Lost in Space

It keeps moving, but when I was a child growing up on the outskirts of Houston I believed that it was already all gone, that I had just missed it, the West, by only a single generation, or at the most two--as maybe every generation believes it has just missed the West. A¶ Perhaps not just heat-

washed clodhopper farm boys standing discontented hoe-side in gypsum-strangled Utah, or wildcatters dreaming fevered uranium dreams or visions of oil-laden anticlines like sugar-plums, but maybe residents of all centuries have stood on a mesa and wondered at a farther, deeper wildness--over the next range of mountains, if not also further back in time. And even then, might they have understood or intuited that their place in that time, believed to be enduring, would in fact prove to be far more prone to disintegration than the physical elements of mountains, forest, plains?

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men,” the protagonist, an aging sheriff along the Texas-Mexico border watching his county turn into a drug fiefdom, says, “These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you’d of told em it was their own grandchildren?”

We can feel it moving now, sliding away; and yet even in its diminishment it is still somehow fiercely present.

(A caveat: I am still, despite my knowing better, dreaming only the Anglo dream of the West. What are the dreams in Indian country, and of Latinos? What dreams do Tibetan and Thai emigres bring, and Russian orthodoxy, and first- and second-generation Chinese Americans?)

It’s a long way from San Diego to Denver, from Seattle to Albuquerque, and yet there remain some undeniable if intangible threads unifying Westerners. A hundred and forty years ago, Major John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who explored the Grand Canyon and much of the rest of the West, said the unifying thread was water, or the absence of it, and for sure that was, and largely is, one of the major physical threads. But there is something else too, some unseen thread of spirit.

Perhaps it’s best not to pick or pluck at that thread too closely--perhaps what we perceive as spirit in the West is really only something as heartless and lifeless as geology, with the rock outcroppings of the East being some several million years older, so that the half-life decay of sun-burnished ions in the West seems still to radiate a bracing and at times intoxicating freshness, able still to be felt and noticed if not yet measured by even a species as insensate and oblivious as our own. Perhaps science will one day ultimately be found to be at the heart of religion, or faith--as almost everything, it seems, is eventually discovered or named or measured or otherwise colonized--but for now, no such explanation or discovery exists, only the inexplicable awareness that there is a difference between the West and rest of the country, and that it is no less profound for its ungraspable immeasurability.

So powerful can be this bond between Westerners and landscape that it’s possible to believe that the West might have existed in our brainpans long before the first paleface ever dreamed of conquest, possession, and of that shadowed and seemingly illogical and inconsistent paradox, freedom. As human culture in the Deep South and East is stacked in vertical layers of time, like geological strata, perhaps the building blocks of the West, particularly today’s West, the New West, are composed of chunks of physical space--basin and range, sunlight, boulder, forest, river, desert--possessing more of a horizontal breadth.

To say it was always in motion would be conjecture. What can be said confidently is that it is moving now--moving with such alacrity, like an animal getting up from a daybed and traveling for a while, that almost anyone can see it, and that even in those places where we cannot see it, we can sense its movement, its possible going-away or leave-taking, and we are made uneasy by it, even as we are still, at this late date, yet unable to name or measure that going-awayness, that freshness and wildness, that Westernness.

Certainly in 1960s Texas it was going away like a horrific backwash. Each Sunday on our way to church my family would pass the informally named Wolf Corner, where I would lean forward in my seat to see the corner fencepost where ranchers had hung that week’s bounty, the little coyotes and the larger red wolves, by their heels, for all the honest world to see. It was out by Highway 6, which was once gently waving grassland--it’s blanketed now with dazzling superstores, an eight-lane highway, the vertical glittering skyscrapers reflecting the hot Houston sun in myriad directions, like the light envisioned perhaps by the prophets who beheld in their own exalted dreams the streets of heaven (assuming they were not holding the wrong end of the spyglass and witnessing instead the oppositional alternative territory described by those same prophecies). But back then it was only sweet balming tall-grass prairie, yielding weekly its grisly bounty--the little wolves’ legs fractured and bloodstained from where they had gnawed for hours or even days at the traps’ grip, some of the wolves and coyotes stiffened and sun-dried, hanging like loose shingles after a storm, and others, newly killed, still limp and soft, like sheaves of tobacco hanging in some deathly curing house.

