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Fire On the Earth

The old man had understood since the summer of ’88 that pigs are afraid of fire.  He’d been in the pig business only three years, following his retirement from the Union Pacific Railroad, when the uncured hay in the hayloft combusted spontaneously, the barn exploded like something on a movie set, and burned to the...

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Comments Anyway

Edward Paul Abbey 1927-1989 NO COMMENT —Inscription on Edward Abbey’s grave marker, Cabeza Prieta wilderness, Arizona My friend Edward Abbey, dead these 13 years, is finally the subject of a formal biography, published last year by the University of Arizona Press and written by a man who never even met him.  Most biographers, of course,...

Food Stamps for Farmers and Other Absurdities
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Food Stamps for Farmers and Other Absurdities

A dry snow scouring the Sherman Mountains east of Laramie turned to rain outside Cheyenne and blew in sheets across Interstate 80, from Pine Bluffs to Sidney to Ogallala to North Platte to Kearney to Grand Island to York, Nebraska, and from York south to Geneva, Bruning, and Hebron: 501 miles of deluging rain from a...

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The Man in the Black Hat

From where the boy’s wagon was parked, Laramie Peak, which from every other perspective appeared in some degree or another triangular, had a rounded aspect suggesting the crown of a tall, black hat.  The wagon stood braced on the summit of a low hill rising from a rolling plain dotted with pale stones and dark...

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A Journey to the Bottom of the World

The plane took off to the east out of Denver, banked steeply right, and came round on a southwest heading: over Pike’s Peak, the Sangre de Christo Mountains, and the Great Sand Dunes National Monument; across the San Luis Valley, the upper Rio Grande, and the San Juan Mountains; over Chaco Canyon, with a view...

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Throwing Off the Yoke

As a display of “America Standing Together,” “Everybody Pile on Falwell” was even more dramatic a spectacle than “Three Firemen Holding the Flag.”  Following televised remarks by the founder of the Moral Majority to the effect that the terrorist attacks of September 11 conveyed God’s wrath against a nation that has been commandeered by heretics...

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The Mysterious Mountain

The wind that had risen directly after sunset blew hard down-canyon, filling the rocky bowl where camp was fixed with a sound like rushing water, scouring the open fire pit, and sending red sparks in sheets among the dry cacti and bushes.  Between gusts, the coals in the bottom of the pit burned dark red...

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Love Thy Neighbor

Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning.  He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there.  His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...

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Crazy Horse

The horse went down on a horizontal stretch of trail where no sound horse had any business stumbling.  The quadrupe-dal rhythm broke suddenly, his near shoulder crumpled, his head sank at the end of the black-maned neck, until the horse seemed to be wanting to kneel and kiss the ground.  I let out rein and...

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’69 Plus 40

Sam Nash pushed the empty beer bottle away across the knife-scarred table.  “I’m ready to hunt bulls,” he said.  “We need to be making tracks for the mountain soon, before it gets too dark to put a camp in up there.” Jim McCorkle set his chin forward but  didn’t answer right away.  He’d ordered black...

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Green Hills of Grayest Sand

Old Jules is more than the title of a book by Mari Sandoz it is the name of one of the monsters of American letters: the Simon Legree of the pioneer household who, married four times, drove one wife to the insane asylum and struck the fourth in the face with a handful of four...

The Third Compartment
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The Third Compartment

“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“         —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...

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Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants

Amnesty for illegal immigrants is an idea whose time not only has ]3assed but, like Elizabethan collars and virginity, can hardly be imagined—unless what Peter Brimelow calls “immigration enthusiasts” are more fanatical still than the Muslim terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. Then before the strike, a major...

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Getting Somewhere

Jackson Hole is burning up. Gerry Spence had to evacuate his ranch ahead of the wildfires, and Dick Cheney could be next. Here above timberline in the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains, 400 miles to the southeast, the breeze is cool, the grass is fresh and green, and the ponds of standing water...

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Sunday Summer

In June, the sun gets up about the time the pollen release ends. Keeping the bedroom window down in the early morning hours is a simple preventive for hay fever that requires only getting up around 2:00 A.M. to drop the window. It’s easier to take a pill the night before and forget about it....

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Resistance

On my knees in the bright pebbly waters of Hermit Creek, I looked up from the cotton shirt I was wringing out to the buff-colored rim of the Kaibab Plateau, over 4,000 vertical feet overhead. “Its a long way down from up there,” I told Tom Sheeley, who had just arrived along the trail from...

