Brown: The Last Discovery of America (22 page)

To find where the West begins I will need to follow Athene’s U-turned arrow straight through nineteenth-century Wall Street, across the Atlantic to Enlightenment Paris, down the bronzed coast of Western civilization to ancient Greece.

The Greeks associated identity with action. The heroic ideal is the active life. I think of Odysseus. Specifically, the last book of the
Odyssey
—Homer unable to finish his tale. Odysseus, father to Telemachus, son to Laertes, finds his way home to resume his rightful role as husband to Myrna Loy. But the ordered world, prepared and preserved by the heroic deed, does not suit. What, after all, does the achievement of stasis mean for the warrior whose very name connotes wandering?

Such is the rate of change in the West, you end up sounding like some hoary Ancient if you recollect the fragrance of almond orchards where the mystic computer chip clicks; if you remember cattle where almond trees bloom. I meet such middle-aged ancients. The man in Albuquerque has seen his hometown completely changed in forty-two years, even the sky. “They” have changed everything. They, presumably, are his own parents.

The limitation of the Greek ideal is apparent the morning after you have found your way home. The curtains are drawn. The room is close. Too many ruffles. You stare at the ceiling. You look at your watch. Now what?

Left behind, Myrna Loy seeks an aperture as her life constricts to ice cubes and Cablevision. She does not for a moment consider California when she decides to retire in the West. She settles in Santa Fe with its ancient, reassuring patina recently applied with little sponges. She wears blue jeans; nods to “Howdy”; she goes to the opera; sometimes to Mass.

The apparent flattery the East Coast pays California is that the future begins here. Hula hoops, beatniks, Proposition 13, LSD, skateboards, silicon chips, Malibu Buddhism. California, the laboratory; New York, the patent office. The price Californians pay for such flattery is that we agree to be seen as people lacking in experience, judgment, and temper. It seems not to have occurred to the East that because the West has a knowledge of the coastline, the Westerner is the elder, the less innocent party in the conversation.

Californians have been trying to tell Eastern America that our nation is, after all, finite. Only within the last few years—a full century after the closing of the frontier—have we gotten a bite on the cliché:
Tonight, Peter Jennings asks: Is the Golden State tarnished?

A few years ago, after an earthquake in Los Angeles, a television producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked for an interview on the future of California. There had been a race riot in Los Angeles. The Berkeley hills had burned. Floods in the canyons had carried away a Topanga grandmother. The Canadian producer decided we would have our televised conversation at Venice Beach, the place tourists come on Sundays to experience comic extremity by the sea. I would sit in an Adirondack chair, the blue Pacific over my shoulder.

And, by and by, there I was on Venice Beach, wired for sound and my hair blowing east. I had become a correspondent. But this was Tuesday, a gray afternoon, the fog pouring in on a gale. Teenagers wearing Raiders jackets stomped over cables that were lying about, kids so accustomed to TV crews they didn’t even pause to gander. An old guy wanted five bucks to stay out of the shot. A trio of German tourists, two men and a woman, and they all looked like Beethoven, stopped at each of the hundred and one T-shirt and counterfeit stands that lined the beach. The Tarot readers set up their card tables and sat with their backs to the gray ocean, limp-haired priestesses of that monotonous turbine. Panning the scene for something golden to shoot, we did eventually find one happy face—at the concrete Muscle Beach exhibition booth, a sunburned old salt with sagging breasts, eager to pose for the camera in his red nylon bikini, winking insanely with every revolution and flex.

An arrow pointing straight up: LINCOLN TUNNEL. A thun derstorm hid the famous ruminant skyline whose opinions I had memorized through thousands of pages. Following the arrow, we found ourselves immediately in the heart of the city. Theaters were letting out. The Booth, the Plymouth. We turned right. People waited for cabs under an awning at 21. Park Avenue. Thirty blocks of glorious redundancy. When we got to Chris’s building, several doormen, uniformed like Soviet generals, advanced to seize our luggage.

In the morning, Chris’s mother half turned from her correspondence to ask if I had brought along my dinner jacket. There was to be a party on Thursday at the Met for “Tom” and his new wife. Downstairs, a doorman stood watching the slow progress of traffic along Park Avenue.

Chris and I found a diner on Lexington Avenue. A Greek waiter threw down two wet plastic menus. I opened mine with the satisfaction of having achieved my American novel. At the top, under
Good Morning
—cock-a-doodle-do and the rising sun—I read:
SACRAMENTO TOMATO JUICE
.

Several seasons ago Ralph Lauren produced fashion layouts of high WASP nostalgia that were also confused parables of Original Sin. Bored, beautiful children pose upon the blue lawns of Long Island, together with their scented, shriven parents. All are washed in the Blood of the Lamb. The parents have rewon Eden for the sake of the children. The knowing children, however, have found a disused apple under the hedge and have shared it.

Mr. Lauren’s later work attempted a less complicated innocence; he had himself photographed astride a horse. The
mise-en-scène
became the American West. According to
W
magazine, in real life (as we say, allowing for variance), whenever Mr. Lauren wants to escape the rag trade in New York, he repairs to his Double RL Ranch, a 14,000-acre spread outside Telluride, Colorado.

On a meadow within that reserve, Mr. Lauren has constructed a Plains Indian teepee, inside which he has placed club chairs from London and Navajo rugs, electrical outlets, phones, CDs—“stuff an Indian never dreamed of,” one ranch hand remarks.

I do not intend to mock Mr. Lauren’s
Trianon sauvage.
It may represent an authentic instinct for survival, like the family-built nuclear shelters of the 1950s. Leaving all that alone, I should confess I have not made my own peace with wilderness, never liking to be more than two miles from restaurants and theaters. From an air-conditioned car, I often regret suburban sprawl. That is an aesthetic regret. As a Westerner, I must approve the human domination of Nature.

