We were ennobled by the land’s awful beauty, its sudden violences-but we remained its master. It was not our goal to bring justice and order to the land, but these things came because we were there and we were good. I might add that we were brave and tamed that landscape and made it useful, which is to say it was no longer a landscape but a backdrop for our ambitions.
You might ask who this “we” is, and the answer is, of course, us. Growing up there, a white kid, I was taught that the land was empty, save for what was wild, before we got there. If I had to describe to you what these myths are, I would say they have to do with power and landscape and self-reliance. This simultaneous flirtation with the past and declared victory over it is where the myths of the West begin. It would be two decades before I realized that most of what we did on those weekends was impossible-that the land on which we stood was practically inarable, that to put a temperature-controlled pool at the center of it was a folly beyond words, that the access to water and food that seemed to never end in a house packed with domesticated objects of the West (tools, guns, animal heads staring out from their taxidermy in mute protest) was a way of enshrining a victory over the past. So much of what I know about the West I learned in that single brief pathway, out of the heat, through a living room, and into the artificial cool of a miniature ranch-the soles of my feet wet, but dry by the time I was standing by the refrigerator.
#Hard west four evangelists tv
One of the most intense memories of my childhood is running from the bright white light near Carl’s pool into the cool dark of his house, passing his guns and the wood-paneled TV set, usually playing a western on silent, and pulling a hand-chilling can of beer from a refrigerator stuffed with meat. He was kind to my brothers and me, and often dispatched us inside the house to get him another beer. Carl was as tanned as a leather sofa, smoked cigars, and spent a lot of time in his swim trunks. One of the shocks of arriving back at Carl’s ranch after one of those buzzing jaunts was to walk through a gate to his inner sanctum, where a perfectly blue pool gazed at the sky unblinkingly. Grit and hot air would blow across your face-the engine felt dangerously close. Riding in that smaller car down two-lane roads at speed was like hanging outside the cockpit of a crop duster. Carl drove a long white Cadillac with cow horns on the hood and a tiny green MG convertible, which backfired and leaked oil. He and his brother operated a slaughterhouse, and occasionally there’d be up to a hundred head of cattle, fattening up. I learned all this on a ranch 20 miles east of Sacramento, where my uncle Carl lived. So for a long time the culture encouraged itself not to speak of them but rather to perform them and allow them to enact themselves upon us. For to subject our myths to actual debate would shatter the projected nostalgia upon which they depend. Were they written down, no one would believe them. In this way, the myths of the West-when you live there-can feel as inevitable as the size of a sky or the heat of summer, the scarcity of water. That to live in the West is to spend your time unconsciously assembling a story in your head-like a melody that has been presented to you in parts. You might think one could dodge this heritage, until you realize that it’s all around you.
In the pose of advertising pitchmen or the way a person stands when wearing a gun. In gestures and overheard sounds, in the half-remembered plots of bad movies. Growing up in the American West, one inherits a set of myths so grave and insubstantial they can only be passed on in the dark.
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