Wallace Stegner and the Consciousness of Place Institute

The Idaho Humanities Council's Summer Institute of 2017

Reflections on Wolf Willow

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner describes the return to his home on the Saskatchewan prairie. Walking into the town he calls Whitemud, he says his visit is to "test memory against adult observation" (6) and revisit the place that imprinted character upon him as a child. "And so it is with mixed feelings of intimacy and strangeness" (12) that Stegner approaches his old swimming hole in the Frenchman river, sniffing out reminiscences and searching for the quintessential force that cemented his memory. "It is the smells that seem to have stayed with me ... the tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native smell ... called wolf willow" (16-18). Identifying the smell that brings him home, "the present and all the years between are shed like a boy's clothes dumped on the bath-house bench" (19). He remembers; he feels old sensations; he has "recovered" himself. He concludes, "If I am native to anything, I am native to this" (20).

In reading Wolf Willow, I came across passages that "recovered" myself, that reclaimed my childhood and reinforced my native heritage. This connection, forged through words and melded by common memory, has changed me this week. I became conscious not only of who I am, but where I am in the world.

My first instance of connection occurred in chapter two, as Stegner describes how a few bars of a Sunday school hymn can instantly turn him into a child on the old homestead, hearing the birds, seeing the buttercups, feeling the wind. I, too, was transported in reading this description. I was a nine-year-old girl, crossing the field between my house and my grandmother's, following the worn path of silk-dirt through the alfalfa. My uninhibited voice sang "There is Sunshine In My Soul Today," lines memorized from church, and as I walked I celebrated the day that was new and clean and the work contained therein. I could see Mount Timpanogas, the jagged skyward edge so dear and familiar. I could see the sheds, the old truck, the tree that grew at the halfway point down the lane.

This is what the view looked like:

Painting of Elm Crest Farm by Sarah Droegemueller, oil pastels on canvas

This painting was created over two years ago, but it is the image that leaps to mind when I think of our farm. It hangs above my writing desk at home, on my "wall of inspiration." Almost everything else on the wall is some piece of Jane Austen memorabilia (because I have been writing Regency-era fiction the past three years), but this piece, this piece of home, touches me more deeply than any imagined romantic notion from my novels. Perhaps I should clue in to this emotion and write of subjects closer to home as well. 

In any case, the passages from Wolf Willow recalled my home and infused me with a longing for places dear and familiar. One of these places is the "trail," the path that leads from my home to Grandma's and then to the barn. The trail is hard-packed dirt in spring, softest powdery dust in the summer, burning with heat, and pounded-slick ice in the winter. It is a connection, lines drawn to signify familial and territorial joinings. 

Stegner writes of the path at his homestead, "the trail was a thing we had exclusively created and ... it led to a place we had exclusively built." He calls it a "worn border to our inheritance," and "an intimate act, an act like love," (272-73) to mark the earth with his identity. I felt the same way of "my" path, my trail through the alfalfa field. 

Stegner left that family homestead after five years of drought, failed crops, withered dreams. He questions why his mother brought them there in the first place, and replies with "she and hers had been victimized by the folklore of hope" (281). Why did anyone attempt it? Stegner writes, "the pioneers unquestionably passed on to their children, including me, some of their faith in the future." Then he denotes, "hope, it turns out, is heritable" (255).

Hope. In my painting, the unseen ingredient shimmering with nostalgia and history is hope. My great-great-grandfather, Martin Albert Clinger, wrote in his autobiography that the most important things in life, the things that gave him the most hope, were faith, family, and the farm. 

The triumvirate:

• Faith: Faith in Jesus Christ and his gospel. Faith in the future. Faith in the land. 
• Family: My father's work ethic. My mother's nurturing. My five sisters and two brothers and their support through mutual suffering and joy. Learning through work and fun together.
• Farm: A connection with wildness, nature, wilderness. Knowing the value of water, whether rain or a ditch or a canal. Watching a seed that sprouts and grows to bear fruit. 

This is just a glimpse of the connections I made in reading and learning of Wolf Willow. I had more ideas come, helping me understand my complex relationship with the land, after reading "The Wilderness Letter," and Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature."

At the core, however, my "geography of hope" is bounded by the Wasatch Range on the east and Utah Lake on the west. 

I know who I am, because I know where I'm from.