Sch-Outposts of Eden

by Page Stegner

Book Overview

A curmudgeon at large in the American West This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871566729
• ISBN13: 9780871566720
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A very amusing memoir

____________________________________________ Let us join Dr. Stegner as he escorts a group of California college kids on a river-trip in the Four Corners country of Utah. They arrive at the put-in: Magnificent, towering walls, sandy beaches, hot sun and smooth rock, cottonwoods - the San Juan is distinctly a mellow experience. "Except that we've got a problem," Bud says, coming out of the campfire light where he has been overseeing the preparation of supper. "We've got five vegetarians aboard. They're caucusing right now about what they delicately describe as the 'nutritional inadequacy' of our commissary. They want to go into Blanding and buy tofu." "Tofu! Blanding is thirty miles... and they're not going to find tofu in Blanding. Tofu?" Prof. Stegner urges cool heads and common sense, but an angry spokeswoman steps forward: She is one of the smokers on the trip - she and a frail asthmatic kid everyone calls "F*ckin'-A Fred". Chanterelle looks a lot like the mushroom she is named after: flat-headed and short-necked, shoulders like a nose tackle, no waist, no hips, no glutes. All stem from the armpits down. "What kind of beans are they?", she says, letting me know by her inflection that I am about to learn something. Chanterelle produces the empty #10 can and holds it up for inspection. "Have you read the label? Ranch beans! " she intones. "Cooked in pork by-products!" Great God. Skewered. I can only shrug, walk away, hope everyone recognises a Mexican standoff. Badges? We don't need no stinking badges. Anyway, this is Professor Pshaw's problem, not mine. "Where is Pshaw?" I ask Bud. "In our hour of travail." "At the Recapture Lodge in Bluff." "Doing what?" "Lodging. He said he's slept on the ground before." * * * Next are three tales from Prof. Stegner's carefree hippie youth, tales that are ...my tribute to those earlier days when it was still possible to entertain the illusion of rugged independence... None of the names have been changed to protect the guileless, chuckle-headed innocents who participated in the search for a free lunch in Eden (down, Fang), and none of the details have been embellished - much... We had a little meeting, drank a little whiskey, and formed the As Is Cattleman's Association of Santa Cruz County. Two middle-aged writers, a professor of American Literature, and a mick mathematician... We met at the ranch for what our jester, Forrest Robinson, keeps referring to as "the roundup". "Man, I'm telling you," Robinson says, "If five men and two boys can't catch one lousy calf before it's time for the champagne brunch, then we ought to hang up our spurs." Yes, patient reader, we have heard that line before. I am going to spare you the details of the chase, the forty man-hour/sixteen boy-hour chase, up and down the mountainsides of coastal California, over fences, thru tangled brush and swollen creek, thru the gumbo mud of hillside winter pastur