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Every Man for Himself
El Paso del Norte.the Jornada del Muerto.Tiguex.Santa
Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Onate was a weeks-long ordeal up the
Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour and twenty
minute flight, including twenty minutes on the ground at Tiguex
(better known today as Albuquerque, New Mexico). The Franklin
Mountains.Sierra Uvas.Cooke's Peak away to the west.the Black
Range.the Magdalena Mountains (under the wing the high park with the
observatory at one end where Jim Rauen and I scouted for elk sign a
few years ago).Ladrone Peak, concealing, according to legend, a
quantity of thieves' gold beneath its sun-blackened folds and
wrinkles.next, the descent into Albuquerque, step by broad step down a
lurching, invisible staircase. There is just enough time for a trip
back to the restroom to rub at the coffee stains in my lap with a
paper towel before we're airborne again, bucking the westerly winds on
climb-out as the plane makes a right turn and resumes following the
river north. For miles--Five? Ten? Twenty? It's hard to tell from up
here--the Albuquerque of 2010, 2020 is platted westward toward Mt.
Taylor, sacred to the Navajo Indians, seventy miles away beyond the
Canoncito and Laguna Reservations: dry scratch marks on the burnt and
arid desert, vast geometrical petroglyphs whose enigmatic meaning is
what? Catastrophe I suppose, recalling the Phoenix city
fathers--mothers too, of course--reported to have a similar grid
planned in place as far west as the Colorado River to meet Los Angeles
pushing east. I won't be around by then, of course, having gone north
instead. The Jemez Mountains.Los Alamos, crawling with Chinese spies
and sleepy American security men on coffee break.Snowfields below now,
patchy at first, then coming together and spreading north into the San
Juan Mountains pushing south from Colorado.San Antonio Mountain, the
Conejos River and the high San Juans where Dick McIlhenny, Keith
Hawkins, and I nearly bagged the Sasquatch last August--appearing now,
in May, like something from the last Ice Age, snowed in for the next
ten or twelve thousand year. After a mere three or four generations in
the air, humanity is almost totally blasé about the view from thirty
thousand feet. My fellow passengers sleep, drink Diet Coke, scan fat
paperback novels into their motherboarded brains--except one, a Native
American gentlemen with his nose pressed against the window as if he
might actually be seeing the world--his world--for the first
time. The plane scrapes above Pike's Peak (elev. 14,110), clearing it
by only 15,000 feet or so, and soon after is on approach to Denver
International Airport on a northeasterly heading.
Viewed from 12,000 feet (or otherwise), the western
hub city of Denver scarcely inspires a son of the Old West to stand in
his plane seat and yell, "Yippee-yi-yay-OH!" Built on a few dozen
piles of whitened buffalo bones after the Civil War, Denver knew its
heyday in the Cowtown period, the old town buried completely now
beneath the glittering superstructure begun during the energy boom of
the 1970s and early 80s and completed by the Colorado or Bust!
migration of well-to-do Caliphoneyans arriving since then. Today,
Denver from the air appears like a vast insect spawn on the face of
the prairie, its myriad suburbs and developments laid out in an
endlessly repetitive honeycomb pattern--a home for termites, perhaps,
or for ants. Raised in the Dantesque environment of Littleton,
Colorado, I too might go berserk (though I wouldn't waste my
ammunition on teenage girls): While the "lesson of Littelton" is a
complicated one, the fundamental message is that modern America has
become unlivable. (Another is that white American males have no future
in America and are beginning to recognize the fact, but that's another
story.)
