West

Grant Ingram

The West. To be sure there are spots around this country that take the breath away with their beauty. Thoreau on his Walden Pond wrote about the beauty that he encountered there; the rawness of the land captured something in him that aroused his inner spirit to the heights of pureness. Byron poeticized the Lake District where Ambleside sits on the edge of heaven. Bede Griffiths claims salvation in an English sunset. I wonder what these men would have said having had lived their lives in the West. This place has a penchant for toughness over beauty. The mesquite and cactus scrub lands of West Texas, the high New Mexican desert, the high country of the Rockies, the endless plains of Wyoming and Montana. To the aesthetic, there is some congruity in these landscapes—each inhospitable in its own way. Far from the gentleness of Connecticut or Virginia, the land imposes itself upon those that choose to live west, and in that resides its beauty. A pioneer spirit still walks out here—the frontier’s disappearance a fresh lament. At least in this kitchen.

I find that I don’t have many compadres with respect to my views here. My grandfather raised sheep in Nolan County, Texas his whole life. I remember his grungy hat of yellow mesh and denim with a patch on the front reading “CAT diesel power.” I remember him slapping that damn hat on his thigh yelling “Hyaw!” while kicking rocks at those poor sheep.

As a kid it seemed like that’s all ranching was—kicking rocks at sheep and cutting the occasional puss pocket out of a cow that had gotten too far into a prickly pear. Looking back it’s startling to me that my granddad may well be the last man I’ll know who lived a life utterly connected to the land. He was a philosopher in his own way: the way a lot of the old timers were. That’s going away now, as are the traditions they kept. But he was prescient in one respect. Sheep don’t do the business they once did.

Cattle, mythical as they are to the West, were always an English bred animal destined to anguish and kill profits in the summer heat and bitter winters.

Domesticating buffalo would have been a much better idea. Regardless of the history of it all, kicking rocks may be all that remains for the ranchers of future generations. Still, the western wear shops are doing good business, prices for ranch land are going up and up, people are buying and buying, and it seems that one of the greatest icons of Americana, the cowboy boot, has found a home in the hipster kids scene today.

I don’t know exactly why I feel a sense of loss, though I do. I grew up in a mid-sized city, spent some summers at the ranch (only for fishing and shooting bottles with the .22—leisure time), but I still feel a profound sense that something major has cracked in our society that we, I, don’t have a strong connection with the land.

“All cattlemen, herdsmen, drovers, men who follow grazing animals over the land, seeking the grass that nourishes them—such men, pantheistic by nature, resolutely reject anything that smacks of the modern world: its politics, its art, its technology. What they accept, at a profound level, is the cycle of nature, in which men and animals alike are born, grow old, and die, to be succeeded by new generations of men and animals. Recycling of this natural sort does not bother men who live on the land; some even resent the fact that modern burial practices retard the process. The notion that they will soon become part of the food chain doesn’t bother them at all.”

I read this passage tonight in a wonderful book by Larry McMurtry called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Maybe he’s got it right. Perhaps the great schism that I feel is that I’ve become insulated from being part of that food chain. No longer in today’s society do I have to worry about food, shelter, basics—no, I’ve been to college, have a job teaching school, and live in an apartment near downtown. I’m not, in a very real sense, subject to nature’s whims. Provided another Katrina doesn’t hit San Angelo, I’ll remain much more subject to things like economic instability. Though I’ve inherited that quality to care very little for today’s politics, art, and technology, I am much more connected to these things than I find comfortable. It is the sense of a loss of something that I never had that runs deep in me. The land under the western sky leaves me with a sense that I belong to it, though I’ve never quite figured out how. I do know that I miss the stars when I’m in the big city. I miss the sunsets over the cotton fields. I miss the smell of a storm a hundred miles away and watching it roll across the flat plains.

There’s a rhythm to it all—a feeling that it is as it should be. Maybe, here in this kitchen, it is that feeling that I miss most of all.