West and East
I'm planning at the moment for my next roadtrip to the western lands. I am preparing the house to be empty for a few weeks, with friends visiting daily to take in the mail. I am going through my Things To Do list that needs to be finished before I can leave; and I am making good headway on it. I am trying to catch up on my file management, to get everything organized before I depart; which is turning out to be an uphill battle in several ways. I have a few more errands to do each day before I depart. And I am, as usual, experiencing a little sleep disruption brought on the anticipation of hitting the open road once again. I almost never sleep well the night before leaving; that seems to happen almost every time.
Here I am in the Midwest. What the coastal snobs call the flyover zone. Here I am almost all the way to the West already, able to get there in less than a day's drive—or at least, get to those places, in a day, that many define as the West.
But where does the West begin?
I've heard Americans debate where the West begins: Texans say the Brazos River; in St. Louis, it's the Mississippi, and they built a very expensive "Gateway Arch" to prove it; Philadelphians say the Alleghenies; and on Beacon Hill the backside of the Commons. But, of course, the true West begins with the western state lines of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. It's a line, as straight as you could hope to find, that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada; fewer than a hundred miles from the geographical east-west division of the continental states, it lies close to the hundredth meridian, the twenty-inch rainfall line, and the two-thousand-foot contour line—all of which various geographies recognize as demarcations between East and West. When you stand east of those states you're in the East; cross over and you're in the West. . . .
The land west of this line used to be known as the Great American Desert, but only geographers use that term now as far as I can tell. By "desert" they mean a high land (two thousand feet and up), commonly arid (less than twenty inches rainfall), and even some sand. They don't mean trackless Saharan dunes and palmy oases.
The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive, influential and awesome way: space. The vast openness changes the roads, towns, houses, farms, crops, machinery, politics, economics, and, naturally, ways of thinking. How could it do otherwise? Space west of the line is perceptible and often palpable, especially when it appears empty, and it's that apparent emptiness which makes matter look alone, exiled, and unconnected. Those spaces diminish man and reduce his blindness to the immensity of the universe; they push him toward a greater reliance on himself, and, at the same time, to a greater awareness of others and what they do. But, as the space diminishes man and his constructions in a material fashion, it also—paradoxically—makes them more noticeable. Things show up out here. No one, not even the sojourner, escapes the expanses. You can't get away from them by rolling up the safety-glass and speeding through, because the terrible distances eat up speed. Even dawn takes nearly an hour just to cross Texas. Still, drivers race along; but when you get down to it, they are people uneasy about space.
—WIlliam Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways (1982, 1999), pp. 131-132
By this definition of West, I live in the East, since my Wisconsin home is east of the line of two thousand feet and up, and twenty inches and up. Barely, though, because I'm within half a day's drive, by current interstate speeds, of the Iowa-Minnesota western borderlines, so within a day I can drive into the plus-two-thousand zone, the long rolling flatlands that are the heart of the Great Plains, which rise up slowly to the Front Range in Colorado and South Dakota, the outlier island uprisings of the Rocky Mountains. I live on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, less than an hour's drive from Lake Michigan; so we get lake effect weather here, even though the prevailing winds make us upwind most of the time. We live in a wet part of the country, more prone to flooding than drought. Winters here are cold and sometimes severe, with Arctic air coming down on us, and huge storms approaching from the prevailing southwest.
I don't think of myself as living in the East, though. For example, people in New England have no concept of the size of the states out here. I once heard an acquaintance in New Hampshire say in a shocked tone, after I told him about a recent roadtrip, "You mean you drove all day and only went one state away?" That's a typical Eastern response; most Easterners have no real sense of distance out here. And the further West you go, the bigger the states get. Although I have said for years that Texas is more of a state-of-mind than a geographical locale. I've lived for significant amounts of time in Wyoming, New Mexico, and California. Each of those states takes an entire to drive across, or longer, depending what route you take. I've traveled through, camped in, and spent time in most of the other Western states, too, neglecting only North Dakota and Washington.
i've driven Highway 50 across Utah and Nevada, to where it ends in Sacramento. They call the western part of Highway 50 "The Loneliest Highway in the World," because those reaches of road in the Basin & Range region of Utah and Nevada have only a few towns dotted hundreds of miles apart. Driving from Ridgefield, UT, to San Francisco takes about 9 hours, with few stops; and in that distance you go up the Ranges and back down into the Basins about once every hour. Every time you go up and down you change elevations up to four thousand feet; by day's end your ears ache with all the pressure changes.
The truth of the West is that it is indeed mostly open space. It affects how you think. I do a lot of my best thinking on those all-day drives across one state. The driving puts me in a contemplative mood, and I am sometimes able to think problems through to resolution.
The open space teaches you patience. You can see a mountain range approaching in the far distance many hours before you arrive near its foothills. There are some incredibly beautiful isolate mountain ranges, that rise from the plains or plateaus surrounding them, that you can see for a hundred miles in any direction, when all else is flat and distant to the eye. For example, the San Francisco Peaks just north of Flagstaff, AZ, are old volcanic cones that rise up from the middle of the Colorado Plateau, with nothing else around for many miles.
The West for me is space. Space to roam. Space to live in. Space that opens your mind. Every time I cross into Wyoming, I feel as if my mind expands, takes on a breadth of dimension beyond the usual. Space is what defines distance. Immensity is what reminds us how small is our actual place in the Universe. One thing I love to do when driving a two-lane road across the vast emptiness of the West, is pull over, turn off the engine, get out and just stand there for awhile, listening to the silence. Listening to the wind, watching other silent winds move in the far distance. One hot summer day in Nevada I stood by the vehicle and watched dust-devil tornadoes, as many as six of them at one time, etch corkscrew trails across the open basin flats.
