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Our bookshelves groan and crack under the accumulated weight of guidebooks: sacred and mysterious sites, brewpubs, state parks, 14,000-foot peaks, passes, bed and breakfast operations, abandoned railroad routes, mountain-bike trails, waterfalls, whitewater courses, official wilderness zones, wildlife sanctuaries, technical-climbing locales...
Not that I have anything against writers making money, but I do wonder why there are so many guidebooks. Most of the delight of travel, after all, is discovery.
As the poet (and San Miguel County Commissioner) Art
Goodtimes has often observed, the only time we really
comprehend our surroundings is when we're lost --
Lost,
indeed, is title of one of his finer
works.
If you always know where you are and where you're supposed to go, you miss these educational opportunities.
But there's probably no point in fighting this guidebook trend -- this is, after all, the Information Age, and people now seek information with the intensity that our forebears devoted to finding bison, gold, or uranium.
With all of this talk about the New West, though, you'd think that amid all the processed trees on the bookshelves, there would be some reliable guidance for travelers to discern whether they're in the Old West or the New West.
The writer Ray Ring, up in Bozeman, Montana, has proposed using the ratio of quick to dead. That is, if the cemetery population exceeds the town's, you're in the Old West. If the living outnumber the departed, you're in the New West.
He compared Anaconda (20,000 graves, 10,000 residents)
to Bozeman (6,000 graves, 30,000 residents) and concluded
that Anaconda, despite its new golf course atop the smelter
slag, is still Old West -- still defined by its history
and traditions, instead of the press of progress.
Ring's approach seems valid. Take an Old West spot like Tin Cup, and the combined population of the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Boot Hill knolls of the local graveyard certainly exceeds the live resident population.
A New West town like Vail doesn't even have a cemetery,
though to be fair, one has been under discussion for
several years, with high real-estate prices the main
complication. (Vail's lack of a graveyard brings to mind a
19th-century town promoter's boast: This place is so
healthy that we didn't even need a cemetery until the
doctor starved to death.
)
But the problem with Ring's approach is that cemetery
census statistics are hard to find. They're not in any
almanac, not even on the Web anywhere, and you never drive
into a town and see a sign like Mountain City, elevation
7,344. Live population 4,391, dead population
3,727.
Another statistical approach comes to mind, using numbers that are easier to find -- the ratio of cattle to people. By that reckoning, South Dakota is the leading Old West state, with 5.19 bovines per human, followed by Nebraska (3.96), Wyoming (3.10), and Montana (3.07).
However, Iowa, with 1.37 cows per person, comes out more Old West than New Mexico (0.87) or Colorado (0.83), and the Hawkeye State isn't even in the West, Old or New. Any Old West index that puts Vermont (0.51) ahead of Utah (0.46) and Arizona (0.18) can't be a good index.
Other cultural indicators looked useful for a time. Hal Walter, a Westcliffe writer, once proposed coffee: if they sell it by the Thermos-load, you're in the Old West, and espresso means New West. But he's since conceded that espresso machines, now steaming even at some livestock sale barns, no longer function as reliable informants. Much the same holds for cellular telephones, formerly a trustworthy warning of New West zones, but now far too common to matter.
To some degree, restaurants can still tell you which West you're in. If they're smoke-free, offer vegetarian cuisine, and employ waitrons or waitpersons who introduce themselves, they're New West. If you don't get a glass with your bottle of beer and you're supposed to keep your fork when you get dessert, you're in the Old West.
So many establishments fall into a gray in-between zone, though, that it's often hard to be certain -- one local truckstop, for instance, went smoke-free, but still brags on its juicy half-pound burgers.
Given all these complications, I'm looking forward to the guidebook which will tell readers whether they're in the Old West or the New West.
Unlike many guidebook topics, this concerns something important. For instance, when it's time for a friendly greeting, are you supposed to hug someone warmly, or merely holster your sidearm?
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