Category: The Hundredth Meridian

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”  Having slept on the hard ground in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, tramped all day through a snowstorm at 11,000 feet of elevation against a 40-mile-an-hour wind with a 20-pound survival pack and a seven-pound...

War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation.  Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...

The Hollows, Hasty and Happy, were hardly ever sure where they were.  At times, they weren’t sure who they were, either, but it never mattered for them because they were very, very rich. Hasty was from Chicago originally, and Happy from Mississippi, where she had earned half a degree from Ole Miss.  In the days...

Atop the final ridge rising to the south rim, Tom Hart stopped the truck and sat behind the wheel, gazing over into the meandering trench stretching from west to east and across it to the line of blue mountains over 40 miles away.  It had been his first sight of the canyon when his family...

The old man had understood since the summer of ’88 that pigs are afraid of fire.  He’d been in the pig business only three years, following his retirement from the Union Pacific Railroad, when the uncured hay in the hayloft combusted spontaneously, the barn exploded like something on a movie set, and burned to the...

Edward Paul Abbey 1927-1989 NO COMMENT —Inscription on Edward Abbey’s grave marker, Cabeza Prieta wilderness, Arizona My friend Edward Abbey, dead these 13 years, is finally the subject of a formal biography, published last year by the University of Arizona Press and written by a man who never even met him.  Most biographers, of course,...

From where the boy’s wagon was parked, Laramie Peak, which from every other perspective appeared in some degree or another triangular, had a rounded aspect suggesting the crown of a tall, black hat.  The wagon stood braced on the summit of a low hill rising from a rolling plain dotted with pale stones and dark...

The plane took off to the east out of Denver, banked steeply right, and came round on a southwest heading: over Pike’s Peak, the Sangre de Christo Mountains, and the Great Sand Dunes National Monument; across the San Luis Valley, the upper Rio Grande, and the San Juan Mountains; over Chaco Canyon, with a view...

The wind that had risen directly after sunset blew hard down-canyon, filling the rocky bowl where camp was fixed with a sound like rushing water, scouring the open fire pit, and sending red sparks in sheets among the dry cacti and bushes.  Between gusts, the coals in the bottom of the pit burned dark red...

Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning.  He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there.  His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...

The horse went down on a horizontal stretch of trail where no sound horse had any business stumbling.  The quadrupe-dal rhythm broke suddenly, his near shoulder crumpled, his head sank at the end of the black-maned neck, until the horse seemed to be wanting to kneel and kiss the ground.  I let out rein and...

Sam Nash pushed the empty beer bottle away across the knife-scarred table.  “I’m ready to hunt bulls,” he said.  “We need to be making tracks for the mountain soon, before it gets too dark to put a camp in up there.” Jim McCorkle set his chin forward but  didn’t answer right away.  He’d ordered black...

Old Jules is more than the title of a book by Mari Sandoz it is the name of one of the monsters of American letters: the Simon Legree of the pioneer household who, married four times, drove one wife to the insane asylum and struck the fourth in the face with a handful of four...

Jackson Hole is burning up. Gerry Spence had to evacuate his ranch ahead of the wildfires, and Dick Cheney could be next. Here above timberline in the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains, 400 miles to the southeast, the breeze is cool, the grass is fresh and green, and the ponds of standing water...

In June, the sun gets up about the time the pollen release ends. Keeping the bedroom window down in the early morning hours is a simple preventive for hay fever that requires only getting up around 2:00 A.M. to drop the window. It’s easier to take a pill the night before and forget about it....

On my knees in the bright pebbly waters of Hermit Creek, I looked up from the cotton shirt I was wringing out to the buff-colored rim of the Kaibab Plateau, over 4,000 vertical feet overhead. “Its a long way down from up there,” I told Tom Sheeley, who had just arrived along the trail from...

Sheep Mountain like a fallen tombstone lay on the horizon under a sky thickening with gray cloud ribbons and white lenticulars. It was too cold for snow yet, and rain had not fallen for weeks in the mountains. The wind raised small storms of dust on the pale surface of the clay road and whirled...

The Founding Fathers intended the “Enumeration” (Article I, Section 2) not only as a means of assuring representational equality among the states but as a graph displaying the growth of the American nation in size and prosperity. For almost 200 years, the decennial census could plausibly be accepted as doing that. The last three censuses...

You could say it isn’t easy being a liberal in the most conservative state in the Union if it weren’t for the fact that in the most conservative state in the Union, the liberals occupy all the best bully pulpits. This means that, in Wyoming as in the rest of the 5O states, Democratic liberalism...

Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...

The alarm clock went off in the dark. In the light of the electric lantern, frost glittered on shadowed nylon walls. The inside zipper stuck; after a few futile tugs I escaped through the mouth of the mummy bag. I had on long Johns, wool socks, and a wool shirt; but the predawn cold bit...

Somewhere between Muddy Gap and the old uranium town of Jeffrey City I became aware of my lungs, painfully expanding and contracting inside my denim shirt. Beyond Jeffrey City the smoke cloud was visible to the northwest, a pinkish-grey mass hanging on the mountainous horizon and planed along its upper edge by atmospheric winds: large...

Several thousand feet below a smoke cloud 20,000 feet thick and 1,500 miles in diameter, the American West looks so peaceful, so at ease, so normal, no matter that over a million acres of it are on fire. The fires, most of them started by dry lightning strikes and burning out overmature forests thickened with...

It’s a long ride to hear Andrea Marcovicci, the Maria Calks of cabaret, in concert after I missed her in Billings a couple of years ago. At Katonah, New York, I checked into the first motel I saw, snubbing the horse between a Lexus and a VW bus covered with flower decals, left over from...

