'Sipping his drink, he looked down on the intersection of Maia and South Temple, a corner once as familiar as his own face... Then something strange happened. The intersection drifted and became a double exposure, as if a transparent overlay had been slid across it. Over the modern corner with its striped pedestrian crossings and its wide cluttered sidewalks hovered the image of an older, simpler meeting of streets. From his window he saw three foreshortened figures pass below him and turn to cross South Temple. The camera cut to street level and he saw them plain: three sunburned boys of sixteen or seventeen or eighteen... Three abreast, they pass out of the frame, out of sight, out of time - glimpsed and gone, irrecoverable, their presence written on the hot summer air of a period as irrecoverable as they: Joe Mulder, Jack Bailey, Bruce Mason, fixed for a few seconds by a Pathé News cameraman filming a Salt Lake City street scene in the summer of what? 1925? 1926, the summer after their freshman year in college.'
Walter Stegner's 1943 semi-autobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain described his family trials during Prohibition. Released in 1979 at the other end of a distinguished literary career (Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford; Pulitzer Prize; American Book Award), Recapitulation follows the same protagonist, Bruce Mason, into early retirement, looking back on his romances and family issues. In this scene, Bruce has come to Salt Lake City for his aunt's funeral, the occasion of the reminiscences contained in this book. He looks out the window of his downtown hotel room.
