Review by Clint Driscoll
Western Writing – October 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Living in the Runaway West: Partisan Views from Writers on the Range
Compiled by the editors of High Country News
ISBN 1-55591-048-3
ANTHOLOGIES COME IN HANDY for readers who are pressed for time. A paperback of the year’s best mysteries or best science fiction provides convenient bedside reading or passes the time in airports. Other collections highlight a single author. Still others present a group of writers whose interests focus on particular aspects of one general subject and capture a unique spirit of the times. Such a compilation is Living in the Runaway West, assembled by the editors of High Country News.
For those not familiar with High Country News, it’s a newspaper published every two weeks and dedicated to covering environmental issues in the Interior West. HCN takes on not only the usual suspects of environmental degradation but also federal, state and local agencies, individuals and special interest groups that contribute to the loss or defilement of what makes the West what it is.
Three years ago HCN began a syndicated columns project entitled, Writers on the Range. The intent of the project, according to Senior Editor Paul Larmer, was to provide newspaper Op/Ed editors with regional views on issues facing the Interior West. The columns would provide an option to the typical offerings of eastern columnists concentrating on national issues or locally written opinions covering events of limited interest.
The project has been a success. HCN recruited western-based writers ranging from newspaper reporters and freelance writers to activists and poets living everywhere from Montana to Arizona and Colorado to Oregon. After reading the columns over the past few years, I’d have to say the only requirements seem to be tight writing and a focused thought put down in 800 words or less.
The result has been a series that reads very much like the conversations and arguments that can be heard at the counter of any cafe over morning coffee (where lattès are tolerated but not necessarily respected). The columns can be found on the Op/Ed pages of many western papers including Colorado Central and The Denver Post.
Living in the Runaway West provides a good sampling of the work of the Writers on the Range syndicate for those who have not had the opportunity to read them and a fine collection of some of the best columns for readers who wish to re-read them. The regional orientation, counterbalanced by the individual focus of each contributor, makes this collection of over eighty essays as varied and surprising as the Interior West itself.
But make no mistake, these are, as the subtitle reads, partisan views. No admirers of William Perry Pendley, Larry Craig, Helen Chenowith, members of the Wise Use Coalition or the local Off-Road Vehicle users club will be found on these pages. That is not to say that the writers spout the usual cant found in national environmental fundraising letters. The writers care about the West and what is harming it, but their takes on solutions, or even what those problems may be, are far from predictable.
Although organized into six sections dealing with growth, public lands, Western myths, politics, what makes the West the West, and culture clashes, the contrary reader can start anywhere in the book, skip haphazardly from one essay to another and not miss the essential tenor of the writers. Essays range from confrontational to melancholic to comic; but all of them, with the exception of a policy-boosting sermon by Bruce Babbitt on dam-breaching, will give the reader something to chew on.
Ken Wright begins with “Why I’m Against It All” in which he makes an argument for stopping even the small, incremental changes which will make life in the rural West more convenient for more people who know it would be wonderful if only another small improvement were added, and so it goes, until Quik-Marts, casinos, marinas, resorts, golf courses and four-lane highways abound.
Mary Sojourner sadly watches Flagstaff evolve from a town serving food with real taste into a strip identical to any other in America.
PAUL LARMER, wondering if he’ll ever fit in or always be considered a newcomer in the West, is comforted by the exotic tulips growing among the native cedars in the town cemetery. In another essay, Larmer, who has only one functioning leg, considers the ORV users’ arguments for access to the back country. He concludes he is against opening the wilderness to all. “Wilderness has its own rules . . . Everyone who enters takes a risk, and that’s how it should be. No four-wheelers or snowmobiles to make the experience easier and safer. It’s the big leagues.”
Richard Manning and Paul Krza ponder the whitening of the West. As intermountain towns become distant suburbs of the coastal megalopolis and the major interior cities, are they forsaking the urban diversity which enriches human experience? Is the term “nice place to raise a family” a racial code word?
‘Asta Bowen observes the Makah begin their ceremonial whale hunt and asks about our modern society which has learned to kill without feeling. Andrea Barnett witnesses the annual Montana buffalo slaughter and notes the irony that brucellosis-infected elk are spared because of a strong hunting lobby. Susan Tweit meditates on the fact that Anglos would never tolerate the destruction of a medieval stained-glass window yet they see no problem with blazing a highway through country filled with holy petroglyphs for the convenience of commuters.
On the lighter side Mark Matthews explains why cowboy poetry stinks and Marty Jones cracks the contractor’s code, providing would-be homeowners with the real meaning of such terms as, “First thing in the morning.” Ed Quillen suggests small towns give up celebrating the Old West with rodeos and mining contests and present a New West Festival instead, commemorating the first 10,000-square-foot house to be built and occupied less than one month a year. Contests would include burger-flipping, toilet-scrubbing and lift-attending. (Life imitates art: drink-mixing and wait-person obstacle course contests are regularly held in resorts along the I-70 sacrifice zone).
Living in the Runaway West has much more to offer than what I’ve mentioned. I recommend reading all of it for the good writing and the original thoughts, and once you’ve read it, put the book on the shelf, and after five or ten years take it down and read it again. Because frightening as it may seem, I think these essays are prophetic, and that they will speak an even bigger truth in years to come.
A word of advice, however: Do not use this collection for bedtime reading since the essays cause one to think which can interfere with sleep.
— Clint Driscoll
