Holed Up -- With Old Ace

I think I have spent too much time in the West, between Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma and now Texas. Annie Proulx' book, That Old Ace in the Hole, is only 359 pages long but it took me months to plow through it. By the time I made it to the last 60 pages or so, the devise of its pace came through to me as essential to where Annie wants to end up: how long Bob Dollar has to be exposed to a place to make it his own.

Bob leaves Denver to work for a company looking to site hog farms in the Texas panhandle. Some are there already, befouling the land and affecting the health of downwind residents. Bob lies about why he has come to Woolybucket and ingratiates himself with the townsfolk, who only incrementally reveal themselves to him, particularly through their idiosyncrasies: quilting bees, barbwire festival, windmill construction lore. It is by these vignettes that the reader and Bob come to understand what makes this place vital despite its remoteness and economic depression.

Here the characters are hardscrabble and tenacious like those from the Dust Bowl rather than opportunists like the population of Tombstone. Those who are manipulators, excepting Bob who is portrayed more as a naif, are revenged by the community.

Proulx writing style does not dazzle nor does her plot line controvert. It is a slow, steady story that depicts a place as unique, permanently marking its residents, and essentially Texan.

Nature.2: Wyoming is not Jackson Hole

At long last, a mystery for one of the Slackers' states --Out of Range, by awarding winning author C.J. Box and the fifth in his series of mysteries solved by Joe Pickett, game warden from Saddlestring, Wyoming. In this installment, Pickett is reassigned to Jackson Hole and its development is juxtaposed up against the vast undeveloped beauty of the Continental Divide.

It's an easy, quick read with an underlying classic mystery formula: the beautiful femme fatale suspect, the evil moneyed manipulators, crusty old elk hunting guides who skirt the law, faithful if stressed family, tainted government workers. It's predictability is forgiven because Box is so good at describing the geography and expressing its grandeur and because his dialogue sounds real.

Time permitting, I will read the other four Picketts.

A Book Needing Cliff Notes -- And Die in the West

Tempted to start this review: "OK," I know who the principle players are: Earp, Holliday and the bad guys died, so. But I found this book impossible to follow. Paula Mitchell Marks is writing from a "socioeconomic" perspective. That's fine; I just finished Coors/Colorado and I recognize that there is an entire business angle going on behind many story settings. What's difficult to follow are the many ancillary characters intruding into the main ring -- Wyatt's brothers, their wives, the other "marshalls" of various jurisdictions, townsfolk, cowboys, miners, until the scenes are crammed like a Wagnerian opera, or perhaps more appropriately, like an oater with a cast of thousands.

I got the Tombstone DVD out of the library, thinking that would clarify things in my mind, and fell asleep, taking it back unwatched. I eventually did a Wiki search, and that reference itself runs to 18 pages. So, all right, it's not a cut and dried event despite America's making a mass-market legend of the gunfight at the corral.

So, I will shirk off my analysis of character motivation by quoting Marks' last paragraph: "The significance of the 'gunfight at the O.K. Corral,' then, does not lie in its existence as a morality play between 'good' lawmen and 'bad' cowboys, or between 'bad' lawmen and 'good' cowboys. Rather, the gun battle, the personalities involved in it, and the events surrounding it are significant for what they tell us about the real complexities of the western frontier experience. The story of the troubles in boom town Tombstone reminds us that the whys and wherefores of living and dying have never been as simple as we might wish them to be -- particularly in the crucible that was the American frontier west."

From the Slackers' perspective, And Die in the West is marvelous history of a place created out of nothing ... out of discovering silver and populated by prospectors and a 19th century selection of "entertainment industry" (read saloons and brothels) at which the successful could spend their money. From the conversion of tents into buildings and cow paths into roads comes the underlying theme of the story: that many of the characters arrived in Southern Arizona to get away from the restraints of Eastern civilization, only to have them come crashing too quickly into town, as mores followed money. Tombstone was a town drawn on flash paper, populated with people looking to make it big, quickly, whether through a silver stake, bullet or badge.

State as Business School Case Study -- Citizen Coors by Dan Baum

Brew it and they will come: Adolph Coors was a master beer maker and an astute businessman who regarded quality and its consistency as the pillars of his brewing company in Golden, Colorado. These traits and strict discipline imposed on his sons, created a family-run business that was paternalistic and self-sufficient. Fiercely independent and rooted in their beliefs of self-determination and tradition, the next two generations perpetuated those ideals to create a successful, regional business -- innovative engineering-wise and ahead of its contemporaries in vertically integrating its operations into energy needs, conservation and packaging. Having survived both the Great Depression and Prohibition, Coors felt invincible.