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Dust Thou Art

Sheep Mountain like a fallen tombstone lay on the horizon under a sky thickening with gray cloud ribbons and white lenticulars. It was too cold for snow yet, and rain had not fallen for weeks in the mountains. The wind raised small storms of dust on the pale surface of the clay road and whirled...

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Getting Out of Dodge

The Founding Fathers intended the “Enumeration” (Article I, Section 2) not only as a means of assuring representational equality among the states but as a graph displaying the growth of the American nation in size and prosperity. For almost 200 years, the decennial census could plausibly be accepted as doing that. The last three censuses...

Rome As You Find It
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Rome As You Find It

For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence for antiquity. Eighteenth-century Englishmen (and those Americans who could manage it) traveled to Italy—Rome in...

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Now Hear This!!!

You could say it isn’t easy being a liberal in the most conservative state in the Union if it weren’t for the fact that in the most conservative state in the Union, the liberals occupy all the best bully pulpits. This means that, in Wyoming as in the rest of the 5O states, Democratic liberalism...

Rome as We Found It
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Rome as We Found It

In horse-and-carriage days, foreign visitors to Rome, after an arduous Alpine crossing, commonly entered the city from the north, by the Milvian Bridge which has existed since the second century B.C. Here, on October 28, 312, Constantine had a vision of Christ on the eve of his victory over his rival, Maxentius. Since that time,...

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Democracy and the Art of Handloading

Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...

What Is Paleoconservatism?
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What Is Paleoconservatism?

Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal. This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe—including “neoconservatives”—and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican...

Gather Ye Rosebuds
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Gather Ye Rosebuds

Jeffrey Meyers, a biographer whose fascination with the literary life is touchingly suggestive of the enthusiasm small boys used to have for the railroading one, is the only person I can think of who would consider it a “privilege” to be led on, toyed with, lied to, and finally betrayed by V.S. Naipaul. Scott Fitzgerald...

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A Happy Hunting Ground

The alarm clock went off in the dark. In the light of the electric lantern, frost glittered on shadowed nylon walls. The inside zipper stuck; after a few futile tugs I escaped through the mouth of the mummy bag. I had on long Johns, wool socks, and a wool shirt; but the predawn cold bit...

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The End of Drought

Somewhere between Muddy Gap and the old uranium town of Jeffrey City I became aware of my lungs, painfully expanding and contracting inside my denim shirt. Beyond Jeffrey City the smoke cloud was visible to the northwest, a pinkish-grey mass hanging on the mountainous horizon and planed along its upper edge by atmospheric winds: large...

Poetry in Ploughing
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Poetry in Ploughing

Totally innocent of the myth of progress and the scandal of death and failure that account for modern sentimentality in its most wrongheaded and obnoxious form, Set the Ploughshare Deep is as realistic a work as a novel by Thomas Hardy or the Old Testament. Tractor and combine axle-deep in muck, seedcorn and soybeans frozen...

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The Alternative Candidate

Several thousand feet below a smoke cloud 20,000 feet thick and 1,500 miles in diameter, the American West looks so peaceful, so at ease, so normal, no matter that over a million acres of it are on fire. The fires, most of them started by dry lightning strikes and burning out overmature forests thickened with...

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A Cowboy at Caramoor

It’s a long ride to hear Andrea Marcovicci, the Maria Calks of cabaret, in concert after I missed her in Billings a couple of years ago. At Katonah, New York, I checked into the first motel I saw, snubbing the horse between a Lexus and a VW bus covered with flower decals, left over from...

Facilis Discensus Averno
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Facilis Discensus Averno

Jacques Barzun’s 30-somethingth book, I though published by HarperCollins, bears the unmistakable stamp of Columbia University, from whose college the author graduated, where he was appointed Seth Low Professor of History, and served for ten years as dean of faculties and provost. I refer, of course, to the college’s once renowned, now démodé, Western Civilization...

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The Centaur

I used to make fun of them, those barelegged, ball-capped figures grunting under the weight of 90-pound loads giving them the appearance of Neil Armstrong on the moon or a man bearing his own coffin on his back: tall, headless silhouettes lurching from around a bend in the trail to dispel the illusion of primordial...

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The Phantom Horse

“What does ‘AQHA 1990 gelding, bred Actual Spark’ mean?” “It means someone has a neutered ten-year-old American quarter-horse, sired by Actual Spark, for sale. Why?” Rhonda looked up from the Casper Star-Tribune she held spread in her lap. “I want to buy a horse.” “What sense does that make? You’re moving back to California in...

