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In his 1979 novel Recapitulation, Wallace Stegner describes a wedding that takes place sometime around 1930 at a ranch near Ferron, Utah. Employing the narrative device of the "camera eye," Stegner creates the physical setting in two pages of evocative prose: "the welted bank" of an irrigation ditch from which rises the scent of mint; "a cliff of cross-bedded sandstone"; a vertical rock face "stained with desert varnish" and covered with ancient petroglyphs; and rising high over the scene "the rim of a level, lava-capped, spruce-spiked plateau,…the source of this ditch that makes the desert live." Near the base of the cliff are a "sod-roofed stable, two long haystacks, and the pole corrals" and farther out "an alfalfa field, intensely green," and white-faced cattle "gleaning a stubble field, perhaps winter wheat, that ends at a barbed-wire fence." In the distance, "a line of gargoyles and hoodoos" marks the edge of the San Rafael Swell. The ranch house is enclosed by a fence constructed from "slabs of ripple-marked sandstone set on end":

In the slabs to which gateposts have been bound by windings of baling wire (Mormon silk, says some amused folklorist at the dream's core) there are brown ribby shapes of fossil fish, some of them a foot long. Inside the gate is deep shade. We are looking into a half-acre of big Fremont poplars that lean over a log ranch house and all but obscure the cliff behind. Through the grove, quicksilver bright, the ditch flows through grass that must be periodically flooded to keep it so green. Scattered and clustered through the grove are fifty or sixty people. They make a picture like a Renoir picnic or a Seurat promenade sur l'herbe, but different, special, simpler and homelier, quintessentially red-ledge Mormon. (191-93)

Bruce Mason, the protagonist and registering consciousness of the novel, is half-remembering, half-dreaming this scene more than four decades after the event. It represents a central chapter in his youthful love affair with Nola Gordon. The ranch belongs to Nola's father, and the occasion is the wedding of Nola's elder sister, Audrey. The gathering also provides an opportunity to introduce "the city boy, Nola's young man" (194), to her countrified family.

This novel, and this episode in particular, had a powerful effect on me when I first read it almost twenty years ago. I grew up in a neighboring town and spent a good share of my youth pursuing (without much success) Ferron girls. My father, who was near Stegner's age, had been similarly preoccupied a generation before me, concentrating his attentions on a young woman named Roma Singleton, to whom he dedicated several pages in his photograph album. She did not reciprocate his feelings and instead married his cousin and rival. (She died a few months after her marriage from injuries suffered in an automobile accident.) Among the relics preserved in Dad's album is what appears to be a scrap of paper torn from a dance card with a line from a popular song written on it: "I still get a thrill thinking of you." So the men in my family had shared Bruce Mason's experience of love and loss. There is even a resemblance between Dad's snapshots of Roma and Stegner's description of Nola: the same dark, heavy, "luscious" hair (63), the face, "a little heavy in the bones…expressionless in repose, dark browed," the dark eyes that glow with "an unquenchable life…deep down or behind, looking out from a center that was untroubled and untroublable, serene, acceptant, complacent, maybe even devouring" (63-64). These details, combined with the assonance of the names Roma and Nola, led me to wonder whether Stegner had known Roma Singleton. Even after discounting this possibility, from the little I knew of her history, I still wondered what led the author to choose Ferron, out of all the places in rural Utah, as the setting for this fictional episode.

