On a flank of the White Mountains not far from the Maine state line lies a small New Hampshire town called Albany, population 735. Every seven years, town officials arrange for a surveyor to walk the boundaries of the town, clearing brush, cleaning up markers, and checking to see whether a neighboring, larger town might...
Twenty-five centuries ago, in a narrow mountain pass 80-odd miles from Athens, the armies of Iran fought a brutal battle with the armies of Europe. The Iranians were defeated (not that day, but not long thereafter), putting an end to their ambitions to extend their empire into an unwilling West. The Iranians left, bitterly lamenting...
It is a sign of the times that one of the most talked-about reality-TV shows of the season centers on a woman who desires to lose weight. Lots of weight. The show’s star, Ruby Gettinger, now tips the scales at around 500 pounds, having once climbed to 700. She has adult-onset diabetes, thyroid problems, and...
Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all ...
Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all that the floods of May and June 2008 that inundated much of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and you have a perfect storm—at least...
When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake. When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...
These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you. The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country. Vegetables, fruits, meats,...
These are bad times to be an eater in America, as anyone who has suffered sticker shock at the supermarket can tell you. The cost of necessities such as bread, milk, and eggs has risen steadily in the last two years—by as much as 30 percent in some parts of the country. Vegetables, fruits, meats,...
Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there. The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...
For most of the 19th century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place. The myths of Hollywood and the wishful thinking of certain revisionist historians notwithstanding, throughout the region, for every gunfighter there were a hundred stockbrokers, and for every outlaw, ten-thousand farmers. The West was urban as much as rural, settled as a...
Edward Abbey never met a controversy he didn’t like. Philosopher of the barroom and the open sky, champion of wilderness, critical gadfly, fierce advocate of personal liberty, Enemy of the State writ large: For 40-odd years, Ed roamed the American West, a region, he wrote, “robbed by the cattlemen, raped by the miners, insulted by...
One hundred and seventy miles southwest of Tucson, hard by the Mexico line, stands a weathered mountain range called the Cabeza Prieta. It is a place of weird landforms and scarce but formidable vegetation, a graduate school for desert rats that only the best prepared dares enter. The geography of the place says, Stay away. ...
Cultural bridges are sometimes made of unlikely materials. One, for instance, is the hoary Steppenwolf rocker-stomper “Born to Be Wild,” a favorite of the Western suds, studs, and leather crowd for three decades, and now, thanks to an accident of history, a fixture at the karaoke bar of Beijing’s Minzu Hotel. Although I protested my...
University presses are in trouble these days. Beset by a decline (intellectual and numerical) in the specialized academic readership to which they have always catered, encountering rising production and overhead costs, and supported with fewer and fewer dollars from their parent administrations, many of them now face the prospect of closing their doors or remaking...
The interstate highways, John Steinbeck complained in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley, “are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. When we get these thruways across the country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” When...
In the closing years of the 19th century, Indians throughout the American West began to dance. Dervish-like, they danced for hours and days on end, in the belief that their ecstasy would call forth the gods, bring back the dead, and banish the conquering Europeans from North America. A Paiute elder named Captain Dick explained...
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
In his journal, the psychologist William James records that he once met Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough had been among the first Western books to attempt to record systematically the beliefs of traditional peoples around the world. James, then undertaking ambitious projects of his own, asked Frazer whether he had ever met any of...
Saint Ambrose, the reputed author of the Athanasian Creed, did not move his lips when he read. Neither did Ambrose’s pupil and colleague Saint Augustine. The Roman chroniclers who witnessed this feat thought it only a curiosity, and the provincial missionaries’ example took generations to become the ruling style of reading in the West. Regardless...
Gary Snyder’s new books A Place in Space, a collection of essays and talks, and Mountains and Rivers Without End, a cycle of poems, are of a piece. Both summarize more than 40 years of writing on literary, environmental, and social concerns. Both speak to causes that Snyder—in the familiar personae of walker and hitchhiker,...
Wallace Stegner’s death on April 13, 1993, was not, as the cliche has it, untimely. He had lived to the respectable age of 85, after all; had lived to see the wide-open West of his early years carved by bulldozers, devoured by cities, and filled with people. Untimely, no; but perhaps ironic, for Stegner died...
The criminal trial of the former football great O.J. Simpson on the charge of murder, a trial that overshadows the Gulf War as the media event of the 1990’s, has been over for more than a year. The civil trial against him, charging that he violated the civil rights of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron...
It all started with television. Early in 1992, then Vice President Dan Quayle took the sitcom Murphy Brown to task because its lead, played by Candice Bergen, was to give birth out of wedlock. The show and its sponsors’ apparent endorsement of this transgression, Quayle argued, was proof that the entertainment industry was antifamily, or,...
On a bright winter morning in 1907, a rancher went searching for a lost calf deep in a labyrinthine canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Descending into a draw so steep that his horse could not follow, he stumbled upon an astonishing find: Betatakin Ruin, a large cliff house complex that seems almost to hang in...
The life of country people, the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has observed, is marked by a surprising complexity. To be successful it requires deep knowledge of the land, of the seasons in their time, of plants and animals—to say nothing of markets, freight costs, and federal regulations. Plant early, and risk late frost; plant late,...
Of the four major North American deserts, the Mojave has been, at least until recently, the least explored. Good parts of the Sonoran Desert are more forbidding; most of the Great Basin Desert lies farther from highways and settlements; and much of the Chihuahuan Desert is less interesting than the fiercely hot Mojave of California...
Certain frontline soldiers in Vietnam, Michael Herr has written, went off to battle in the jungle whistling the themes to the television shows Combat and The Mickey Mouse Club, making Vietnam the first television war in more ways than one. Brian Alexander, a journalist, carries a different television talisman into the jungle in Green Cathedrals,...
