Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

"The plain spreads southward below the Trans-Canada Highway, an ocean of wind-troubled grass and grain. It has its remembered textures: winter wheat heavily headed, scoured and shadowed as if schools of fish move in it; spring wheat with its young seed-rows as precise as combings in a boy's wet hair; gray-brown summer fallow with the weeds disked under; and grass, the marvelous curly prairie wool tight to the earth's skin, straining the wind as the wheat does, but in its own way, secretly."

Stegner is the poet and the prophet of that great, endless expanse of wilderness that floods across the US/Canadian border. Iowa, Utah, Montana, Saskatchewan, all lumped together in the American imagination in that evocative phrase: "The West". He writes of the land, of the importance of wilderness, of a certain type of hardship, of a vanished world. I have read pretty much everything he has written, and nothing in the whole bunch ever sounded a wrong note. This particular book slips between autobiography, fiction and history to tell of a particular place and a particular time (Saskatchewan from about 1906-1920). It explores that end of the pioneer culture, and the evolution of pioneer communities. It also seeks to analyze why the dream of progress failed in that hard climate:

"It is an object lesson in the naïveté of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and the repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to country rut, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village� That curve is possible anywhere in America, but nearly inevitable on the Plains, because on the Plains the iron inflexibilities of low rainfall, short growing season, monotonous landscape, and wide extreme of temperatures limit the number of people who can settle and the prosperity and contentment of the ones who manage to stick.