Free Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Page A

people were the newest and best part of it. It is there in my head now, as bright and dark as Housman’s vision of human hate, but with the opposite meaning. We talked and talked. We told each other what we liked and what we had done and what we wanted to do. If we quit talking for a minute, in flowed that frosty, comforting midwestern night.
    “Don’t you think of this place as an
opportunity
?” Charity asked us. “Don’t you feel the way we do, how young and promising it is, and how much there is to be done, and given, and taught, and learned? Sid and I feel so lucky. Back in Cambridge some people felt sorry for us, going away out to Wisconsin, as if it were Siberia. They just don’t
know.
They don’t know how warm and friendly and open and eager it is. And bright, too.
    “Maybe the students aren’t as well trained as Harvard students, but a lot of them are just as bright. If there are Winesburgs in the Middle West it’s because people don’t give them a
chance
to
become
anything. They expect too much too soon. They won’t stick it out and give what they ought to give. Instead, they run away to Chicago or New York or Paris. Or else they stay home and just grumble and knock and talk about spiritual
poverty.
    “I don’t know about you, but Sid and I think a little city like this, with a good university in it, is the real flowering of the American dream. Don’t you feel it? It might have felt like this in Florence in the early fifteenth century, just before the big explosion of art and science and discovery. We want to settle in, and make ourselves as useful as we can, and help it grow, and grow ourselves. We’re determined to give it our absolute best. Before we’re all done with it, let’s make Madison a place of
pilgrimage
!”
    She went on like that for blocks, while Sid murmured, and agreed, and prompted, and listened. She said a lot of things we might have thought or hoped but would have been embarrassed to express. Never in our lives had we felt so close to two people. Charity and Sally had their competitive pregnancies, we were all at the beginning of something, the future unrolled ahead of us like a white road under the moon. When we got back to their big lighted house, it seemed like our house too. In one evening we had been made at home in it.
    All of us felt it. We must have. For in front of their gate, before we drove away still wearing their burnooses, we fell into a four-ply, laughing hug, we were so glad to know one another and so glad that all the trillion chances in the universe had brought us to the same town and the same university at the same time.

5
    Madison. It comes back as broken scenes. We sit in ragged lawn chairs on the ragged lawn. I am grading papers through a hangover headache, Sally is still trying to get through Jules Romains’
Men of Good Will.
Saturday, not quite noon, the morning after we came home from the Langs’ dinner party wearing their romantic burnooses and too stimulated to sleep. We talked, we made love, we talked some more, finally we wore out. Now it is the next day.
    It is a fair blue day, Lake Monona is tepeed with white sails, there is a bright chop on the water that my aching eyes avoid, focusing out of duty on the pages of a freshman theme describing Observatory Hill. Something strikes my eye, I laugh out loud, Sally looks up from her book.
    “Listen to this. ‘The top of the hill is round and smooth, worn down by centuries of eroticism.’ Is she pulling my leg, or is this one for Dave Stone’s boner collection?”
    “I suppose she means ‘erosion.’ ”
    “I suppose she does. But yearning speaks between the lines. It’s like that headline, ‘Pen Is Mightier Than Sword, Says Wilson,’ that left out the slug between ‘Pen’ and ‘Is.’ Inadvertence is the truest humor.”
    “Is it, now.”
    The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop