Landscape My West

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Yet I remember little complaining, whether by woman or man. Things had to be done, and they got done, for that was the way of living.

But it was a wonderful time for a young and growing boy, with fields, thickets and streams within walking distance in nearly every direction. There were gophers to be snared or, when the boy got older, to be shot with a single-shot .22. There were grouse in the buckbrush, ducks on the ponds and, best maybe of all, fish in the streams.

The first trout. I caught it when I was eight or nine and fishing with my father; a trout near a pound in size, big for a cutthroat, and I fell on it after I had horsed it out of the water without skill. A Black Gnat, I remember, was the fly that did the trick.

A few years later, my imagination stirred by reading and conversation with my father, I found a rusted spur near an old corral, and it became Andy Adams, a cowboy up from Texas. A buffalo skull, unearthed from a onetime wallow, grew into a great herd, a solid carpet of animals moving toward the Teton River. I wander up Cashman coulee, four miles from town, and all that remains of Johnny Cashman's homestead is a flat stone that was his doorstep, and I am alone there, with the sound of the breeze in my ears and the sound of time in my head, and I feel lonely and good.

Such memories are mine, and mine alone, and they live with me in my country, but I doubt they by themselves are enough to keep me here.

I ONCE SAID OF THE WEST THAT IT was America's great adventure of the spirit. It was in our hearts and our heads and perhaps ours by acquisition from the westward push of earlier men in other countries. At any rate, the first colonists were little more than settled before men began pushing at the mountains to the west. They made it to Pennsylvania and the Ohio River and founded towns along it. They came over the Wilderness Trail into Tennessee and Kentucky. Farther on ran the Mississippi and the land beyond, the land not ours yet, and some men said to hell with that and crossed over and put up cabins. And these men were just the beginnings of America's westering.

For the West was and is a state of mind, evident to this day. Say "West" in the East, and the hearer's eyes may shine with distance, and he may confess a longing for a cabin on the banks of a good trout stream. A good many easterners visit the West and elect to remain if they can find means of livelihood, and some, having visited, choose to return. It is incidental that these transplants often become the best environmentalists, for they have seen what man has done in the East and hope not to see it repeated.

It is too bad or very good, according to viewpoint, that my West offers little in the way of fortune or jobs. Location and climate work against both. The politicians vow they will change things. The chambers of commerce wear faces of cheer to mask disappointment. Both contend we have only to exploit our natural resources to find prosperity. To which one might ask: What other resources in addition to coal, which is already being mined? Montana and Wyoming have lost population in recent years, and none of the other states in my survey have grown much, if you exclude Nevada, which one-armed bandits maintain.

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