Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

My grandparents are a deep vein that has never been dug. They were people.

Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”?

I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest.

Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of—that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on.

“Gee! Same hairdo all her life!” Yes, Miss Morrow. Same old hairdo: classic knot and bangs. Anything good was worth sticking with.

Augusta was incredulous, aghast, and accusatory; Susan stubborn, perhaps just a shade triumphant.

“In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”

But I wish I could take her by the ear and lead her aside and tell her a few things. Nemesis in a wheelchair, knowing the future, I could tell her that it is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

“I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”

Time hung unchanging, or with no more visible change than a slow reddening of poison oak leaves, an imperceptible darkening of the golden hills. It dripped like a slow percolation through limestone, so slow that she forgot it between drops. Nevertheless every drop, indistinguishable from every other, left a little deposit of sensation, experience, feeling. In thirty or forty years the accumulated deposits would turn my cultivated, ladylike, lively, talkative, talented, innocently snobbish grandmother into a Western woman in spite of herself.

Susan wondered if her own discontent was a weakness or if it was only a manifestation of greater sensibility. Was there something gnarly and tough about working-class people that kept them from feeling all that more delicately organized natures felt? If Georgie died, would Lizzie be prostrated, apathetic, and despairing, as Augusta still was, or would she rise in the morning, supported by some coarse strength, and build her fire and make breakfast and go on as before?

The element of longing in her fantasy appalled her. He was too dear to her, she could never survive his loss. But how lovely it would be, all the same, to be back home, to have a woman to talk to–her mother, Bessie, best of all Augusta.

She knew without any question, no matter what he said, that Oliver’s act had been heroic; but she still wished he were more competent in cultivated conversation.

An eccentric but not a fool, she whipped their quiet routine into a froth.

Totally humorless, she made them collapse in laughter. As unkempt as a hermit, she had innumerable suggestions on dress and housekeeping. Obviously a careless mother, she dwelt on the Coming Event and irritated Susan by knowing everything that should be done in preparation and in the way of upbringing. She cast her bright enameled blue eye on Georgie, known as Buster because he busted everything within reach, and told dismayed Lizzie that he was destructive because his latent tenderness had not been appealed to. Boys should play with dolls, to teach them care for others and to stimulate their later parental responsibility–brickbats and tiles they would find for themselves.

where he could wake and sleep to the sound of the sea. It would soothe his harsh masculine temperament if he was male, and reinforce her capacity for love and devotion if she was female.

So nearly a gentleman, Mr. Kendall was, so fatally not one.

He will end up on some valley ranch doing unfamiliar labor for a few dollars a month and a shack to live in. For buying some stovepipe outside the company store! somebody says. Exactly. A bad mistake. He knew the rules.

Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more?

And this is all, absolutely all, I am going to think about it. I am going back to Grandmother’s nineteenth century, where the problems and the people are less messy.