Wallace Stegner’s Warning About the Kind of People We Become

Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a book about the American West. But really, it is a book about place.

More importantly, it is a book about what happens to human beings when they stop thinking of a place as something they merely occupy and begin thinking of it as something they belong to.

That makes Stegner’s work surprisingly relevant to one of the questions confronting America today: Do we still know how to live somewhere?

Stegner spent much of his life writing about the West: its landscape, its history, its people and its mythology. But he was suspicious of the mythology. The West represented opportunity, freedom and reinvention, but it also produced exploitation, speculation and a relentless appetite for the next opportunity.

Stegner gave us a memorable way to understand that tension. There are, he suggested, boomers and stickers.

The boomers come to a place looking for what it can give them. They arrive during the boom, take advantage of the opportunity and move on when something better appears.

The stickers are different. They settle, develop affection for a place, and they make a life there.

And because they intend to remain, they begin to care about what happens to the place after they are gone.

Stegner’s distinction is not really about whether someone moves. That is important.

A person can move across the country and become a sticker. Another person can live in the same town for 50 years and behave like a boomer. The difference is affection and investment.

As Stegner put it, the culture that grows in the West is the product not of those who “pillage and run” but of those who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” 

That idea deserves to be rescued from the geography of the American West and applied to the geography of everyday life. Because we have a problem.

We have become remarkably good at living places without belonging to them. 

We move into neighborhoods. We occupy houses, commute to jobs, shop a businesses, and send our children to schools. We attend churches, clubs and sporting events. And yet we can go years without knowing the names of the people who live immediately around us.

We have become residents without necessarily becoming neighbors.

That is where Stegner becomes more than a Western writer. He becomes a social critic.

The tragedy of the boomer

The boomer isn’t necessarily a bad person. That’s one of the reasons Stegner’s idea is more interesting than simply calling people selfish.

The boomer is operating according to a particular philosophy of life: What can this place do for me? What can I get from it? What opportunity does it offer? What can I build, or sell, or make money from Where can I find a better house, a better job, a better school, a better climate, a better lifestyle?

Then, when the calculation changes, the boomer moves on.

There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition or mobility. America was built in part by people willing to move, take risks and pursue opportunities.

Stegner’s warning is about something deeper: What happens when extraction becomes our default relationship with place?

A place becomes a commodity. A neighborhood becomes a market. A house becomes an investment. A town becomes a growth opportunity. And eventually, even relationships can become transactional.

The sticker operates differently.

The sticker asks: What can I contribute to this place?

That is a radically different question.

The sticker doesn’t just stay. He invests.

This is the part of Stegner’s philosophy that I find most compelling.

We often equate staying with rootedness. But staying isn’t enough. 

You can live in the same house for 30 years and never know your neighbors. You can attend the same church for decades and never learn the story of the person sitting three rows behind you. You can own a business downtown for generations and never become part of the community around it.

That isn’t really rootedness.

A sticker does something more: he or she invests, learns, participates, remembers, takes responsiblity, and develops affection. And eventually he begins to say “we” instead of “they.”

That little change in language may be one of the great markers of belonging.

“They should fix that" becomes: “What can we do about it?”

“They don’t have many people coming to that event" becomes: “How can we get people there?”

“Someone ought to check on her," becomes: “I’ll go check on her.”

That’s what a sticker does.

This is where neighboring comes in

For the past several years, I have been working on Missouri Good Neighbor Week with a simple objective: make neighborhood activity and interaction expected and normal again.

At first glance, this might seem like a campaign encouraging people to be nicer.

It is more ambitious than that. It is an attempt to change our understanding of what it means to live in a place.

A good neighbor isn’t simply someone who keeps his yard looking nice and doesn’t make too much noise.

A good neighbor knows something about the people nearby. A good neighbor notices. A good neighbor participates. A good neighbor occasionally inconveniences himself for somebody else. A good neighbor develops relationships before there is a crisis that requires them.

In other words: A good neighbor is a sticker.

That may be one of the most useful applications of Stegner’s idea. We shouldn’t define neighboring merely by the absence of bad behavior. We should define it by the presence of investment.

The question isn’t simply, “Am I a good neighbor?” Almost everyone will say yes.

The more interesting questions are:

• Do I know my neighbors’ names?
• Have I invited them into my home?
• Would I notice if something was wrong?
• Have I done something for someone nearby without expecting anything in return?
• Have I participated in the life of my neighborhood?
• Have I contributed something to the place where I live?

Those are sticker questions.

Stegner’s great insight

The genius of Stegner’s idea is that it ultimately isn’t about where you live. It’s about how you live there.

You can be a sticker in any size city, neighborhood, subdivision or apartment. You can even become a sticker in a place you know you won’t live forever.

Because rootedness isn’t measured only in years. It is measured in affection, attention and contribution. That may be why Stegner’s writing feels particularly timely.

We live in an age of extraordinary mobility. We can move anywhere. Work almost anywhere. Shop anywhere. Build relationships with people anywhere. Follow news from anywhere.

Our physical location has become less important to our daily lives.

Pperhaps that is precisely why physical location has become more important to our sense of community.

The person across the street cannot be replaced by an online follower.

The neighbor who brings you soup cannot be replaced by a notification.

The person who notices that your elderly mother hasn’t opened her curtains cannot be replaced by an app.

Proximity still matters. Place still matters. People still matter.

Stegner reminds us that the quality of a place ultimately depends upon the kind of people who decide to invest themselves in it.

The question Stegner leaves us

I finished Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs thinking less about the American West than about my own street.

Who are the stickers and the boomers?

And, perhaps more importantly: Which one am I?

That is the uncomfortable beauty of Stegner’s idea. It isn’t really a label we get to apply to other people. It is a question we have to ask ourselves.

When I enter a community, am I asking what I can get from it? Or what I can give to it?

When something isn’t right, do I complain and move on? Or do I take some responsibility?

When a new family moves in, do I wait for them to become part of the community? Or do I walk across the street and introduce myself?

Stegner understood that communities are not created by abstract ideals. They are created by people who become attached to particular places and particular people.

People who stay, serve, remember, care, and decide this place is worth their investment. People who become stickers.

That is why Stegner’s book deserves to be read today. Not merely as a meditation on the American West. Not merely as an important work by one of America’s great writers. But as a challenge to a culture increasingly tempted to treat every place as temporary and every relationship as optional.

Perhaps the future of our communities depends upon recovering an old-fashioned idea:

You don’t have to own a place to belong to it.

You simply have to love it enough to invest yourself in it.

And perhaps the simplest way to begin is also the most ordinary.

Learn the name of the person who lives next door.

Then learn something about his life.

Then do something for him.

That’s how a resident becomes a neighbor. And that’s how a neighborhood begins to become a community.

WRITTEN BY

David L. Burton

For more information, visit the Engaged Neighbor website. Take our pledge and become part of a movement! Or subscribe to our newsletter. Access some of the research documents written by David Burton, the author of this blog. Or better yet, purchase one of his books off Amazon. Contact David L. Burton via email at dburton541@yahoo.