In fact, the town of Ferron does not appear in Recapitulation, only the outlying ranch. The landscape elements Stegner incorporates into the scene are characteristic of the region, but there is no one place where they all converge as they do in the novel. On at least one geological detail he is simply wrong. The Wasatch Plateau does indeed rise, level and spruce-spiked, a mile high above Ferron, but it is not lava-capped. It is composed entirely of sedimentary materials. However, the nearby Fish Lake Plateau, where the Stegner family had a summer cabin, does have a lava cap. Obviously the author assumed that the similar-appearing mountains above Ferron were similarly constructed. And of course he is quite right about the dependence of the village farms on the mountain watershed and grazing lands. A few other details fail to ring true to a native of the region. The reference to a "sod-roofed stable" (192) may be a throwback to Stegner's prairie childhood. There were doubtless some dirt-roofed buildings to be found on Ferron farmsteads but surely not, in that climate, sod. More likely it would have been a structure with a roof of straw on a framework of cedar posts and poles. There was no "Manti-LaSal National Forest" (193) in 1930; the administrative merger of the two forests would not take place for another twenty years. Mormon girls do not wear confirmation dresses (199). The wedding dinner is plausible in most respects, with "platters of fried chicken and corned elk [corned elk?], washbasins of potato salad, dishpans of hot biscuits" (202). The milk can filled with lemonade is accurate (it would probably have been a dreadful concoction made from water and sugar and lemon extract with two or three real lemons tossed in for appearance's sake), and so is the dessert of pie and (certainly in peach-growing Ferron) home-made peach ice cream (203).

But what strikes me most forcibly is not that Stegner got a few details wrong after forty years, but that he got so many right. My feeling when I first read the novel, and when I re-read it today, is that I know this place and these people:

My earliest memories begin a decade later than Stegner's scene, but I too was outfitted at the Price J. C. Penney; I too have swooped across an irrigation ditch on a swing suspended by a lariat from a cottonwood limb (194); I know from first-hand experience what the boys did out back of the stable while more respectable folks were assembled in the dooryard. The Mormon bishop, "a large genial man in white shirt and arm garters" (195), belongs to a world I knew. So does the nervous bridegroom, even to the detail of the necktie:

I remember the counterparts to the mothers who "stoop and fiercely yank up their daughters' stockings and yank down their dresses" (195), the old women placidly observing the scene from "a swing lounge in the deepest shade" (193), and the girls in pastel dresses looking "cool, serene, removed from all the stress" (196).

Not long ago I attended an evening of cowboy poetry at a ranch home outside of Ferron. With the last daylight fading behind the Wasatch Plateau, the sounds and smells of calves and horses from the nearby corral, the crowd clustered on the lawn under the cottonwoods, and the musical gurgling of an irrigation ditch, I had an uncanny sensation that I had stepped into the pages of Recapitulation. Later in the evening, over dutch-oven peach cobbler and homemade ice cream, I told the host, an Emery County commissioner, that I wanted to send him a copy of the novel.

"I don't want to see anything that man wrote," he growled. He went on to explain that he had recently been invited to participate in a public lands policy discussion organized by the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah, where he felt he had been ambushed by wilderness advocates hostile to his way of life. I tried without much success to persuade him that Stegner possessed an understanding and appreciation of rural Utah and Utahns not always shared by those who invoke his name and reputation in support of their environmental politics.

Maybe if I had gone ahead and sent him the novel it would have changed his mind. But maybe not. I have known some readers to complain that Stegner's treatment of Mormon folkways is false and patronizing. Admittedly, his impressionist canvas does not include the full social range of a rural Mormon community. Nor are red-ledge Mormons as isolated from the outside world as Stegner's picture might suggest. As the author himself has acknowledged elsewhere, Mormon towns, despite being "stuck off in the lost corners of plateaus and deserts…often contain their quota of world travelers" and present "a curious mixture of provincialism, parochialism, and cosmopolitanism" (Mormon Country, 19). With understandable partiality, Bruce Mason sees Nola as strikingly different from everyone else in her family and her community, a princess brought up among a tribe of yokels. At one point he wonders, "How did a girl from a cow town on the edge of the slick rock country…get born with perfect pitch and the ability to play almost any instrument, after a try or two, by ear?" (62-63). But in fact a great many talented and ambitious women, and even a few men, have come out of cow towns. There is evidence of that even in Stegner's novel. The other young woman Bruce Mason remembers best from his college years, the book- and art-loving Holly, also grew up in a cow (or in this case sheep) town: "a girl from Parowan who had made the big step to city excitements but remained a girl from Parowan. If you cracked the enamel of her sophistication you found a delighted little girl playing Life" (11).

