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Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics) Paperback – April 9, 2002
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Afterword by T. H. Watkins
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
- Print length335 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherModern Library
- Publication dateApril 9, 2002
- Dimensions5.16 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-10037575931X
- ISBN-13978-0375759314
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"A superb book. . . . Nothing in these lives is lost or wasted, suffering becomes an enriching benediction, and life itself a luminous experience."--Doris Grumbach
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From the Back Cover
About the Author
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of many books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and Finding Beauty in a Broken World. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction, she lives in southern Utah.
T. H. Watkins (1936–2000) was the first Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University, and was the author of twenty-eight books.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.
It is obviously very early. The light is no more than dusk that leaks past the edges of the blinds. But I see, or remember, or both, the uncurtained windows, the bare rafters, the board walls with nothing on them except a calendar that I think was here the last time we were, eight years ago.
What used to be aggressively spartan is shabby now. Nothing has been refreshed or added since Charity and Sid turned the compound over to the children. I should feel as if I were waking up in some Ma-and-Pa motel in hard-times country, but I don’t. I have spent too many good days and nights in this cottage to be depressed by it.
There is even, as my eyes make better use of the dusk and I lift my head off the pillow to look around, something marvelously reassuring about the room, a warmth even in the gloom. Associations, probably, but also color. The unfinished pine of the walls and ceilings has mellowed, over the years, to a rich honey color, as if stained by the warmth of the people who built it into a shelter for their friends. I take it as an omen; and though I remind myself why we are here, I can’t shake the sense of loved familiarity into which I just awoke.
The air is as familiar as the room. Standard summer-cottage taint of mice, plus a faint, not-unpleasant remembrance of skunks under the house, but around and through those a keenness as of seven thousand feet. Illusion, of course. What smells like altitude is latitude. Canada is only a dozen miles north, and the ice sheet that left its tracks all over this region has not gone for good, but only withdrawn. Something in the air, even in August, says it will be back.
In fact, if you could forget mortality, and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.
Sally is still sleeping. I slide out of bed and go barefooted across the cold wooden floor. The calendar, as I pass it, insists that it is not the one I remember. It says, accurately, that it is 1972, and that the month is August.
The door creaks as I ease it open. Keen air, gray light, gray lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch. More than once, in summers past, Sid and I cut down some of those weedlike trees to let more light into the guest cottage. All we did was destroy some individuals, we never discouraged the species. The hemlocks like this steep shore. Like other species, they hang on to their territory.
I come back in and get my clothes off a chair, the same clothes I wore from New Mexico, and dress. Sally sleeps on, used up by the long flight and the five-hour drive up from Boston. Too hard a day for her, but she wouldn’t hear of breaking the trip. Having been summoned, she would come.
For a minute I stand listening to her breathing, wondering if I dare go out and leave her. But she is deeply asleep, and should stay that way for a while. No one is going to be coming around at this hour. This early piece of the morning is mine. Tiptoeing, I go out onto the porch and stand exposed to what, for all my senses can tell me, might as well be 1938 as 1972.
No one is up in the Lang compound. No lights through the trees, no smell of kindling smoke on the air. I go out the spongy woods path past the woodshed and into the road, and there I meet the sky, faintly brightening in the east, and the morning star as steady as a lamp. Down under the hemlocks I thought it overcast, but out here I see the bowl of the sky pale and spotless.
My feet take me up the road to the gate, and through it. Just inside the gate the road forks. I ignore the Ridge House road and choose instead the narrow dirt road that climbs around the hill to the right. John Wightman, whose cottage sits at the end of it, died fifteen years ago. He will not be up to protest my walking in his ruts. It is a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favorite road anywhere.
Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders. Through the hardwoods along the foot of the hill, through the belt of cedars where the ground is swampy with springs, through the spruce and balsam of the steep pitch, I go alertly, feasting my eyes. I see coon tracks, an adult and two young, in the mud, and maturing grasses bent like croquet wickets with wet, and spotted orange Amanitas, at this season flattened or even concave and holding water, and miniature forests of club moss and ground pine and ground cedar. There are brown caves of shelter, mouse and hare country, under the wide skirts of spruce.
