Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall down.

I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential.

She plunged into things with energy, she was never afraid of work. John Greenleaf Whittier said she was the only girl he knew who could conduct a serious discussion of the latest North American Review while scrubbing her mother’s floor.

They sat on the piazza and talked with Grandmother while Grandfather listened, working quietly among his roses. But that was after she had reached, or appeared to have reached, the angle of repose.

Growing up the youngest and darling of the family, always surrounded by the atmosphere of love and duty where harsh words and looks were unknown,

“Best egg in the basket,” he used to say of me when I was a small boy and wanted to help him plant and prune and prop and espalier

He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products.

The West began for Susan Burling on the last day of 1868, more than a century ago.

Her people belonged to the old aristocracy of New York.

the words which began our life correspondence, not gushingly nor lightly. We wrote to each other for fifty years.

he had neither the social ease to make further excuses for talking to one so popular, nor the courage to tear himself away. So he sat at a little distance as if in deep thought

because right there the spice of wistaria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head.

All right, Grandmother. Generously said.

Thenceforward you were a loving sister to Thomas, and dearest friend, without ambiguities, to Augusta. You never expressed to them or to anyone any feeling of betrayal or disappointment.

But she puzzled where to take him on some excursion. Long Pond and Black Pond, liked by New York visitors, were not enough for a man who had seen the Yosemite and ridden the length of the San Joaquin Valley through square miles of wildflowers.

and at last he found, through Prager’s influence, a job that excited him. He wrote that he was to be Resident Engineer of the New Almaden mercury mine near San Jose, an ancient and famous mine that had furnished mercury for the reduction of the gold of the whole Gold Rush.

I couldn’t tilt my head back. He sat down quickly on the Bendix crate to bring himself closer to my level. Few people are that understanding

mostly what she felt in the moment of arrival was space, extension, bigness.

I know that mountain, old Loma Prieta. In nearly a hundred years it has changed less than most of California. Once you get beyond the vineyards and subdivisions along its lower slopes there is nothing but a reservoir and an Air Force radar station.

The light was dim and cool, as she thought the light in a house should be. A breeze went through the rooms, bringing inside the smell of aromatic sun-soaked plants.

Her own savings must be held for their mutual life, not for the attachments she had left behind. It wouldn’t be fair, though she knew he would agree without hesitation if she asked.

mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and expired again, tired as a sigh.

It seems absurd to talk so much about an experience common to all women–but I think it one of the strangest feelings–that double pulse, that life within a life. . .

When it stormed, her house was the sanctuary she thought a house should be. On those days Oliver could not see to work in his dark little office past four thirty.

But he was impatient with George Eliot. He said she wanted to be both writer and reader–she barely got a character created before she started responding to him and judging him.

Mrs. Elliott’s talk was full of names and books and causes that Susan had been brought up to think worth reverence-and a few, such as Whitman, worth a pang of excited alarm–but

Oliver hooted. Why not put a pistol to his head and be done with it? An eccentric but not a fool, she whipped their quiet routine into a froth. Totally humorless, she made them collapse in laughter.

Come, come to Santa Cruz! Mrs. Elliott said as she departed.

she should bring him to Santa Cruz 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.

She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque.

There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy,

“Oliver,” she said earnestly, “why do we even try to stay?” “Because I’m still learning something,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of good experience, and an engineer’s capital is his experience.

by comparison, irritations rather than injustices. Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

“Even in a place of our own, they’d feel obligated. I don’t want them obligated. Anyway, we couldn’t afford a place of our own in San Francisco.”

It was a bitter irony to her that now she could hardly bear to think of leaving this place where only a year ago she had sat with her hand clenched in Oliver’s, fighting desolate tears, sick for home

O fortunate, o happy day When a new household finds its place Among the myriad homes of earth

“Eh, lad,” he said, like a sad Cousin Jack. “It’s back to they boardin’ ’ouses for both of us. And we’ll never know ’ow that ’oist works.”

But she has a ribald streak that I don’t much like. She is a card-carrying member of this liberated generation,

I am going back to Grandmother’s nineteenth century, where the problems and the people are less messy.

have her pictures. They make it easier to visualize that sleepy town before it was made over by a midway, and then by pious retired couples, and then by a branch of the University of California.

Perhaps he remembered holding her by that ankle while she hung over the waterfall above Big Pond. Perhaps he thought, though I do not believe that he did, that on that picnic afternoon of his courting he might just as well have put his hand on the pan of a bear trap.

Undoubtedly she thought of the window they stood at as a magic casement. Couldn’t she hear the perilous seas? It

place. I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.

What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.

“You’re all right, Susie,” he said. “You know that? Most women would go to bed for a week after a night like that.” “Where?” she said, and giggled. Her voice startled her, brittle as ice in that thin air.

The wind came across into her face with the taste of snow in it, and not all the glittering brightness on the snow could disguise the cold that lurked in the air.

When he opened the outside door the fume of his breath was white and thick, and the vicarious chill made her burrow deeper in the blankets. For a moment he stood there pail in hand, a rude, unidealized figure against a rectangle of bright steel sky–fully

he turned his chinless, amused face to the middle, where Mrs. Jackson sat like Buddha in a bustle.

With great authority the expert says what is not necessarily so.”

out. It’s been high-graded to death.”