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Excerpt
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IT'S MURDER MYSTERY NIGHT
at the Alleykatz Cappuccino Bar. As I look around the room at the
other suspects, I see a cross section of a small prairie town: teacher,
rancher, waitress, writer, businesswoman, farmer, artist, civil servant,
truck driver. The fact that I am here with these folks tonight is a clue
to the character of this place. Eastend, Saskatchewan (estimated population
650), is a homey town where people make their own fun and are quick to
befriend a stranger.
I’ve come to Eastend not to solve mysteries but to search for ghosts.
Specifically, the ghost of Wallace Stegner and the spirit of the windblown
plains that shaped his writing, his values and his sense of self.
Stegner (1909-1993) spent a large chunk of his childhood here before emerging
as an archetypal Western voice—one of North America’s finest
writers ever—and the founder of Stanford’s creative writing
program. His family came to Eastend from Iowa by stagecoach in 1914 and
stayed on until 1920. In the summers they farmed a homestead on the open
prairie; during the school year they lived in town.
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| EASTEND: Snug in its river valley. |
“If I am native to anything, I am native to this,” the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author wrote of Eastend, or Whitemud as he called it, in
the semiautobiographical novel Wolf Willow. “I can say to
myself that a good part of my private and social character . . . [has
been] scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely, lonely,
exposed prairie of the homestead.”
After the family home in town reopened as a residence for writers and
artists in 1990, the 81-year-old Stegner vowed: “I intend to haunt
that house, just to keep track of what goes on.” Haunt the house
he must, as I fell under his spell from the moment I walked in. My first
visit was a year ago, when I spent two weeks living in that house and
photographing the landscape he so vividly described. Now, I’ve come
back to explore the town and its people, to see how much of the Stegner
experience lingers. Part of the lure, perhaps, is my recent return to
my own prairie roots.
Like Stegner, I grew up in the West but appreciate the rich culture and
gentle countryside of the East. Living in Ottawa for 30 years, I have
enjoyed galleries and performing arts centers as well as canoe trips and
hikes. But prairie roots run deep. The roots of the rough fescue grass
go down more than 25 feet, thus escaping drought and fire and resisting
attempts to pull them out. So, a few years ago, I decided to move back
to Calgary. An hour to the west lies the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains;
to the east lies the “bald-headed”—or, depending on the
company you keep, “bald-assed”—prairie.
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| REVISITED: Stegner's boyhood home, restored. |
Most people driving across the plains describe them as boring. For some
of us, however, they evoke an awe that only a writer with the skills of
Stegner can begin to articulate. I sometimes feel defensive agreeing with
the comment of one dyed-in-the-wool prairie person who, when asked what
he thought of the beauty of the Rockies, is said to have replied, “They
are very nice, but they block the view.”
Stegner, of course, said it better: “Over the segmented circle of
earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds
down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild,
a light pure, glareless, and transparent.”
THE STEGNER FAMILY farmed a piece of
land some 50 miles southwest of Eastend, along the Montana border, where
they tried, without success, to make money growing wheat. The homestead
was isolated and austere: a shack and barn in a shadeless field. Stegner's
only sibling, an older brother, stayed in town with a summer job, and
the nearest neighbor was four miles away.
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| BLACK IRON BRIDGE: The bridge described in Wolf Willow. |
Those solitary summers deepened his sense of self. “I would not
have missed it—could not have missed it and be who I am, for better
or worse,” he wrote in Wolf Willow. “How better could
a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know?
Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a
waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose
on the coulee bank?"
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| DANGER ZONE: The Alleykatz, where entertainment can be murder. |
The landscape left him not humbled, but stoic and independent-minded.
“Standing alone under the bell-jar sky,” he wrote in Wolf
Willow, “gave me the strongest feeling of personal singularity
I shall ever have.”
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| IT'S HISTORY: The former Pastime Theatre, now a museum. |
It also instilled the conservationist values he would put forth so eloquently
during his decades at Stanford. By the mid-1950s, Stegner was not only
an award-winning writer but also a leading environmentalist. In 1960 he
wrote an influential treatise, the Wilderness Letter, urging congressional
support for a national park system. He argued the need to preserve areas
of great beauty, natural diversity and recreational potential and to set
aside places for “spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity,
the birth of awe.” The letter left little doubt that his boyhood
experience contributed to this thinking: “A prairie . . . big enough
to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon . . . is asgood
a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing
prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest,”
he wrote.
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| OLD AND NEW: The venerable Cypress Hotel, where Stegner's father stored some ill-fated potatoes. |
The native prairie is indeed vanishing. Modern equipment and government
incentives, combined with above-average rainfall in the past 20 years,
have allowed efficient farming of marginal lands throughout the plains.
