Storming the Gates of Paradise (4 page)

On another road trip a few years ago, we’d gotten on Interstate 50 farther west and driven through the part of the highway that is also the Bravo 17 Bombing Range, past the electronic warfare installations, past the fake town they practice bombing, to Dixie Valley, a ranching community whose population was forced out by sonic-boom testing in the 1980s. Fallon Naval Air Station—a naval base in this driest of the fifty states—was testing the military uses of sonic booms on livestock, school buses, and homes. Animals stampeded and aborted, windows shattered, people went off the roads, and the navy solved the problem by eliminating the population in this oasis where clear spring water breaks the surface of its own accord.

The few dozen houses had been burned to the ground, and tanks used for aerial target practice were scattered between them. As we looked at the ruins of one ranch house, an extraordinary sound erupted behind us. The best way I can describe it is as the equivalent of a chainsaw running up one’s spine, a noise so powerful it seemed more physical than sound. I turned just in time to see a supersonic jet disappear again, after buzzing us from about two hundred feet. It came from nowhere and went back there almost immediately, as though it had ripped a hole in the sky. The wars fought in the Middle East have been fought here first, in strange ways that could make those wars more real but instead make them more removed.

Once, driving a back road in Nevada, I was stopped for half an hour by a road
construction crew. The woman in the hard hat who’d flagged me down spoke wistfully of San Francisco when I told her where I was from. She’d visited once in high school and spoke as though the seven-hour drive was an impassable distance, and perhaps it was, for her. Her town was called Lovelock, and it had a few casinos but no movie theater or bookstore. When I think of how Americans could fail to measure the carnage caused by hundreds of bombs in one city by that of two hijacked airplane crashes in another, I think of her.

And I think of the wars fought for our cheap gasoline, the wars that make viable not just my summer jaunts but year-round homes sixty or seventy miles from the grocery store (to say nothing of military flights measured not in miles per gallon but gallons per mile). When the freeway clotted up with roadside businesses south of Salt Lake City, this seemed verified by an auto dealer with a flashing signboard: “Our Troops. God Bless Them.” And maybe all the talk about freedom means freedom to drive around forever on cheap petroleum, out here in a terrain just a little less harsh than Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson was afraid of the red lands, afraid that where the arable soil ended so would his arcadian yeoman ideal and Europeans would revert to nomadism. There’s something roving and ferocious about the white West that suggests he’s right; the United States is really more like the lands it’s been bombing lately than like Europe.

Red for a kind of cowboy ethos that society is optional and every man should fend for himself. This vast space was where people stepped out of society when their domestic lives failed or the law was after them. The ethos, of course, ignores the huge federal subsidies that support cattle raising, logging, and mining, just as Republican tax cutters overlook the fact that the military they wish to expand consumes the lion’s share of tax revenue. Western and action movies concoct endless situations in which belligerence is justified and admirable, in which a paranoiac autonomy is necessary; and the current president, like Ronald Reagan before him, portrays himself as a representative of these places and their cosmology, an act of self-invention as bold as that of any renamed outlaw. Reagan went from the Midwest to Hollywood; Bush is a product of East Coast privilege, even if he did go to flat, dry Midlands, Texas, to cultivate his insularity and a failed oil business.

Maybe the seductive whisper of these empty places says that you don’t have to work things out, don’t have to come home, don’t have to be reasonable; you can always move on, start over, step outside the social. To think of a figure in this vast western space of the Great Basin is to see a solitary on an empty stage, and the space seems to be about the most literal definition of freedom: space in which nothing impedes will or act. The Bonneville Salt Flats—a dry lake bed in northern Utah—where some of the world’s land speed records have been set, and Nevada’s Black Rock Desert dry lake bed, where more speed records were set and the bacchanalian Burning Man festival takes place every September, seem to have realized this definition in the most obvious ways: speeding cars, naked, hallucinating, tattooed love freaks partying down. And, of course, the U.S. military training for foreign adventures. (In the first Gulf War, the commanders referred to the unconquered portions of Iraq as “Indian Territory.”)

Easy though all this is to deplore on moral grounds, the place is seductive. There’s a sense for me that all this is home, that every hour, every mile, is coming home, that this isolated condition of driving on an empty highway from one range to another is home, is some kind of true and essential condition of self, because I am myself an American, and something of a westerner. There’s a bumper sticker that says, “I love my country but I fear my government,” and, more than most nations, the United States has imagined itself as geography, as landscape and territory first, and this I too love.

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Tory said he was “comfortable” with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. The places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron’s wings when the storm is about to break.

Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we’re rootless except that we’re also the Hopi, who haven’t moved in several centuries; we’re violent except that we’re also the Franciscans
nonviolently resisting nuclear weapons out here; we’re consumers except that this West is studded with visionary environmentalists; and on and on. This country seems singularly dialectical, for its evils tend to generate their opposites. And the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.

