Going West

Excerpt from Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis by Bethany M. Maile by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

The commands were familiar: Tray tables, emergency exits, oxygen masks; save yourself first. I didn’t pay attention. It was 5:30 a.m., and I had a long day ahead: Boston to Chicago, Chicago to Salt Lake, a four- hour layover, and then, finally, Salt Lake to Boise, Idaho. It would be dark. The Treasure Valley would be a constellation of city lights, all of Ada County the Little Dipper. Outside the window Boston was a crosshatching of harbor lights, streetlights, headlights, flashing billboards, a skyscraper lit to read go Sox. The Big Dipper, Hydra, the Milky Way.

I pulled out a copy of Ginsberg’s collected works. He’s the shit, a boy in my literature class had told me. Keep it. “Howl” was the only thing I recognized.

In dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway

Across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

A western cottage. My parents’ home: their wrap-around porch and horse pasture; the alfalfa fields that fringed Eagle, Idaho; the broad face of the Boise Mountains; the blue basins of the Owyhees. A dream. I envisioned that wide prairie sky, nothing like the slivers between Back Bay skyscrapers. I pictured my mare bucking at low thunder. I saw Clint Eastwood pull a six-gun; I heard Loretta Lynn’s trembled, jingling voice. I smelled spring thaw and wet hay. I barreled toward the Wild West—an illusion, a myth—on a journey with no destination.

Eagle, Idaho, is a farm town–turned–glitzy suburb six miles northwest of the capital city. It is home to the “World’s Largest Rocky Mountain Oyster [testicle] Feed,” a scatter of farm fields, three bakeries (one irksomely described as a “cupcakery”), two golf courses, a Hilton, and one spa where tiny, forceful women massage rose petals into guests’ backs. It is home to a few ranchers and farmers and twenty thousand suburbanites.

Like so many eighteen-year-olds from barely known corners of the country, I was eager to swap gravel roads for subway tracts, hayfield keggers for neon-lit bars. I enrolled at Emerson College in Boston. Air damp and salty, museums you could get lost in, an arts college full of young people who developed Kodak film and pinned French New Wave posters to their walls—all things Idaho lacked. I went east expecting prep school kids and crew on the Charles River. School Ties and Good Will Hunting. With those movie-induced expectations, I didn’t last a year.

Mary Clearman Blew said, “Stories are a way of explaining the inexplicable, of giving shape to that which has no shape, meaning to that which eludes meaning.” Narrative fills voids. Think of creation stories (how the earth formed off a turtle’s back, how woman grew from a rib); they tell us where we are, how we got here, who we’ve become.

In Idaho’s history there is an apt example of this kind of meaning making. When the first white travelers explored the American West, they were overwhelmed by the vastness, by the perceived emptiness, by all that, as Blew said, eluded meaning. In an attempt to fill this imagined vacancy, they told stories. Fictions that turned to mythologies that haunt this place and its people still.

So people tell stories, in general, as a means of explaining and understanding, but they tell stories about place, in particular, because the relationship between place and person is essential. The sociological theory of place identity says we are all by-products of place, the region that grew us a kind of lineage or heritage or a strand of DNA we carry within us. Place is a means of self-realization, self-actualization.

The apartment in Boston sat belowground, and the only good light was in the kitchen. I’d sit on the floor, back against the oven, and flip through the New York Times. One morning nothing of note, until this: a picture of a home the color of cattails camped low in a meadow. The Rocky Mountains, jagged and endless, jutted up from a field of sage and cheatgrass. Hills yellowed in the warm light of a waning sun. Split rail fencing—like oversized strings of barbed wire—circled the yard. A meadow electric-yellow with wild mustard seeds. It was Idaho at its most idyllic, a real stunner.

It wasn’t just that this picture was familiar—a snippet of home three thousand miles away; it was that it was a picture of Idaho at its most enchanting. The house was dwarfed in the saddle of the valley. There wasn’t a single person in sight, and any evidence of civilization (telephone poles, paved roads) had been carefully cropped out. Just mountains, thirteen acres of fenced meadow, and that single home, mine if I wanted it, the picture suggested. In the ad one of the most familiar incarnations of the American dream beat on—go west, claim land, watch the deer wander and the hawks dive. It was the familiar story of possibility, escape, solitude. And I tore it out and stuck it to my fridge.

Thirty years before I boarded that plane home, a swell of young people migrated west. In the 1970s Back-to-the-Landers wanted hand-shucked corn and fresh butter. They bolted from the city and took to the hills. All the hippies were doing it.

In Denver, Colorado, my parents met and six weeks later married. My father, who had grown up in the rolling mountains of Upstate New York, came to Colorado for law school and fly-fishing and the jutting red teeth of Pikes Peak. In my parents’ hutch is a photo of him then: he wears tiny jean cutoffs, a long beard, and wild, waving hair. His head thrown back, he is, I can tell, laughing his full rolling laugh.

