Review by Ed Quillen
Western life – June 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Why I’m Against It All – Rants and Reflections
by Ken Wright
Published in 2003 by Raven’s Eye Press
(P.O. Box 4351, Durango CO 81301; 970-247-2433)
ISBN 0-9700044-2-7
FEW PEOPLE who read Durango writer Ken Wright’s essays would call him a “conservative,” but that’s a precise description. Not only does he wish to conserve what’s around him, he wants to push the calendar back to a time when the rural West did some honest work, like ranching and mining, and remained a primitive land apart with washboard roads and party-line telephones.
Or at least if this book has a theme, that must be it. It’s an anthology of 29 pieces which have appeared in diverse publications (including this one). Since these screeds and jeremiads were written to stand alone, they do not align like links in a chain, but they share an attitude.
Wright, who grew up in New England, liked the West he found 20-some years ago. He and his fellow ski bums at (then) low-key Winter Park could share a shack in the winter, live cheaply, work nights and enjoy great powder days — in and out of bounds. He and his fellow river guides could camp above Buena Vista, and because they didn’t have to pay rent, they could afford to close the Green Parrot on most summer nights.
It was a cowboy bar, so “it took a while for our kind to be welcomed there, but enough pool games and shared pitchers of Coors, and we soon became part of the Parrot scene,” which included a fellow they called “Merle” because of his musical preference. “Try to invest a little variety by putting on some R.E.M. or Bad Company or even Johnny Cash, and Merle would simply unplug the jukebox, plug it back in, then plug in enough quarters for a half-dozen sequential listenings of ‘Okie from Muskogee.’ Served us right.”
That was in an essay about his favorite taverns — smoky places with tacky decor and cheap beer, which seem to be vanishing in a wave of brew-pubs and coffee bars. Wright prefers being a redneck: “I mean ‘redneck’ in its best sense, its operational definition: that uniquely American critter, the blue-collar out doors man with the butt-white back and sun-fried head.”
Although he resembles the stereotype in that he hunts and fishes and drives the back roads in an old pickup, Wright puts a deeper meaning into those activities; they’re not just recreation.
“Bow hunting also means I sit a lot, hopefully letting the animals come to me. And I’ve done that, too, especially at dawn and dusk, like now. Just sitting, watching, waiting for … anything. I try hard to carry few preconceived ideas about what might happen out here, because it’s near-impossible to predict from where a deer might step, or how it might look when it appears, or how skittish it’ll be as it moves. When hunting, to expect something is to miss something.”
HUNTING doesn’t just take one outdoors for a change of scenery and pace. It provides the answer for his toddler son’s barbecue question: Daddy, who killed this chicken? That query “made me realize I want to think about who kills my chicken and what its life was like (which, of course, is exactly what the propaganda of packaging and advertising is designed to make you not think about).”
On the water, Wright eschews dry flies in favor of spin-casting, and it’s not for the excitement. “Fishing is boring. It’s absurdly repetitive, and in terms of practical rewards — fish for dinner, or even the excitement of reeling in a honkin’ big fish — it gives a pretty poor return on the money and time invested. It’s neither a practical hobby nor dynamic form of entertainment (and it’s also nearly devoid of meaningful exercise, unless you need to train to spin a lot of little handles or jerk a lot of rods). Yet fishing’s dullness and numbing repetition are precisely its magic.”
In other essays, Wright addresses everything from the new public-land user fees — “The problem .. is not that public lands don’t pay their own way, the problem is thinking that public lands should have to pay their own way.” — to taking children on a river trip: his scampering naked son “is the same little boy who at home refuses to wear anything without either a Colorado Rockies or Batman logo on it.”
BY AND LARGE, these essays are a delight, but I wouldn’t recommend reading this book in a single sitting. One a day or even one a week would be a more rewarding schedule, with less chance of missing gem phrases like “as passively receptive as a solar panel” or people who “lived, rather than made a living,” or the place “where Kokopelli hasn’t been castrated.”
Wright obviously cherishes wilderness, but he loves wildness — in people and places — even more, and he’s eloquent in expressing his fear that both kinds of wild are vanishing as the mountain West gets more sanitized and civilized.
The solution he proposes is “Keep the roads a mess, the infrastructure archaic, the water scarce and the transportation hell. Don’t let the profiteers gouge out the amenities and infrastructure luring the urban refugees now ravaging the west, and they won’t come…. I’m not saying we should shut the door — I moved here, after all. I just say, anyone can live here if they want, as long as they’re willing to do it on this place’s terms. If folks don’t want to give up nice roads, easy access to air transport, bluegrass lawns, tee-times, specialty coffee shops, shopping malls and on-ramps to the information superhighway, then there’s most of the rest of the country already paved over, roaded through, and wired-up for them.”
At times, though, this book has the sound of a middle-aged guy, now married with two children and a monthly mortgage payment, lamenting the passage of the wild and crazy days of youth: the impromptu boogie-until-dawn after-closing-the-bar party; the three- cases-of-tall-boys two-day tours of the Western Slope; the panic of getting stuck half-way down a cliff. Those things may not happen again for Wright (or myself), but when I ponder the matter, it seems clear that today’s mountain-town 20-somethings seem just as talented in fool-hardiness as I was 30 years ago or Wright was 20 years ago.
And despite the best efforts of the civic improvers, our mountain towns still have some filters to discourage the lightweights — like the sparsity of high-paying jobs with benefits that allow urban refugees to enjoy their condos and golf courses.
So while I share a lot of Wright’s attitude, I don’t quite share his despair. Economic cycles come and go, so the get-rich-quick greedheads may depart for greener pastures, just as they did in the early 80s.
That’s my grain of salt for this collection. It’s fine writing — entertaining, informative, sometimes infuriating — that comes from an honest passion for the places and people (both with rough edges) that most of us cherish.
— Ed Quillen
