Yesterday, as we drove back after picking Mary up at the airport I noticed a landslide on the west side of West Fargo on an interstate ramp. The excessive amount of moisture we've received this year worked with gravity, and a large chunk of good old Red River Valley dirt came sliding down. Just south of the interstate by Valley City there was another spot like it. I ran across the term "angle of repose" a few years back when I read one of the great American novels of the same name Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It means the maximum angle of slope at which sand, loose rock, mud, etc. will remain in place without sliding on a hillside. Stegner, born in 1909, lived for a time in North Dakota, and I am surprised the state promoters haven't laid more claim to him than they have people like Louis L'Amour, Lawrence Welk, Peggy Lee, plus the whole lot of them that grace the hallway of the state capital building.
The book centers on the life and thoughts of a historian and the history of his family that he uncovers. As a professor Stegner ran the writing program at Stanford University for many years and a good many of my favorite writers studied under him: Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, William Kittridge, to name a few. The book can probably be considered a metaphor for him and his family as after much sliding and moving downhill, they finally came to rest, just as a landslide would.