My feet are wet. Off in the woods I hear a Peabody bird tentatively try out a song he seems to have half forgotten. I look to the left, up the slope of the hill, to see if I can catch a glimpse of Ridge House, but see only trees.
Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.
We didn’t come back to Battell Pond this time for pleasure. We came out of affection and family solidarity, as adopted members of the clan, and because we were asked for and expected. But I can’t feel somber now, any more than I could when I awoke in the shabby old guest cottage. Quite the reverse. I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent in my mind and more at ease with myself and my world, than I feel for a few minutes on the shoulder of that known hill while I watch the sun climb powerfully and confidently and see below me the unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying greens of hayfields and meadows and sugarbush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting and warming as the stretched shadows shorten.
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
When I come in I find Sally sitting up, the blind closest to the bed—the one she can reach—raised to let a streak of sun into the room. She is drinking a cup of coffee from the thermos and eating a banana from the fruit basket that Hallie left when she put us to bed last night.
“Not breakfast,” Hallie said. “Just hazari. We’ll come and get you for brunch, but we won’t come too early. You’ll be tired and off your clock. So sleep in, and we’ll come and get you about ten. After brunch we’ ll go up and see Mom, and later in the afternoon she’s planned a picnic on Folsom Hill.”
“A picnic?” Sally said. “Is she well enough to go on a picnic? If she’s doing it for us, she shouldn’t.”
“That’s the way she’s arranged it,” Hallie said. “She said you’d be tired, and to let you rest, and if she says you’ll be tired, you might as well be tired. If she plans a picnic, you’d better want a picnic. No, she’ll be all right. She saves her strength for the things that matter to her. She wants it like old times.”
I let up the other two blinds and lighten the dim room. “Where’d you go?” Sally asks.
“Up the old Wightman road.”
I pour myself coffee and sit down in the wicker chair that I remember as part of the furniture of the Ark. From the bed Sally watches me. “How was it?”
“Beautiful. Quiet. Good earthy smells. It hasn’t changed.”
“I wish I could have been along.”
“I’ll take you up later in the car.”
“No, we’ll be going up to the picnic, that’s enough.” She sips her coffee, watching me over the rim of the cup. “Isn’t it typical? At death’s door, and she wants it like old times, and orders everybody to make it that way. And worries about us being tired. Ah, she’s going to leave a hole! There’s been a hole, ever since we. . . . Did you feel any absences?”
“No absences. Presences.”
“I’m glad. I can’ t imagine this place without them in it. Both of them.”
Product details
- Publisher : Modern Library; Reprint edition (April 9, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 335 pages
- ISBN-10 : 037575931X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375759314
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.16 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #23,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #930 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #1,277 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #2,601 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Once in awhile,Stegner, goes off on a tangent; I found myself wondering, "Where is this going?" I put the book down and came back the next day and I was again intrigued. It is not a page turner, but it is so beautifully written you take your time to absorb and THINK.
Once in awhile I think about friendships I made that no longer exist. Friendship is not easy; all parties involved must want to maintain this friendship and work to have it continue. Stegner not only emphasizes the bonds in friendship, but also in the marriages of the two couples. The friendship is strengthened when adversity enters the story. Illness and impending death bring the friendship to the point of love. This love of friendship exists when one desire to do something only to please the friend. Read and learn!
The Langs and Morgans were an unlikely pairing. Opposites and contrast abound throughout the novel. The Langs, wealthy privileged easterners, products and producers of large extended families, seemingly have it all. They are adventurous, intelligent, and healthy. In contrast, the Morgans come out of the west from nothing—no money nor families, prone to difficult childbearing and diseases. Yet, these two couples form life-long bonds that survive (although not always so strongly) for their entire adult lives. In some ways, it would seem that the Langs gave more to the Morgans than visa versa. Charity’s exuberance to Sally’s gentle ways; Sid’s worldliness to Larry’s naive world view. But this is a story of the strength of a fired professor and his polio-ravished wife and their ability to overcome.