"Red-ledge Mormon" is a throwaway phrase used only once in the pages of Recapitulation. I suppose it can be construed as suggesting something akin to "red-neck," but in the context of the novel it is by no means a pejorative label but rather nostalgic and affectionate. In the larger context of Stegner's oeuvre this scene takes its place alongside many other appreciative characterizations of Utah places and the people who inhabit them. The early Mormon Country, for example, opens on an idyllic village springtime scene with "lilacs…[filling] the air under the great cottonwoods with scent" and "the grassy gurgle of water in the irrigation ditch" (3). There is a chapter on "Mormon trees," the lombardy poplars that once lined the roads and fence lines of rural Utah and that Stegner interprets as "a reflection of Mormon group life," speculating that the trees "appealed obscurely to the rigid sense of order of the settlers, and that a marching row of plumed poplars was symbolic, somehow, of the planter's walking with God and his solidarity with his neighbors" (24). Also in this volume is the author's first description of the red-ledge region of southern Utah, where "the settlements are literally hewn out of the rock, founded with incredible labor and sustained against conditions that would have driven out a less persistent people after one year" (45). In the later years of his career Stegner was still writing fondly of the region:

As I read it, the phrase "quintessentially red-ledge Mormon" refers to the entire scene that Stegner has sketched, not only the human figures but that collaborative interaction between physical environment and culture that shapes a landscape. What, then, does it mean to be a red-ledge Mormon? In the first place, the ledges are not necessarily red. In the vicinity of Ferron the predominant color is the blue-gray of the Mancos shale formation. Elsewhere the colors can range from basaltic black to the white of the Flagstaff limestone, from honey-toned Wingate sandstone to the chocolate red-brown of the Shinarump, from the greens and purples of the Summerville formation to the wide chromatic range of Navajo sandstone. There are scores of different formations in the illustrated geologic textbook that is the plateau and canyon country of Utah, each with its own palette of colors and its own distinctive cliff- or dome- or hoodoo-forming character.

What the ledges have in common is their variety and their intensity—sometimes too intense for those who have not been accustomed to living with rock on this scale. Pennsylvanian Elizabeth Wood Kane, traveling with Brigham Young from Salt Lake City to St. George in 1872, was repelled by the "violent effects of color": "There is no home-like scenery in Utah," she wrote; "a scene-painter's nightmare would be tame to nature's productions here with rocks and sand" (Twelve Mormon Homes, 97). Yale-educated Clarence E. Dutton, conducting a study of the region's geology during the same period, described the red-ledge country as "a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery" that is "not to be comprehended in a day or a week, nor even in a month" (Grand Cañon, 140). Wallace Stegner tells of an aunt from Iowa who compared the massive escarpment of the Sevier Plateau to "the river bluffs in the county park at Fort Dodge." Stegner remarks, "She couldn't even see it. She had no experience, no scale, by which to judge an unbroken mountain wall more than a mile high, and her startled mental circuitry could respond with nothing better than the fifty-foot clay banks that her mind had learned to call scenery" Ward Thomas ("Thoughts in a Dry Land," 52-53). Stegner himself could find the red-ledge terrain philosophically unsettling:

But to a native red-ledge Mormon the land is never empty and seldom lonely. The vast exposed geologic record is an emblem of eternity, and everywhere the earth is invested with rich associations drawn from personal experience and family and community tradition. The jagged shapes silhouetted against the sky at dusk or dawn provide a feeling of security. The long views convey a sense of spaciousness and freedom. The hidden canyons and secret springs, the remote panels of mysterious ancient rock art are inscribed on the mind like a treasure map. The light has a special clarity, the air a special taste. The green of irrigated fields against a red-ledge backdrop is like no other green.

