New West Book Essay

An enigmatic and rough ranch hand meets a gregarious socialite on a guest ranch, they fall in love, and though they live separate lives, they remain close until her death. This real life, turn-of-the-century affair between Wyoming cowboy Enoch Cal Carrington and East Coast publishing heir Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson is an obvious plunder for Western fiction. The unlikely relationship is also an analogy for a Jackson Hole where Western live-and-let-live ideals converge, often begrudgingly, with East Coast sophistication. In 2008, Alta, Wyo. resident, Earle Layser retold Cal and Cissy’s story in I Always Did Like Horses and Women: The Enoch Cal Carrington Story. The nonfiction account caught the attention of valley novelist Tina Welling, who studied Layser’s book, among others, for her latest novel. That Welling released Cowboys Never Cry (NAL Trade, $15) around the same time late last year that Layser issued his new collection of essays, titled Green Fire (Dancing Pine, $21.95), at first seemed to be just coincidental, but turned out to be opportune, the result of a shared interest in the paradox that Westerners whose livelihoods depend on the land often find themselves at odds with its preservation. 

Western Book Roundup

In this week’s Roundup I’ll take a look at some books of special interest to Western readers that will be published during the first half of this year:

January

• Kings of Colorado, the debut novel by Austin’s David E. Hilton is out this week.  To learn more about it, check out my interview with him or the review I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

• Annie Proulx’s new memoir Bird Cloud is now in stores—it has been getting a strange mix of glowing and/or disapproving reviews.  Among the people who loved it are Tim Gautreaux, who covered it for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Donna Seaman, who gave it a starred review for Booklist.  Not as enamored were Alexandra Fuller and Dwight Garner, who both wrote about it for the New York Times—Garner’s review is really funny. 

Book Review

”In Search of Powder: A Story of America’s Disappearing Ski Bum” is an elegy to a dying alternative lifestyle. Evans has compiled a diorama of the economic and cultural dynamics of the decades that transformed insulated, funky ski towns into glitzy, accessible destinations. He reminds us of what we already know: The ski bum’s habitat is shrinking and, ironically, the ski bum’s iconic mythology contributes to the degradation.

As a recreational pastime became an option for post-Vietnam escape, the very mystique of the free-spirited, ruggedly individualistic, dropout skier fueled the extractive growth of ski areas. Pitiably depressed mining towns became publicly traded entertainment resorts. In those exploited places, Evans observes, the ski bum became an endangered, if not terminal, species.

Evan’s sketches and interviews of former ski bums turned legit (or not) include representative stories from personalities in Lake Tahoe, Mammoth, Telluride, Park City and Jackson Hole. Some characters you’ve heard of, some you haven’t. Some grew up on time and quickly abandoned “the concept of knowing what makes one happy and being undeterred in actualizing it” to cash in.

Western Poets

A few short months after arriving in Montana, I made a point of stopping at The Milltown Union Bar, the working-class watering hole immortalized by Richard Hugo in his poem by that name. The bar, as it was in Hugo’s time, is really called Harold’s, “Harold’s Dine Drink and Dance” the sign reads. Driving west on Interstate 90 toward Missoula you see it at the exit for Bonner and barely need to wet your lips and twist your wrist 10 degrees in order to slice off the highway and circle down the ramp in its direction. 

New West Essay and Book Preview

Reading the latest demographic data from the U. S. Census Bureau reminds me why I so miss the late Hal Rothman, a brilliant historian of the American West who died in 2007 from ALS. He would have loved knowing that his adopted state of Nevada—he taught at UNLV for 15 years and loved every minute of it—has experienced the largest population jump of any in the union over the last decade. 

Yet immediately after absorbing that striking data, he would have dashed off a sharply worded critique for New West or High Country News or the Las Vegas Sun that placed this boom into the larger context of the Silver State’s hostile politics, depressed economy and the yawning gap between its rich and poor. Growth for its own sake was nothing to brag about, he would have argued, an argument that is as key to his incisive study of Las Vegas, ”Neon Metropolis” (2002) as it is to his posthumously (and just) published history, The Making of Modern Nevada (2010).

The same could be said for the West in general; its boom comes with an implicit bust. The census reveals, for instance, that the region’s population continues to grow at a double-digit rate. Although the increase between 2000 and 2010 is not as steep as it has been—in 1950 the uptick was 40.4 percent, in 1970 it was 24.1 percent, and in 1990 it was 22.3 percent; and although the past decade’s rise of 13.8 percent is the lowest in a century, the figure remains impressive and troubling. 