Always, there was something there, placed partly as warning and partly as triumphant victory-show, a marker of how the war against--what? obsolescence, frailty, insignificance, loss?--was faring. Some weeks there were more carcasses than others, and over the years the offerings gradually declined, though almost always there would be at least one, as if the ranchers were trawling the grassy sea, and as if their nets would always find something, some wildness deep within that green grass. As if that country to the west--just beyond the barbed-wire corner fencepost--would slow, but never entirely cease, in giving the wolves up.

This was the dailiness and drama of my childhood, situated peculiarly between the Deep South and the far West, in oil-hungry, oil-rich, brash and arrogant and violence-born Anglo Texas. The vertical strata of time mattered, but the story, the myth, of the westering frontier was also present, just over the horizon. There was not just the echo of it, there was still, barely, the real and physical essence of it; we saw it, every Sunday. In those first few years of the 1960s, while the rest of the country--the Southeast, the Northeast and Los Angeles in particular--stewed and broiled over civil rights issues, we were attending the premieres of movies like “How the West Was Won” and “The Alamo,” in which--not to sound too much like a bleeding-heart liberal--vast territory existed for the taking and, quite naturally, force was the way to take it, particularly since it was inhabited by Mexicans or Indians. Let Mississippi stew over drinking fountains, and Boston and New York argue over segregated schools and busing; in Texas, we were busy looking longingly to the past, and to the West.

Hard country, sometimes. Or once it was, before we set about breaking it, then crushing it. It’s an accepted law of biology that in a harsh or austere physical environment, species will often develop elaborate and highly specialized adaptations that allow them to inhabit the various demanding niches in that environment, and thus it is that in a stonier, more arid landscape, one shaped alternately by glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes and forest fires, a magnificent and amazing array of creatures evolved to fit that continuous scroll of disturbance, to fit that Big Story of the West. Nimble-footed snow-white goats cling with utter improbability to the sides of steep mountains, and 800-pound grizzly bears eat butterflies, ladybugs and lilies, and sleep underground for five months of the year. Golden eagles glide with seven-foot wingspans, and all-seeing condors soar with spans of nine feet.

And upon a landscape dominated by such dramatic disturbance events, which result in the release of stored vegetative energy in wild all-or-nothing amplitudes, magnificent stories of the ultimate prosperity, that of long-term survival, are also created. The myth, the holy grail, of life is sustainability, a word so oft-used and malleable as to lose all currency, and yet a word that lingers nonetheless, like a fever or a hope lodged always within us, though buried and forgotten, replaced instead with another word, tomorrow.

How much of the West, then--as defined by those things that are found only here--can we retain, and how should we go about it? Too often, still, such discussions have not yet seriously begun. Instead, we mostly just squabble. We scrap over the last crumbs of resources like little boys tussling in a schoolyard, perpetuating the cycle of belligerence and anger and arrogance that is white Westerners’ birthright. It’s the story of how we got here. Other than the true natives, or, as they’re called in Canada, the First Nations people, we all came here from somewhere else: from Spain, looking for gold, or from New England, looking for furs or gold or for more open space, or from anywhere, looking for anything, and as often as not finding it--managing, somehow, to find whatever we had come searching for, finding our heart’s desire. Nor were the answers to those desires limited to material things. Sojourners arriving in the West came searching for a new start and freedom--religious and otherwise--or, most nebulous of all, adventure and happiness. Sometimes they came hoping for a better relationship with others; in many instances, they were fleeing unsatisfactory ones, so that part of the West’s early destiny was that of emotional refuge, as well as reservoir of hope and opportunity, and physical bounty house.

With the white West’s birthright then being established, the course of future expectations was set, with the bell curve of sustainability barely yet beginning its ascent: so much to see, so much to take, so much to receive. Everywhere the eye fell, there was bounty for the taking--sometimes by force, with superior technology, though other times uncontested--and beyond those places where the eye fell, there was imagination.

