Brown: The Last Discovery of America (19 page)

In
Arctic Dreams,
Barry Lopez observes Americans “as temperate zone people . . . have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice.”

However fierce is America’s history, however notorious we are for the violence of our impulse, the prevailing myth of Americans (among ourselves) is indeed temperate. We prefer plainness in our theology, in our food, in our rhetoric; we mistrust extremes of allegiance; we mistrust even excessive plainness. Thus, too, did we construct caution into our system of governance—three countervailing powers to keep any one office or person or kind from holding too much. America is strong, we believe, because the majority belongs to the middle class, the temperate class; strangers alike to extremes of wealth and want.

Foreigners point to our Civil War as evidence of internecine hotness.

Silently we refer foreigners to cool marble monuments dedicated to young Americans sent to fight in foreign lands where the tyrants of winter held sway.

Foreigners point to our Wild West.

But foreigners misunderstand the early American’s sense of his task. The impulse of the Wild West was not wildness but domesticity.

In cowboy movies at the air-conditioned Tower Theater, the Wild West was a province of lost boys: an assay office and a saloon, presided over by the only suit in town, Blackie—Mister Blackie—who sported a close-clipped mustache and a string tie, who smoked cigars, but not the big kind. Until: One particularly fine morning, the second wave of newcomers arrives—the temperate wave, the civilizers—the schoolteacher and the preacher, Starbucks, Aaron Copeland, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the new sheriff, ardent, book-learned, loose-forelocked.

Caught in the middle—linking the generation of disorder to incoming good—stands the theatrical moll, the prostitute, saloon singer, a pragmatist who has an “arrangement” with Blackie (she lives upstairs in his saloon), though she reserves a transparently good heart and reveals a foreshadowing bullet-hole-sized beauty mark on her powdered left breast. She comes quickly to more than admire the sheriff, who says to her, “I’ll bet you’d look real pretty without all that war paint.” In the face of such naïveté, she must lower her spidery lashes. We understand she will never live to wear gingham. The schoolmistress, who doesn’t put out, will get the sheriff.

Beyond the muddy edges of town, there was never any question about the horizon’s meaning. The horizon was an encroaching wilderness, unmaking.
Blackboard Jungle. Dragnet. The Man with the Golden Arm. The War of the Worlds. Frankenstein. Psycho.
The barely inhabited West was where sociopaths roamed, where Gabby Hayes minced around in an apron, and mountain men bedded doe-eyed Indian maidens who had hearts of wampum, but would never live to wear-um gingham. The confrontation with wildness was the coming attraction, more of the same. Onward, onward would the pioneers move—westward—west toward Burbank.

Hollywood began putting the brakes on cowboy movies in the late fifties; Burbank was enveloped by smog.

In the 1930s, that quintessential New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, took his chilly brain on tour. He discovered here, in the Far West—in temperate San Diego—the highest number of suicides in the country; the highest rate of depression. “You seem to see the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure. Here our people, so long told to ‘go West’ to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight.”

What Edmund Wilson knew would not yet alter the nation’s sense of the land and its meaning. Throughout the twentieth century, as throughout the nineteenth, Americans were famously an east-west people. We told our meaning as we told time, counterclockwise. The past lay east, the future west. Europe, the previous shore, was the Old World; we the new, the ringing moment, twelve o’clock. China, the old again, and so on.

Some Americans once took fatal exception to the east-west narrative line. Civil War rebels invented a south-north point of view, insisting that Easterners were in fact Northerners. Beyond the slave owner’s sin, the impertinence committed by Southerners was their invention of a heterodox narrative line.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once described the Mason-Dixon line as the border to Latin America. Perhaps Fuentes meant that the Old South, like the Latin South, was a culture agrarian in its ethos, baroque in its social organization; so actual in its imaginative life as to appear fantastic. Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty, as magical realists. And Faulkner, of course (according to García Márquez).

In
Walden,
Henry David Thoreau extolled the wild goose as “more of a cosmopolite than we”—we Americans. “He breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.” The advantage of the Canadian goose, in Thoreau’s exemplum, is that Nature obliges geese to a north-south runnel.

Thoreau was determined to take the direction of his life from Nature. But Nature, as manifest in the purlieus of Walden Pond, was not the Nature of the Wild West. Wild-eyed teenagers who left Concord for Sacramento were of a different, an adversarial, opinion regarding Nature. Thoreau was horrified by stories of the cruelty toward Nature of westering Americans—accounts of a giant redwood cut down; photographs of young men dancing upon the sawn stump. America would never have achieved temperance if westering Americans’ estimate of Nature had not been so mad; if America’s reverence for domesticity had not been so mad.

The mid-twentieth century brought federal discontinuity to the American narrative line. The U.S. Congress brought geographical exotics—Hawaii and Alaska—two new “states” into our union. Both territories were exteriors—anti-domestic in theme, in aspect. The one forbidding, the other erotic; both compositions of water—the one frozen, the other melted sky.

