I just finished reading Wallace Stegner and the American West by Philip Fradkin and it's been a bit of a revelation. I have never picked up a Stegner novel or read an essay or realized that he was the one who coined the phrase "geography of hope" in reference to the American West. I don't understand why he was never assigned when I was in graduate school - although he did not write on the polar regions, in a lot of ways Alaska is far more synonymous with the west then the north, (it's sort of a north/west mash-up I guess but leans more to the frontierish ideal then the ice and snow image) and it seems like we should have read western authors at some point but it never happened. Just like it never happened when I was in high school either. (And don't even ask about my pathetic undergrad English classes. They were bland and pointless to the extreme.) We had New England literature (Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau), Southern writers (Faulkner and Williams) and so-called American greats (Hemingway and Fitzgerald). And no, I didn't skip the female or non-white authors - there were most certainly none of those. We never got to the west; I didn't even know there were authors out west. (Fitzgerald and Hemingway somehow morphed into western authors when they moved there for a little while.) But Stegner really embraced the west, he explored it, he celebrated it, he believed in it.

How bizarre that no one ever pointed this out to me in an academic setting.

I've been reading about Stegner (and essays by Stegner) to broaden my own ideas about the frontier myth versus the western reality. We talked so much in grad school about wilderness and what it meant and was supposed to mean and had to mean. It was almost always a contentious classroom discussion. But ideas about the west are important because they are real to a lot of people; they compel them to do things like to go live in an abandoned bus with a bag of rice and not much else. (Or visit said bus wearing "street clothes" and have to get helicoptered when they get lost - because shockingly you can get lost in the wilderness!!!!) (Although how anyone gets lost in that area at this point I can't imagine.)

I digress.

Here is Stegner is his famous "Wilderness Letter" used to build support for the Wilderness Act:

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

This "geography of hope" or notion of reinvention, of finding the self you always wish you were, is a big part of what compels people to walk into the woods, or climb the mountain, or leave the trail. It's a romantic notion, as anyone who actually has lived out there will attest, but it is so strong that it overwhelms everything sensible. As quoted by Fradkin, Larry McMurty wrote in 1981 "The romance of the West is so powerful you can't really swim against the current. Whatever truth about the West is printed, the legend is always more potent."

I have several books by Stegner, including Mormon Country, which I'm really looking forward to. Writing about people who got lost is only part of the picture I'm working on - it's why they chose to lose themselves that also matters. They seek out wild places but don't bring along a map. Maybe it's hope they're looking for and they don't think you can find it without losing yourself completely.

I don't think that was Stegner's point but so far, it seems to be theirs and it puzzles me; but I'm loving the ride of putting this puzzle together.