It was, above all else, a deeply physical place. The heightened delight of the five senses engaged and nurtured a sixth sense, and rather than call it extrasensory perception or imagination, call it perhaps simply spirit; and it was a spirit at times as robust and dramatic and at other times as subdued or suspended as the amplitudes of the land itself. As if in a new garden of Eden--or the first garden of Eden, as if that long-ago story had not been history but prophecy, and now, finally, we had arrived--we spilled out onto a landscape the geology of which was still so new that it was as if some gardener had just turned over the earth and stones with a spade and then stepped away for a moment, the new-turned earth still so freshly made or dug that it had not yet begun to gray with aridity or oxidation, and was even still exuding that loamy scent of clarity, pungency, sharpness.

It took me a few tries to land in the West, or the farther, further West--the land lying beyond Fort Worth, where I was born, and the oilfield prairie of Odessa, where I lived in infancy, and the surreal sprawling petrochemical-clotted superstructure of Houston. I studied wildlife science in northern Utah, at Utah State University, then changed my major to geology (after an illuminating internship with the timber giant Weyerhaeuser during which I realized how desk-bound and paper-ridden my boss, a wildlife biologist, was). I got a job in the Southeast--drawn back there as if by some hard-to-escape tide--but then managed to scrabble my way back west, where I fell in love at first sight with the soft muscled humps of the blue-green hills here, the Appalachian-like folds on the U.S.-Canadian border, in the southern terminus of the Purcell Mountains, one of the largest mountain ranges in Canada and the only place where that range comes down into the United States.

The name of the blue-green valley, the garden, into which I fell was the Yaak, a Kootenai word for arrow, named for the way the rushing river in that valley’s center charges down out of the mountains to enter the bowed arc of the much larger Kootenai River. The valley lies in a unique and magical seam between the maritime weather influences of the Pacific Northwest--old forests, drippy dark dank mossy fungal rot emerald earth-soak--and those of the Rocky Mountains, with their blazing hot rocky glaciated uplifted spines rising from a land sculpted (and so recently) not just by rot, but by fire and ice. The Yaak, nestled in this cleft between two lands, was, and is, its own place, with its own essence, character, spirit.

I had been in wild country before, not just in the West, but around the world, and yet the Yaak’s wildness felt unique to me, substantial, and almost tangible--so much so as to be nearly visible, like the luminous silver-blue rivers of fog that filled the canyons following a cold night rain on sun-warmed earth; so much fog and mist-tatter shrouding the smoothed animal shapes of those mountains, and then revealing them, that always things seemed to be on the move here. And I began, slowly, to think about such things--to imagine what might be the causes for such things--as the root of spirit, as if it were, after all, the unique revelation created by a certain confluence of physical possibilities, as if there might for each landscape, and each moment upon that landscape, be a wavering, pulsing spirit, exuded like breath. Nor would such a confluence be limited to the physicality of the five senses. Instead, it would incorporate the unseen or intangibles--imagination, and history--in such a way as to always be slightly changing, like fog roiling up a series of ravines, and yet always recognizable as belonging to that one place.

There was, and is, a density of spirit in my valley, which I began to envision as being composed, like the strands in a braided rope, of any number of much smaller strands--the relationship between pileated woodpeckers and the centuries-old larch trees in which they hammer out their cavities, the unique microrhizae in the soil beneath those giant larches, microrhizae acting as catalysts in some yet unknown grand soil-building recipe that helps nurture and sustain the old forests, with the woodpeckers’ furious chipping-away somehow contributing to that tiny-yet-huge, or tiny-yet-miraculous, recipe . . . .

Everywhere I looked, inhaled, listened, touched, there were thousands of such tiny connections, which in turn were connected to one another in an at times phantasmagoric array of radial cross-braidings, more mind-boggling (and dynamic) than any similar but finite array of coaxial or fiber-optic construct. Because of this valley’s unique position in the world, curiously caught between at least three different other worlds, there were more species and more relationships than anywhere else in Montana, and, unlike any other valley, any other place, in the continental United States, nothing was known to have quite yet gone extinct here--or not since the last Ice Age. Many of the valley’s species were now down to single- or double-digit populations: perhaps a dozen grizzly bears, five or six wolves, a dozen mated pair of bull trout, a handful of lynx and wolverine, an unknown number of Coeur d’Alene salamanders, and even a lone occasional woodland caribou, down from Canada--just barely two of everything, as if upon some reverse kind of Noah’s Ark--but even in their diminished representation they were still fully present, still in the here and now, rather than dwelling in some dusty corner of dim memory history-book fade-away.

