The West

The West

The bent and muddy license plate lying on the back seat says “US Government, official use only”. It’s in the back seat because I ripped it off the front bumper turning around on a narrow mountain road.
I am sitting in the official truck trying to find a place where my arm will be out of the sun. Every place it shines on me, it hurts. That’s because the elevation is eight thousand feet, and I’m used to living in a place where it’s less than two thousand feet. The truck is parked in front of a cattle gate with barbed wire running off to infinity in both directions. I say infinity, but in fact, I can only see the fence for a little ways because the terrain is so rough. Some of the posts are metal, but most are crooked and spindly little sticks. This is western Colorado, and it looks very much like most of the rural west. Off to my left, about ten miles away, I can see the Gunnison Mountains. Seventy something miles away are the La Sals in Utah.
The guy I’m working with is asleep, so I start daydreaming. Déjà vu tells me that I have lived this very scene before. My first job when I was eighteen years old was working for the Government, and I spent most of my days driving around in a truck much like this one, on roads much like this one. That was thirty three years ago. It feels like perhaps I have accomplished nothing since then. I am right back to doing the same thing after all this time.
Still, I love the West.
Whenever I go to a new place I really enjoy the different geologic features and the various micro eco systems. During my last trip the variation of terrain and vegetation was amazing. Everything from bare dry rocks radiating the sun’s heat in waves, to a ravine filled with ferns that could have been somewhere near Seattle, all in the same general area. Fourteen thousand foot high mountains only a few miles from a mostly flat, dry, wasteland.
It occurs to me that I have become jaded to some degree by the remarkable things I get to see. Six point buck deer walking through town. Being only a few feet from bears, elk, and moose. Looking down a thousand foot drop-off where eagles are flying below me. Rivers that boil with spawning salmon.
You see, I work in the places others go to vacation. The perspective of a tourist is different then the one of someone there to work. You see all the tourist attractions, but also get to learn the inside story. I feel quietly superior to the tourists and people who live in the “civilized” parts of America; they don’t know what they are missing. You don’t just observe the West, you become part of it. You become accustomed to the severe weather, the dangerous creatures, and the rugged terrain. You understand the culture of the people who live here. The West is a place, but it’s also an idea. It lives in the people who inhabit these remote places.
I take for granted people waving when you pass, men dressed in camouflage wearing guns. I’m not surprised when there is a horse or an ATV parked at the cafe. I know “the Code of the West”.
Looking back, I realize that at eighteen I knew nothing of the West or how to make my way through it. Now, I have become accustomed to the extremes of the West. My daily commute to work has been in helicopters, boats, ATV’s, and hiking up vertical distances greater than the Empire State Building. I’ve been two hundred feet below sea level, had lunch on the top of a mountain in fifteen feet of snow, and been a mile below the ground in a silver mine. I have watered my horse with my cowboy hat.
I am a Westerner.
I guess the last thirty-three years haven’t been a waste after all.