Tag: West

Native Landscape

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This sunset was still on the camera when I left for Virginia. I dragged it all over the country with me and now I’m not sure when I snapped the picture. I like the subtlety of the peaches, though.

I’m happy to be back in my vista.

People from the East and South complain of the open spaces here, how they feel exposed and swallowed up by the expanse of it. I recall someone telling a story about being tailed for miles on the highway on the eastern plains of Colorado or Wyoming — I forget which — slowing so the person could pass, though the other car never would. The driver simply clung to the back bumper. Finally the storyteller pulled over and the other car did, too. An East Coast woman tumbled out, apologizing, saying how she felt so overwhelmed by the empty sky and deserted highway that she just wanted to be near another car.

My New Hampshire boss complains that she has a difficult time judging distance here. She can’t tell how fast a car is approaching or how close it is, because she feels she has nothing to reference it to.

I understand what they mean because I feel suffocated in places like Virginia. The Appalachians are pretty, yes, but they hem you in. The trees, even shed of leaves seem to block the sky. Granted, it was foggy and rainy during our visit, compounding the feeling. Even the houses, though, seem to be built to wrap around you and divide you from the outside.

Not like our house, designed to pull the vista in and fill the rooms with it.

I drove from Abingdon to the DC area, to visit Allison. Oh, said the innkeeper in Abingdon, you’ll drive through the Shenandoah valley. It’s so beautiful. At one point it just opens up and you can see the valley and the mountains.

Even with all this fog and rain? I asked.

Oh, he said.

It cleared enough going north that I did see some of the valley and the distant rolling hills, which I just can’t quite bring myself to call mountains. Theirs is a vista of softness and blur. Eternally smoky.

Something in me relaxed to return to the crisp Western light, our slice-edged mountains. Even in a sleepy photo like this one, the outline of the peaks is crisp and defined.

I suppose it’s all what you’re used to. I grew up in the West and some restless part of me only settles down when I’m here. Georgia O’Keeffe came here for the light though, among countless others.

Great is the gift of being able to see.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Waddle

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Lots of whining lately about all the rain.

Understandable. It gets old. Those of us in the sunny West rely upon our average of 330 sunny days each year. The last two weeks of nearly unceasing rain has people making grumbling remarks about Seattle. They also make absurd statements like “Since when did Denver get a monsoon season?” This from people I went to high school with. Who have lived in Denver for 40+ years. They should know better.

Before the drought, our Junes were always cool and rainy. They’ve forgotten.

Memories are short. And subjective experience seems to be the shortest. We’ve been in a drought for ten years now. An entire decade. Did you remember it had been that long. I didn’t — I’d been saying eight years. Now I’m wondering which two years I lost… At any rate, this decade-long drought in the western states has exceeded the infamous Dust Bowl.

Nobody seems to know this.

Of course, we don’t have the icons of that drought. The enormous dust clouds. The ragged people fleeing the farms to wander the cites with their belongings on carts. Technology allows us to irrigate, to control the flows of the rivers, to truck in water. Instead of losing livelihoods, our urban lives are impacted by hot, sunny days, perfect for recreation.

Now people are saying they miss the drought. They’re right — there isn’t much of one at the moment. (That link updates weekly, so if you’re reading this later, the map might be different. But what it shows as of June 9, 2009, is small patches of abnormally dry soil in the West and huge swathes of soil with normal moisture — it’s a miracle, really.)

It was like this, in the before time. I remember the summer I turned 16. I babysat for two kids and we would ride our bikes in the chilly rain to their golf and tennis lessons. When I was young, I used to write in my books the date I finished them. (No, I don’t know why.) I finished Little House in the Big Woods on June 8, 1974 and I noted that it was snowing. With an exclamation point. Cold and rainy, yes — even then snow in Denver on June 8 was remarkable.

Of course we’re all tired of the rain. We want to sit on our patios. We want to play in the mountains and soak up the western sunshine. We’ve had enough of cold and want summer already.

But in all the wanting for the warmth, let’s take a moment to give thanks for the rain.

Not from Around These Here Parts

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My New Hampshire boss complains about the aesthetics of the West.

In this way, Lincoln is a city of the West, while otherwise most of us would lump it into the Midwest. She doesn’t like the lack of trees, the ugly buildings, the inefficient parking garage. She asks why the storage sheds are purple and orange, if people really believe rocks on astroturf are a good landscaping choice and why no one tries to disguise their Dumpsters.

While it irritates me, I find it hard to defend.

My North Carolina father, when he arrived in Colorado to attend the Air Force Academy, wrote home that he’d never seen a thousand shades of brown before. And I remember when I first saw Kentucky (where my boss grew up), I thought it looked artificial, a theme park of emerald grass and alabaster fences, gleaming horses trotting about for show. But this isn’t about the acquired appreciation for the aesthetic of the western landscape, for the sere plains and treeless crags. This is about culture. About the difference between people who build pretty little fences around their Dumpsters, painted to match the building, and those who figure garbage is garbage and why dress it up?

Some call it western practicality, implying an attention to something greater than frou-frou considerations. I’d hazard that it’s an extension of the frontier mentality, living on the edge of survival, where all energy is focused on food and shelter and marauding cattle thieves, not on painting the ranch house. The thing is, those days are long over, but the stubbornness lingers. Western folks take pride in not caring, just like they take pride in not having the good stuff.

“We don’t need that….” “We call this nice weather around here…” “I’m not throwing money away on…”

The myth of the cowboy is a story of sweat and grit, not white-washed fences.