Here in the Yaak, I was free--one of only about 150 residents in a valley that, counting all the land lying between the Kootenai River and Canada, totals roughly a million acres--to wander the forests and think about such things. It was different from Houston, where such connections had not been visible, and where such pulses had not been felt. Houston had once been the West, but then the West had moved on, drifting, almost as if restless, or searching, seeking its own fit, across the landscape west of the Mississippi. Not separate from that landscape--indeed, formed by it, and being re-formed, slightly, each day, each century--but still, always, in motion.

It would be the grossest of stereotypes to suggest that, given two ways of thinking--as an Eastern industrialist, or as a Western agrarian--two or more different cultural and, ultimately, even religious types might develop, even within the same unified country; to suggest that a yeoman farmer or rancher, arising well before daylight and toiling sweat-browed throughout the long day before crashing into mindless slumber shortly after dark, whenever the season’s darkness found him or her, might somehow possess or develop a work ethic more fulsome than that of the lathe operator or conveyor belt technician who watches upright steel cans or glass bottles trundle past in unending phalanx. It would be folly to say that an American Easterner--for purposes of easy contrast--might be more acculturated to producing a soulless product or creation, while some American Westerners might be more acculturated to producing a product (I use the word ironically) that, if not possessing a soul, is more likely to carry the spirit of a living thing, in the organic tradition. In any developed culture of mankind, there have probably always been genes, differences, for city rats and country mice, regardless of whatever physical barrier--a river, a ridge--separated them north and south or east and west. And any of us can imagine or might even have known any number of investment bankers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and so forth, whose relentless work habits would make the feeding frenzy of sharks seem tame and moderate, while it is just as easy to imagine the gentle noonday slumber of the pastoralist, crookstaff laid across his or her knee as the fatted flock grazes across the endless summer-green pasture beyond, converting the sun’s benevolence into free cash, the bounty not of human cunning or ingenuity, nor backbreaking labor, but extracted merely and directly--a gift--from the land . . . .

These easy distinctions or false or at least highly permeable borders cannot hold or explain any difference between the West and the rest of this country--all types have always inhabited all regions--and yet the mind, almost as if under force of myth, is pulled toward an exploration of these themes. And so might there be some faint element of truth in them, or the echo of a once-upon-a-time truth? Both types, industrialist or rancher, automotive assembly worker or logger, would surely have to rely upon or at least have a relationship with mercy, though it’s possible that the laborer or captain of industry might believe that he or she could have a slight edge over fate’s twists and fortunes via the relatively more predictable behavior of machines versus the vagaries of weather--and from that difference, might a general kind of Westernness develop?

In some ways such a notion is not dissimilar from the idea that “prairie populism” developed first in the agrarian Midwest, and then edged westward, as a direct response to the repeated ass-kickings wrought by angry weather upon the physical lives that sought to cling to a physical land, as did the usual sects, cults and fundamentalist religiosities that traditionally develop in any culture during hard times--war, famine, pestilence, social and/or economic upheavals--the human comfort found in a hasty retreat to the perceived security of rigid and predictable rules, borders, mores, with (or so goes the philosophy) a commensurate and predictable covenant established between adherence and outcome.

Even for those who did not engage directly in the hands-on extracting of raw materials from the seemingly endless landscape, those extractive occupations were once powerful in the Old West, culturally as well as economically, and would have exerted due influence upon the developing culture of the white Westerners. Again, looking at Texas as one of the early portals into the West--what historian William Goetzmann has termed not just the real and physical West, nor solely the cultural West, but also “the West of the Imagination”--one can find fairly easy clues to what the Old West was, if not yet a full fix on what the New West might be. Legendary Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach has noted that the republic of Texas had more running wars along its borders, and for a longer period of time, than most other nations in history. In Texas--amid that blood-gotten and blood-held territory or ownership--land, rather than knowledge, was seen as the source of all wealth.

