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Out Where the West Began
Flying home from the East, I usually honor crossing
the Mississippi as the occasion for my first double dry martini; so
that passing the Hundredth Meridian, equidistant between the towns of
Kearney and North Platte, Nebraska, is generally the cause for
celebrating with the second. For at least a century and a half, the
Hundredth has been the line of demarcation between the Eastern and
Western portions of the United States, the meteorological instant at
which the polite old East expires and the Wild West lunges forward. In
the days of prop and turbo-prop planes, the Hundredth also coincided
roughly with the start of the perceptible upward sweep of the
continent, climaxing in an orogenic burst of snowy granite as the
aircraft bumped and scraped over the ragged Front Range of the Rocky
Mountains. Experienced at ground level, the geographical transition
from East to West is less dramatic, essentially a matter of increasing
aridity rather than of elevational rise. Still, somewhere east of
Scottsbluff the Nebraskan Sandhills provide enough lift that the
native Westerner, taking note of the depleted ozone, thinning air,
snow squalls (in June), and the ubiquitous odoriferous sagebrush
especially, long before be catches sight of Chimney Rock above the
North Platte River perceives that he is almost home again.
On a morning flight last fall from Salt Lake City
to Chicago, the view off the left wing over Evanston,
Wyoming, included the Wasatch Mountains of northern Utah, Bear Lake
straddling the Utah-Idaho line, the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges
north of my hometown of Kemmerer (Wyoming), the Grand Tetons more than
200 miles to the north, the Green River Basin, the Wind River
Mountains, and beyond them to the north and east the Absaroka
Mountains on the southeastern boundary of Yellowstone Park and the Owl
Creek Mountains that form the southwestern rim of the Bighorn Basin.
In spite of acrid ocherous smogs drifting from Los Angeles and Salt
Lake, the copper smelters of Arizona, and the electric power plants at
Page (Arizona), Four Corners, and Colstrip, Montana, you can still see
nearly forever in the Great American West. More important even than
what you do see, however, is what you don't. From 30,000 feet, every
human construction is recognizable: every town, every mine, every
reservoir, every highway--even many of the dirt roads. Why? Because
there are so few of all these things, comparatively speaking. With no
trouble at all, I can trace the central public road system on a blank
map of the state of Wyoming, which at the start of the 21rst century
remains substantially undeveloped, and therefore substantially open,
and for that reason substantially free.
The low population density of the Rocky Mountain
states and Nevada, and the relative insignificance of industrial
"improvements" made by human beings to the region, emphasize what
never needed emphasis to begin with: namely, the titanic heroic
landforms of which it consists. Often when contemplating a trip--400,
800, 1,000 miles--I catch my mind's eye drifting down the highway
ahead of me like a space probe, snapping and transmitting familiar
images of every salient geologic and geographic feature between, say,
Kemmerer and El Paso, a distance of exactly 1010 miles. The plains of
western Wyoming . . . the Wasatch Front . . . Soldier Summit . . . the
Roan Cliffs . . . the Book Cliffs . . . the LaSal Mountains . . . Ute
Mountain and Mesa Verde . . . the Jemez Mountains . . . the Sandias
behind Albuquerque . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Elephant Butte .
. . the Black Range . . . the Organ Pipe Mountains . . . El Christo
Rey above The Pass itself. The Mountain West is of a boldly
discernible piece, the Colorado Plateau merging logically with the
West Slope of Colorado, the Mogollon Rim in Arizona forming a
plausible transition between the northern Sonoran Desert and the
aforementioned Plateau, the Basin and Range formations of the Great
American Desert advancing with discrete precision from eastern Utah to
eastern California. Writing this, I seem to be standing in a darkened
room gazing down at a lighted relief map of the entire Rocky Mountain
West spread at my feet.
Such ease of conception leads to love, and love to
jealousy--an emotion as defensible, even admirable, when its object is
the land as it is indefensible where persons are concerned. "My home,"
the late Edward Abbey wrote, "is the American West. All of it." So is
it mine, but it makes an awfully big home to love--and to defend. And
the West today is in critical need of defense as extra-regional
forces, eager as well as resentful ones, gather for a final assault
that is part the ultimate land grab, part a process of gentrification,
part an assertion of the new Manifest Destiny--also known as
Modernization.
