North America, copyright 1958 by Houghton Mifflin Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher; Four Portraits and One Subject, copyright 1963 by Houghton Mifflin Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher; Womans Day, reprinted by permission of Womans Day magazine, a Fawcett publication.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91170-9

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In most parts of the West (Utah is one exception) a child is likely to learn little in school about the geography and history of the region that is shaping him. He gets them through the pores if he gets them at all. Many never get them, some get them late: it is not uncommon for grown men and women to develop a monomaniac interest in local history that as children they never heard of. The discovery that it has been around them all the time, and they deprived of it, forever shatters their ability to take it for granted as inheritors of a stabler tradition might do.

I suppose the essays in this volume demonstrate some aspects of that process of learning to know what one spontaneously responds to because it is what one grew up in. They were written over a period of more than twenty years, beginning just at the end of World War II when the West was poised to take its fateful leap into modernity; and they reveal, I am sure, no systematic approach and develop no coherent thesis. I have tried the systematic approach and the developed thesis in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and Wolf Willow, the first wholly impersonal, the second colored by my own experience and feeling. These essays, mainly personal, were written during the years when I was gathering material for those two books, and they probably show me getting my education in public. For example, I am amazed to find myself, in The Rediscovery of America, speaking admiringly of Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. Now I know enough not to speak admiringly of reclamation dams without looking closely at their teeth. But I have not changed the essay, or any of the essays, except to cut away a little dullness and update a few facts. They represent the way I felt when I wrote them. So be it. Later ones will perhaps correct their errors.

Physically and socially, the West does not remain the same from decade to decade any more than other places do. If anything, it changes faster. Some of the places spoken of hereGlen Canyon, for instanceno longer exist. Others, such as Las Vegas, exist in a state of crescendoing hype. All exist within the warping influence of great in-migration, uninterrupted boom, and unremitting technological tinkering. But these essays on country are to be understood in relation to a timeless condition, aridity. Walter Webb viewed the West, correctly, as an oasis civilization, and his generalization applies as truly to Los Angeles as to Las Vegas or Albuquerque. The drought of 19761977 proved that it even applies to the San Francisco Bay area. Limitation, deprivation, are words we must keep in mind when speaking of the reputedly limitless West. Even a state with only a half million people in it may be over-populated. Even an oasis civilization, if it tries to squeeze too much out of its resources, is in danger of depleting or destroying itself.

So if these essays begin in innocence, with a simple-minded love of western landscapes and western experience, they move toward the attempt, more systematically made in other books of mine, to understand what it is one loves, what is special or fragile about it, and how far love will take us. It is possible to love a country to death.

In gathering things together for a book, I have omitted a good many essays on the subject of conservation, which, being polemics, have dated badly as the controversies that evoked them died down. I have also left out purely literary essays that have nothing to do with the West as area or idea. So this is not a volume of conservation essays or literary essays, though it contains some of both. It is a book of confrontations (not in the 1960s sense!) with the West, a series of responses and trial syntheses. The West being what it is, a Westerner trying to examine his life has trouble finding himself in any formed or coherent society (again Utah is an exception). His confrontations are therefore likely to be with landscape, which seems to define the West and its meaning better than any of its forming cultures, and with himself in the context of that landscape.

So here. The first group of these essays are personal responses to landscape, or perhaps one should say geography, and they conclude with a personal expression of faith in the importance of geography, and especially wilderness, to human personality and culture. In making wilderness the geography of hope, I have undoubtedly revealed myself: there is nothing so desperately demoralizing to a New World optimist as the sight of the New World floundering toward total reunion with Europes cynicism, belligerence, and despair.

I am aware that the literary essays of writing. Though I may enjoy these productions as tours de force, and may even myself play games with some of the technical innovations they have produced, I want a foot on earth, I am forced to believe in human community and in Time. I believe we are Times prisoners, I believe Time is our safety and our strength. I think we build our little huts against it as the latter-day Illyrians built their huts within and against the ruins of the great palace of Diocletian at Split. One of the deprivations of people in western America is that Time in their country is still not molded by human living into the forms of sanctuary, continuity, and confidence that it is the ambition of all human cultures to create.

Hence this general, inadequate summary of some of the things that too many Westerners do not know about their West. Known, they can be built on.

Let us discriminate among the parts of what we are talking about. The Pacific Northwest and California are separate subregions, earlier settled and more amenable to settlement than the interior West. The Southwest is ethnically and historically another country. The states that are leftMontana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Nevadacomprise the Rocky Mountain West, but they are by no means all mountains. The whole eastern side of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado is high plains, the gently sloping long hill which the swinging rivers built. Montana, named for its mountains, is three-fifths high plains, Wyoming about half, Colorado about a third. Southern Idaho, western and southern Utah, and all of Nevada are desert.