My mother said he married her not because she wore red halter tops and snug jeans or because her hair fell in a thick honey mane, but because she made him laugh. That commitment to a good time defined his fatherhood. He was the dad who gave our friends nicknames. Who snuck candy into midnight movies. Who rafted rivers and hiked mountains and rode horses. Who never hesitated when balancing us bareback or guiding us through flashing rapids. He wanted his children sure and steady in the potentially perilous. And when the horse bucked or the raft flipped, when we were stunned or scared, he held our elbow and said tenderly but with clear direction, “Come on now.” Adventure, resilience—my father so naturally embodies that western spirit.

In him my mother saw a sort of escape. The only child of a bitter married couple, she had endured a lonely upbringing in the damp gray of Duluth, Minnesota. She lived in a quiet home with plastic liners on the furniture where everything smelled of bleach and wood polish and her mother’s Camel cigarettes. With an IQ that launched above the Mensa line, she taught herself to read at age three, and her razor wit sped through conversations. Other kids, I suspect, did not understand her. So she turned to books and the woods for comfort. By the time she finished graduate school, when a cousin invited her to Denver, she busted right out.

Eighteen days after my mother landed in Colorado, she met my father. They lived in the same apartment building and met at a St. Patrick’s Day party where they clinked green beers and danced to Willie Nelson. A week later, when my father’s apartment flooded, he banged on her door. A German shorthair puppy curled in his arm and a thirty-pound bag of dog food balanced on his shoulder.

“I can’t have the dog,” he said. “Hide him?”

She took the puppy, and he dumped the food in her closet and called the super.

His television, the most expensive thing he owned, was ruined. In the evenings he watched Mary Hartman at her place, and to pay his debt, he cooked her liver and onions or lamb chops with mint jelly. She hadn’t landed a job, and she didn’t know many people. Twice her friends had flown out to try to lure her back home. But my father looked like Ryan O’Neal. He could break a wild horse and shoot a target dead-on. He was someone who saved the dog’s food but left the tv.

They hardly knew each other, but they knew they each imagined a yellow house with a wraparound porch and a full maple out front; a pasture of mares, coats slick after a hard ride; a red barn; a farmhouse on a mini-farm. And this was, essentially, the home they would make. My father would build that house. My mother would plant that maple. They would buy horses and set them to graze that field. Their three kids would jump from the barn’s loft and swim in the irrigation ditches. They dreamed a future, and then they built it.

They wandered New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming. They camped in Yellowstone—its horizon blotted with buffalo herds, its geysers sulfuring the air—and crossed into Idaho. The Wyoming border is a serious knockout—Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons. But heading west, deeper into Idaho, the scene dries up. The Snake River plain spreads in buttes and clay-colored canyons and tumbleweed and sage. If a traveler keeps plugging west, she will eventually hit Boise.

On the north lip of the valley, in a city patriotically named Eagle, my parents’ Beetle broke down on a piece of for- sale property, ten acres at the base of the Boise range. Destiny, they’ve always said.

The West found me in the East. Across from the Coolidge Corner T-stop, thirty minutes from Boston Common, sits Brookline Booksmith, an independent bookshop with deep armchairs and a basement mazed in paperbacks. This is how Mary Clearman Blew came to me. I was not hunting for relics of home. But there on the shelf, the spine of Bone Deep in Landscape. On the cover a herd of horses stood at attention beneath that familiar, wide sky. I turned the book and read about a fifth- generation Montana rancher who rounded up cattle and hauled water and, I imagined, never didn’t have calluses.

Brookline is the place I had expected to love. As a girl, I imagined myself grown and living in a place just like Coolidge Corner—an art deco theater showing independent films; a record shop where cashiers with wrist tattoos knew just the album you were looking for; a park where stay-at-home fathers pushed children on swings. It was the backdrop to my childhood anticipation. But I rode the train out of Boston, back to the hydrangea-lined stoops of Brookline, and stopped at the bookstore. I paid the cashier and slid Blew’s book, with its dappled plains and expectant mares, into my bag.

I remember two things about my last day in Boston. The Common, between the Park Street T-stop and Emerson’s campus,  was crowded with strollers and joggers and men in suits and younger men with open guitar cases and women with briefcases and twenty-somethings with iPods thumping in their ears, the  air sweet with brewed coffee and wet wool, the ground slick with wet leaves. The city pulsed. The sky was bright, the same clear blue as a cold, high desert morning, but there was just one thin angle of it. I remember that slice of sky and buying my plane ticket home.

The months I spent “regrouping” (as my mother gently put it) were lacquered in late-teen angst.  Think Garden State or The Graduate—the young adult returned home, dazed, stuck. I slept in my old bunk bed and got a part-time job at the Gap. Over the lunch break I ate corn dogs in the food court. After a shift, a couple of dollar movies. Chilling at the mall and movieplex, like I was sixteen again. Depressing as hell.

