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All manner of high-powered experts gathered Wednesday in Boulder to ponder the future of the American West. What wasn't said may be more significant than what was.
For instance, we're in the middle of a presidential election, and a goodly portion of the West is federal land. Yet there wasn't a single mention of how the election outcome might affect land-management policies.
Why? My uneducated guess is that Washington has become irrelevant. Certainly nobody wanted Yellowstone National Park to burn to cinders last summer; nonetheless, it did. Few people cheered the precipitous decline in commodity prices in 1982 that threw the West into the economic depression that we're still struggling through; nonetheless, it happened.
Apparently the policies and politics of our absentee landlord just don't matter that much any more.
When I first looked at the schedule for the symposium, I groaned, because at the end of every panel discussion, assorted poets were supposed to recite. Generally, I would rather sit through six hours of a sewer-board hearing than listen to 10 minutes of a poet.
But the poets were the highlight of the symposium.
Perhaps that was because the West is more a mythic
landscape than a physical one. During the glory years of
Athens, the classical Greeks defined and celebrated their
Greekness
with Homer's poetry of a bygone time, the
heroic epics about Achilles and Odysseus. The opening of
the West fills that role for Americans. It is our national
mythology, our source of heroes and villains. Just as the
classical Greeks weren't real sure where the Troy of their
heroic age really was, we have trouble defining a physical
West that corresponds to the West of our heroic age.
Defining the West thus may be a job better suited for poets
than for geologists or historians.
What of the future, though? Getting to that symposium meant pushing an old pickup across 150 miles of depressed Colorado real estate -- climbing out of the valley of the Arkansas, where the mines are closed, then across the wind-swept vastness of South Park, dotted by abandoned homesteads.
Those crumbling ranches represent the true tragedy of the West. They weren't built by bunco artists scheming to get rich quick; they were built by men who just wanted a little land to build a living that they could pass on to their children. They endured blizzards, droughts and privation. They got crippled, they worked their wives to early graves, and they ended up with nothing to pass on.
At the end of the traditional Western novel, the hero and his fresh bride stand on the land he has won, and they're going to build an empire and a dynasty. Most often, they failed.
The sad truth about the American West is that despite 150 years of energetic effort, nobody has yet figured out how to build anything that will endure, any sort of economy that can be sustained indefinitely.
At the symposium, every speaker agreed that the old ways won't work any more. But there wasn't any consensus on what we should try in the future. That may be why the poets were so popular -- of everything about the West, its myths and legends stand the best chance of enduring.
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