A Drive From Wet to East
By JONATHAN RABAN
Seattle
FOR my eighth-grade daughter’s spring break this year, we drove, on minor roads, from Seattle through Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, to see the Grand Canyon — past 1,500 miles of landscape utterly new to her, although, born in Seattle, she is a native Westerner. The West she knows is the wet West, the urban corridor along Interstate 5, on the rainy side of the Cascade Mountains; the dry West, which is to say the vast bulk of our region, is a foreign country, of whose manners and language we wet-Westerners are cheerfully, carelessly ignorant.
Less than an hour east of Seattle lies Snoqualmie Pass, and as the road descends, beside the Yakima River, the dry West begins as it means to continue: Douglas firs give way to sagebrush, juniper and piñon pines; on the car radio, rock gives way to country and gospel, then to empty static; bumper stickers change from Democratic to Republican; per capita incomes and house prices sink precipitously. When I first drove this way, 17 years ago, it struck me as being akin to climbing a hill in Wales only to find oneself in Syria.
You move, almost at an eye blink, from a landscape watered by 36 inches of rainfall to a technical desert where 9 inches fall in a good year — and good years are getting fewer. The dammed rivers of the dry West, like the Columbia and the Colorado, grievously overstretched by the demands made on them for electricity, drinking water and fantastically ingenious irrigation schemes, are both the region’s most precious resource and its most vulnerable hostages to accelerated climate change. The dry West is getting dryer by the year, even as the wet West grows steadily richer, and the rift between the two — in culture, politics, economy, theology — can seem as deep as the Grand Canyon itself.
It’s not good to be such a rubbernecking tourist at one’s own back door, reaching for the camera to snap the ghost towns, rotting false store fronts, abandoned farmsteads, as they loom out of the wide-open emptiness of rock and sage, where you can drive for 40 miles without seeing another vehicle. We know little and care less about the real lives of the rancher, farmer and copper miner, though the wet-Westers buy up inexpensive land here for weekend ranches, fly-fish the rivers, picnic in the spectacular national parks, drink in the mystique of the “Old West,” as if the entire region were a giant recreational area laid on to relieve the claustrophobia of big-city types from both coasts; a place belonging to past history, not the present; a human museum of men in cowboy hats, with guns on the racks of their pickups and blue-eyed, thousand-mile stares.
The dry-Westers understand us better than we do them: they know the tourist value of their own picturesque decay. In one day in Nevada, we passed three towns, each with its slogan — “The Living Ghost Town,” “The Friendliest Town on the Loneliest Road in America,” “Where the West Comes Alive” — and all exploiting the queasy charm of the boarded-up business and the dead-ended dream. At “The Friendliest Town ...,” the Owl Club, a casino-bar-restaurant, sells T-shirts emblazoned with a list of people most unwelcome there: the string of derisive epithets, some unprintable, ends with the word “Liberals.”
We deserve the sneer beneath the smile. They know what we want — to demolish their dams, starve their farms of water to supply our cities, reintroduce the wolf, buffalo, and grizzly to their workplaces, close their mines, enjoy their West as our nature-playground. We’re all for the “Old West” summer rodeo, but we’ll sign petitions against grazing on public lands.
Back on the wet coast, I think of the rue in a remark made to me in a Nevada bar: “If only we could find a use for sagebrush — like turning it to ethanol — we’d all be millionaires.”
Jonathan Raban is the author, most recently, of the novel “Surveillance.” |