But Eastenders seem to love the prairie as much as Stegner did, and there
is growing pressure to save what’s left. Several major conservation
activities are springing up in the area. A local family has donated a
parcel of rangeland to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to form the bulk
of a 20-square-mile “Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area.”
And the Canadian government has established a 185-square-mile “Grasslands
National Park” that will eventually encompass 350 square miles.
As farms here expand, many are becoming “industrialized,” with
absentee owners or very large family holdings. Thus, while houses remain
scarce, the prairie is no longer a boundless wilderness, but a collection
of grassy islands in a sea of agriscape. Driving through is still thrilling,
however, because these are some of the largest islands of grassland left
in the Great Central Plains.
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| STATE-OF-THE-ART: Eastend's fossil center. |
On one of those islands lies the abandoned Stegner homestead. The site
is within a federally run grazing reserve and wildlife area, off-limits
today without a special permit.
AT THE END OF EVERY SUMMER, the Stegners left the homestead and
headed back to Eastend. The trip took two days by lumber wagon or eight
excruciating hours by Model T. Today, it’s little more than an hour.
If homestead conditions were harsh and lonely, life in town was convivial
and snug. “I never returned to town in early September without a
surge of joy—back to safety and shelter, back to the river and the
willow breaks, back to friends, games, Sunday school parties, back to
school, where I could shine,” Stegner recalled in his essay collection,
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.
Eastend in those days was a cross between frontier encampment and infant
town—so young that his family’s arrival in 1914 coincided with
the birth of the town’s first Euro-Canadian child, aptly named Eastena
Anderson. Stegner’s biographer, Jackson J. Benson, noted that he
“was probably the only important writer living into the 1990s who
actually experienced the pioneering period of North American history.”
Stegner went back only once, in 1953, to conduct research for Wolf
Willow. In the book he drew a generally fond picture of his youthful
adventures in town, relishing “a wild freedom, a closeness to earth
and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals [and] the physical
sweetness of a golden age.” Yet he also scoffed at Eastend as a “dung-heeled
sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting,
without sculpture, without architecture, almost without music or theatre,
without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction,
without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books.”
The ambivalence is striking. “To tell the truth, I am not sure I
would trade my childhood of freedom and the outdoors and the senses for
a childhood of being led by the hand past all the Turners in the National
Gallery,” Stegner wrote. As an adult, however, “I would not
for a thousand dollars an hour return to live!”
He concluded: “Give it a thousand years.”
IF STEGNER WAS RIGHT that Eastend needed a
millennium to develop, what chance did I have of finding significant changes
after a mere half-century? True, the population of about 120 has since
“ballooned” to about 650, but the town has hardly grown in physical
size. Stegner’s father built the family home on Eastend’s westernmost
street, and it’s still the westernmost street today. In fact, the
town has not expanded in any direction beyond its 1953 limits, and the
highest structures by far are still the grain elevators.
Tracing Stegner’s footsteps as described in Wolf Willow, I
found many of the old landmarks, including the cemetery with names made
familiar through his writings, and the Pastime Theatre, now the Eastend
Historical Museum and Information Center. The Cypress Hotel, where I stayed
on this second visit, looked as grand as when it reopened after a fire
in 1916. The blaze destroyed both the hotel and the Stegner family’s
potato crop, which was stored in the hotel basement. When I recounted
the incident to Ruben Stredwick, a schoolmate of Stegner’s who still
lives here, he didn’t remember the potatoes but commented that it
was “a great way to bake ’em, ho, ho, ho.”
I then passed the school Stredwick and Stegner had attended. Stredwick
said he remembered “Wally” playing in the schoolyard. Empty
now and looking a little decrepit, the school must have been the core
of their community—not only for education, but as a social center
and, in 1918, as an emergency hospital during the great flu epidemic,
which killed 10 percent of the townspeople.
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| PLAIN AND SIMPLE: "The sky," Stegner wrote in his Wilderness Letter, "was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks." |
I was admiring some gardens on my stroll through town when, from behind
a hedge, a crisp voice greeted me with a friendly hello and an invitation
to come on in and see the garden. The voice belonged to Bea Tasche, a
born raconteur and source of unlimited information on all things Eastendian.
After inviting me in for tea and a tour of her home—the original
house of the Z-X Ranch, on which the town site of Eastend was built—Bea
noted that some folks in town were upset about how Stegner described Eastend.
But, she confided, “he was right about some of it.”