The Old West has been dying more quickly in some places than in others, and for a long time people have been guessing about what will replace it. To say that, like democracy itself, it is a grand experiment in progress is a bit of a cliche, and yet it does speak of a hopefulness that the experiment will continue. The subject of the experiment might be said to be the land, its spirit, our own spirits, and--perhaps closer to the bone here, and to the naming of Westernness--the intersection of not just ourselves with that land, but of our spirits with the land’s, so that a made and organic, shifting thing--a third thing or spirit--is formed from that confluence and held in somewhat steady if dynamic equilbrium, like a trout holding its position in the oscillating currents of a quickening stream. If this is the case for Westernness, then as long as the land remains relatively unchanged, such confluence should always yield a product somehow identifiable as Westernness.

What do Seattle residents have in common, then, with those of Denver, of San Francisco, of Salt Lake City, of Libby, Montana? Those five cities, to name any, each possess a specific flavor and identity--indeed, anyone familiar with them would know where he or she was in an instant, upon returning to them--and yet despite their differences, they all feel Western. Despite the landscape’s great diversity--old-growth cedar cathedrals, dazzling playas, grassland, rolling hills, Joshua tree deserts, serrated mountains and glaciers--there is, always, among its residents, an attachment to the land. More often these days it is a visual rather than physical attachment, such as the shining blue bay and eucalyptus shimmer rising from the hills around San Francisco, though these visual attachments still engage the other senses as well: the salt-and-fish-and-fog odor, the bay breezes against the skin, the sparrows in the wild rosemary hedges along the sidewalks . . . .

The list of sensory attachments could go on and on: Las Vegas defined by its magnificent and overpowering, almost hallucinogenic aridity, Billings with its red rock bluff circumscribing the basin of the town below, Santa Fe with its strange sweet light and pinyon essence. The malls are devouring Phoenix-Tempe and even the saguaro stronghold of Tucson--perhaps they will one day soon fall from Western grace, the edges fraying and deteriorating into nothing but mall-land, as Houston fell long ago, and Los Angeles still longer ago--but surely, still, will not the center always hold?

Many of the West’s communities these days are engaged in a land rush to protect, rather than despoil, the open spaces and natural resources that help give the West its identity, and its economic as well as ecological value. A popular report by the nonprofit Sonoran Institute, “Prosperity in the 21st Century West: The Role of Protected Public Lands,” cites researchers J.M. Shumway and S.M. Otterstrom, who “found that the greatest number of new migrants to the West are in what they call ‘New West’ counties, characterized by their recreational nature, scenic amenities, proximity to national parks or other federal lands, and a preponderance of service-based economies. They concluded that in the New West, the importance of mineral, cattle, and lumber production is dwarfed by an economy that is now based on ‘a new paradigm of the amenity region, which creates increased demands for amenity space, residential and recreational property, second homes, and environmental protection.’ ”

If open space remains the breath of the West, then the roadless backcountry, the wilderness, remains the burning spirit within that breath. Never mind that in all of the West--certainly in all of the Lower 48--there remain only a few places where you can find yourself more than 12 miles from a road, most probably in the contiguous complexes of wilderness acreage in Idaho, California, Montana. A good Brownie or Cub Scout can hike our wildest country in but a day or two. And of the great continental tableau of wildness that was once all of our birthright, and particularly Westerners’, only 2% of the land west of the Mississippi is protected wilderness. Two percent! As Will Rogers said of land, “They ain’t makin’ any more of it.” Or as the great Western historian and novelist Wallace Stegner wrote so famously in his 1960 “Wilderness Letter”:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.”

Economists as well as environmentalists have taken to calling these last roadless lands the “Capital of the New West”--not in the sense of financial capital, but rather the seat of political power. How ironic that the thing of which we once possessed the most, the big blank spots on the map, open space and wilderness, sometimes overlaid with a brief furze of timber, or a thin hammered patina of precious metals, or dollops of oil here and there, or flecks of coal studding it in one place or another, or with the bright rushing shafts of clear cold trout-water charging straight down from out of the mountains like an arrow--the excess, the bounty, that we bartered or all but gave away to the industrial East, usually receiving in those barters but a handful of trinkets or coins--might yet still be present in sufficient quantity and distribution to allow us to retain or even regain an identity that very nearly was lost entirely.

