A New West Book Review

America’s 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey, by Monte Hartman and William Kittredge

By Allen M. Jones, 5-20-06

Comes down to it, coffee table books make for awkward reading material. No matter the subject, the format rarely asks for more than distracted browsing. Square like file cabinets, heavy as car batteries, you can't really curl up in bed with one of these babies. They're meant for display, not study. Exhibits A and B always come from National Geographic and Barnes & Noble. Now and then, though, you find a volume that takes full advantage of all those low printing costs in China. Serious images on glossy paper paired with passages of artful, careful text. My favorite is a brief collection of black and white boxing photos by Kurt Markus, sprinkled through with excerpts from Fat City. Some bad ass sumbitch standing there with his gold tooth and inward sneer, then that famous paragraph, "All I need's a fight and a woman. Then I'm set. I get the fight I'll get the money. I get the money I'll get the woman. There's some women that love you for yourself, but that don't last long." The words accentuate the photos, and vice-versa.

The fine new book by photographer Monte Hartman, America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey (Texas Tech University Press, $39.95), with an essay by William Kittredge, is of a similar species. A photographer and a writer coming to a shared subject with divergent but complementary sensibilities. Here's the setup: Hartman, in the interests of cataloguing the "vast center of America," made half a dozen road trips up and down the longitudinal spine of the country, North Dakota to Texas, snapping off ten thousand or so shots as he went. Grain fields, Dairy Queens, hay rakes, his stated goal was to "capture history itself." To document that line of separation between east and west. One hundred and twenty of these images finally made it into the book. Eight years ago, and independent of Hartman, Kittredge made his own trip down along this line, writing rather than photographing, drawing his own conclusions. "It's my idea that we must turn from a culture mostly driven by an urge to accumulate...and invent a society eager to give, to nourish, to take care. It was my thought that I might find enclaves of such a society in the Great Plains." The 100th meridian, of course, is that 1,900 mile line wherein, east to west, moisture begins to diminish, where rain goes from reality to theory. Walter Prescott Webb to Wallace Stegner, our best minds have always recognized that the West is defined not by geography but aridity. Tall grass into short grass, eastern Nebraska into western, it's always next year's country. Trying to document elements of that meridian, I can't think of a regional project with more potential value.

While it's hard not to quibble with certain elements of Hartman's approach, there's no denying the man's abilities as a photographer. Shape, color, and light, he has an impeccable eye for composition, for juxtaposing line against line, drawing the viewer's eye into his subject. In North Dakota, he likes a flood drenched plain in orange twilight, one stretch of barbed wire fence in a strong horizontal, another triangulating stretch (just the fenceposts visible above the water) disappearing into the distance. In South Dakota, he gives us a flat plain with alternating gold, green and brown strips of field, a dark storm building overhead. For one of his Nebraska images, he makes it a point to show us a confusion of street signs – Dairy Queen, Elks Lodge, Farm Equipment – all pressed flat by the long reach of his telephoto. Oklahoma includes the grinning mouth of a Ford truck grill, the spray of a yucca plant; Texas the fresh round swirls of a tilled field.

Accompanying the first third of Hartman's photos is a new essay by William Kittredge (always an occasion). Since Wallace Stegner's death, and given how Larry McMurtry's prolificacy has lately turned profligate, there is no one more authoritatively positioned to comment on the West than Kittredge, nor anyone who can write about it half as well. His best sentences are like hitting a forehand sweet spot, that solid and satisfying thrum up the arm. "I was interested in seeing how the descendants of people who made a stand on what was taken to be an empty stage had used their histories to turn vast territories familiar, into a homeland; I was interested in seeing if their life story of generations, and of place, had become for them interchangeable. And most centrally, I was interested in seeing if there was any sort of necessary relationship between life in conjunction to vast spaces and societal generosity, if the one kind of openness fed into the other." This generosity of spirit stands in useful contrast to the occasionally bleak sensibilities of Hartman. A kind of redemptive steam valve.

Interestingly, throughout the book, Hartman limits his subjects to landscape and to the artifacts of human intrusion on the landscape. The only face between these covers is his own author photo on the dustjacket. Given that he has specifically set out to "delineate the struggles with topography and weather that have shaped Plains peoples' lives and a nation's values," his decision to avoid portraiture entirely seems limiting. "Composition in Orange and Blue" is a study of grain silos. "Weathered Wall" is a weathered wall and "Gray House" is a gray house. For a photographer to study a cultural geography and exclude its people seems an unreasonable fettering, like trying to run a marathon in rubber galoshes. But perhaps he has other agendas. Hartman writes, "At the main intersection in Englewood, Kansas, I stopped to scan a depressing scene of deserted gas stations and decaying buildings. It recalled the surreal mood of postwar annihilation films about the earthly survivors of a nuclear Armageddon." The beauty of Hartman's images aside, it seems unfortunate that he should fail to see that actual lives are still being lived in Englewood. What he's calling an Armageddon is still someone's home. Elsewhere on the 100th meridian, and in stark juxtaposition, Kittredge writes, "I parked and walked the sidewalks. The few fellow walkers I encountered studied me from the corners of their eyes and looked quickly away. I was a sixty-year-old stranger...and thus, I think, suspect, an intruder, perhaps even dangerous, in some mysterious way capable of fracturing the quiet, careful dream of sufficiency..." What Hartman sees as a no man's land, Kittredge calls a quiet dream of sufficiency.

Bouncing between these two world views, one sensibility accentuating the next, you're drawn to take sides. Should we be concerned with the impact people have had on the landscape (Hartman's subject) or the impact the landscape has had upon the people (Kittredge's subject). Like no other book I know, America's 100th Meridian manages (perhaps inadvertently) to articulate this debate. Kittredge writes, "In the Texas Highway Hospitality Center, on the freeway leading into Laredo, I encountered a man with his possessions in plastic bags. Surrounded by malls, he muttered to his muse. Another day of drowning." In light of this discussion, perhaps in the end the West is not a geography at all, not a post office or hay barn, not even necessarily a state of aridity. Whatever character it possesses is fluid, changeable. Maybe it's a condition of hope, of potential. This is the place we've come to make our stand, largely because the places we left weren't worth a damn. Kittredge muses, "When, I wondered, would I encounter the legendary southwestern lightness of the heart and wildness? I searched for barbecue and I longed for heedless songs, some transcending, and dancing around, maybe balloons on the ceiling, even a martini." In the restless imaginings of what the West used to be, what it still could potentially become (Dad's dusty celluloid hopes segueing into the digital dreams of our own children), it's the searching that's the thing. Once having sent out taproots past the 100th meridian, and no matter the empty gas stations and dusty streets, you've got to believe that, someday, maybe tomorrow, the rain's finally going to fall.

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