Review by Ed Quillen
Tourism – March 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Discovered Country: Tourism and Survival in the American West
Scott Norris, editor
Stone Ladder Press
University of New Mexico
ISBN 0-9637623-0-3
BY SOME RECKONINGS, tourism is the largest industry in the world, and it certainly looms hereabouts.
We know about other industries. Mines devour mountains, cows eat grass, and lumberjacks leave stumps. They’re visible and measurable and often even predictable. But what does tourism do? How does it change a community and its environs?
This anthology is an attempt to answer those and related questions with selections from both the popular and academic realms, separated by fourteen Courtney White black-and-white photographs rich in irony.
The fifteen popular essays include well-known Western writers like John Nichols and Don Snow, along with many who should be better known. They’re all good reading, and they’re sprinkled with trenchant gems.
John Nichols: “Where commerce and social interaction take place solely with transients, culture and responsibility die.”
Jim Stiles: “Those who found a trip to the canyon country to be akin to a religious experience have been replaced to a large degree by recreationists, who regard this country as a playground…We went from ‘desert mystics’ to ‘adrenaline junkies.’ ”
Linda M. Hasselstrom: “Modern travelers who seek ‘wilderness experiences’ often seem intent on hauling as much of their lifestyle along as they can… One effect of this delerium is the implication that the wilderness is just a large gymnasium.”
Jim Robbins: “What people haven’t looked at is whether we’re trading in one kind of colonial status for another. Is the Rocky Mountain West becoming a great theme park?”
Alexander Wilson: “These ‘place-product packages,’ as they’re known in the industry…become industrial plants whose goods are æsthetic experiences and hospitality services.”
Ellen Meloy: “They see the Southwest as a region of federally neutered rivers, where a person is no longer free to kill himself in a four-foot rubber duckie pulling an inner tube piled with beans, testosterone, and a small machete. Instead, some geek rangerette at the put-in asks to see his bilge pump.”
My favorite was Don Snow’s piece, a mea culpa explaining how a committed environmentalist came to be a tourism promoter (for a while). Fight the rapacious coal companies of Montana in the late 1970s, oppose other rip-and-run schemes, and suddenly you get tagged as an “aginer,” opposed to everything. To remain a political force and fight the backlash, you’ve got to be for something once a while.
And here was tourism, which brought in money while relying on clear vistas, clean rivers, pristine hillsides — why not support it, be for something for a change?
“Could any harm possibly come of this? Tourists take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints. Don’t they?… Tourists come for the wildness, the openness, the green, glorious whole. They want water left in the rivers. They want pristine lakes and long, uninterrupted views… Hell, they want what we want.”
But tourism didn’t create a new green politics. “Trust me on this. We didn’t get what we bargained for in our Faustian contract with boosterism. We simply got more, which somehow amounts to less.”
So there’s 121 pages of passionate and informed writing, followed by 14 enlightening pictures. In a just world, this collection would be required reading for a residency permit, or even a visitor’s visa, in the Mountain West. They miss a few obvious topics (resort-belt commuter slums and capital flows spring to mind), but no book can cover everything.
None of this touches directly on Central Colorado — Aspen is the closest locale, and most essays concern New Mexico and Montana — but it really is about the world we live in. Moab issues are often Salida’s and Santa Fé woes can invade Crestone and Westcliffe.
This book could have well ended there, but the editor suffered from a noble intention, “bridging the gap that distances critical social theory from on-the-ground political, ethical, and æsthetic concerns.”
Alas, the critical social theorists from academe apparently forget that few of us rubes are capable of digesting this sort of material: “For this very reason, the Insight Guide olla maiden, posed to sell the Southwest, raises ‘ambiguous and disturbing questions about the æsthetic appropriation of non-Western others — issues of race, gender and power.’ What does it mean not only that the Other is frequently presented …”
This convoluted prose is a pity, for the academics deal with important issues, especially about tourist commerce and local culture. If the critics define a certain style of pottery as “authentic,” then there’s a market and production increases, to where the clay pots are about as “authentic” as so many toasters or computers.
But there’s a reward at the end, an essay from Charles Bowden about Chorizo, the town where “The pigs move on as if nothing has happened. Probably nothing has.” Its location “is best kept a secret. Still, it can be found by anyone who goes somewhere and who then sticks and decides to hold that ground, whatever the cost. In this republic there will be many Chorizos as time stops, place begins, the beer keg is tapped, and the dogs sleep through the heat of the afternoon.”
What’s good in this book is most of it, and that majority is so good that you quickly forget how badly some professors write. Those parts are easy to skip, and the rest is impossible to ignore.
— Ed Quillen