Recognizing the ecological value of these last roadless areas on the public lands--some 58.5 million acres in 39 states, though with most of the acreage in the West--the Clinton administration, under the direction of then-U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, spent years receiving input and holding public meetings before crafting a rule that would protect them from logging and roadbuilding, though in his first week of office, the new chief executive, George W. Bush, suspended the rule, claiming, among other things, that the 2 million comments received and the 600-plus public meetings held were insufficient public involvement, and then, without even a single public meeting, decided to turn the decision-making recommendations for these federal lands over to the states, and not just to states, but to one person in each state, the governor--with the White House still being able to veto those recommendations if it disagreed. As if 100 or more years had never passed, and no lessons had ever been learned; as if the West still existed as but a fiefdom for the corporate and godlike dictum of the East. The Bush administration figuring, perhaps, that given the Republican skew of governors during that four-year cycle of such things (such men and women but a blink in the geological span that involved the creation of these pristine lands, and their forests and prairies, their red deserts and mesas), the good governors would readily hand over those public lands to the corporate liquidators.

Funny things began to happen, however. Republican governors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger came out in full support of the old Clinton-era model--protect all of the public’s roadless lands, the last of the last--while pro-Bush states such as Montana replaced Republican governors with Democrats. State leaders in California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Maine and Montana legally challenged the administration’s new rule, which remains in limbo, bouncing among various dueling courts, appellants and litigants. Meanwhile, in Nevada, Sen. Harry Reid championed a new paradigm linking wilderness designation with economic and community development, and other states--Idaho, Washington, Montana--quickly began adapting and revising their own wilderness dreams, some of which had been overlooked and waiting ever since the Wilderness Act was first passed, back in 1964. Even conservative California Rep. Richard Pombo, long the bane of the environmental movement for his polarizing attacks on the Endangered Species Act and for his resistance, as chair of the House Committee on Resources, to any wilderness designation, announced that he was willing to begin entertaining such proposals as long as they also contained provisions for economic development.

Is all this a heralding, the first flickers of the possible return of the hard-times flames of prairie populism, or is it just a deeper yearning for the increased security brought by old-school bipartisanship? Whatever it is, it seems to be something, not nothing--statistically significant, these beginnings of change--and there are many complicating factors braiding into it, among them the shift away from resource-extraction industries, the increased demographics of Latino voters, the increase of water issues in regions of critical aridity, the rampant loss of open space in a region that was once almost nothing but open space, and the heavy-handed return, in troubled times, of God to politics, forcing the faithful to decide, among other things, which is God’s way: to destroy wild nature, or to preserve it as vestigial examples of the sophistry of creation.

Perhaps all countries have their West--their wellspring or at least reservoir of mythic story, their looking-glass through which they see, decade after decade and across the centuries, only the images they wish to see, and few others. And bittersweetly, perhaps all countries then have, sooner or later, their New Wests, in which those beloved images do not so much alter as simply fade, giving rise to a No West.

Certainly, there are days when this is my fear. None of the three obvious choices--Old West, New West or No West--is particularly palatable to me, and so like a hermit I hunker down in a remote valley wired to the World Wide Web, go on hikes in the mountains with their vanishing grizzlies, go to softball games and picnics down in a nearby town, and attend meetings with local environmentalists or community service organizations that labor and conspire to develop collaborative proposals that might protect the grizzlies’ last refuges while providing meaningful employment for that last percentage of the workforce that still wants to work in the woods. And on good days, in such an unpeopled country, it does not seem like an impossible task.