Western Book Roundup

I like the funny ones best.  That statement applies to everything, really—people, bears, hats—but especially books.  Throughout the year, I try to make note of the funniest lines and passages I come across in my reading.  Sometimes this proves problematic, as with Brady Udall’s funny-all-the-way through book, The Lonely Polygamist.  When I was typing out my selections from that one, my husband asked, “Why are you retyping that entire novel?” So here’s my second annual list of funny passages from the western books I read this year.  This one goes out to everyone who proudly sports a blue smear of a tattoo that once read “Charlene.”

• From Kevin Canty’s Everything

“She came inside as ever with her basket and jar and several other bags and bundles.  She moved though life in the middle of her own rummage sale, surrounded by rummage.  Some of it was knitting, some of it was food.”

“RL used to love the hippie girls—yes, he did—before they all turned thirty and became strict and sour.”

“She was good for her age but it was not a good age.”

A New Take on Old West Lit

In the September High Country News, Laura Pritchett wrote that she doesn’t want to live up to some stereotyped image of the “new” western woman if it means she has to gut trout (“The Western Lit Blues”). She’s “starting to get a little worried” that westerners have lives that are more complex than the ones she sometimes sees portrayed on the printed page. “There’s more going on with life out here in the West than is often rendered in books,” she says. But the publishers—mostly in New York--“expect certain patterns” and “want stereotypes to be affirmed.” At the same time, they want a novel to reflect the “authentic” West.

In a novel, the plot is driven by one of two questions. One is, “What is the character thinking? The other is, “What happens next?” Thanks to a very complicated interplay of literary supply and demand, the nineteenth and early twentieth West produced an inordinate number of “What happens next” books. Adventure books, romance books. In 1902 Owen Wister called his own novel, The Virginian, a “colonial romance.” And the demand for horse operas and ten-penny potboilers led to books called “westerns” and “westerns” led to all this stereotyping.

Words for the Western Landscape

In his introduction to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, editor Barry Lopez writes, “The land beyond our towns, for many, has become a generalized landscape of hills and valleys, of beaches, rivers and monotonous deserts…almost without our knowing it, the particulars of these landscapes have slipped away from us.” Published this year in a paperback edition by Trinity University Press, Home Ground (480 pages, $19.95) seeks to preserve terms that describe the natural landscape by compiling definitions written by accomplished writers.  Over the past month, New West has featured excerpts from Home Ground.  Today’s term is “sawtooth,” as described by Pattiann Rogers.  Rogers is an award-winning, Colorado-based poet.  Her most recent book is The Grand Array.

A New Take On Old West Lit

She won “Best Leading Actor” from the Omaha Actor’s Guild, packed the theater as Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” and now she was on the phone asking me for Christmas material.

“I need a western piece to read for some charity appearances,” she said. “I won’t have time to read them all, so just pick one and I’ll cut it to fit the time requirements.”

Cripes. If there’s anything I hate worse than making decisions it’s making other people’s decisions.

Okay, so what makes a good Christmas story? The answer’s as obvious as an elephant in an outhouse. It shows how Christmas is a time when Evil is banished by Good and self-isolated people crave society. Look at A Christmas Carol or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. For that matter, look at “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or even The Nutcracker. Christmas is magic, Evil is overcome by Good and people celebrate.

This made Owen Wister’s “A Journey in Search of Christmas” my prime candidate. Lin McLean has a wad of roundup money in his jeans and an ache in his heart. Everyone in Cheyenne seems to know that a woman has made a fool of him by marrying him when she already had a husband. Looking to be alone, Lin takes the train to Denver. He intends to spend Christmas Eve by punishing a power of whiskey and blowing himself to a fine meal. He might even go to the theater. 

Words for the Western Landscape

In his introduction to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, editor Barry Lopez writes, “The land beyond our towns, for many, has become a generalized landscape of hills and valleys, of beaches, rivers and monotonous deserts…almost without our knowing it, the particulars of these landscapes have slipped away from us.” Published this year in a paperback edition by Trinity University Press, Home Ground (480 pages, $19.95) seeks to preserve terms that describe the natural landscape by compiling definitions written by accomplished writers.  Over the past several weeks, New West has featured excerpts from Home Ground.  Today’s term is “racetrack valley,” as described by Stephen Graham Jones.  Jones is the author of several books, including the new story collection The One That Got Away.