The American West—a tonic for troubled souls even though nobody knows what the phrase means anymore, since the West of legend has been ritually slaughtered a thousand times and casually hacked to pieces a million more by developers, miners, drillers for oil shale, academics studying its demise, and natives who needed a quick buck. Since we’re mostly suburbs of each other that could be anywhere in America, and since we don’t seem to care that the region’s identity is being displaced yet again. Hell, the displacement of regional identity is the West’s middle name!
The American West—light enough brush fires here and watch Wall Street go up in smoke. Because what we have here in the West is empty space, plenty of it. Enough to make America feel like a spacious country even though we’re standing so close together that we can smell each other’s armpits. If this empty space were burned, would America feel so spacious anymore?
The American West—just saying it makes ya want to whip yer ten gallon hat off yer sweaty brow, whap yer horsie on the ass, and yell “Yee haw!” Don’t it? Going off to where the hell ya don’t know, but you’s going somewheres, and it’s better than the somewheres ya came from. So the where of it don’t really matter because the West is eager to receive ya and reshape ya, remodel ya into something vast and mythic.
The American West—which I love and can’t seem to escape from for very long, even though there’s nothing particularly Western about me, and everybody can tell I’m from New Jersey, anyway. Even though there’s no real reason to stay here now that the West has been Jerseyfied, Texaned, and Californiated. Now that it’s losing those constant, comforting reminders—silos, tractors, piles of rotting hay—that some human being, at some point in our lifetimes, once farmed the dirt on which our subdivisions, coffee shops, and pet boutiques are built.
The American West—where the wolves are men, the sheep are men, and the coyotes are nervous as they ferry people north across the Arizona border, wondering when things will get so bad in El Norte that they have to ferry people back south again.
The American West—where people from all over the world come to achieve their ultimate dream of personal freedom: having enough space to drive like assholes with no repercussion. Not driving like mean-spirited assholes who cut you off on the entrance ramp out of spite, but oblivious assholes who drive like you don’t exist.
The American West—without which we would have nowhere else to turn when we screw up our lives elsewhere and need to escape from the prison of the self. Face it, that’s what people are really doing when they “need a fresh start.” Did you mess up and spend a couple years in prison? C’mon out here, open up a stained glass shop. Wreck your family so bad with your mournful pleas of lust that none of them will ever speak to you again? C’mon out here, we need more shamans. Throw away your old rules, haphazardly pick up fragments of other people’s rules, and voilà—you’ve got a new identity before you even know it. And it won’t matter whether this new identity leaves you any better off than the last one, because your new identity is mythic! It’s forged in the West! It must be more sincere than the identity you left behind, even if you end up with a crappy service job at nine bucks an hour and have to kite checks to pay your mortgage.
The American West—with its murdered ghosts keeping silent now. Eerily silent. I don’t know what they’re plotting, but it’s big. Be careful if you see three or more of them gathered at once. (P.S.: I hear some wool over the eyes helps ease the pain of vision.)
Steven Wingate | Contributor
Steven Wingate's debut short story collection Wifeshopping won the Bakeless Prize for Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. His fiction, poetry, cross-genre work, and reviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Witness, Mississippi Review, The Pinch, Colorado Review, The Journal, Brand (UK), Waccamaw, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. His column on the writing craft and life appears regularly in Fiction Writers Review. In 2010-11 he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.
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