The most breathtaking moment in the
Road Runner
cartoon show came when Wile E. Coyote set a trap for Road Runner. The trap poised on a mesa’s edge was a billboard-like image extending the mesa’s dead-end road into a different landscape, so that the coyote’s prey would crash through the paper image and fall to its death. But the indomitable bird ran straight into the picture and vanished up its road. Representation had become habitable space, and it was no coincidence that the landscape represented was the arid terrain of the Southwest. In much the same way, Ike Clanton escaped the Earp brothers’ assault at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, by jumping inside the adjacent photography studio; and the events he had just survived made their own entry into the picture—into literature, moving pictures, and TV. This habit of walking into pictures is the defining cultural habit of the American West, a habit that could be called identity-shifting, self-mythologizing, self-reflexive, simulationist, and a host of other words more often associated with the present moment. But if postmodernism had a birthplace, it was in the Old West.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as tourism sociologist Dean McCannell points out, roving herds of theorists—Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson among them—invaded California, which they described as the capital of postmodernism, the place where the future had arrived. Had they spent as much time reading the region’s history as they did staring out car windows and watching
TV, they would have found that theme parks and drive-by shootings, rogue cops and actor politicians, amnesia and identity-laundering were nothing new; they were in fact Western heritage, just as the toxic waste wars and technology booms bore a strong family resemblance to the previous century’s Indian wars and gold rushes. And if this cowboy postmodernism had a mother, it was Jessie Benton Fremont. She played a willing Wile E. Coyote to her husband, John C. Fremont, who disappeared into the picture of the West she made, and a whole nation followed after him. Out of that picture a century later came a cowboy movie star president who transformed the whole nation into his vision of the Wild West: more weapons, more punishment, more mythology, less regulation, less social welfare, less memory (and another publicly adoring wife, Nancy Reagan, parenthetically pulling the hero’s puppet strings). In that version of the West, past and present, identity is infinitely malleable, and history is indistinguishable from fiction.

Jessie Benton Fremont, by all accounts, would have preferred to be a man, and thereby an adventurer. Born in 1824 to a retiring southern belle and the powerful expansionist senator from the old Old West, the Missouri frontier, she was named after her paternal grandfather and grew up to become her father’s confidante and political aide. Thomas Hart Benton himself saw her as his son and raised her much as though she were one. When she first realized how her gender would constrain her, she cut off her hair and refused the role; a few years later, at seventeen, she scandalized her relatives by cross-dressing in a military uniform at a family wedding. Finally, she settled for marrying the handsome nobody John Charles Fremont, and she and her father invented him as the son she should have been (a good proto-westerner, the illegitimate Fremont had already improved upon his father’s name by adding the accent on the first syllable and the final
t
that made the name speak of mountains).

Thanks to his father-in-law’s influence, Fremont received the command of the government’s 1842 surveying expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Though the journey was of scientific and political significance, it was the literary quality of the report that made it a huge success. By all accounts, that literary flair was Jessie Fremont’s. She got up from her childbed to ghostwrite for her neurasthenic husband, and she continued to write in his voice throughout his subsequent surveys
and for the rest of their lives. The 1843
Report on an Expedition of the Country Lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains
became a best-seller and a guidebook, and it made the man whose name was on the title page a national hero. Emerson complained about Fremont’s narcissistic self-consciousness for all the descriptions of how he and his party looked, amid the romantic descriptions of scenery and thrilling accounts of adventure, but it may have been Jessie Fremont who saw it all as a picture. This pivotal first-person account of the West, this testament of manhood and authenticity, seems to have been the literary construct of a teenage girl who had stayed in the East.

Fremont’s first expedition, the expedition of 1842, reached its climax with the ascent of what he called Fremont Peak in the Rockies. On Fremont Peak, he saw a bumblebee: “It was a strange place, the icy rock and the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains, for a lover of warm sunshine and flowers, and we pleased ourselves with the idea that he was the first of his species to cross the mountain barrier, a solitary pioneer to foretell the advance of civilization.” The mountain and the bumblebee are both reinvented as portraits of the hero, a billion years of geology undone so that the man precedes the mountains; this utterly new place is only a mirror, and, layers upon layers, the man himself may be a fiction made up by a woman. It is clear the West is being invented, not even discovered, let alone encountered. As a text in which one finds in the landscape symbols and signs of oneself, Fremont’s bumblebee incident has a place in symbolist literature; as documentary, it’s more problematic. For the brave bee who is the author’s double in this fiction of authenticity, literature, not life, is the ultimate destination: Fremont pays it fitting tribute by squishing it between the pages of a large book he happened to have with him.

One could wish that the West he concocted had been worthy of a greater philosopher—but Fremont was carrying out Baudrillard’s agendas: “Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory—
PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA
—it is the map that engenders the territory. . . . Simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’ ” (The other West—the West of Native Americans as inhabitants rather than invaders, of an economy dependent on massive federal handouts rather than rugged individualism, of women and various
others disqualified from cowboyhood, of a colossal military infrastructure in which further expansionism is rehearsed—has seldom appeared since, except in recent revisionist Western histories and photographs.)

It was this report and the military actions that followed that Americanized the Mexican West, opened up the land for mining, cattle grazing, military training, the crime and punishment industries, boasting, and forgetting—the characteristic activities of the American West. Before the Fremonts made the place literature, what lay beyond the Mississippi was little known to Yankees. Nobody was interviewing the Indians, and the trappers who knew it well were largely illiterate outsiders too; one of these illiterates, the Indian slayer Kit Carson, became Fremont’s principal guide and was rewritten, by Jessie Fremont among others, into a national hero. Fremont and Carson have towns, streets, mountains, and rivers named after them. They became both the landscape they explored and the developments that effaced it (and in their wake came John Wayne Airport and Roy Rogers State Park). This opportunity to invent oneself, to enter into the new America as a fiction is what the West offered, and what its rootless amnesiac open spaces and society offer still: the self-made man as an artistic rather than merely economic possibility.