What I didn't know as I stood blissful in the foam was that I had begun to foam too, though I hadn’t yet felt the salt. Well, that’s exactly what Wallace Stegner has done with Crossing to Safety, a book that captured my heart.

Larry and Sid meet through their jobs as lecturers at the University of Wisconsin’s English department, their newly pregnant wives hit it off immediately. Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it. For the past several years, my husband and I have lived in a few academic communities while he worked in administration and I worked on faculty. Not settling, not feeling trapped or resentful, but just learning to be OK with your life and appreciating what you have instead of wasting your life obsessing over what you don't have. I read this simple, yet sweeping Great Depression story of love and friendship, of time and discovery, of pleasure and pain, and it sparked something in me that leaves me a bit in awe, a bit speechless, a bit drained.

The odd result is that Sid and Charity become indelible characters, while Larry’s own wife Sally becomes a one-dimensional plot point. After telling her that a book about them would be a falsification, Larry ruminates to himself — and Stegner ruminates to his reader — the difficulty of making “a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these. I couldn’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify. A long hike, perhaps standing in for a life journey, is fraught with unexpected impediments, an unmapped beaver pond, storm-downed trees that force unfortunate detours.

Crossing to Safety ultimately lingers with you awhile as a mournful and melancholy tribute to the passage of time. Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

Besides the wonderful characterisations, Stegner created a very atmospheric novel, with beautifully descriptive prose. Yet, all of these reasons are detailed in the book that, ostensibly, he has eventually written about the friendship of the two couples, Crossing to Safety.