Stegner could have devoted much more time to the “others” in the story: professors and wives, children and other relatives, but the essence of his novel was the Langs and the Morgans. As the novel opens, we know that Charity is dying and doing so in her own way. “Isn’t it typical? At death’s door and she wants it like old times, and orders everybody to make it that way. And worries about us being tired. Ah, she’s going to leave a hole.” And perhaps the “meta-essence” is Charity. Her personality drives those around her, and in that drive we see both the positive and negative effects. She decides that they will be friends; she decides that the Morgans will be assisted when times are tough. She wills the polio stricken Sally to live.
Sally: “Except for Charity, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t have wanted to be.”
Larry: “I know.”
Sally and Charity bond immediately. Yet, Larry is not so enchanted with Charity. The two often spar, much to Sally dismay. Sally often defends Charity. Likewise, Larry bonds with Sid, becoming his champion. It seems to me that Larry understands the price that Sid pays to his determined wife. Sid never measured up to Charity’s father; couple that with never measuring up to his own father: “My most vivid memory of my father is the total incomprehension—the contempt—in his face when I told him I wanted to major in English literature at Yale.”
In the story as Larry interprets it, we see Charity becoming more dogmatic from the “compass” for their camping adventure to Sid’s career. “Charity’s family are all professors. She likes being part of a university. She wants us to get promoted, and stay.”
Her vision of how things should be (and how Sid should be) grows more rigid over the years. There is no room for personality, desire, or hope different from Charity’s vision. As ulta-generous and loving as she is to the Morgans, especially to Sally, her charity does not extend to Sid. To Charity (and probably to his father), Sid is a disappointment, too emotionally driven like the poet he wants to be.
For me, the ultimate cruelty was Charity’s exclusion of Sid in her dying “plans.” As the widow of a cancer victim, I do not believe I could have recovered if my husband had banned me from his side. We nearly made it to 25 years, not quite. Langs more than likely were 40 or more. The role of spouse/care giver is difficult. Often, I felt I could never say the “right” thing: if I tried to be cheerful, I was told that I didn’t understand the fatality of the situation. If I was down, I was told that I wasn’t helping to be positive. Do I blame him? Absolutely, not. His burden was far heavier than mine. It was merely difficult to provide the comfort needed at the moment. In the end, we understood that our love, as human as it may have been, was true and strong. To have been excluded from his bedside would have been emotionally and spiritually fatal to me. I was often the emotional one to his reserve as Sid was to Charity. I call that balance.
Charity’s expectations and determination were not totally unexpected. Stegner masterfully developed each character making their flaws and strengths human and real. I may have been disappointed in a character’s choice, but each time those choices stayed real. Crossing to Safety was a joy to read.
"Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn't as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones. What if we had been born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town?..."
"Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature. You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine..."
"We went through those three weeks in the summer of 1941 like people driving an open road while storms gathered ahead and to both sides. On them, the sun still shines. Who knows, the clouds might part, blow over, clear away; the rain might turn out to be no more than a hard shower. Meantime, the light is lurid and lovely, the mesas reach out of black distance and warm their cliff-ends in the sun, unexpected rainbows arch the valleys..."
"In the bed that was still strange to me I lay listening for outside sounds that I was not sure I could interpret, and I had a thrilling sense of the safety of hereness and the close dark. It didn't really matter what noise out there had caught my sleeping ear. Sally breathed quietly beside me. The clock ticked us toward morning..."
Top reviews from other countries
The story is about two couples who meet for the first time in the 1930s. Larry and Sid, the men, are both immersed in starting a career at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and Sally and Charity, the women, are both pregnant. So far, so good, so potentially boring. The book has a tone that reminded me half of Steinbeck, half of Hemingway, although I couldn’t really argue against any other takes.
It took quite a while until I could lose myself inside their stories, their characters, their conflicts. They are all not particularly extraordinary (except for Charity?), but there’s a profound humanity in the way Larry reminisces about those four lives that are so deeply entwined.
It might not have been love at first sight, but what came late will probably last for a long time.
Like other wonderful books such as Siri Hudvest's What I love, it talks beautifully of art. It made me what to go to museums, to listen to music properly, to create, to develop my life. I really can't recommend this book enough; I will definitely reread it, and then make my way through all of Stegner's other writings.