Essay Reviews Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone. By Douglas Thayer. (Layton, U T: Peregrine Smith, 1989. 154 pages, $7.95.) We are still living out in American life and literature the consequences of our paradoxical attraction to and destruction of wilderness. We spend enor mous resources to preserve wilderness and also wantonly destroy it. Many of us still seek to find some central meaning to our lives, even some ultimate healing, in a “return” to nature, to the primitive that is best encountered, we naively believe, in wilderness, in the simple, clean life of the desert survival trek or the fall hunt. Douglas Thayer’sstories offer the most powerful examination I have seen of the consequences of our continuing destructive relations to wilderness, and gently point to some alternatives in mature, family- and community-centered living. Thayer grew up in the Rockies, like some ofhis protagonists, as a deadly little white savage, killing whatever wildlife he could, running wild and swim ming naked along the margins of Mormon villages. His conversion came through education and writing and the maturing of his own Mormon faith. He studied at Stanford under Yvor Winters, perhaps the most powerful modern voice against Romantic optimism—and blindness—about nature. His stories reveal a constant and increasingly successful effort, as Bruce Jorgensen has shown, to adopt the major Romantic lyric form, a self-educative meditation in or upon a wilderness setting, “to western Mormon experience and consciousness, but in ways that also question and undercut this form.”1 Though the stories in Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone have been written over a twenty-five year period, they are more closely connected in theme and are more logically arranged than those in Thayer’s earlier collection, Under the Cottonwoods', they also reflect more precisely the quality of Thayer’s own spiritual journey. There is a kind of reverse chronological order: The first three stories are about present-day boys and men attracted to primitive nature and the rituals by which we imagine it may be penetrated—hunting, fishing, erotic freedom, exploring old mines, even living naked and voiceless in the desert. The fourth, title story is about a man born only twenty years after Custer’s defeat, who as a boy growing up in Nebraska mourned the destruc tion of the buffalo and Indians, spent his life trying to recover them through study and collecting artifacts, and who is finally destroyed by that quest in an 1“Romantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer,” Western American Literature 22 (May, 1987): 33-48. 52 Western American Literature encounter with the real wilderness remaining in Yellowstone. Finally, in a novella that I believe could be turned into a first-rate film, Thayer gives us a marvelous mountain man adventure tale that uses many of the clichés of the popular Western novel or movie but finally subverts them in a powerful revela tion of the white man’sfailure, in all his own destructivepower, to comprehend either the value or the destructive power of wilderness. “The Red-Tailed Hawk,” the opening story, provides a decisive and mov ing critique of Romanticism and of secular modes of salvation. The narrator tells of a day-long hunt just before Christmas, over ten years before, when he was fifteen. But the plot is carefully interspersed with his present versions of earlier meditations on the seductive freedom and solitude of his life in nature, which he had constantly attempted to fix and preserve through killing and mounting birds, particularly a red-tailed hawk that hangs over his bed. The hunt ends with his killing a Canada goose, swimming out to retrieve it, and then nearly dying of exposure. He losesthe fingers of a hand but comes to a full awareness of the cost of merging with nature; and that experienced insight brings him back into acceptance of his family and thus himself as part of the human community and to acceptance of both the works (the actions of law and societal structure) and also the grace that have saved him. The narrator of the title story, a young, unconverted version of Thayer, gives a sympathetic, even seductive, view of a...
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Jan 1, 1999
Michael Mcghee 
Open Access