Not long ago I stood on the rim of the flat-topped, cliff-girt mountain that they call the Horn and looked down on the valley where I grew up. The dry plateau top stretched behind me like a level plain, strewn with rounded, polished pebbles, the product of some streambed or oceanic wave action millions of years in the past. Before me spread a panoramic view of the kind described by Stegner, perhaps the same view that gave Clarence Dutton a shudder along the spine as he surveyed "a picture of desolation and decay; of a land dead and rotten, with dissolution apparent all over its face" (High Plateaus, 19). To the north the vista was bounded by the Book Cliffs stretching east toward Colorado. To the southeast, beyond the castles of the San Rafael, rose what Dutton described as the "gothic" shapes of the Henry Mountains, and far to the east, barely visible through the haze, I could make out the white peaks of the LaSals. It was indeed, as Stegner says, "a long way to look." Below me lay the villages of my childhood, little checkerboards of streets wrapped in patchwork quilts of farms, very small indeed in the immensity of the land.

I remember looking the other way when I was young, up toward the three shapes that defined my western horizon: the ruler-level cap of the Horn, the humpbacked dragon form of the Red Point, and the symmetrical pyramid of Gentry Mountain. From the viewpoint of our dooryard on the outskirts of Huntington, the human presence in the land seemed more substantial and enduring. Beyond our little orchard and pasture, my grandfather's field extended to the willow-grown fence line a quarter of a mile away. Beyond it lay the Cook place and beyond that the Rowley place and then the line of cottonwoods and box elders that marked the course of the Big Canal and divided the crop land from the dry flats and foothills where Grandpa's cattle ranged in the spring. To be a red-ledge Mormon you have to carry both perspectives in your mind simultaneously, the sense of an immense, torn, and mostly empty land, and the sense of a small but significant human presence, solidly planted.

For a Mormon in the red-ledge country, the attachment to the land is likely to be strengthened by a sense of heritage, the remembrance of ancestors who came in response to a religious calling to "redeem the waste places of Zion." I grew up on my grandparents' stories, and Pioneer Day celebrations, and hymns sung in the old meetinghouse that seemed to have particular reference to our own valley:

What sets red-ledge Mormons apart from other Mormons is a conviction that their pioneer forebears were sent to redeem tougher waste places than other pioneers, and that the small footholds of fertility and civilization amid the rock are precious because of the human sacrifice that went into their creation.

At the same time, being a red-ledge Mormon probably has less to do with religious belief than with a distinctive way of being in the landscape. In Recapitulation, Nola Gordon's family is "as much cowboy as churchgoer, and she herself was no more religious than a lizard on a rock" (65). And yet the clan instinctively returns for big occasions to the ancestral haven of the Mormon village, which represents home to them as the ethnically mixed towns of Price or Helper or Sunnyside cannot. But even among those non-Mormon ethnic populations, when viewed from the inside, there can be a deep-seated sense of place. Helen Papanikolas, who grew up in Helper under the ledges of Steamboat Mountain, has recounted how some Greek immigrants, recruited to work in the coal mines, found a comforting resemblance between the rugged cliffs of Utah and their own rocky homeland, and how immigrant women, accustomed to carrying well water to their gardens in the old country, delighted in the convenience of the Mormon irrigation ditches and the weekly "water turn" ("Women in the Mining Communities," 91). So you don't necessarily have to be a Mormon to be a red-ledge Mormon. For that matter a deep and abiding passion for the red-ledge country may be the outgrowth of a deliberate or intuitive choice rather than an accident of birth. Edward Abbey, with no prior attachment to the region, found his personal equivalent of Thoreau's Walden Pond amid the red-rock arches of Utah. No one has ever more thoroughly lost (and perhaps found) himself in the slickrock canyons than did Los Angeles-bred Everett Ruess.

When Recapitulation first appeared, Stegner's old Salt Lake City friends recognized Nola Gordon as having been modeled on Juanita Crawford, the woman to whom the author was engaged during his senior year at the University of Utah. Stegner admitted to his biographer that this identification was "maybe 18 percent right" but insisted, "There are very few episodes in Recapitulation that come from reality (including all the romantic scenes and the Mormon wedding)" (Benson, 383, 384). Eighteen percent seems both suspiciously low and suspiciously exact. What, one wonders, would have increased it to nineteen percent, or twenty? As Jackson Benson points out in his biography, Stegner was sensitive about criticism of his use of actual people and events in Second Growth and Angle of Repose. As a novelist he quite naturally wanted to emphasize that his fiction was fiction, a "made thing," even though it might be based on "hints from reality" (Benson, 383).