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The Voice of the Turtle

“Niuno è solo l’april!” Mimì tells Rodolfo in Act Three of La Bohème. Mimì didn’t survive until April, and if she had she might have felt alone without Rodolfo anyway. Still, spring, like sex, is exuberant, irrational—rather, it’s suprarational. And unignorable, like a 70-mile-an-hour wind, which is what spring amounts to in most of the...

The Cost of Holocaust
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The Cost of Holocaust

        “There is no salvation to he extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can he revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can he found in it. If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because to those who believe, the voice of the...

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Having It All

You could say liberalism is about squaring the circle, if it weren’t for the fact that even liberals don’t really expect to accomplish this feat: They aim at creating the impression they can effect the impossible, and lying afterward about their success in having done it. In between comes an impressive array or sequence of...

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A Sinner in Paradise

White sky, white earth. In the foreground a fenceline: three strands of barbed wire stretched taut between crooked posts cut from a juniper forest growing along the sandstone hogback, the bottom strand running in and out of low drifts of scalloped snow. The brushy tips of sagebrush vibrating on a stiff wind above the snowglaze,...

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Friends at a Distance

Second only to prostitution, writing is the loneliest profession. Because a writer’s work is wherever he happens to be, he has no real need to be anywhere; because writing is neither a team sport nor a cooperative enterprise, and because the laborious act of composition is notoriously prone to distraction, the writer normally performs his...

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After the Flood

In the nearly 11 years since Chronicles took up the issue of virtually uncontrolled immigration to the United States, a great deal of political and social ground—much of it unrecoverable—has been lost. Immigrationists don’t claim to have won the debate on immigration reform, because they haven’t. Aside from writing op-ed pieces, nasty and dishonest reviews...

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The Cowboy Reservation

At the kickoff of fall semester last year, the University of Wyoming hosted a conference attended by James Watt, Pete Simpson (the brother of former Senator Alan Simpson), and Kathy Karpan (an unsuccessful candidate for both governor and U.S. senator), among other notables and celebrities, to discuss the state’s supposedly dismal economic and social future....

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Bliss Meadows

Most of the 50 states having been designed as political units rather than the geographical ones John Wesley Powell vainly urged Congress to consider in the case of the Western territories, there’s no particular reason why southeastern Wyoming should be much more than the place where Nebraska, Colorado, and the Cowboy State fit together. And...

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Waiting Nights, Beastly Days

The high Colorado Rockies are like a type of beautiful woman, eye-catching without being especially interesting. Spectacularly well-endowed, they are also obvious, unsubtle, lacking in individuality and complexity, bland in their stunning perfection, with a hint of vulgarity. Or perhaps it’s the sort of people who are drawn in glittering swarms to these towering fourteeners,...

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Backtracking for Home

I was gone from Wyoming less than two years, not so long as to forget, just enough for the shock of recognition to be poignant. The cold northern skies, the tilted mesas tinged green with sagebrush and purple with lupin, and how they smell after rain; the dark, distant mountains whose mottling snows above timberline...

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Every Man for Himself

El Paso del Norte . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Tiguex . . . Santa Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Oñate was a weeks-long ordeal up the Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour-and-20-minute flight, including 20 minutes on the ground at...

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Just You Wite, Maddy Hallbright, Just You Wite!

For Washington architects attempting the construction of a brave new unipolar world, the end of Henry Luce’s American Century is not even faintly clouded by the suspicion that America (meaning what was reorganized in 1789 as the United States) has virtually ceased to exist, after a mere 200 years. And if America isn’t America anymore,...

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Home and Abroad

The stock market is over 10,000, Michael Kinsley exhorted Pat Buchanan recently, and so America can do as it likes internationally in the exercise of the U.S. mega-military machine that Madeleine Albright has been slavering, throughout her Foggy Bottom years, to activate. America, according to journalistic convention, is fat, happy, and content, having arrived finally...

The Road to Regression
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The Road to Regression

        “Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...

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The View From Out Here

There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...

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Citizen Ed

It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary terms of decades, centuries, and millennia; what is certain is, the dead don’t. Edward Abbey had been deceased just two months short of ten years and I was defunct about four months, entombed that long in the overpopulated, electronicized, ideologized megasprawl...

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Wildness in Waiting

Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....

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Neoenvironmentalism

The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...