Among the most effective rhetorical
sleights-of-hand in history is the conflation of the antonyms
"progress" and "modernization," a trick that has depended for its
success upon a cynical appeal to all men, religious and secular, who
have believed that Homo sapiens is somehow called to create a
civilization increasingly more just, wise, sensitive, intelligent, and
reflective of his truest nature. That these words are not synonymous
is suggested by the fact that while the Kingdom of God proclaimed by
Jesus Christ was manifestly an improvement over every society to date,
including that of the ancient Hebrews, 2,000 years of subsequent
modernization not only have failed to institutionalize it, but have
instead produced societies even more decadent than the ancient Roman
Empire that God's Kingdom was meant to supplant.
In somewhat of a reverse parallel, the rural
American West, thoroughly Americanized in the middle and late 19th
century, has not since been modernized except in such un-Western
outposts and oases of modernity as Jackson, Vail, and Lake Tahoe. For
approximately a century after the American frontier was declared
officially closed, life in the Rocky Mountain states outside the great
metropolitan hubs persisted as essentially a frontier culture without
the rest of the country being aware of this until a couple of decades
ago, when the emergent environmentalist movement took notice of the
fact and decided the time had arrived to close out what remained of
the frontier for good and all. Since the early 70's, environmentalists
looking to return the rural West to unworked wilderness have joined
forces with transplanted urbanites seeking to gentrify it, while
environmentalism and urbanization, as impersonal forces, have created
conditions in which the old Western ruralism based on ranching,
agriculture, mining, and timbering may be destroyed. Contributing
mightily to the process of change is the current exodus, beginning
almost overnight, from the nation's greatest non-Western--in
particular Far Western--cities, caused by what can fairly be described
as the collapse of a once great civilization (our own). While the
refugees tend to flee, as if by instinct, to the hinterland, their
destination is usually the urban, not the rural, West, which at first
thought seems like a blessing. So long as the majority of these
Conestoga Californians, Texans, Washingtonians, and Connecticut
Yankees pen themselves in glittering ghettoes, why worry about them?
One answer is water, the West's scarcest resource. Another is that the
newcomers, urbanites all, regard the hundreds of thousands of square
miles surrounding these cities as their rightful playground and
preserve.
This is the real story behind current headlines
having to do with grazing and mining reforms, with the demand for more
wilderness closures, with the hoopla emanating from the Bureau of
Reclamation that promises an end to the era of dam-building and
similar grandiose projects and the start of a new age of "quality
water management," by which is meant cutting off the supply of water
to ranchers and irrigation farmers and diverting it instead to the
misplaced lawn-growers of Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Denver. From all
around the country, the baby-boomers are arriving on the Western scene
(if only for a few weeks' vacation each year), looking around, and
declaring: "We like it here!" For most of the 90s, the chief of all
baby boomers in his Big White Teepee in Washington, Dee Cee was set to
deliver it to them. After all, they have the votes. And the money.
Owing to its vastness and still relatively small
population, the Rocky Mountain West is preeminently the sole portion
of the United States (Alaska perhaps excluded) that remains American,
as opposed to Modern. It was in part to retain this quality of being
American that the South fought the Civil War--and lost. In defeat, it
suffered the accelerated imposition of 100 Percent Modernism, so that
by the 1950's it had become more than its own unrecognizable
descendant: a travesty rather, a caricature of the rationalist
utilitarian colossus that had conquered it. A similar fate may well
overtake the West unless present trends are substantially alleviated
or reversed. Two decades and a half ago, the rebel yells of the
Sagebrush protesters had the slightly cracked tone of secessionism,
but the Sagebrush Rebellion has come to nothing, for the time being at
least when the native sons of the West will be hard pressed to hang
onto the tenuous ground they now occupy. Meanwhile, Westerners
continue to survive in the only portion of the Lower Forty-Eight where
wilderness, official or not, is the absolute condition of human life
rather than a scenic backdrop to a pale facsimile of it; where the
weather, day in and day out, is a matter of life and death; where
man's relationship to animate nature is the true and primeval one of
kill or be killed; where men--and women--go routinely armed; and
where, consequently, the old American dream of freedom survives. For
these reasons, issues affecting the future of the West are and ought
to be of vital interest to all Americans, who may one day stand to
benefit from Western intransigence in what seems more and more to be
end times for the country as a whole.
It is ironic that the apostle of the New
Nationalism, Teddy Roosevelt, should have described the West,
admiringly, as a place where "you can still plug a man in the belly
and get away with it." But why not? Better a society where bad men go
free than one in which decent men and patriots go to jail. |
