a return to the west

I don’t know how I got here, but here I am. Where am I? Somewhere along the plains, drifting. My mind in the clouds and a long blade of grass in my mouth, chewing, pondering, wandering. 

How did I get here? I don’t know but I have myself to blame. 

I am, I must admit, shocked to have discovered who I am. Which is apparently a grown-ass modern man with a rich and complex emotional life. Who also likes Westerns. Like cowboys and horses and six-shooters—those types of Westerns. 

Yeehaw. ​

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1850-1930). Round-up on the Sherman ranch, Geneseo, Kansas, U.S.A.

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I know, I can’t believe it either. 

And yet, over the last few weeks I’ve finished one Western novel (“In the Distance,” Hernan Diaz), started another (“The Drop Edge of Yonder,” Rudolph Wurlitzer), watched a Western anthology (“Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), and sought out my all-time favorite Western (“Dead Man”) from the library when I couldn’t find it on Netflix. 

I mean, how do I have a favorite Western? I thought I hated Westerns.

Amid much self-reflection though, it’s clear. While I actually, secretly, love Westerns, I don’t necessarily love your pa’s Westerns. Less John Wayne and more speed and methamphetamine. Acid Westerns, psychedelic Westerns, Westerns, perhaps, in form only. 

I want deserts and mountains and plains. I want booze and cards—but only as numbing agents. I want pain and heartbreak and long stretches of silence. I want unfulfilled spiritual longings that turn into existential journeys. I want a protagonist who largely eschews violence but still rides on into the blood-soaked desert doing whatever possible to survive.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1850-1930). Cowboys on the range--an autumn beef roundup, Montana, U.S.A.

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Who can’t relate, right? 

I suppose I was always bound to this fate, though—having followed from the beginning this dusty, dirt path trampled by boots of family, heritage, and geography. 

Somewhere there is proof: Me, pictured with a cowboy hat. Me, wearing a belt buckle the size of my head. Me, riding my trusty (rocking) steed. Me, with my sixes in my holster but my fingers itching for some action. 

I looked for those pictures, but they’re not there. Perhaps I tossed them long ago, before Nirvana and grunge grabbed me, back when I was embarrassed by flannels and Levi’s. My memory, like the horizon, mostly blank but with subtle shades of blue and brown congealed into a single solitary void, fails me.    

Ironically, this is maybe why I’ve returned to Westerns. Like most people approaching an age-precipice (hello, 40s!), I’ve taken comfort in nostalgia. There is gold in those abandoned mines, and it’s richly satisfying rediscovering something I once loved and lost, particularly if that something offers newer beats and sensations I missed the first time.

There’s comfort in Westerns, too. And it’s easy to see now why these tales of self-discovery and self-mythologizing and homespun redemption can be so appealing. In recent days, we’ve all faced a vast plain of nothingness, a void on the horizon that’s so impossibly meaningless and numbness-inducing that only blasts of brutal violence seem capable of punctuating it. 

The book I just finished—“In the Distance,” by Hernan Diaz—does much of that. A Western formally, “In the Distance” is also much more. But it never strays, never becomes something else. 

Its pleasures are expected but always, somehow, new, too. They arrive bathed in warm silence but ready to grow and spread with the ferocity and blaze of all the best myths. 

But like our outlaw protagonist himself, the book’s pleasures also gentle and life-affirming, peaceful and heartbreaking. But most of all, these pleasures are constant and unforgettable. 

So much so, that when the tale finally, unmercifully ends, I hoped for another beginning, one that’s not a new one but the same one. I set down the book, paused, breathed a few breaths, then picked it up again, ready for the story to be told again once over. 

And when I finally moved on to another Western, the story might have changed, but the song remained the same. I was off once again to explore some unknown and bewildering land. 

Giddy up, yeah? ​​