By the early 1960s, popular technologies like cheap air conditioners and jet airplanes, plastic cups and Interstates, reoriented Americans upon new migratory paths and new spiritual paths. Popular technologies ameliorated the tension of the east-west line, which was also the Judeo-Christian line, which was also the transcontinental railroad.

Americans, for the first time, were released from the tyranny of seasons, as well as from the sympathy of seasons, as well as from any defining sense of rootedness. The country divided, in popular speech, in fashion, in fiction, into zones of cold and hot. The “rust belt” became our corrupting past—the end of the Industrial Age. The Sun Belt was a newer, more ancient history that intrigued; a zone of preference. The Sun Belt adapted folkways of Native American spirituality. The Sun Belt was at once the launching pad for modern missiles—a new age of exploration—and a prehistoric landing strip.

The artificial breeze (popular technologies like cheap air conditioners and jet planes) lured Americans from the temperate zone, to situate a new majority of the nation within a bright Gehenna. Though they were following the trail of Thoreau’s Canadian goose southward, the jet stream pioneers were no less determined than their westering ancestors to govern Nature. The Sun Belt thermostat was fixed; it went no higher, no lower, than spring. People of the New South claimed not to feel the heat; people claimed not to think about heat because they were piped, from the air-conditioned office building to the air-conditioned car; from the car to the front door. In between, the merest intimation of an intemperate Nature.

Today’s Michigan matron, let us say, and despite her arthritis, for which there is no cure, and despite chronic disappointment, for which there is no cure, nevertheless flies with the complacency of Thoreau’s goose. At the first sign of frost, she abandons her native thirty-two degrees for a two-hours-distant condo on a fake lagoon in Florida that used to be a lagoon. The Michigan matron, let us say, now imagines America as she imagines her life, as she imagines her garden—as bounded by seasonal borders. Between airports there is no sense of direction. There is Departure and there is Arrival. Exit autumn; enter spring. In between there is only a manageable interval of stale air.

Easterners and Midwesterners who moved south into the Sun Belt found themselves living alongside Hispanics whose habit was to describe the United States as
“el norte,”
describing their journey. That description became my father’s habit as well—California as
el norte
—though my father’s impulse was ironic and was meant, as were most of my father’s utterances, to mark my father’s distance from American perspective.
El norte
became my father’s gloss on the gringo’s sense of history, the gringo’s compass, but also the Mexican grudge, but also the Mexican infantilism (clinging to Mother Mexico), but also my father’s disappointment with his own placement in the world. But also his son’s optimism (my inclination to be buoyed by the weightless optimism of the West). I had no history. I was born in the West.

One morning my father announced: “We came north to live in the American West, Mama,” as if this were the script for an American movie about our family. My mother was oblivious of the joke, which was directed, anyway, at my ambition. For, you see, my father understood my ambition. My father had no past in Mexico. He had been an orphan. He left Mexico as one leaves a cold room.

My family knew many Mexican men who came to
el norte
only to work. They came north in order to sustain the dream of a complete and enduring life elsewhere. Never did these Mexican men speak of having left the past behind, as Westerners in Sacramento spoke of having left the past behind them, or as my father spoke of the past as beneath him. These Mexican men worked to sustain the past; they sent money to the past every Saturday. From the Mexican migrants’ point of view, California was a commute.

The Mexican ambition for
el norte
has changed since my childhood, insofar as it has become a predominantly metropolitan ambition. Most peasants who now travel north follow rumors of cities of gold, where there are dishes that need washing, beds that need making, roofs that need mending, swimming pools that need cleaning. From the Mexican migrants’ point of view,
el norte
remains a robust ambition, a robust way of looking at the American West.
El norte
remains a viable term.

At academic conferences on the American West (
Whither the American West?
), I now find myself auditing the proceeding with something of my father’s sensibility, something of his humor. Professors in cowboy boots speak of the fragility of the American West. The future is a danger to the American West, no longer its point. Ecologists, historians, call for intervention; speak of Indians needing protection (not the gambling tribes); they speak of streams, trees, salmon, wetlands—wilderness—as needing protection.

What is endangered in America is the notion of the West. In the late 1950s, at the same time that California became the most populous state, Alaska became a new horizon—an albino hope, a gray-rolled cumulus, a glacial obsession—like Melville’s great whale. Alaska absorbed all the nouns that lay bleaching along the Oregon Trail. Solitude. Vacancy. Wilderness.

Several states now cluster under the white belly of Alaska: Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon, northern portions of Colorado and Utah. In something like the way the East Coast invented the West, California has invented a rectified North. From the perspective of California, Oregon is a northern state; Seattle is a northern city. Vancouver becomes a part of the continuum without regard to international borders.

Many Americans already need an escape from the overpopulated cities of the sun. The new North is where environmentalists seek a purer air or stream, a less crowded freeway. The disenchanted seek simplicity. The new North is where militiamen seek an older, whiter, elbow-roomier America. The new North is where nostalgic skinheads pursue the Norman Rock-well idyll, fleeing Hispanics who swarm the construction sites in L.A.