But modern threats pursued their philosophies ... unions, boycotts, pollution, governmental regulation ... a barrage of "attacks" that they fought against well into the fourth generation of citizens Coors.

Baum's book is much more balanced that the blurb back cover reviews suggest, particularly the one from the Chicago Tribune that sums the story as an example of cultural change that left inflexible, insular companies teetering. To quote Baum, "The characteristics that differentiated Coors from Anheuser-Busch -- that made them all so proud to be a part of Coors -- were small-scale attention to quality, identification with the West, and disdain for the hollow showmanship of advertising. All that was slipping away. The Adolph Coors Company was on its way to becoming Anheuser-Busch -- if it was lucky. If it wasn't, it was on its way to disappearing."

When an outsider finally is selected to run the company, the Coors perceive a new kind of invasion, no longer one of Visigoths, but one by the Frito Banditos. The beer going national and becoming yet another well-marketed and advertised commodity, Coors mutates into a changeling -- created by Wharton MBAs and (m)ad-men who transform the profit line and keep the company in business, However, with its eccentricities sacrificed to Mammon. It is the equivalent of niching Duncan Hines from Pillsbury cake frosting. It is no longer, "if I brew it they will come," but "tell me what you want to buy and I'll pretend what I make is what you think you need."

Avoiding the similarly undifferentiated, mass-produced, mass-consumed interstate highway system, I drove old Route 93 instead of I25 and I70 from suburbs south of Denver to Boulder several times last spring. The scenery is spectacular, the road hugging the front line. The sign to Golden is unobtrusive, and from 93, there is no vista of a near-by big industry; however, neither are there signs of a rushing pristine mountain creek feeding the bottling line. I never turned off; not being a big beer drinker, friends say that if Coors made wine, I would have. The place evokes a rugged self-sufficiency and a selective, limited interdependence among the sparse population. The newly constructed rows of condominiums are a 21st Century's intrusion which look ill-prepared to handle and thrive in the rigors of the geography and climate.

Reading Citizen Coors continues themes found in two other of our states: Meet You in Hell about Carnegie as a titan of 19th Century industry in Pennsylvania, and American Lightning about labor-management tensions in Los Angeles in more recent decades. The Coors are portrayed as austere fundamentalists, unlike the gilded age exhibitionism and self-promoting largesse of Carnegie and Frick; they are baffled yet uncompromising by workforce agitation and consumer manipulation. Their ultimate concessions come across as having been demanded as extortion and not as parity.

Tracing a family and its livelihood across generations in one location is almost as interesting in Colorado as in TC Boyle's Worlds End rendering of interconnected families in the Hudson Valley. What's missing is a sense of what Golden and Colorado were like before they was marked by the Coors. Published in 2000, it does not reference the pendulum swing to micro-breweries and also predates the locavore cause celebre. Maybe the genetic predispositions of Adolph the first have skipped a couple of generations and can flourish anew.

Sanitizing the Dirty Thirties -- Little Heathens, Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

Coming on the heels of The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl in the 30's in Oklahoma, I thought this book would parlay an analysis of the decade in a near-by State. Instead this is a nostalgic white wash by a little old lady, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, who never once mentions threatening weather or lack of money for food. Here's is a simple life, of shoeless days in meadows, cuddly farm animals, passels of cousins, and fortuitous inspiration and education.

Maybe if I were a mid-Westerner, I would prefer this book to Noel Perrin's essays on Vermont. But it covers lots of the same topics of farm life albeit from a child's perspective not a middle aged man who consciously chose that place rather than being born there.

There is nothing that is essentially Iowan about the book either. Picture look like Bennington, Vermont buildings. Recipes and folklore are universally American. It is a charming book as a piece of family history that warrants a private publication and a sharing with distant relatives. That's all.

Place as Fount of Political Philosophy -- Kentucky

Perhaps of all the titles selected for the fifty State tour, Belonging -- A Culture of Place sounded like it would be the most apropos book. Alas, I was pleased with only half of its essays; the ones that did not engage me were those that rang of polemics.

Bell Hooks, born and raised in the Kentucky hills, is at her best in the chapters dealing with black agrarian life, from the sustenance gained from raising tobacco to the solace of sewing quilts, from the scale of place determined by the distance one can walk to the sense of sisterhood fostered on a front porch. Her best stories rival those of Noel Perrin's love of the land and native flora and fauna of Vermont. Her appreciation of the need to be rooted to the land by farming it respectfully -- acknowledging the power of Nature as the leveler of man's pretense to domination -- segues well from The Worst Hard Time's theme of becoming disconnected from one's agricultural community, sinning against Nature.

