Western voices

The blog will be silent for the next week while I travel with a group to Biloxi to help rebuild houses damaged by Katrina. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on two of our alternative books for November: The Ninemile Wolves, by Rick Bass and Coyote’s Canyon by Terry Tempest Williams. I can’t imagine how these two could have occupied the same stage at the book festival. Other than sharing a love for the Western landscape, they seem to see with different eyes and speak with different voices.

Rick Bass clearly sees the wolves of Ninemile Valley as his blood brothers, magically able to slip the bonds of civilization like smoke and shadows, yet tragically drawn into the pulsing magnetic field thrown off by the domestic way of life, by ranches and roads, cattle and property lines. The Western dilemma. We can’t live like wolves. In these days and even in this place, even the wolves can’t live like wolves. Yet, he can’t bring himself to shuck his Western mindset enough to come out and actually say right out that he too is trapped like them. Rather, like a professor in a cowboy bar, he adopts a too-gruff tone of voice and reminds us that he too carries a gun and can kill. It’s not persuasive and it’s not meant to be. In fact, his very ambivalence is eloquence and reveals his emotional tie with the land and the wild.

Terry Tempest Williams doesn’t try to disguise anything. Reading her is like listening to an old hippie who has been wandering in the desert since 1969. She sees the spirit in all things, even to the point of not seeing – or willing not to see – the physical and just plain animal side. I was surprised to learn that she is a naturalist because her stories dwell so much in myth and mystical meaning that nature seems like only the pale backdrop for her dramas of the heart.

Listen:

When traveling to southern Utah for the first time, it is fair to ask if the redrocks were cut would they bleed. And when traveling to Utah's desert for the second or third time, it is fair to assume that they do, that the blood of the rocks gives life to the country.

Oral tradition reminds one of community and community in the native American sense encompasses all life forms, people, land and creatures. Landscape shapes culture. Aldo Leopold states, ”the rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects the corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.” Perhaps we can begin to find the origins of our cultural inheritance in the land. Not just backward, but forward to understand the profound interconnectedness of all living things. As Gregory Bateson says, if the world be connected, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds whether ours, or those of redwood forests or sea anemones.