In the new year before our inauguration of a new president I computed a route home from Alberta to southern Colorado that would skirt the cities and track the Rockies. I dragged the blue Googley lines along old roads to old places, cross-cutting the Can-Am grain. When it was done and printed out I had 2491 miles to go in 12 days, with stops to ski and see friends.
The global political economy was going to hell, so I resolved to keep the radio off and drive in silence, transcending conceptual thinking about collateralized debt obligations or morally bankrupt bankers. Within minutes of kissing my sweetheart Pat goodbye, however, I was thinking about real estate. It was everywhere along the new west Edmonton freeway. Tall new houses standing eve to eve in blocked-out farm fields practically eclipsed the sun (It’s low in the winter there). I recalled a granite craftsman telling me at a party, “These houses will be falling apart in ten years. We’ll be going back in to do things right.”
Forget the unsettled foundations, the fuming particle board, the green studs, the nail guns and spray guns. I was setting out on a pilgrimage down along the Rocky Mountains, the high wild continental crest. It was sacred. I would think about hope and whether it meant anything – not so much Barack Obama’s generality but the more concrete meaning of Wallace Stegner’s epithet for the West: “the native home of hope.” |
"Guide to the Lost Mountains," my book on the tragedy of Colorado, can be ordered through this quick: LINK
Stegner, born 100 years ago, was a novelist and essayist with a deep interest in history. He was one of the few native Western writers who could communicate with the East without having to play cowboy or Indian. His “Wilderness Letter” written a half century ago to a federal panel called the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission was being quoted by environmentalists and academics on the occasion of his centennial. It’s a tight little essay with useful quotes like: “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.” It became the passionate heart of the argument for the Wilderness Act of 1964 shepherded into law by then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall (whom Stegner was visiting in Santa Fe when a car crash took the writer's life 1993).
I met him once at Stanford, an old bull with a drift of white hair. I asked him how he would define American history, expecting a discourse in the spirit of the Frontier Thesis. He leaned forward, and said, surprisingly, simply: “One big real estate deal.” That was the practical side of the writer who could find the poetic in an engineering term like “angle of repose,” which became the title of his most acclaimed (Pulitzer Prize) novel . . . But the tall new fast houses intruded, flickering by.
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