California Barely on the Map in Book’s New West

Shall we deem this a snub, or a compliment?

Shall we respond with a wounded sniffle? A haughty snort of amusement?

Or shall we simply pretend that we’re way too busy buffing our bodies and meditating over crystals and lunching with our agents to even give this piffling matter a thought?

Maybe that last approach is the best. It’ll prove that we’re cool. Too cool to care that the glam and glossy Atlas of the New West--hailed by academics as a definitive study of a region in transition--left us out.

Yes, left us out.

According to this atlas, most of California does not belong in the West. At least, not the New West. For that matter, neither does Seattle. Or Portland. In fact, the whole Pacific Coast has been bumped right out the region.

The exclusion has sparked a spirited debate among thinkers in California. (The Not West? The Way West? The Postmodern West?)

One school of thought would say good riddance. We’re going global. Connecting with the Pacific Rim. Who needs to be identified with a bunch of bacon-frying cowhands anyway? We’re a breed apart, and should be damn proud of it too. As state librarian Kevin Starr puts it: “There were no shootouts at the Palo Alto Corral.”

Some folks, however, hold that we just might want to keep our mooring in the West.

If nothing else, it’s a good place to send our malcontents. A good source of water too. Plus, well, not to be a stickler about semantics, but if California’s not West, what is? “Just look at the map,” says UCLA geography professor Norris Hundley.

William Riebsame has looked at the map. And looked at it and looked at it again. He’s an associate geography professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and general editor of the atlas. In other words, he’s the one who drew the lines. He admitted into the New West the sliver of California east of the Sierra--a skinny stretch that includes Yosemite, Bishop and oddly, Palm Springs. The rest of the state got the boot.

All the barbs tossed his way for that bit of gerrymandering have hit their mark: Riebsame concedes that he may have been hasty in excluding California from the West. “I regret it now,” he says.

But what’s done is done--done and splashed over 192 color pages.

Not your typical dry compilation of road maps, the atlas features essays, photographs and dozens of whimsical graphics. This is not a book concerned with the shortest route between Sedona and Salt Lake City. Instead, the editors attempt to define the New West through maps that show, for example, how many fly fishing streams run through Utah, how many toxic waste sites litter New Mexico, the percentage of Colorado homes used as vacation spots rather than year-round residences.

In Riebsame’s view, the New West stretches between the great mountain ranges of the Rockies in the East and the Sierra and Cascades in the West. The Pacific Coast cannot be considered truly Western, he says, because it’s too high-tech, too diverse, too well-stocked with cappuccino bars.

And, above all, too big.

There are more students in the Los Angeles Unified School District than there are people in the entire state of Wyoming. There are more Forbes 500 companies based in San Francisco than in Montana, Idaho and Nevada combined.

“You can’t have a [distinct Western] region if it includes California,” says Ed Marston, publisher of the High Country News, which covers the New West from its Colorado base. “California overwhelms. It drowns us. All our identity is gone.”

Interior Is Ambivalent About ‘Great Empire’

To be fair, some Westerners do embrace California, in all its oversized glory.

Phil Burgess, president of a Denver think tank called the Center for the New West, says he no longer hears Westerners warning against the “Californication” of their precious range. Now, he says, folks realize that California is “a great empire . . . the king of the mountain.” And they understand that the West’s future depends on hooking into California’s high-tech industries and bustling Pacific Rim ports.

“More and more people have realized the leg bone of California is connected to the thigh bone of the Interior West,” Burgess says.

The atlas’ editors, however, defy that symbiosis, insisting that the Interior West does just fine on its own, thank you very much.

“We’re interested in seeing how far we can push the idea of regional identity,” Riebsame says. “We think of ourselves as not having much to do with the West Coast.”

That’s fine by Gov. Pete Wilson.

“They probably don’t intend it as a compliment, but I would have to agree that California is, in many respects, unique,” he says. The other parts of the West can boast “some wonderful places and some wonderful people,” Wilson says politely, but compared with California . . . “well, they’re just different.”

Not so fast, counters Michael Fleming.

He’s a cowboy poet and a Californian. And he’s sick of folks thinking the two don’t jibe. “When you say you’re from L.A., eyebrows arch a bit,” Fleming says. “They think Hollywood. They expect we’re into New Age stuff.” But he figures he can write lonely, loping verse with the best of ‘em.

OK, so he’s not a cowboy himself. (He works at a magic-show theater for a living.) And when his hometown of Santa Clarita holds a cowboy poetry festival, it takes place at an old movie studio with fake weathered buildings and a Hopalong Cassidy feel.

Still, Fleming considers himself a bona fide Westerner.

He can even ride a horse. “Or I can stay on anyway,” he says. California, he concludes, “is definitely part of the West.”

Indeed, California shares many of the characteristics that the atlas authors say make the Interior West so distinctive, from stunning national parks to bountiful agricultural land to complex water transport schemes. Like the rest of the West, California boasts jam-packed cities, Native American reservations, abundant natural resources--and plenty of toxic Superfund sites.

California can even tout a home-grown cowboy culture that traces back to the Spanish-speaking vaqueros of the 18th century. “The cowboy as we know it today wouldn’t exist without California, in terms of language and dress, even in the shape and style of the saddle,” said James Nottage, chief curator at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles.

New West Different From the Wild West

Though they acknowledge California’s historical influence, the atlas editors--who work out of the Center of the American West in Boulder--argue that their turf is developing its own modern-day identity, free from Golden State meddling.

The New West, they contend, is no longer the Wild West. There are still cattle drives, of course, and mining camps and even brothels. But their atlas charts new sensibilities taking root in the outback: gay newspapers in rodeo towns, a New Age retreat in remote Montana, an espresso shop in Moscow, Idaho, and a Patagonia outlet in Crowheart, Wyo.

The struggle to assimilate these yuppie accessories with the rugged myth of the range gives the New West a unique regional identity, according to the atlas editors. “The change is rapid . . . [and] the interior states are ill-equipped to make it turn out for the best,” Riebsame says. “This is a region at risk from its newfound riches.”

Skeptics sniff that there’s nothing unique about the steady--and disquieting--march of microbreweries and indoor rock climbing gyms. If that’s all the New West is, Starr says, “California was New West about 100 years before this [atlas] appeared.”

They’ve heard such complaints so many times that Riebsame and his chief atlas collaborator, historian Patricia Limerick, pronounce themselves ready to cave. Their next project is a “Handbook of the New West” that will explain regional quirks such as why cowboy hats smush your hair (they’re super tight to stay on in the wind) and how to visit Native American spiritual sites (only with the utmost respect).

This time around, Limerick promises, the maps will expand. This time, she says, “we will readmit California to the regional unit.”

But will we deign to come back?