Cocktail Hour
Ed and Wally in New York
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Great essay on Wallace Stegner by A.O. Scott in the New York Times got me thinking about Stegner and Abbey again.
Here are a couple of snippets from my book, All the Wild That Remains, about Ed and Wally and the big city…..
When I mentioned the names of these writers in the East, I sometimes got befuddled looks. More than once I had been asked: “Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?” No, I would patiently explain. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.
It was kind of funny, really. Stegner and Abbey were both so firmly entrenched in the pantheon of writers of the American West that if the region had a literary Mount Rushmore their faces would be chiseled on it. But back east their names, as often as not, elicited puzzlement. When this happened, I would always rush to their defense. Wallace Stegner, I would explain, won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel one year and the National Book Award for another the next, and singlehandedly corrected many of the facile myths about the American West, earning him the role of intellectual godfather, not just of the region but of generations of environmental writers. As for Ed Abbey, I would say, he wrote a novel that sparked an entire environmental movement—have you heard of monkeywrenching or Earth first!?–and another that some consider the closest thing to a modern Walden, a book that many describe as life-changing…..
Both men were understandably unhappy about the career-deflating tag of “regional writer,” but the tags have stuck to some extent. Mimicking the confusion of some of the easterners I’ve talked to, Abbey once jokingly referred to himself as Edward Albee. “Never make the New Yorker’s mistake of taking New York for America,” Stegner warned. Abbey, as usual, was more confrontational about his geographic inferiority complex. He railed against being ignored in print and person. When a friend from New York City suggested that the problem was that Abbey was a big fish in a small pond while he, the New York friend, was a small fish in a big pond, Abbey wrote in his journal: “Perfect. This guy thinks New York is the big pond, and the American West the small one.”
Going back into retirement
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Onward to the Sea! (And Back to Boulder)
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In the end, my nephew Noah and I were on the road for 4 weeks and 6,500 miles. In the last post I got us from North Carolina to the Badlands of South Dakota. Here we pick up in North Dakota…..
Meeting off-duty Teddy and Edith in Medora, NC.
Noah on the Maah Daah Hey Trail above the Little Missouri (where we camped for two nights.) Continue reading →
Into the Badlands
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My nephew Noah graduated three weeks ago. The two if us have spent the last couple of weeks following the trail of Theodore Roosevelt (when not going to Celtic games or playing ping pong). Here are a few highlights from the last 13 days…(Pardon the preponderance of photos of me, often wearing the same shirt, but Noah is the one usually taking the pics.)
Morning writing spot in the Badlands
TR’s journal at Houghton Library. Here he tersely describes turning in the boat thieves in Dickinson, ND.
Rough Beauty by Karen Auvinen
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Long time, no talk Bill and Davers. I’m coming out of seclusion because a very special book is due out a week from 
today, June 5. With Scribner’s behind it and three starred reviews already (calling it “Breathtaking” and “a beautiful contemplative memoir,”) Karen Auvinen’s Rough Beauty is poised to be a break-out book. And it deserves to be.
I was lucky enough to read it early to blurb it. Here is what I wrote:
This beautiful and elemental book is an invitation into a life of nature and ritual. Her existence scoured to simplicity by a home-destroying fire, Karen Auvinen sinks into the seasons, watching the world turn from her isolated mountain home, battling loneliness and her own stubborn self, but through contact with the natural world–including the neighborhood bear– achieving moments of illumination and profound truth. At the center of the rituals that make up this mountain life–including walks in nature, meditation, and gourmet dinners—is a high priest named Elvis, a white husky who is tethered to Karen by devotion (and the occasional leash) and fills her days with love, teaching her that she isn’t quite the tough loner she fancies herself to be.
There are many books about seasons in the wilderness but this is one about a life in it. Henry Beston wrote:“The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.” Not Karen Auvinen’s world. Rough Beauty has the power to change lives. It stands as an antidote to the brittle and the electronic, the hurried way we rush through our days.
So there it is. Read this book and change your life.
Mueller Time
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To put it in terms my people can understand: All the others are writing blogs, or at best flash fiction.
Robert Mueller is working on a novel.
Just a Thought….
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“An exploration of the questing desires of the young heart, ‘Ultimate Glory’ should be recommended reading for every college student. A 20-something, unsure whether to listen to the yearnings of the soul, might find answers in Gessner’s chase of a flying plastic disc.”
The Washington Post
Fighting for Bears Ears: The Freedom of Restraint
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The Harasser-in-Chief is heading to Utah today to announce that he’ll shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, possibly by as much as 85%. According to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, this will be “the largest rollback of protected areas in U.S. history” and “an appalling affront to Native American tribes who sought healing and cross-cultural understanding through protection of their sacred sites and ancestral homelands.”
A year ago I was part of a group of writers who contributed to a chapbook, edited by Stephen Trimble and put out by Torrey House press, that was distributed to congress and other decision-makers in the build up to President Obama declaring Bears Ears a National Monument. To find out more about the project click here. And I’ll post some more information about the book below.
Here was my offering:
The Freedom of Restraint
I remember the moment exactly and I remember the word that came with the moment. The word that the moment all but summoned:
Freedom.
For me, for many Americans it is a word that has had any true meaning hammered out of it by rhetoric and commercialism. It has been worn down and out by too many truck commercials and blowhard politicians, a fine and shining word now left behind on the ground like an old soda can.
But now it was back–filling my mind.