Recapitulation is fiction with an autobiographical foundation. Bruce Mason first appears in The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), which traces a boyhood and early manhood clearly modeled on Stegner's own. In Recapitulation Mason is a distinguished career diplomat in his late sixties who has come back to Salt Lake City to bury an aunt, his last surviving relative. In the course of a two-day visit he experiences an uncanny sense of doubleness as he revisits with his younger self the scenes of important events in his earlier life.

Although any reader of either novel must feel that a great deal of the author has gone into the creation of Bruce Mason, Mason is not Stegner. To note some of the most obvious differences, Mason went from Salt Lake City to law school at the University of Minnesota followed by a foreign service career. Stegner went to graduate school at the University of Iowa and pursued a career as a writer and professor. Mason has apparently not been back to Utah for many years. Stegner made numerous return visits. Mason has never married (presumably in part as a result of emotional scars left by his affair with Nola); he is the last of his line. Stegner (who insisted that his "vanity was hurt" but that his "heart was not broken" when Juanita jilted him [Benson, 384]) had a long, happy marriage and left behind a son and grandchildren.

By the same token Nola Gordon is not Juanita Crawford, but the fictional creation corresponds to the actual model at many points. Born in 1905, Juanita was twenty-four when she met nineteen-year-old Wally Stegner, who had skipped two years of school and entered the university at sixteen. (The novel represents Nola as being a little younger, twenty-two in 1930, but still older than Bruce: "On the merest glance, he is younger than she—younger in years, younger in manner and self-command" [132].) Her father, Nathaniel "Tan" Crawford, was a rancher who ran cattle on the San Rafael Swell, where such landmarks as Crawford Flat and Tan Seep still bear his name. By all accounts Stegner's characterization of Nola's father as "a tough old bird with a gimlet eye" could justly be applied to Tan Crawford. Juanita, like Nola, was the baby of the family, born when her mother, Evalyn Lowry Crawford, was forty. She had one much-older sister, Surelda, and two brothers who survived to adulthood, Elwood and Carlyle. Ferron-born rural sociologist Lowry Nelson, whose mother was Evalyn Crawford's sister, devotes a chapter to Elwood in his memoirs. However, Elwood had left home long before Stegner met Juanita. Nola's brother, Buck, is apparently modeled on Carlyle Crawford, who himself became a prominent rancher in the Ferron area. Nola's mother has been dead for years, and she has been brought up by her sister and "half a dozen aunties" (197). Aunts did indeed abound in the much-ramified Crawford and Lowry families, but Juanita's mother lived on until 1953. Nola possesses a West Point class ring given to her by a home-town boyfriend named Eddie Forsberg. One of Juanita's classmates at the Presbyterian mission school in Ferron was Bruce Easley, Jr., the local doctor's son, who graduated from West Point.

Except for her age, Nola's sister, Audrey, does not appear to be closely modeled on Juanita's sister. Surelda Crawford Ralphs, whom I vaguely remember, was an attractive, dignified woman, a far cry from the awkward, rustic Audrey. According to Juanita's nephew Don Crawford, the family believed that the wedding in the novel was based on the wedding of Juanita's cousin Faun Singleton to Robert Dahle (Benson, 383). That event, however, took place in May 1933, two years after Stegner's break-up with Juanita. (In any case the stylish Faun and her husband, a school teacher who later served for many years as a high school principal in northern Utah, would seem to be unlikely models for the rough-hewn Audrey and Darrell, bound for a remote ranch on the Minnie Maud.)

The log ranch house in its grove of cottonwoods is imaginable in the Ferron region, but it does not reflect the actual living conditions of the Crawford family. During the period when Stegner knew them, they lived in a handsome two-story brick house that still stands on West Main Street. If there had been a home wedding, it would have been celebrated here, not at the farm north of town. More likely, however, a wedding party would have been held in the high school gymnasium, which was located on an adjacent block, or in the newly-completed Mormon chapel that had replaced the old meetinghouse destroyed by fire ten years earlier.