So maybe I do live in the East, if only by a narrow margin. I'm a Great Lakes native by birth and inclination. I love our watery world here—just as much as I love the high arid desert. But I love to drive West from here, and leave the East behind, and all its cares and tribulations. That big silence is worth the trip, every time.
Here I am in the Midwest. What the coastal snobs call the flyover zone. Here I am almost all the way to the West already, able to get there in less than a day's drive—or at least, get to those places, in a day, that many define as the West.
But where does the West begin?
I've heard Americans debate where the West begins: Texans say the Brazos River; in St. Louis, it's the Mississippi, and they built a very expensive "Gateway Arch" to prove it; Philadelphians say the Alleghenies; and on Beacon Hill the backside of the Commons. But, of course, the true West begins with the western state lines of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. It's a line, as straight as you could hope to find, that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada; fewer than a hundred miles from the geographical east-west division of the continental states, it lies close to the hundredth meridian, the twenty-inch rainfall line, and the two-thousand-foot contour line—all of which various geographies recognize as demarcations between East and West. When you stand east of those states you're in the East; cross over and you're in the West. . . .
The land west of this line used to be known as the Great American Desert, but only geographers use that term now as far as I can tell. By "desert" they mean a high land (two thousand feet and up), commonly arid (less than twenty inches rainfall), and even some sand. They don't mean trackless Saharan dunes and palmy oases.
The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive, influential and awesome way: space. The vast openness changes the roads, towns, houses, farms, crops, machinery, politics, economics, and, naturally, ways of thinking. How could it do otherwise? Space west of the line is perceptible and often palpable, especially when it appears empty, and it's that apparent emptiness which makes matter look alone, exiled, and unconnected. Those spaces diminish man and reduce his blindness to the immensity of the universe; they push him toward a greater reliance on himself, and, at the same time, to a greater awareness of others and what they do. But, as the space diminishes man and his constructions in a material fashion, it also—paradoxically—makes them more noticeable. Things show up out here. No one, not even the sojourner, escapes the expanses. You can't get away from them by rolling up the safety-glass and speeding through, because the terrible distances eat up speed. Even dawn takes nearly an hour just to cross Texas. Still, drivers race along; but when you get down to it, they are people uneasy about space.
—WIlliam Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways (1982, 1999), pp. 131-132
By this definition of West, I live in the East, since my Wisconsin home is east of the line of two thousand feet and up, and twenty inches and up. Barely, though, because I'm within half a day's drive, by current interstate speeds, of the Iowa-Minnesota western borderlines, so within a day I can drive into the plus-two-thousand zone, the long rolling flatlands that are the heart of the Great Plains, which rise up slowly to the Front Range in Colorado and South Dakota, the outlier island uprisings of the Rocky Mountains. I live on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, less than an hour's drive from Lake Michigan; so we get lake effect weather here, even though the prevailing winds make us upwind most of the time. We live in a wet part of the country, more prone to flooding than drought. Winters here are cold and sometimes severe, with Arctic air coming down on us, and huge storms approaching from the prevailing southwest.
I don't think of myself as living in the East, though. For example, people in New England have no concept of the size of the states out here. I once heard an acquaintance in New Hampshire say in a shocked tone, after I told him about a recent roadtrip, "You mean you drove all day and only went one state away?" That's a typical Eastern response; most Easterners have no real sense of distance out here. And the further West you go, the bigger the states get. Although I have said for years that Texas is more of a state-of-mind than a geographical locale. I've lived for significant amounts of time in Wyoming, New Mexico, and California. Each of those states takes an entire to drive across, or longer, depending what route you take. I've traveled through, camped in, and spent time in most of the other Western states, too, neglecting only North Dakota and Washington.
i've driven Highway 50 across Utah and Nevada, to where it ends in Sacramento. They call the western part of Highway 50 "The Loneliest Highway in the World," because those reaches of road in the Basin & Range region of Utah and Nevada have only a few towns dotted hundreds of miles apart. Driving from Ridgefield, UT, to San Francisco takes about 9 hours, with few stops; and in that distance you go up the Ranges and back down into the Basins about once every hour. Every time you go up and down you change elevations up to four thousand feet; by day's end your ears ache with all the pressure changes.
The truth of the West is that it is indeed mostly open space. It affects how you think. I do a lot of my best thinking on those all-day drives across one state. The driving puts me in a contemplative mood, and I am sometimes able to think problems through to resolution.
The open space teaches you patience. You can see a mountain range approaching in the far distance many hours before you arrive near its foothills. There are some incredibly beautiful isolate mountain ranges, that rise from the plains or plateaus surrounding them, that you can see for a hundred miles in any direction, when all else is flat and distant to the eye. For example, the San Francisco Peaks just north of Flagstaff, AZ, are old volcanic cones that rise up from the middle of the Colorado Plateau, with nothing else around for many miles.
The West for me is space. Space to roam. Space to live in. Space that opens your mind. Every time I cross into Wyoming, I feel as if my mind expands, takes on a breadth of dimension beyond the usual. Space is what defines distance. Immensity is what reminds us how small is our actual place in the Universe. One thing I love to do when driving a two-lane road across the vast emptiness of the West, is pull over, turn off the engine, get out and just stand there for awhile, listening to the silence. Listening to the wind, watching other silent winds move in the far distance. One hot summer day in Nevada I stood by the vehicle and watched dust-devil tornadoes, as many as six of them at one time, etch corkscrew trails across the open basin flats.
So maybe I do live in the East, if only by a narrow margin. I'm a Great Lakes native by birth and inclination. I love our watery world here—just as much as I love the high arid desert. But I love to drive West from here, and leave the East behind, and all its cares and tribulations. That big silence is worth the trip, every time.
Labels: geography, New Mexico, photography, roadtrip, travel
posted by Art Durkee at 1:51 AM
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