Landscape My West

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Make no mistakes. I have my complaints. The wind that sweeps the eastern front of the mountains can be fierce, and, fierce or not, it is almost as constant as the sun. Winter weather can be lethal. People do perish, if not often, in the snowy cold. The blazing afternoons of summer can induce sunstroke. Women, left alone in their windblown and creaking homes on the plains, have lost their minds while their men sought work. The long moan, the long scream, of the wind. It frazzles nerves.

I have cursed the wind one day only to smile the next when not a twig stirred. I have cursed the fingering cold that feels inside clothes for the very seat of life, but I know that relief will come and probably soon, relief in the form of the warm embracing breezes of the chinook. It is then that a man wants to throw his hat in the air and cry out, "By God, this is a great land! This is great country!" He celebrates then and in the long evenings of summer when the day cools and the aspen leaves quit their quaking. The almost never-failing hour of no wind.

Here is a country that constantly asks forgiveness for its excesses and is constantly forgiven.

Sometimes, though not often, I ask myself what binds me to the West. Is it memory, sweetened by time, of childhood and boyhood? Is it long familiarity with field and stream, mountain and meadow? Is it just long residence and subsequent reluctance to think of any other section as home? Am I just old and lazy with a headful of ancient and useless recollections? What is it?

I GO BACK A LONG WAY, TO THE EARLIEST years of this century when, as a baby, I was brought to Montana from my birthplace in Indiana. The little settlement of Choteau, like other small and sequestered camps on the high plains, lacked electricity. It lacked telephones. Miles from any railroad, it depended for supplies on freight wagons. There is the rustle of chaps in my ears and the clinking of spurs on the plank sidewalks, and a team stands hipshot at a hitching post by the general store. I smell stale beer and the breath of whiskey as I walk past saloons, and now there is the cry of new-fallen snow under my heels, and the mail and passenger coach comes into town on a run, its iron tires striking sparks from the gravel of the street.

I come home from my little wanderings, and Mother is preparing a meal or cleaning lamp chimneys, or stoking the wood-and-coal range or making beds or carrying out slop. She's always busy. I don't think about it then, but she never has time to rest.

Those were wearing and demanding days, hard on limb, muscle, endurance and patience, and hard on eyes that tried to read at night under the dim and wavering light of a coal-oil lamp. And especially hard on women, who, in addition to the other chores of a household, including the care of children, had to set out three squares a day, for no married man thought of taking lunch in town, though old Soo Son kept a good restaurant.

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