Faulkner thought the American soil cursed by
slavery. As if slavery were the worst thing ever to occur on the North
American continent, including the destruction of the Indian peoples,
however savage and cruel they might have been. Not to mention quite a
number of nonhuman indigenous species, including the passenger pigeon
and the buffalo. In her fine book The Buffalo Hunters, Mari
Sandoz describes the virtual extinction by white hunters of the bison
herds on the Great Plains--millions and millions of animals--over a
period of a little less than a decade, beginning in 1876 (a year
before the "reconstruction" of the defeated South ended). What
happened to the Indians, and the buffalo--intimately related in their
mutual destruction, as they had been in their aboriginal
existence--was not an accidental chapter in American history, but a
preview of the modern empire emerging. The colonists arriving in
America during the nearly two centuries before the creation of the
United States were a different breed from the immigrants who
came after 1789: the first group more settled (and settling),
educated, and pious, concerned with transplanting civilization to the
New World; the second rootless and rapacious, exploitive, materialist,
and individualistic, interested in escaping Western civilization
rather than in recreating it a hemisphere away. The colonists, being
civilized people, carried civilization with them; the immigrants, less
civilized, brought chaos. The colonists sought remote places in which
to worship their God undisturbed; the immigrants hoped to "get ahead,"
"make something of themselves," exercise their precious "equality"
against everyone, including especially their betters. From
approximately the beginning of the nineteenth century forward, the
immigrants debarking at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia consisted
largely of the European peasantry and proletariat; men and women who,
whether from the country or the city, had never owned or controlled
land--indeed, any natural resources at all. Released into the vast
American hinterland beyond the Appalachian mountains and, later, the
Mississippi River, they behaved like slum kids set loose in a Mayfair
confectionary shop of continental proportions. As the comparison
suggests, the determining factor seems to have been class, not
culture, race, or ethnicity, the late-arriving Anglo-Saxon-Celtic
immigrants having acted as irresponsibly as the newer stock (or more
so, Sandoz--the daughter of Swiss immigrants herself--would say).
However that may be, almost since the creation of the American
republic America has been in anything but a peaceably republican mood,
fueled by Democratism--the will to power, expansion, and
domination--in its headlong plunge across the continent to the
Pacific, across the Pacific to the Orient, and eastward to the Old
Country again in the three-quarters of a century since Europe
performed an early act of misguided multicultural enthusiasm by taking
the ancient and honorable Japanese ritual of Hari Kari and
transforming it into a suicidal orgy prompted by mass cowardice and
confusion.
How does America in 1999 look to a man who has
lived for the past twenty years in a small town in the least populated
state in the Union, without a television set or a local movie house,
and traveling mainly by pickup truck? Like Denver International
Airport, I guess.
Civilization once dominated, without necessarily
controlling, the world. At Denver International, nothing controls, in
spite of the shiny arcades, polished floors, and all the moving parts.
Wogs is everywhere--at the car rental desks, security check-in, out on
the tarmac. Also crowds of lazylooking, slow-spoken and slow-moving,
ill-dressed native Americans (but neat, no stains or body odor:
everyone hoping and praying to get laid tonight). If the American
people are working themselves to the bone, two or three jobs apiece or
so we're forever being told, why are more than fifty percent of them
overweight? Americans' dress and physical condition suggest they take
neither themselves nor anything else seriously, lulled as they have
become in the torpor of the Mentally Homogenous State. (Mass public
education really works, contradicting the jacket-and-tie
intellectuals who claim human nature possesses a natural defense
mechanism against indoctrination, brainwashing, and socially enforced
stupidity.) Backlit advertising panels on the walls feature nature,
children, romantic love, simplicity: Industrial America paying homage
to all those things it's most intent on destroying. "How do you keep
in touch with the world around you as it changes?" Thanks but no
thanks. In the news today: The Senate Republicans reverse yesterday's
vote on gun control; Robert Rubin, chief architect of our national
felicity, will leave Treasury in July. He may yet go down in history
as the economy's Thomas Andrews, though escaping, probably, going down
with it, as Andrews did in the case of his own masterpiece, the
Titanic. To Hell with the stock market, our national idol.
Capitalism has created an illusory world in order to sell the world;
mass democracy an illusory universe to sell itself. The wasteland we
find ourselves inhabiting is the inevitable result.