Then back to my room at the Cypress, which, like Eastend itself, was
a mix of old and new. Though recently renovated, it had no phone, so I
found myself standing in the kitchen at 10 p.m. after the office and restaurant
closed, checking my e-mail through the only available telephone jack.
This is not to suggest that Eastend is standing still, set to dry up like
so many other small prairie towns as huge agricultural operations displace
family farms. To the contrary, there is a sense of vitality in the air.
New buildings are rising next to false-fronted frontier classics, and
Eastenders point with pride to their exemplary public library/high school
complex as well as an important new paleontological museum and research
center.
Indeed, the town is experiencing a bit of a cultural renaissance. A local
resident, Sharon Butala, has become one of Canada’s bestselling authors,
putting Eastend on the mental map of many Canadians. And the Wallace Stegner
House is a magnet for creative minds in need of quiet to finish their
works. At $200 per month in Canadian dollars, the rent cannot be beat.
There’s even a burgeoning tourist industry, thanks to the $3.1 million
fossil display and research center that opened last year after paleontologists
unearthed a rare Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton near town. One of the
most complete specimens in the world, the behemoth is in the new museum,
and the area is now being billed as the Valley of Hidden Secrets. Wandering
around the outskirts of town, I can never decide whether to look up and
drink in the sky or keep my nose to the ground in search of another dinosaur.
HOW MUCH of Stegner’s boyhood world is
left here today? Modernization has made its mark, but the frontier spirit
persists. Eastend is still a place where, by the second day in town, you
say hi to familiar faces and are asked over for lunch. And outside of
town, it may yet be possible to find a young lad who feels the isolation
and awe that Stegner did. Coyotes still howl at night, and the wind still
“blows all the time in a way to stiffen your hair and rattle the
eyes in your head.”
Even on my short visits, there were times when the forces of nature jerked
me back to the harsh reality of this environment. While photographing
a tranquil scene at the local reservoir, I saw a huge cloud boiling over
the horizon, and my first thought was that a prairie hailstorm was on
its way. But the cloud was an odd brownish-black, and I realized I was
facing a massive dust storm. My mind flashed back to the stories my father
told of blinding dust storms and failed crops during the drought of the
Great Depression. Was I witnessing the inevitable return of the dry times?
Suddenly, the front hit and the wind whipped the dirt around my feet.
I snapped out of my contemplation, grabbed my precious camera gear and
dove for the safety of the car.
As cushioned from the Stegner experience as modern life may seem, this
place retains a character increasingly hard to find in southern Canada
and the lower 48 states. It provides room to take a deep breath, let the
mind float and search the soul. Even the tourism literature for Eastend
invites the visitor to come “find yourself . . . in the middle of
nowhere.”
Like Stegner, I need to get back to those wild places and simpler ways
for “spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of
awe.” Eastend remains such a place. I hope—and I suspect Stegner
would as well—that it will stay that way for another 50 years. Or,
better yet, a thousand.
Jim Foley is a writer, photographer and conservationist in Calgary, Alberta.
Excerpt
Killing Fields
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| LOOK OUT: A massive dust storm rises over the reservoir. |
NOTHING COULD HAVE PREVENTED us from hunting,
fishing, trapping, and generally fulfilling ourselves as predators. I
think there was not a boy who did not have a .22 by the time he was ten
or eleven; my brother at ten was shooting a twelve-gauge shotgun, picking
off cottontails and snowshoe hares, an occasional duck, an even more occasional
grouse, which he sold to a lath-like woman who was anemic and had been
told to eat wild game. Though she was a market, she gave us the creeps;
we had seen her break a raw egg into a glass of beer and drink it down.
Without anemia to justify us, we had our own savage feasts out in the
willows, dining upon sage hen or rabbit broiled on sticks over the fire.
When larger game failed we netted bullfrogs, or caught them on a fish
hook baited with a scrap of red flannel, and hacked off their legs and
roasted them. We stole old frying pans and cached them in our hideouts
in the brush so that when occasion offered we could fry up a panful of
chubs or a big intricately boned sucker. I remember one whole day below
Martin’s dam when we waded the shallow clear water hunting for the
tracks of clams in the sandy bottom; and the saltless, emetic chowder
we cooked up and bravely ate; and the distorted little knob of a pearl
that one of us found in a clam smashed open on a rock, and the instant
dream of fortune it aroused, and the decimation that resulted as we employed
against the clams the mass destruction that our fathers and grandfathers
had employed against placer gravels and buffalo and virgin timber and
free land. We had it in us to be as blindly destructive as any in the
history of North America. Only our opportunities were limited.
—from Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last
Plains Frontier (© 1955 by Wallace Stegner; published in 1962
by Viking Press, N.Y., and Macmillan of Canada Ltd.).
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