However, there are other essays that read like diatribes. She is the "distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian Studies" at Berea College, a town and institution founded in 1853 to create a place of mixed races and equal classes. Hooks returns here, the prodigal daughter, seeking a place of comfort but clinging tenaciously to her terror of whites and her distrust of all the sources of power in America. Her writing style, so evocative in the stories about her grandparents and the hills and meadows, erodes to dialectic buzzwords as hegemony, patriarchy, dominator culture crop up like weeds in her otherwise cultivated reminiscences.

Large parts of these "Kentucky history made me politically what I am today" chapters contain entire paragraphs quoted from deconstructionist authors, revealing her to be yet another uber-liberal university instructor. With roots as an English major and graduate student, she advocates an entirely new language be created to permit dialogue between races. Large segments of her interview with Wendell Berry, a white Kentuckian whom she admires as a mentor for his writing about his friendship and love of black fold who lived nearly his childhood home, is merely her ranted about her perception of his motivations and her interpretations of their larger social context, with Berry replying more often than not that he had nothing of the sort in mind.

This anger seems so dissonant with the other lessons she learned in rural Kentucky and with her avowed philosophy to find contentment in a simple, earth-bound life. The interpretation of birth place as the source of religious and political groundings emerged in our books for Oregon and Nebraska, not to mention Utah. But while Hooks has some distance and wisdom that allows nature to restore her spiritually, she still fights proudly to maintain the "oppositional" habits she absorbed as a hillbilly.

Among her citations is a lengthy quote from the Different Drum by M. Scott Peck that includes: "While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other's gifts and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness other's brokenness ... and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection."

She had brought back home some inspiration from her wanderings, but she has not converted them to insight. She id defiantly settled in the blue grass.

The Farm is Gone, but the Roots Remain -- Oklahoma

This is the book about the West that I have been looking for all year: much more on the mark than Devil's Gate or Circle the Wagons or Plains Song. The Worst Hard Time is a book about the Dirty Thirties, the Dust Bowl, set primarily in the Oklahoma Panhandle, as written by Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is writing about pioneering hardships as treacherous as those in the Utah book and about farm family tenacity as found in our selection for Nebraska. But it is Egan's writing talents that make his story sing, while the others drone on monotonously.

I also have decided that this story beats the Mormon migration because it portrays lives of people "being there" as opposed to "getting there." Comparing the two along a dimension of character motivation is interesting, except that I found it more interesting to see intent executed in daily tribulations rather than just inspiring relocation.

Egan is describing hellish lives of those homesteaders / nesters who stuck it out as long as they could during the "drouth" and dust storms and their ensuing impoverishment and killer disease. Being lured to the Panhandle, No Man's Land, the last undeveloped area in America, with promises of low cost acres, these families had a few good years, especially during World War 1 when government policies further encouraged the expansion of land devoted to the cultivation of wheat by guaranteeing high prices. Wildcat speculation ensued, further plowing under the native grass by absentee landowners. The author clearly lays the cause of the Dust Bowl to these land and farming policies, exacerbated by the lack of information and support for land-preserving farming techniques.

The magnitude and frequency of the dust storms, the nuances in the color of the dust depending on which state it was eroded from, the horrific physical symptoms of inhaling fine particulate matter for years, the sense of being held hostage by inaccessible roads and machine-stopping static electricity, the plagues of grasshoppers and jack rabbits -- the litany of curses is endless. But the only thing that does not blow away was the grit of the people.

The Slackers' search for the meaning of place in a life is herein offered another perspective. In The Worst Hard Time, place of origin is so weathered away as to be something unrecognizable ... no familiar scenery, no animals, no neighbors, no household belongings. Yet the Panhandlers remain marked by the memory of their former surroundings and their hope for its rejuvenation.

I have never been through the Panhandle, only driving up 35 straight through the middle of Oklahoma and then hanging a left on to 70, to drive interminably through the Kansas prairie. Seeing the open, grass-covered land there makes it hard for me to envision several states heading towards becoming the Great American Desert. It is difficult to associate a reclamation being needed to have it look as it does today.

As I finished The Worst Hard Time, I picked up Belonging, for Kentucky, and even after only three chapters, I am forced to think again about the over-development of land and the effect of a boom and bust, flood and drought cycle on a person's life and the values one acquires from a culture rooted in the surrounding environment. Both are nudging me to read You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel to further explore how a place changes yet remains indelibly the same in the blood and the heart.