By the time I've added the extra insurance ("bumper
to bumper") the agency man hints I need to have in order to avoid a
tolerable chance of ending up owing something like the sticker price
on the car, the total amount comes to twice the charge the travel
agent quoted me a month ago. It's how we do business in America today,
and you give us any backtalk, we'll call Security and have you taken
out of here (argument being regarded by the authorities nowadays as
simply an early stage in the process of going postal). In the parking
lot at the end of a bus ride across what appears to be a couple of
counties I'm deposited, without introduction, behind the wheel of a
Dodge Something-or-Other (Sprite? No, that's the soft drink) and a
dashboard bearing no resemblance whatsoever to my '88 Ford truck's.
They might as well have given me a Stealth Bomber to pilot as this
Dodge Spud. (Greyish tan, elongated, and lumpy, the car resembles
nothing so much as a freshly dug potato.) It takes fifteen minutes to
discover how to turn the lights on and I'm launched then, into the
penumbra of the coming Rocky Mountain night, the weird sci-fi
landscape--not urban, not suburban--that is becoming America.
Since the collapse of antiquity, its retreat to the
monasteries and feudal estates of Western Europe, the history of the
West has been the idolization--and the idealization--of material
wealth, against which Christianity, for one, has had a tough time
competing. Alchemy--the quest to turn dross into gold--didn't end with
the Middle Ages, it just changed its name and moved out of a basement
address. Alchemy, not Christianity or even science, is the true
history of the past one thousand years. The New World was no sooner
discovered than it became recognized as man's ultimate treasure, the
Golden Continent; later in its history, gold, already idealized,
became abstracted, through paper money first, then stocks and bonds,
the new alchemy; the final step has been off the Gold Standard and up
to the Golden Dow. That's progress, after all. And who, in our
wonderfully modern, secularized, and enlightened America, has actually
seen or even heard of a golden buffalo calf--Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, or Other--confidently awaiting the daily sacrifice on the
national altars?
Modern Western culture, like every culture in the
history of the world, has its momentum, its trajectory, before which
Americans--now more than ever--refuse to stop, look, and listen.
There's a train wreck in store along the track: our real
rendezvous with destiny. The Civil War and its aftermath, not the
Missouri Compromise, was the "firebell in the night;" Having been rung
so often since, it is now as cracked as the Liberty Bell. Americans,
for the most part, pay no attention. Sometimes it seems that, in spite
of a population of 265 millions and counting, there is no one at home
in America.
The motel at the Loveland exchange is nearly
deserted but a single room costs fifty-plus dollars. When I go for
breakfast next morning it is snowing, which the manager, a Polish
immigrant, isn't thrilled by. Looks good to me, though--another
immigrant (from New Mexico, in this case) who's had enough sun this
past 22 months to satisfy a thousand mad dogs and fifty thousand
Englishmen. From Fort Collins, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming is a
distance of 80 miles and 2000 vertical feet through broken red hills
dotted with black juniper trees, separated by grassy swales fresh and
greenlooking beneath a covering of wet May snow. South and Northwest
are the high, snowcovered mountains of Estes Park and the Snowy Range
pushing up into Wyoming from Colorado. A brief halt across the state
line to get out of the car, kiss the ground, and do what men so easily
and uncomplicatedly do, outpacing the female sex yet again--and
onward, following the snow-slick curves up to Tie Siding at the
southern end of the Laramie Plain. Good grass here, real turf, and
black forested mountains beyond, full of snow. The dashboard shows an
exterior temperature of 41 degrees: Paradise is a cold day in
Heaven..More grass, a few ranches, the railroad running beside the
two-lane..At last, a view of Laramie, Wyoming--my new
home--established on the east side of the valley against the low
north-running ridge, a part of the Medicine Bow..Fair grounds,
railroad yards, the tall spire of the Episcopal Church rising above a
community of 26,650 souls. That's too many people still, but a big
improvement over Las Cruces (pop. 78,000 minus the university). In
today's insane and overcrowded world, one needs to be grateful for
smaller and smaller favors. |