At the start of his new novel, Finding Moon, Tony Hillerman apologizes “for wandering away from our beloved Navajo canyon country.” That apology, however, is unnecessary. While Finding Moon may not be Hillerman’s best novel to date, it takes its readers on a suspenseful ride through exotic country in just the wav that his best-selling...
American literature, Wallace Stegner once observed, is not so much about place as motion: we are a restless people, and we write restless books that hurtle us from A to B with a blur to mark our passage. Discounting Stegner’s own lovely evocations of place in books like Wolf Willow and Grossing to Safety, one...
If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world’s richest nations. As it is, one in every ten Americans now resides in the so-called Golden State. Its economy affects not only those...
America, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner had it, is a land defined by its frontiers, once inexorably westward- lending, led by Manifest Destiny. The cultural geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer gave Turner’s “frontier thesis” a twist that denizens of the New West will appreciate: “The westward movement in American history,” he wrote, “gave rise to the...
The current debate over the so-called cyberstream, the data highway that futurists promise will lead us to a technoutopia, has many people bewildered, so dense is it with rhetoric and empty assertion. This is not surprising: most of the debate is filled by boosters of gadgetry on the one hand, by neo-Luddites on the other....
It is by now a truism to say that the border between the United States and Mexico encompasses a third nation, one that shares in both societies but that forms its own culture. That may well be, but the border represents different things to different people. For some Anglos, it is a glimpse of Third...
Away on the western brink of the Pacific Rim lies a land so mysterious to most Americans that it might as well be mythical. There, according to popular understanding, thrives a breed of 122 million fantastically rich people who through black magic have siphoned off the wealth of the Western world. They need no sleep....
The Ozark Mountains make up an area that American literature has largely passed by, leaving it the province of folklore and song, of homespun stories that seldom make their way to the lowlands. Ken Carey’s fine new book about the region, Flat Rock Journal, fills a great void, and not simply because with a literature...
“All artists,” my old friend Ed Abbey was fond of saying, “should have their lips sewn shut.” Certainly, to judge by current trends in the art world, many ought to have their fingers broken, their easels burned, their chisels hammered into plowshares. Witness, to name but one instance, last summer’s Kulturfest in sunny San Ysidro,...
It is ironic that the modern environmentalist movement was founded bv men with whom most modern environmentalists would have nothing to do today: game hunters, many so avid for the chase that they would spend fortunes to collect antlers and skins and skulls from far-off places. Theodore Roosevelt, to name one distinguished early conservationist, was...
The frontiers of the world breed many men of John Audubon’s ilk: footloose, intemperate, experimental, in questionable standing with the law. He is better known today for the conservation society that bears his name—a group that began as a birdwatching organization and evolved into a powerful lobbying force—than for his singular contributions to American science,...
All literary genres have their loyalists, but few have more devoted—and querulous—readers than the Western. So when in the mid-1980’s rumors began to circulate that Larry McMurtry, hitherto known for his angst-ridden tales of modern Texas, was at work on an epic oater, shoot-’em-up fans began looking for a noose, sure that the bespectacled belletrist...
Gerald Vizenor intends in his fictions to pay due homage to Coyote, the American Indian trickster figure, through twist-and-turn narrative high jinks. He has often been successful, notably in the rollicking novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China, a comic masterwork in which a visiting Native American scholar sets a nation of a billion...
Folklore is not history, and mythmakers hate complications. Finally we have a reliable life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College whose earlier book Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) won the American Historical Association’s prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Daniel Boone...
Hunter S. Thompson does not suffer fools gladly. For that matter, he seems to suffer no one at all, gladly or not. A survivor of the 1960’s, he has deemed his contemporaries “a whole subculture of frightened illiterates” and those younger than they “a generation of swine.” (And these are the people he professes to...
Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a “personality” in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person. As is so often the case with figures of public celebrity, the facts of Poe’s life have been obscured by layers of...
Rivers exercise a strange pull on the human imagination; they work their way into every art form, from Bernini’s Renaissance sculptures of the great flows of Europe to Mikhail Sholokhov’s social-realist novels of Cossack life along the Don to Basho’s haiku celebrating the waterways of northern Japan. In this country no region has taken to...
“Every kind of writing is good save that which bores.” —Voltaire The Pacific Northwest of the United States, embracing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana, has long been a major source of agricultural and mineral wealth. For generations it has also served as a center for the fine arts, but only recently has it done...
At the age of 83, Wallace Stegner is the éminence grise of Western American literature, a man responsible for shaping the writing not only of the region but also that of points eastward, thanks to the scores of graduates from the Stanford writing program that bears his name. Stegner’s work, regrettably, sells far less than...
A few months ago I went out into the Arizona desert to take photographs for a book of natural history I am writing. I had with me an expensive, late-model Japanese camera that might be advertised as “idiot-proof,” had the manufacturer been less guarded in the tone of its publicity. In fact, the camera turned...
The old man has done a bit of everything that a journalist can do. He has been an opera critic, a war correspondent, a sportswriter. He prides himself most on the years he spent covering the bullfights of his native Sevilla. For some time now he has been mumbling to his American visitor, Bruce Schoenfeld,...
The wide-eyed declamations of Shirley MacLaine to the contrary, there is nothing particularly new about the so-called New Age, that hodgepodge of religious borrowings from diverse sources ranging from the genuine (Buddhism, cybernetics) to the quackish (L. Ron Hubbard, Ignatius Donnelly). What is new—and surprising, in a creepy sort of way—is the number of Americans...
“America,” noted H.L. Mencken, “is a land so geographically tilted that everything which is loose rolls to California.” In the last few years, however, it seems that most of the great untethered mass has run out of steam amid the cactus groves of nearby Arizona, known in these parts as the poor man’s California and...