But this is a story about myths, about meaning making, about using narrative to understand place and by association ourselves. In 1859 the government sent Albert Bierstadt west to capture, as he called it, “that wild region.” He sent back paintings of ultra-dramatic landscapes: light tints mountains in gold, storm clouds pregnant with rain shade meadows and turn the whole scene fecund. Dramatic to the max, Romantic in the deepest sense.

Romance becomes another word for fiction, illusion, myth. But the word feels even more loaded. Romance is mythic in that it has “no foundation in fact,” but it’s also the “belief in something fabulous” (so says the Oxford English Dictionary). So romance combines the extraordinary with factlessness. It puts faith in the best version of a story, and this combination (how alluring this impossible dream) is what keeps people suckered.

To say I bailed on college and ran lickety-split home because I felt Romantic might be an overstatement. A lot of things were at play: a boyfriend I’d left behind, the cost of a liberal arts education, and, maybe loudest of all, that dream of steaming meadows, frost smoking beneath a just-risen sun. But I knew better, had spent my whole life in the prairies and cul-de-sacs outside Boise, Idaho. There were more malls than mercantiles, more minivans than pickup trucks. This story was more fiction than fact. But knowing all that, I dreamed just the same.

This weakness to romance is essential to the western identity. Three years after Bierstadt’s trek, the Homestead Act famously promised 160 acres to any white man who could “improve the land,” which usually meant figuring out a way to water their lot. The government hadn’t advertised that most of the West was tough-to-farm desert, and to make matters worse, the land was nearly lumberless, so farmers had no way to fence off their crops from free-range cattle. But easterners had seen Bierstadt’s paintings and expected a lush garden, ready for tilling.

It was a pretty tricky move.

When they arrived, though, they rose to the occasion. They irrigated the desert, diverting river streams into prairies and plains. In 1874 Joseph Glidden invented barbed wire, and most of the West was fenced off. From 1879 to 1890 the population of Idaho increased 600 percent.

While there were a lot of reasons for westward expansion (the hope of a quick fortune likely topping the list), I suspect romance played a pretty big part. The government had told a careful and lovely story. It had played to people’s tendency toward big, sweeping beauty. And eventually the settlers knew what they were in for. Word of the tough land had to travel back. But people couldn’t resist what they’d seen—big mountains and wild rivers and full skies. Visions like that are hard to shake.

Those months in Boston have condensed to a few memories: weekend trips to Cape Cod with its grassed dunes and bleached beaches; the smells of a crowded subway train—aftershave and hairspray; cobblestone shining in a late summer rain; my first taste of matzo, paneer, lox.

But there are also fragments of conversations that pointed to a fundamental confusion. One classmate said he’d love to drive to Idaho one weekend. When I told him he’d need at least three days to get there, he responded, “Bullshit. It’s by Michigan, right?”

On a campus lawn after a poetry reading, I wore a cream silk dress and bare feet, my pinching high heels stuffed in my bag. A circle of writing students said where they were from—Brookline, Manhattan, Brooklyn. I said Idaho, and a woman who was enjoying an Ivy League education, said, “Ah, a Southern belle!”

The conversations I recall most sharply are the ones that ended with me feeling countrified and like my home wasn’t worth knowing. More than likely, this was insecurity talking, mistaking their confusion for personal dismissal. But still, I stood there toeing bare feet through the grass, trying to feel comfortable and failing.

After the reading I went home and pulled a beer from the fridge and stared at that ad taped to the door, that house surrounded by land as wide open as an invitation.

It’s hard to accept that the place that grew me (knowing that we are all products of place, that place and self are loyal sisters) is either skippable or shameful. Blew said, “I, who have suffered the contradictions of double vision, of belonging in place and out of place, feel a magnet’s pull into that everlasting tension.” It was the desire to know the world outside of Idaho that landed me in Boston, and it was the need to understand the place I’d left that drove me back.

In his book Who Owns the West? William Kittredge explained, “We operate in systems of story and metaphor that we use to define the world (both natural and social) for ourselves, and we must always seek to remodel the mythology (model) we have inherited from society (because each synthesis always fails).” He said stories are necessary; they create meaning, but they also ultimately give out. Here, in the myth’s failing, I am most intrigued. “Stories are places to live, inside the imagination . . . and we’re in trouble . . . when the one we inhabit doesn’t work anymore, and we stick with it anyway.” Stories fail because places outgrow them. They fail, invariably, because places (and their people) change and the stories do not always change with them.

The plane filled with light, and the flight attendant offered me a cup of coffee.

“No thanks,” I said.

I closed my window shade and put down the Ginsberg collection and shut my eyes. I saw elk and jimson prairies and the churning eddies of the Payette River. In that moment I entered a lineage of western dreamers: my parents before me; Bierstadt before them; the Manifest Destiny men before them; Humboldt and Powell and Lewis and Clark; before them, before them, before them—another in a long line of interlopers.