Stegner shares thoughts on living, writing in the West

WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO THE LEMONADE SPRINGS: Living and Writing in the West, by Wallace Stegner, Random House, 227 pages, $21.

This collection of essays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stegner takes its title from the hobo ballad “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” that Harry McClintock is said to have written in 1928 and that I remember singing as a kid.

As Stegner puts it, “The hobo’s version of beatitude — of a place where the bulldogs have rubber teeth and the cinder dicks are blind and policemen have to tip their hats, where there’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too, where the handouts grow on bushes and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs — summarized his unquenchable hope as it summarizes the indigenous optimism of the West.

“I suppose it is a proof of the incorrigibility of that spirit that when I began to look for a title for this book of essays about the West I was drawn back to that same hobo ballad. What lures many people to the West always has been, and still is, mirage.”

The 83-year-old Stegner, the founder and former director of the Stanford Writing Program, long ago established himself as an expert on Western life, history and problems.

One of his main laments is that non-Westerners tend to see the American West in its mythic enlargement as created by the pulp magazines, Currier and Ives prints and, to a certain extent, by artists such as Remington and Winchester. Cowboys and Indians. Good guys vs. bad guys. Cattle rustlers, Petticoat Junction, and the sheriff who just blew in from Dodge to save the day. If ever there was a stereotyped culture, this is it.

Long-suffering Mainers whose Maine is not the touristy rockbound coast of quaint lighthouses and lantern-jawed fishermen in yellow oil slickers puffing on corncob pipes should know just where the man is coming from.

Stegner was born in Iowa in 1909 to a father who, in his words, “was a boomer, a gambler, a rainbow-chaser, as footloose as a tumbleweed in a windstorm” and a mother “who was always hopefully, hopelessly, trying to nest.”

His young life was one of constant motion from one boom town to another throughout the western United States and Canada. No grass grew under the Stegner family’s feet. The years when the both the West and the migratory budding author were young were indelibly stamped into the author’s consciousness, and readers are the better for it.

In an essay titled “Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood,” Stegner spins a bittersweet tale of the family’s travels from North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Salt Lake City to Reno, constantly meeting with failure. In “A Letter, Much Too Late,” he chronicles a poignant recollection of his mother’s life as she struggled to settle and connect with the places they lived. The reader will not soon forget either piece.

But the larger theme of the book centers on Stegner’s thesis that to live in the West is to contend with aridity, the consequences of which multiply by a kind of domino effect.

In man’s attempts to compensate for nature’s lack of water whole sections of the Western landscape have been remade by government decree, results of which are not always a pretty sight.

Stegner sometimes wonders if the country would have been better off if the explorers Lewis and Clark had been forced to file an environmental impact statement before they headed west.

Had this been the case, he muses, we might long ago have been dissuaded from our hard determination to dominate nature. And we wouldn’t be constantly attempting to make the arid Western desert support many more people than it is capable of sustaining.

Kent Ward is a free-lance writer who lives in Winterport.