Land and Sky

What makes the West the West

Drive west from Bozeman, Montana, which at Western speed limits (80 mph) you can do for longer than most people want to be in a car—a day or more—and you begin to understand part of this country, and maybe some of its people.

Ironically, you won’t really see any people, or, at least, very few. What you will see is an unbroken horizon of land—sagebrush, rivers, mountains—and seemingly limitless sky coming down to meet it. At times, you can convince yourself that you are rushing toward the curve of the earth, land falling away from you just beyond eyesight. Occasionally, you will see cattle, fencing, coyotes, but little else to ground you in the familiar ways of life. It’s hard to imagine that the place looked much different 500 years ago.

I once drove from a soccer tournament in Idaho Falls, which is on the more eastern side of the state of Idaho to Hailey, Idaho, which is in the central part of the state. After crossing the city limits, I drove for for two and a half hours at 65 mph and didn’t see a single car, not a single person. The only signs of what you might call civilization were power lines—straight as a ruler—stretching across open land until they vanished.

That kind of emptiness can be both disconcerting and redemptive. Disconcerting because when things go wrong, there is no easy fix. The land is as dispassionate as the sky. And with an overheated car or empty gas tank, one can get pretty lonely long before any kind of help might amble over the horizon.

That being said, the vastness also brings with it the flush of redemption, even exhilaration. To be a speck on that Western horizon is to experience the world in its simplest and purest form. To feel small and unnoticed, in such a world is also to marvel at its evolutionary longevity.

Back in Bozeman is the Museum of the Rockies. Hidden among the enormous skeletons and dioramas is a fun little fact: The dinosaurs roamed the Earth for 155 million years. 155 million years! I can barely conceptualize a couple hundred years of human history. Some people might have a grasp of a couple thousand years. Even at that, 2,000 years of modern human history relative to the dinosaurs’ time would be the equivalent of 1.1 seconds of our 24-hour day. Hardly noticeable, I’d say. I’d also say that the dinosaurs did pretty well for themselves to hang around for that long. I’m not sure humanity has that staying power. Homo sapiens, our genus and species, has managed to survive about 190,000 years so far. That’s about one one-thousandth of the dinosaurs’ time on Earth. Comparatively, it should be the dawn of our time here, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like late afternoon-evening, after the sun has slipped out of sight and the air has a little bite to it.

Ask people what they think of when you say, “the West,” and you will get a panoply of answers: Hollywood, the Pacific, liberal politicians, earthquakes, sunshine, fruits and vegetables, surfers, water wars; the list goes on.

What you hear less often is what most of it is: open space. And that open space, that sparsity of humanity, breeds a mindset. Independence is part of the mindset. Live in the great open spaces for a while and one can’t help but adopt a sense of independence. If there is no one else around to depend on, what are you going to do? Finding your own way is a prerequisite to getting by.

A visceral connection to the land is another quirk of a Western mindset. Land dominates every aspect of living in the West. It brings forth food in enormous quantities (sometimes), and maybe more importantly, holds the water crucial to that food and our existence deep within its belly.

There is also a spiritual component to the land that is more difficult to explain. Maybe the best way to frame it is this: If you feel it, you feel it. And if you don’t feel it, it takes some time to find it.

I spent many years guiding people down rivers in the West. Those people were often from the cities, particularly East Coast cities. Many were uneasy with the ruggedness of the land, the wildness, the bigness of the place, and, perhaps most bewildering to them, that there is often little control to be had. In many ways, civilized society measures its success by its degree of control: control of environment, social behavior, economic systems, sometimes even thought. Control is something we are taught to strive for, and, ultimately, to have.

But I’m not sure control is the equilibrium toward which the natural world actually trends. We learned early in our lives—probably in high school chemistry—that the entropy of an isolated system (which is what we live in) always increases. In other words, over time, order loses, disorder wins, every time. In the history of science, no one has ever found an exception.

Back to the river. What I found was that after a few days in the wild, in places where other forces often control the day’s events, our guests slowly began to feel the exhilaration of letting go, of sensing the power and comfort of something bigger. Before my eyes, they would let free the idea of control and let the natural world and all of its unpredictability wash over them. Sounds trite, but it really was a phenomenon to behold.

The cliché goes that barbed wire tamed the West. Maybe it tamed the horses and cows, but not the land. It’s as big and unruly as ever. And I’m grateful for that because great expanse is a luxury.

I can imagine those before us, Native Americans and later pioneers, traversing a land with seemingly no limit. As they passed over vast ridges, more and more land and sky unfolded before them. Who wouldn’t want to keep going? Wouldn’t you want to see what was on the other side? Of course, there was an end to it, but they didn’t know that. For their practical purposes, and to some extent ours, it’s a thirst that can’t be quenched. That kind of thirst gets in your soul and, if you’re lucky, never leaves.