A snowshoe trail leads from Highland Lodge to Barr Hill in Greensboro. Admirers of Wallace Stegner’s writing hike that path on a glorious fall morning to visit one of the places described by the writer during a centennial celebration of his birth. Photos by Joseph Gresser
GREENSBORO — “The view from Folsom Hill is not grand in the way of western landscapes. What gives it its charm is the alternation of wild and cultivated, rough woods ending with scribed edges against smooth hayfields — this and the accent dots of white houses, red barns, and clustered cattle tiny as aphids on a leaf. Directly below them across the shaggy top of a lesser hill, is the lake, heartshaped, with the village at its southern end.”
— from Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
A person seated on Barr Hill, the model for Wallace Stegner’s Folsom Hill, could hear voices drifting ahead of the line of hikers emerging into the clearing. Soon about two dozen people stood at the edge of the softwoods that have grown up since Mr. Stegner first visited the hill in the 1930s.
They looked around them and finished the hike that started at the Highland Lodge earlier Saturday morning by seating themselves around the cold ashes of a fire pit built near the hill’s prime view. The group had assembled in Greensboro from places as far away as Arizona to participate in a weekend event marking the hundredth anniversary of Mr. Stegner’s birth.
They ate box lunches brought from the lodge. The hikers listened as Clive Gray, a Greensboro resident, gave some of the history of Barr Hill. The 256 acres overlooking Greensboro and the surrounding countryside was long a favorite picnic site when his parents bought the property more than 70 years ago, he said.
Now the land is owned and preserved by the Vermont branch of the Nature Conservancy, Mr. Gray said. Over the years it has changed as trees grew, not only on the slopes of Barr Hill, but throughout the area.
Mr. Gray noted that Caspian Lake can no longer be viewed from the hill except through a V-shaped cut made by a forester. Nor does one see cows “tiny as aphids” these days, although that is a function of farm economics rather than encroaching vegetation.
Mr. Gray said his parents first brought Mr. Stegner and his wife, Mary, to Greensboro, a place where they spent summers for about half a century. It is now a place that attracts lovers of his writing.
One group who came to commemorate Mr. Stegner’s centennial included four members of a Brunswick, Maine, reading club and their families. Nancy Heiser, a member of the group, said some of their number had to stay home because they had young children or other family obligations.
“We took a photograph of all of us. We called it a ‘wish you were here photo,’ but it’s really an ‘are you jealous yet?’ picture,” she said.
Ms. Heiser said her group is made up of women who are interested in conservation. “Friends, literature, and nature,” she listed as some of the best things in life.
Anne Hanson, who works for the Highland Lodge, gave herself the title of Centennial Coordinator for the weekend celebration of Mr. Stegner’s
Philip Fradkin, (left) biographer of Wallace Stegner, describes his work. Carl Brandt — both men’s literary agent — listens.
work. About 24 people stayed at Highland Lodge for the event, while others with local connections were coming to individual events, she said.
Ms. Hanson said the idea of a celebration of Mr. Stegner’s work came to her before she was aware of the anniversary. Ms. Hanson said when she discovered that Mr. Stegner was born in 1909 she knew the gathering was a necessity.
A important piece fell into place when Ms. Hanson glanced one day at her college alumni magazine. In it was a piece about Philip Fradkin, like her a Williams graduate, the author of the biography Wallace Stegner and the American West.
Ms. Hanson contacted Mr. Fradkin and asked if he would be willing to participate in the celebration. Not only was he willing, he also suggested that Carl Brandt, the literary agent he shared with Mr. Stegner, should be added to the program.
Along with these two, Mr. Gray and Marion Stegner, who was married to Mr. Stegner’s son, Page, agreed to participate. The weekend opened Friday night, September 25, with a showing of a documentary on the writer’s life followed by a discussion of the second of the two novels he set in Greensboro.
The first, Second Growth, was published in 1947 and, according to local lore was poorly received by local residents displeased by the portrayal of their community. Mr. Stegner is said to have absented himself from Greensboro for a few years after the book came out.
Crossing to Safety, on the other hand, is well loved, a fact attested to by community members who swelled attendance at the opening session to about 75, according to Ms. Hanson. Other sessions hovered around the 50-person mark.
After tea Saturday afternoon, Mr. Stegner’s admirers sat comfortably in the lodge’s dining room and heard Mr. Fradkin and Mr. Brandt talk about their work.
Mr. Brandt, who inherited Mr. Stegner as a client when he left journalism to take his father’s place in the family firm, described the writer as “the consummate professional.” He recalled Mr. Stegner as being a disciplined writer who always held a day job as a means to keep writing and to keep himself in touch with life.
“He kept replenishing his intellectual bank account,” Mr. Brandt said.
Even when Mr. Stegner started out, writing was not a way to make a living, Mr. Brandt said. Nowadays, there is a 50 percent chance that Mr. Stegner’s early novels would not even see print, Mr. Brandt said.
Mr. Fradkin, who met Mr. Stegner only once when he interviewed him for an article in Audubon Magazine, said he wrote his biography to show “how the landscape determined who Wallace Stegner was.”
Before starting, he contacted Page Stegner who said he was not interested in a biography of his father that was a hagiography. “That sent me to the dictionary,” Mr. Fradkin recalled. There he learned that Mr. Stegner did not want his father’s life to be told as if he were a saint.
The men agreed on the goal of a candid view of Mr. Stegner’s life, and Mr. Fradkin set out in his Volkswagen camper to visit the many sites of Mr. Stegner’s life, from his origins in Iowa through British Columbia, Utah, Wisconsin, to California and, of course, Greensboro, Vermont.
In Mr. Fradkin’s view, Mr. Stegner was very much a man of the West. He seemed a bit puzzled and, indeed, disappointed in Mr. Stegner’s decision to retire to Greensboro. He told the gathering that he thought Mr. Stegner “was a wimp” to favor the Northeast over the West at the end of his life.
Afterward Mr. Fradkin clarified his words saying that he thought that in his last year Mr. Stegner no longer wanted to face the West’s constant change.
“What he wanted is what he found here at the end of his life. It brought him full circle, if not geographically, to a lifestyle with a sense of history, a sense of stability and a code,” Mr. Fradkin said.
Mr. Fradkin said his favorites of Mr. Stegner’s novels are Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose. The local partiality for Crossing to Safety, seemed to puzzle Mr. Fradkin who finally said, “I caught onto that book because of where I live and you caught onto the other book because of where you live.”
This fit in nicely with Mr. Fradkin’s overall view of Mr. Stegner — “He was a writer who could cross many borders.”