Stegner visited Juanita's family on more than one occasion. The feeling Bruce Mason has of being an outsider and his perception that "every single aspect of his background, if it were known, would be a black mark against him" (198) may be an accurate reflection of Stegner's standing in the eyes of the Crawford family. Jackson Benson quotes Don Crawford:

In the novel, Bruce Mason has made no effort to keep track of Nola or any others of his Salt Lake friends. He doesn't know whether she is still alive or even whether she married Jack Bailey, the man for whom she jilted Bruce and toward whom he still, forty years later, feels a deep hostility. Juanita Crawford married Francis M. Broberg, Stegner's co-worker at the I and M Rug and Linoleum store. Juanita Broberg died in Salt Lake City in 1974. Stegner began working seriously on Recapitulation two years later, after having "thought about this new novel for years" (Benson, 381). Did he feel it was necessary to wait until after her death to write such an intimate and revealing story? Or did her passing awaken old memories that demanded to be resolved through art, much as the death of Tryphena Sparks impelled Thomas Hardy to write his last novel, Jude the Obscure? Or was Stegner as completely unaware of Juanita's later history as Bruce Mason was of Nola's?

The shock of recognition I experienced on first reading Recapitulation, the sense that the novel had some connection to my own life, was not entirely without foundation, though the connection is tenuous and at a generation's remove. My mother, who was several years younger, remembers Juanita Crawford as a strikingly attractive girl who wore a Spanish shawl and played the piano at high school assemblies. Faun Singleton, Juanita's cousin and closest friend during their growing-up years, was my Uncle Max's high school sweetheart. At her ninetieth birthday celebration the families arranged an awkward reunion between the two, who had not seen each other in seventy years. And my father's inamorata, Roma Singleton, was Faun's niece and Juanita's first cousin once removed. (Red-ledge Mormons habitually trace such degrees of relatedness.) So the intriguing similarities I sensed between the woman in Stegner's pages and the snapshots in my father's album turn out to have been a family resemblance, which apparently included a capacity to ignite fire in the blood.

References

Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking, 1996.

Dutton, C. E. Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah, with Atlas. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880.

—. Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon

District. United States Geological Survey, Monographs, no. 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 182. District. United States Geological Survey, Monographs, no. 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 182.

Fox, Ruth May. "Carry On," in M.I.A. Songs and Sociability Songs. Salt Lake City: General Boards of M.I.A., n.d., 8.

Hemans, Felicia D. "Hymn of the Vaudois Mountaineers," adapted in Latter-day Saint Hymns. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1927, 118.

Kane, Elizabeth Wood. Twelve Mormon Homes, Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona. Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1974.

Nelson, Lowry. In the Direction of His Dreams:  Memoirs. New York: Philosophical Library, 1985.

Papanikolas, Helen Z. "Women in the Mining Communities of Carbon County," in Carbon County: Eastern Utah's Industrialized Island, ed. Philip F. Notarianni. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1981.

Stegner, Wallace. "Coda: Wilderness Letter," in The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West. Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1969.

—. "High Plateaus," in Wallace Stegner and Page Stegner, American Places. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1983.

—. Recapitulation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979.

—. "Thoughts in a Dry Land," in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York:  Random House, 1992.

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Schools and the Economy

"When the economy is bad, schools always get the blame," observes J. Myron Atkins of Stanford University. "But when the economy is good, they never get the credit." Atkin has a point. Two independent analyses of global economic competitiveness this year ranked the U.S. in first or second place (behind tiny Singapore). And yet, a co-author of one of those reports, Harvard University economist Michael E. Porter, warned at a press conference in July that "although the U.S. is very competitive and pumping out innovations at a feverish pace today, the scientists that are creating those innovations graduated from university five to 20 years ago." — San Francisco based science writers, W. Wayt Gibbs and Douglas Fox, "The False Crisis in Science Education," Scientific American, October 1999, p. 89

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