I have been to Telluride only once, for the film festival. Often enough of late I have visited those chic little towns that nestle in the mountain states of the West. Lynn’s wedding in Idaho, most recently—the guests had flown in from L.A. and London. On the Saturday morning, nearly everyone rode into the foothills on horseback.

Whereas I trudged one mile, perhaps two, in the direction of loneliness. A noise stopped me. A crackle or something; a pinecone dropping; a blue jay. I think I did discover an anxiety the pioneers could have known in these same woods a century ago. Injuns? Well, but I am an Indian, and my shoes were getting scuffed. Maybe the woods were dangerously settled? Snow White and her Seven Militiamen? And then a prospect far more unsettling: The forest was empty. I turned and quickly walked back to the lodge, where Ella Fitzgerald’s voice flitted through speakers in the eaves of the lobby.

Mr. Lauren, quoted in
W,
speaks in oracular puffs from beneath designer blankets: “I’m just borrowing the land.” (. . .) “You can never really own it.” (. . .) The
W
article notes, however, that the Double RL Ranch is circumscribed by fifteen miles of white fence.

Wisdom and a necessary humility inform the environmental movement, but there is an arrogant self-hatred, too, in the idea that we can create landscapes vacant of human will. In fact, protection is human intrusion. The ultimate domestication of Nature is the ability to say: Rage on here, but not elsewhere!

In nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of the American West, the land is the dropped rind from a transcendently fresh sky. Time is evident; centuries have bleached the landscape. There is no evidence of history, except the presence of the camera. The camera is debris; the pristine image “taken” is contamination. The camera can only look backward; our appraisal of the photograph is pure and naïvely fond. To see the future we must look through Ray-Bans darkly.

Puritan theology predisposed pioneers to receive this land as the happy providence of God. The gift must have inspired exhilaration, for settlers damned the waters, leveled mountains, broke their backs to build our regret.

An acquaintance in his eighties recently had pits of cancer dug out of the side of his nose. My friend lamented his disfiguring fate in the present tense: “I use sunscreen; never go out without a hat.” The young doctor’s prognosis harkened to a pristine West: “This damage was done a long time ago, when you were a little boy and stayed too long in the sun.”

I believe those weathered Westerners who tell me over the roar of their air conditioners that the wilderness is no friend. They seem to have at least as true a knowledge of the West as the Sierra Club church. A friend, an ex-New Yorker, now a Californian, tells me she was saved from a panic attack, driving one night through New Mexico, by a sudden blaze of writing in the sky:
Best Western
.

I was driving myself to the sea on a twisting wilderness road. Each mountain turn revealed new curtailed vistas, kliegs of sunlight, rocks spilled at the side of the road. Then another turn and, in a clearing, a bungalow, a lawn, a coiled hose, a satellite dish.
What an absurdity, thought Goldilocks, to plant Pasadena here.

Something in the heart of the Westerner must glory in the clamor of hammers, the squealing of saws, the rattle of marbles in aerosol cans. Something in the heart of the Westerner must yearn for lost wilderness, once wilderness has been routed. That in us which is most and least human—I mean the soul—cannot live at ease with oblivious nature. Nor do we live easily with what we have made. We hate both the world without us and the world we create. (Bad suburban architecture hints at good Augustinian theology—we are meant for some other world.) So we mythologize. Ralph Lauren has built roads, sunk ponds, cleared pastures. “My goal is to keep and preserve the West.”

Lauren’s teepee of “commercially farmed buffalo hides” was painted by a “local mountain man” with figures representing Mr. and Mrs. Lauren and their three children.

Once the shopping center is up and the meadows are paved over and the fries are under the heat lamp, we park in a slot, take our bearings, and proceed to the Cineplex to watch Pocahontas’s hair commune with the Great Conditioner. We feel ourselves very sympathetic with the Indian, a sympathy we extend only to the dead Indian. Weeping Conscience has become the patron saint of an environmental movement largely made up of the descendants of pioneers. More curiously, the dead Indian has come to represent pristine Nature in an argument made by some environmentalists against “overpopulation” (the fact that so many live Indians in Latin America are having so many babies and are advancing north).

That part of me I will always name western first thrilled at the West in VistaVision at the Alhambra Theater in Sacramento, in those last years before the Alhambra was torn down for a Safeway. In the KOOL summer dark, I took the cowboy’s side. Now the odds have shifted. All over the West, Indians have opened casinos where the white man might test the odds.

Another summer day, late in the 1960s: I was driving a delivery truck for the Holbrecht Light Company to a construction site at the edge of Sacramento. Making a sharp right turn, I saw a gray snake keeling through the mirage of water upon the asphalt. I make no apology for that snake. It is no literary device I conjure to make a theological point. It was really there in the delivery truck’s path on that summer afternoon for the same reason that Wyoming sunsets resemble bad paintings.

I hadn’t time enough to swerve or to stop.
Bump. Bump.
Front wheels; back wheels. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw the snake writhing, an intaglio of pain. I drove on.

Eventually, I found the empty new house where I made my delivery. After a few minutes, I returned to my truck, retraced my way out of the maze. Only then did I remember the snake and look for it, where I had run over it.

Several construction workers were standing alongside a sandwich truck, drinking sodas. One man, a dark Mexican, shirtless, had draped the snake I killed over his shoulders—an idea that had not yet occurred to Ralph Lauren who, at that time, was just beginning to be preoccupied with high WASP nostalgia.