Nine years ago, I joined the millions before me who left some easterly place chasing adventure and possibility for a home in the West. But I had been a Westerner long before that.
For most of my early life, my image of the West came from a TV screen—John Wayne on horseback framed by a massive sky, and Wile E. Coyote on a Monument Valley cliff-top wearing Acme jet-shoes. It existed in my imagination as mysterious, remote, dangerous and undeniably seductive. I devoured Jack London’s books and became moderately obsessed with 19th-century Native American history; read biographies of Wyatt Earp and George Custer; knew every grisly detail about the Donner Party. Later, my points of reference were surfer dudes and California girls, Hollywood and Vegas. It did not escape my notice that the people who lived Out West seemed to have a heck of a lot of fun, in mostly sunny weather.
My perspective matured during two very different visits in the early 1990s. The first was a trip to Los Angeles where I stayed with a friend. I got up early every morning to run on the beach. The air smelled like rotting garbage, and the view featured a slow-moving river of headlights curled around the shoreline as far as the eye could see. I remember thinking, how do people live here?
Three years later, I was on a reporting gig at a biological research compound deep in the interior of the Mojave Desert. I went for a walk in the semidarkness before dawn. The first sliver of sun was emerging to my left, while on my right the descending full moon hovered above the ridgeline in perfect high definition, white and astonishing. The penetrating quiet was like nothing I had ever heard.
As a resident, I’ve come to know the West as glorious and warted, pristine and defiled. I’ve found solace amid Arizona’s canyons and Utah’s red rock monoliths, in the ancient adobe dwellings of New Mexico and the rugged mountainsides of Washington. I’ve awoken in a hundred primeval places reachable only on foot and thanked providence that I was lucky enough to see them.
And plenty of times I’ve sat in traffic wondering why in the world I decided to move here.
As history professor David Kennedy, ’63, describes in his evocative piece "Can the West Lead Us to a Better Place," the West remains a romantic place that inspires dreams and attracts dreamers, but it’s also in peril. City sprawl eats a little more wilderness all the time, immigration still vexes us, and water has replaced gold as the prize people fight over. The West is to some degree a victim of its own come-hither appeal. For seven generations we have chunked out its mountains, diverted its rivers and built cities. In the process, the region became an engine for commerce and a cultural harbinger.
Which makes solving the West’s problems all the more important, as Kennedy points out. The West is no longer—if it ever was—merely a golden landscape good for the soul, a province of myth and wonder. Today, what happens here affects the daily lives of people around the world. Time to get busy fixing it.
