a southern gentleman goes west

The cherry of a cigarette burns hot red in the neon blue dawn over the high plains of Wyoming. No one speaks. There’s a cold mist and heavy dark clouds hanging low, occasionally obscuring the top of a distant hill. We’ve been driving all night through a storm and the rain made the highway look like a long black mirror, vanishing into the night. We’ve both been awake too long, stabbing into the beginning of a third day now. The storm’s cleared enough that I can actually look at the landscape, fading out of sight in the blue mist, into the hypnotic distance of snow fences and buttes, hills littered with boulders. There’s emptiness in every direction. The darkness is punctuated every hundred miles or so by the glow of a gas station, like some sort of beacon in the cold expanses of Wyoming.

For maybe the fourth time tonight we stop for hot coffee. Day is breaking and other people are beginning to appear. Sara pulls the car into an open space between several huge pickup trucks. The drivers match the trucks, all hulking working class barbarians living the cowboy dream. These guys are the northern equivalent of the roughnecks I remember from the oil fields down south: a violent and stupid breed of man with simple needs and simple ways of meeting those needs. The roughnecks may be miscreants and fuckups, but all they really want is to get nice and drunk. These fuckers on the other hand would be all too ready and willing to beat the living shit out of anything they don’t understand. I sit in the car when Sara goes inside, and while watching her through the front windows I see something that worries me. Every man in the place turns his head to stare at her when she walks past. A beautiful sophisticated woman from the city is not a common sight in this outpost at six in the morning. It must contrast pretty sharply against the trashy tubs of lard these men are used to loving. In a less civilized world I’d probably have to defend my property.
I like to talk about respecting the laws of nature, letting the weak die and vanish, and often describe civilization itself as sort of a disastrous cop-out. At this moment however, the hypocrisy of my attitude becomes evident. I’m a frail intellectual, even sporting a fucking ponytail, and traveling with a very attention-getting woman. In a less civilized and more “natural” world, any one of these ogres could kill me with his bare hands and rape my woman. Life went on that way for a long time before the straightjacket of civilization was fastened… and in some places it still goes on like that today. I know at the bottom of it that “might is right.” Inside the safety of civilization, intelligence is might… but I dread what would happen if we should ever loose our grip on the reigns of these brutes. These people are another plunge into the dark ages just waiting to happen, and they’re doing what they can to take us there. These guys and their massive pickup trucks are a perfect example of the demographic that’s most responsible for the national debacles of recent years. They love god and guns and exemplify the brutish stupidity of the lord’s most worthless creatures. To put it simply: they’re very patriotic.
Fucking Wyoming. It’s not the land that bums me out; just the people. It’s one of those places with indescribable poetic beauty, ruined by the crude graffiti of human culture. The land has an identity all it’s own, and its got nothing to do with America or Americans. It’s harsh and barren, elevating and imposing like an enemy that one admires. I love the beauty of a threatening landscape. If one could just tune in to the personality, not of the nation, but the land it’s on. The land definitely has it’s own spirit, and in Wyoming that spirit is hard to ignore. Cities and towns fail to blot it out. One feels it in the rocky landscape, the bitter cold wind, and the impressive open distances. It was here before we were, and I hope it will still be when we’re long gone.


June 3, 2009