Monday, June 29, 2015

Vagneur: The myth of the West is all that's left

by Tony Vagneur

We were driving down Highway 24, a young man and myself, pulling a loaded four-horse trailer at about 65 miles per hour, listening to me extol the virtues of the passing landscape as being especially great cattle country. Out of the corner of my eye, the sight of grazing animals caught my attention, and before I could say “cows,” I realized I was staring down a herd of llamas. 

“What the hell? That ain’t the spirit of the Wild West,” I exclaimed. 

“Nope,” said my passenger, “that’s the New West.” A sullen silence began to overtake us as we weighed the depth of his remark, but there were worse things ahead. Within a few miles, off to our right, we spied a panoply of new homes, just far enough apart (or close enough together) to create an impenetrable wall to the wild creatures among us. Disgustingly, they were, in total, a subdivision under the auspices of some jackassed name, meaning clearly, “New-Fangled Ranch,” each home site covering 10 to 15 acres. 

In the spirit of the “New West,” I suspect most of those lovers of open space couldn’t tell the difference between a cow pie and a wild mushroom.

The myth of the West is about all that’s really left of the spirit of the West. So many of us have moved westward, looking for that indefinable feeling of independence, of freedom, of being our own person, that we’ve totally mucked it up. It is very difficult to tell, at least on the surface, the difference between the West and the East, simply because almost everyone who moves west for the intangibles also brings with them a psychological load of city-bred constraints, and slowly the magnificent breadth of the West is being chiseled down to the lowest common denominator. 

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