This is a collection of pieces Stegner wrote about the American West for various outlets in the 1980s. They're grouped into three broad sections: desert, rivers, and trying to support oneself off what the land provides.
It's similar, in some regards, to Edward Abbey's work. There's even a pull-quote from Abbey on the back, though the quote is more about how much Abbey dislikes most other nature writers for being, variously, equivocating, insipid, low-bellied, and rhapsodical, among other insults. The only thing he ostensibly says about this is it's a, 'real book written by a real writer.'
I cannot confirm Page Stegner is a real person, let alone a real writer - the picture on the inside flap of the back cover might be of anyone! - but I guess this is a real book, in the sense there are words, arranged into legible sentences on paper pages that you can hold and read.
Stegner's writing certainly has the cantankerous air of much of Abbey's writing, but is lacking when it comes to conveying what it is Stegner finds particularly appealing or beautiful about the places he's writing about. Because he's too busy griping about how everyone, save him and a couple of his buddies, are not appreciating the wilderness properly.
Guys on dirt bikes tearing around the desert? Scum. Environmental studies majors who get outraged about pollution from mining, but show little interest in the actual scenery? Dolts. People who regard the desert as an inhospitable expanse of greasewood to be hurried through at maximum speed to reach Vegas? Pitiable. Government agencies ostensibly tasked with protecting the land? Foot-draggers who are so incompetent or corrupt the wilderness would be best served by them doing nothing. People who go camping, but used wood fires instead of propane? Monsters who take it as an excuse to burn all their other trash while they're at it.
In a piece about a logging company town falling apart after the company was bought out by a bigger firm not operating on any notion of sustainable harvest or community, Stegner mentions the son of a friend is part of an Earth First! group that had set themselves up in redwoods to try and prevent their being cut down. The friend, knowing Stegner was headed that way, asked him to pass a message along. Stegner shows no interest in doing so and makes no attempt to find the kid. Another friend who came along is constantly miming they should leave and go fly-fishing. They both seem to think the best thing would be if the tree got cut down with the kid in it and he died.
Basically Stegner sneers at everyone who isn't him, until the final part of the book, which reveals Stegner as an incompetent dumbass. To be clear, this is a deliberate choice by Stegner, a series of descriptions of schemes to 'live off the fat of the land,' and failing utterly. Let's buy a couple of beef steers at auction and raise them on our friend's land, so we have our own steaks! Wait, what's the difference between a heifer and a steer? What do you mean, feed additives and inoculations cost money? There are wild boar on the friend's land, let's kill them and get cheap pork! Oops, the neighbor is a hog farm and we killed some of their sows. Let's get a boat and we'll fish! We don't know how to fix the engine, our anchor has no chain and the boat is too big for the trailer.
Reading those last 30 pages, I was left wondering who Stegner was to look down his nose at anyone else. He doesn't know anything. Not the geology, not the biology. Maybe a bit of history, in that he's clearly read Lewis and Clark's journals of their expedition (or at least the Cliff's Notes) but there's no sense he's an expert there, either. He gets lost enough to doubt he's got any idea where he's going, so it's nothing like an effective travelogue. And why would it be? If he described it in terms capturing the elements that appealed to him, the reader might want to go there. Then we might interact with it in some fashion he would consider unacceptable. Gasp! Horrors!
It reminds me of some of Aldo Leopold's writing. That people should want to preserve nature and recognize its value, but, you know, from a distance. They shouldn't actually get close to it, or see it or anything. Just appreciate it as a theoretical thing they know exists, and that it's good it exists.
Except Leopold at least sometimes gushed over the beauty of his land when he did this. Stegner keeps talking about how so much of the West is owned by the government, and is therefore the People's Land. Shaking his head at the members of the public who don't recognize what they've got and consider it valueless. Yet he doesn't seem to want any of "The People" out there. Except him and his fishing buddies.
I can do "sneering condescension" in my sleep. I'm looking for an author to capture the mystique or appeal of lands that at first glance appear so uninviting. Which Stegner is either uninterested or incapable of doing.
'Three belligerent troglodytes in plastic goggles with plastic pots on their head. Spent a hard day out in the dunes churning up the burrows of kangaroo rats and kit foxes, no doubt. Observe the splayed feet for mashing brake and clutch pedals, the hairy forearms for strangling handlebars, the porcine, shock-absorbing buttocks, the opposable thumbs. Observe the havoc they wreak on the delicate soil, soil that in this climate takes a millennium to form. Good day to you, too, gentlemen. I hope that when you reach the interstate you may experience what a famous outlaw biker once described as the ultimate in a two-cycle thrill - a high-torque, full-throttle, speedwobble across the highway divider into the oncoming grill of an eighteen-wheeler.'
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