The Spectator Bird

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels,
Remembering Laughter,
1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943;
Joe Hill,
1950;
Wolf Willow,
1962;
All the Little Live Things,
1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal);
The Spectator
Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); A
Shooting
Star, 1961; Angle of
Repose,
1971 (Pulitzer Prize, 1972); Recapitulation, 1979; and
Crossing to Safety,
1987. His non-fiction includes
Beyond the Hundredth
Meridian, 1954;
The Sound of Mountain
Water (essays), 1969;
The Uneasy Chair. A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974;
and
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West,
1992. Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los
Angeles Times
for his lifetime literary achievements. His
Collected Stories
was published in 1990.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1990

Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1976

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
The spectator bird/Wallace Stegner.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-04259-5

I. Title. II. Series.
[PS3537.T316S6 1990]
813'.52-dc20

90-7317

 

 

 

 

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On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the clichés about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years. No bland sky, no cool morning overcast, no placid afternoons fading into chilly evenings. This is North Sea weather. The sky boils with cloud, the sun glares out now and then like the opening eye of a doped patient, and the brief beam of intelligence it shoots forth lights on the hills and turns a distant subdivision into a view of Toledo.

Fat towhees sidle up to one another, pinheaded doves forage in the grass, the field next door is suddenly full of robins who arrive like blown leaves, picnic awhile, and depart all together as if summoned. From my study I can watch wrens and bush tits in the live oak outside. The wrens are nesting in a hole for the fifth straight year and are very busy: tilted tails going in, sharp heads with the white eyebrow stripe coming out. They are surly and aggressive, and I wonder idly why I, who seem to be as testy as the wrens, much prefer the sociable bush tits. Maybe because the bush tits are doing what I thought we would be doing out here, just messing around, paying no attention to time or duty, kicking up leaves and playing hide and-seek up and down the oak trunks and generally enjoying themselves.

It is meditation of this kind that keeps me, at nearly seventy, so contented and wholesome.

Ruth, finding me irritable and depressed, has pushed and pestered until she has got me to promise I'll go to work on the papers again. Eight years ago I took them from the office like a departing bureaucrat trucking off the files, thinking that at the very least there were things in them that would get me a tax deduction if presented to some library. I thought I might even do one of those name-dropping My
Life
among the
Literary
books out of them. Ruth still thinks I might. I know better.

The writers I represented have left their monuments, consequential or otherwise. I might have done the same if I had not, at the bottom of the Depression, been forced to choose whether I would be a talent broker or a broke talent. I drifted into my profession as a fly lands on flypaper, and my monument is not in the libraries, or men's minds, or even in the paper-recycling plants, but in those files. They are the only thing that prove I ever existed. So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only immortal part prematurely into mothballs. I am not likely even to put the papers into order, though that is the excuse I make to Ruth for not starting to write. A sort of Heisenberg's Principle applies. Once they are in order, they are dead, and so am I.

So I watch the wrens and bush tits, and paste photographs into albums, and read over old letters, and throw some away and put some back, and compose speeches to Ruth to the effect that it is one thing to examine your life and quite another to write it. Writing your life implies that you think it worth writing. It implies an arrogance, or confidence, or compulsion to justify oneself, that I can't claim. Did Washington write his memoirs? Did Lincoln, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Socrates? No, but Nixon will, and Agnew is undoubtedly hunched over his right now.

As for Joe Allston, he has been a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own. There has not been one significant event in his life that he planned. He has gone downstream like a stick, getting hung up in eddies and getting flushed out again, only half understanding what he floated past, and understanding less with every year. He knows nothing that posterity needs to be told about. What he really does in his study is pacify a wife who worries about him and who reads newspaper psychiatrists urging the retired to keep their minds active. Now I finally get around to writing something—not My Life
among
the Literary, nothing more pretentious than
My
Days among the Weeks.

Ruth herself, having got me, as she thinks, working, goes forth into the world and agitates herself over environmental deterioration, the paranoias and snobberies of our town council, the programs of the League of Women Voters, and the deficits of the Co-op. Once a week she goes down to the retirement home (convalescent hospital, death camp) and reads aloud to the shut-ins. A couple of times I have gone there to pick her up and have come out with the horrors. How she stands spending a whole morning among those dim, enfeebled, tottering dead, knowing that she and I are only a few years from being just like them, is beyond my understanding.

“They're sweet,” she says. “They're lonely, and friendly, and game, and pathetic, and grateful. They have so little, some of them.” I suppose they are, and do. As if to shame me, one of them even made me, in gratitude to Ruth, a psychedelic typewriter cover, green baize appliquéd with orange and magenta flowers, asserting something sassy into the teeth of time. They have asked me to come down and talk to them about books, but I have not gone. I have no more to say to them than if we were refugees from some war, streaming along a road under air attack, diving for the same ditches when we have to, and getting up to struggle on, each for himself.

What Ruth fears most in me is depression. Well, I wouldn't welcome it myself. So I will try her prescription (Write something. Write anything. Just put something down) for a week, the way a kid lost in the mountains might holler at a cliff just to hear a voice. I do not expect revelation to ensue, or a search party to emerge cheering from the bushes.

At eleven this morning, as usual, I walked down the hill for the mail. Up on top in the sun it was so warm that I went in shirt sleeves, and at once regretted it, for on the drive cut into the north-facing hill it was as clammy and fishy-smelling as a cold lake shore. The gully below the road muttered with the steep little stream still running from last week's rain. The steepness aggravated the pains in my big toe joints and knees. I found it hard to believe that no more than a year ago I used to plunge down that drive fast, letting gravity take me.

Halfway down, I stopped to watch a couple of does bedded in fresh grass across the gully. We are much too tamed in these hills for mountain lions, and too subdivided for hunters. Result: an ungulate problem worse than Yellowstone's. They come in, twenty at a time, to sleep in our shrubbery and eat our pyracantha berries, roses, tomatoes, crabapples, whatever is in season. I have old socks full of blood meal hanging from trees and shrubs I value, because deer are supposed to be offended by the smell. I have even contemplated getting a shipment of lion dung from that place in Los Angeles that sells it, and have only been deterred, or deturded, by the reflection that lion dung would probably offend me as much as it would offend an ungulate.

These two lay tame as cows under a big oak, their jaws rolling and stopping and rolling again as they watched me, their club ears forward, their tails twitching. Morning, neighbors. And stay the hell out of my garden if you don't want your hides full of bird shot.