The West: Landscape of Death

All of my bitching about the heat of New Mexico has reminded me of thoughts I've had several times recently while driving through the American West:

The West is a landscape of death.

People do not belong here, except in small numbers. Look at Native American populations. New Mexico has a large Native American population. But most of the pueblos are along the Rio Grande or other water sources. It is the same throughout the West. The groups that nomadically traversed the West on horses were once limited to water sources as well before they acquired horses from the Spanish. Only with horses did mobility come and even then, horses had to be watered too. It's no revelation that water is the most important element of the West. Control over water=power. Donald Worster, Marc Reisner, and many other historians have pointed this out.

But you can't control water forever. And what happens when that control fails? To me, living in the arid West is living with fear. If you've driven across Wyoming, Nevada, New Mexico or several other western states, haven't you thought, "God, I hope the car doesn't break down out here." Because what happens if the car does break down? You might be 50 miles from the nearest town and even more from somewhere where you could actually get your car fixed. Now let's say that American society breaks down. Our ability to get water from the river to your home is ended. The West dries up. Oil supplies are insufficient to get gas into your vehicle. What do you do? How do you survive?

The answer is that you will die.

I don't feel this way west of the Cascades or in the East. I'm not living with a constant fear of death in wet regions. Because people are meant to live there. If my car breaks down in Oregon, Tennessee, or Vermont, I know that I can find someone relatively close by to help me. I know that if I was abandoned to the world in those places I might be able to survive by living off the land in a way that is virtually impossible in the West.

But isn't the landscape of death that is particually appealing to people. For this landscape brings with it much to offer if you don't have to worry about survival. Sunny skies. Warm temperatures. Wide views. Beautiful sunsets. The Big Sky Country. The Land of Enchantment. Even the historical tourism of these places revolves around death--Dodge City, Tombstone, Billy the Kid. This violence was part of larger issues of resource control in the West--resource control absolutely necessary to survive in this deadly land.

The separation of people from the realities of the land where they live is part of a much greater problem of willful ignorance of the environmental damage we do everyday in order to live our consumerist lives. Nowhere in the US is this disconnect stronger than in the arid West, where we fetishize the very things that are telling us not to live there. Someday that fetish will collapse and we will wonder why we didn't pay attention to those very clear warning signals.