The larger, metamorphosing, dissolving West is out there, of course, brighter and hotter than ever, beyond my solitary walks through little meadows of wild orchids and beyond the ice cream socials. Alcohol and substance abuse is flooding over the West in breathtaking fashion; in some areas of Montana, more than a third of 8th graders have engaged in binge drinking, and the backwoods proliferate with nickel-and-dime crystal meth labs. One can see the commercialization of the tobacco-chewing, Marlboro-smoking, beer-drinking culture of losers and antiheroes almost anywhere, can hear it in too many of today’s country music songs. Immigrants, too, by the millions--some legal, some not--exert a changing force upon the culture and the land. Sometimes it’s easy and other times it’s hard to find a right and a wrong in these changes, and it is no small irony that doubtless this is how it must have seemed to the native people who were displaced by the current culture, by Europe’s shouted echo, even as Latin America and Asia now answer with storylines and dreams and movements of their own, across the centuries.

How will the landscape receive them? The Next West will certainly and finally be a dewatered West, as Major Powell foresaw. In a country that uses 408 billion gallons per day, the needs or rather desires of industry and humanity are not likely to be sacrificed to meet the needs of forest and wildlife that are interconnected with that water and that humanity. A world different from the one we inhabit now will emerge, along with consequences we have not even considered, but which will, upon their manifestation, their textbook revelation of cause and effect, seem so obvious to us that we will slap our foreheads in dismay at having overlooked their imminent and inevitable forthcoming.

Back during the last days of the fragmentation and cultural eradication, or attempted eradication, of the indigenous people who had lived here for millennia, developing their own fit with the West--was such immense change really only a mere 125 years ago?--the predictable breakdown in ancient and previously intact cultures wreaked havoc upon the native tribes. Smallpox, dislocation, starvation brought about by the extermination of buffalo: As their physical world was destroyed, so too was much of their inner world. Native religions merged, splintered, fell apart; tribes began mixing and matching, borrowing religious and ceremonial and cultural practices from one another as if in a desperate attempt to rebraid, with spirit, into a defensible, identifiable, collected whole, amid such ceaseless and relentless oppression and loss.

Very near the end of the traditional culture of the Plains Indian, a phenomenon known as the Ghost Dance arose in which it was prophesied that the sacred lands would be returned to the people who had for millennia inhabited them, and that the buffalo and other vanished residents would reinhabit the Plains, and whether through a turning back of time or a full revolution forward to that time again, no matter: The vanquished Indian tribes, or that tiny fraction of them, found such solace in the vision, the prophecy, that the U.S. government forbade the dance, censoring even their hopes and dreams and beliefs.

In “No Country for Old Men,” McCarthy writes of that same aging rural sheriff who has been fighting the ever-escalating drug wars along the Texas-Mexico border, and who has witnessed what he perceives to be the final and absolute disintegration of the culture he once knew and had for so long labored to defend: “He walked down the steps and out the back door and got in his truck and sat there. He couldnt name the feeling. It was sadness but it was something else besides. And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death. You need to get over that, he said. Then he started the truck.”

There exists, surely, no one measure or definition to describe the West: not its past nor its present, and certainly not its future. This late-summer morning, in the day’s first light, I am in the suburbs of a small Western town where the leaves of an apple tree are glowing, illuminated by the rising sun--an image of great and green beauty that could occur almost anywhere--and yet I know, as if by gravity alone, or by some secret and ceaseless whisper, that I am in the West. Perhaps a million other mingled odors, silent histories and the unnamed or unknown constellations of the night before, with their faint tidal tuggings still imprinted upon my subconscious, conspire to inform me of this fact; there is no measure, there is only the place and the time, and it is now, is still now, but it is also changing, has almost always been changing. The last wolves have long been killed off from the prairies outside Houston (and the prairies dewatered, poisoned, then paved over), and yet in other places wolves are coming back, reappearing, as if following diligently the arc of prophecy.

Why should it surprise us so that such a thing can be true, that one can know one is in the West upon first awakening in the morning, even before one opens one’s eyes? That one can know and sense and hear and taste and feel and see Westernness intimately, without being able to measure it? The world is full of inscrutable things--still, and thank goodness--and how much more bereft and fragile we would be than we already are were we not able to discern always and at heart’s depth, without a moment’s forethought or other knowledge, something as basic as the four cardinal points on the compass: in the West.

To not possess such knowledge, one day: I can think of no other better definition for the word “lost.” Which we are not, yet.