I used to make fun of them, those barelegged, ball-capped figures grunting under the weight of 90-pound loads giving them the appearance of Neil Armstrong on the moon or a man bearing his own coffin on his back: tall, headless silhouettes lurching from around a bend in the trail to dispel the illusion of primordial...

“What does ‘AQHA 1990 gelding, bred Actual Spark’ mean?” “It means someone has a neutered ten-year-old American quarter-horse, sired by Actual Spark, for sale. Why?” Rhonda looked up from the Casper Star-Tribune she held spread in her lap. “I want to buy a horse.” “What sense does that make? You’re moving back to California in...

“Niuno è solo l’april!” Mimì tells Rodolfo in Act Three of La Bohème. Mimì didn’t survive until April, and if she had she might have felt alone without Rodolfo anyway. Still, spring, like sex, is exuberant, irrational—rather, it’s suprarational. And unignorable, like a 70-mile-an-hour wind, which is what spring amounts to in most of the...

You could say liberalism is about squaring the circle, if it weren’t for the fact that even liberals don’t really expect to accomplish this feat: They aim at creating the impression they can effect the impossible, and lying afterward about their success in having done it. In between comes an impressive array or sequence of...

White sky, white earth. In the foreground a fenceline: three strands of barbed wire stretched taut between crooked posts cut from a juniper forest growing along the sandstone hogback, the bottom strand running in and out of low drifts of scalloped snow. The brushy tips of sagebrush vibrating on a stiff wind above the snowglaze,...

Second only to prostitution, writing is the loneliest profession. Because a writer’s work is wherever he happens to be, he has no real need to be anywhere; because writing is neither a team sport nor a cooperative enterprise, and because the laborious act of composition is notoriously prone to distraction, the writer normally performs his...

At the kickoff of fall semester last year, the University of Wyoming hosted a conference attended by James Watt, Pete Simpson (the brother of former Senator Alan Simpson), and Kathy Karpan (an unsuccessful candidate for both governor and U.S. senator), among other notables and celebrities, to discuss the state’s supposedly dismal economic and social future....

Most of the 50 states having been designed as political units rather than the geographical ones John Wesley Powell vainly urged Congress to consider in the case of the Western territories, there’s no particular reason why southeastern Wyoming should be much more than the place where Nebraska, Colorado, and the Cowboy State fit together. And...

The high Colorado Rockies are like a type of beautiful woman, eye-catching without being especially interesting. Spectacularly well-endowed, they are also obvious, unsubtle, lacking in individuality and complexity, bland in their stunning perfection, with a hint of vulgarity. Or perhaps it’s the sort of people who are drawn in glittering swarms to these towering fourteeners,...

I was gone from Wyoming less than two years, not so long as to forget, just enough for the shock of recognition to be poignant. The cold northern skies, the tilted mesas tinged green with sagebrush and purple with lupin, and how they smell after rain; the dark, distant mountains whose mottling snows above timberline...

El Paso del Norte . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Tiguex . . . Santa Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Oñate was a weeks-long ordeal up the Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour-and-20-minute flight, including 20 minutes on the ground at...

The stock market is over 10,000, Michael Kinsley exhorted Pat Buchanan recently, and so America can do as it likes internationally in the exercise of the U.S. mega-military machine that Madeleine Albright has been slavering, throughout her Foggy Bottom years, to activate. America, according to journalistic convention, is fat, happy, and content, having arrived finally...

There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...

It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary terms of decades, centuries, and millennia; what is certain is, the dead don’t. Edward Abbey had been deceased just two months short of ten years and I was defunct about four months, entombed that long in the overpopulated, electronicized, ideologized megasprawl...

Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....

The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...

I have lived now in the West 20 years, two years past the age of liability for military service (if there were a Western States of America, and if they had a draft) and one year short of my political majority and the suffrage. Although you can have spent half a century living in a...

The Northwest strikes me as a better place than the Southwest to live in—fewer people, better hunting, plenty of invigorating Arctic air and the cold dry snow—but the Southwest, probably, offers greater advantages for the Western writer. The presence of the Spanish and Mexicans, the more developed Indian populations, and the clashes between these and...

“Hear that,” Dick McIlhenny said. He removed the headset and handed it to me, while holding the Bionic Ear cupped toward the woods. “I hear it.” “What does it sound like to you?” “Footfalls, coming this way. Look at that horse.” The gelding stood at attention behind the trailer, his body rigid and his ears...

At four-thirty in the afternoon Papa’s on North Mesa Street in El Paso was preparing to open for business. Although the place looks like a student hangout and is located near the university, the clientele is largely well-to-do professional men who can easily afford the nine, twelve, and twenty-dollar cigars displayed in a wide tall...

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...

In a world filled with perplexity, inscrutability, and conundrum, two major mysteries at least are not unfathomable. What do women want? The answer has had human beings stumped from the time of the origin of species, yet the answer is perfectly plain: they don’t know. The question of what environmentalists want is of more recent...

The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...

Up in Oregon a woman was bathing in a river. The transistor radio she had set on the bank played as she swam. She was still swimming when a movement farther along the bank caught her eye. She turned and saw Elvis disappearing into the woods on her side of the river. At the same...

Historians have been arguing since the 1950’s whether the West ought to be understood as a frontier, a region, or the seamless westward extension of Eastern and Midwestern America. Beginning in the 1980’s the debate intensified, owing to the work of the so-called New Western Historians who like to think that they started it all....

Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...