Landscape My West

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I am just as well satisfied with lack of growth. Perhaps I'm being selfish, but I hate the ancient and seductive lie that bigger is better. Bigger, oftener than not, is worse. Witness Los Angeles, where the atmosphere is an insult to lungs. Witness almost any part of California where traffic is so thick as to promise gridlock. Witness Denver, a toxic exception to my West, where citizens are beginning to bemoan the city's growth. Witness New York, Chicago, Miami. Then ask, what's wrong with stability? Alexander Pope said that to stay where you are is somewhat to advance. Amen to that.

Often overlooked or dismissed entirely is our prime asset. It is space; room, as Joseph Kinsey Howard said, to swing elbow and mind. That's what men need and too often destroy. Space, for humans and wildlife and nature. We have it in my West, and, despite pesticides and herbicides and the best efforts of the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, we have some lively streams and healthy trout. And, except for a few spots, we have clean air, and the sun rises and sets in glory, and the soul of man finds a place.

I DRIVE OVER THE HIGH PLAINS, AND I see ahead the great mountains of Colorado. Or I have cut north earlier and come to the impossible, breathless thrust of the Grand Tetons.

Or I tour through the sagebrush and pronghorns of Wyoming, and here is Independence Rock, the Sweetwater River and, beyond, Devil's Gap and the beginning slopes of South Pass where the mountain men, its discoverers, welcomed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman.

From western North Dakota through central Montana the blacktop runs dark through snow-fields, glitter-white under the sun, and ahead is the horizon and distant beyond it another and another.

And it is all good, all these things. It is home again.

I AM SITTING AT MY DESK, THINKING of values, trying for words to put on the blank page that waits in my typewriter. Soon now the wild geese will be flying, shouting their courage as they wing for the nesting grounds in the north. Later, with the first snowstorm in the fall, they will head back for the south, honking encouragement to youngsters untried by distance. I have often wondered whether the leader of their wedged pattern ever tired of breaking trail through the hindering air and fell back while another took his place.

Last winter a herd of 20 or 30 antelopes cruised by my fence line, a sight I'd never before been treated to hereabouts, and just once elsewhere in Montana when I was a very small boy. I watched and wished them well, wanting to tell them to forget their fatal curiosity should an antelope hunting season ever open in Teton County.

On many a night I have lain awake listening to coyotes sing, their voices wild and desolate, crying the woes of the world.

IT IS LATE FEBRUARY NOW, THREE weeks or so after the storm king ordered a charge. First came the wildest wind I've ever known, 124 miles an hour by town measurement. Here, 25 miles to the west, it was probably stronger. Snow and sub-zero cold followed that opening sally. People who had to get about walked hunched over in their bundled clothes, leaving vapor trails as they went. The few cars that operated, operated with complaints, with protests unheard before.

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