Why I Moved West
By Rick Bass
I live in, or rather, below, the mountains for two basic reasons: because I think mountains are one of the last huge and wild and magnificent things we have left in this country. And because in 1972, Robert Redford made a movie called Jeremiah Johnson, which he filmed in Utah, in some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen.
We all remember critical moments in our lives, when the senses were deeply and newly touched—by a poem, a teacher, a book, a camping trip. For me, that movie was one of those events. Sometimes, I forget about Utah, and often, I forget about art: about the aesthetic value of conjoining structure with idea and emotion, as that movie did.
I don’t remember if I saw Jeremiah Johnson in a theater or on television. I might have watched it on Mars, so captivated was I by the visuals and, as a young man, by the story. A man runs away to a new beginning, and recovery. I remember the physical senses: Johnson thrashing around in snow and cold water, chasing a trout; Johnson by a smoking campfire; Johnson being solitary, and struggling with that solitude, some days despairing, others, exultant. As an adolescent I thought, I know this person.
I remember after the movie was over watching to see where the movie had been filmed: the strange names of those mountains and the national forests. I went to an atlas that evening and looked them up on the map. I found the nearest college towns to those forests: Logan, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo … I wanted to study wildlife science, in the mountains, in the West.
Because of the mountains in that movie, I went to Logan, to Utah State University, where they put me on the fourth floor of a seven-story dorm in what was known as the Gentile sandwich: three floors of Mormons above and three below, with the thin supply of out-of-state students—pot-smoking ski bums, most of them—packed into the fourth floor. Surrounded. And metamorphosed, as if by landscape, yes. I don’t intend here to make cheap and easy fun of a culture, a religion, of such significant integrity, one with so many admirable values. I only want to say that being isolated, an alien in a strange and beautiful landscape in which it sometimes seemed I had as much in common with the rivers and stones and deer as with the people, was another of my lucky breaks. The world has become quickly small, and whatever we can do to make it seem large again, even if only in a few places, is probably a good thing.
I’d been around a Mormon or two before—I was aware of certain things about them, like how they’d say, “Oh, my heck,” or “H-E-double toothpicks” instead of “hell”—but by and large it was, like the physical landscape, an immensely new cultural territory for me as well.
Did I want to become a mountain man like Jeremiah Johnson? Probably, yes. On weekends I’d haul off across the tops of the mountains on snowshoes with no tent, only a down sleeping bag, no matter what the temperature or weather. I’d make little lean-tos, build little fires, and read books all weekend long, shivering, turning the pages with clumsy, mittened hands. Glad to be out of Houston suburbs, where I’d grown up. Glad to have a vision, even if only, for the time being, a borrowed one, from someone else’s work and art.
Scanning the course catalog for easy but interesting electives, I chose by whim and whim alone a couple of bookish classes—an appreciation of the short story taught by Moyle Rice, and an essay writing class by Tom Lyon. I had no intention of ever becoming a writer, and had no idea, no way of knowing, that I had fallen into the pie, and had signed on with the two finest writing instructors I would ever know. It was all chance and luck, but I suspect I would never have become a writer without those two classes at the right time, in the right place. (I was not a natural scholar, nor did I bring any significant amount of previous book learning with me. When, in the short-story class, Moyle Rice was rhapsodizing about the work of a certain writer by the name of Flaubert, I spent 12 weeks believing he was referring perhaps to a great Native American chief of the region: Flow-Bear.) I assumed then, and still do, that all literature is regional.
I continue to suspect that growing up in Houston was only one of the greatest determining factors in developing a love and a need for wild country. My memories even of Houston are strangely not of its awfulness, but of nature: of hearing, for the first time each year, the autumn cry of migrating geese, and tasting—above the perpetual tang of benzene—the first cold front, or what passed for a cold front down there in the tropics. By examining the deeper memories that resurrect themselves whenever I return to visit Houston, I can see those things that surely must have existed then, but which simply, against the seeming odds, failed to attach to me, or the developing template of who I would become, and what I would love.
How could I have ignored, or never noticed in the first place, the clotted tangle of skyline billboards, the 99 percent soil-saturation by concrete, the perpetual, clanking, tangled glitter-and-chrome gnarl of gridlocked traffic? The hissings and belchings of smokestacks elicited from me back then no more angst than had they appeared in a distant harmless dreamscape. Where was I, really, in those years, present-but-not-present, as if existing instead in some West-dormant waiting-upon period?
There in Houston, as a child, I would from time to time hear whisperings and rumors of the farther West, and despite the petrochemical horrors of that highly urbanized, and then suburbanized, city, I still somehow came to believe in an ethos of the West, however that might be defined. Whatever the West really was, in my mind, it was wild country, with a healthy population of wild and free creatures, their comings and goings and their habits and processes largely unhampered and uninhibited by the interference or prejudices of humankind.
The West just keeps moving, and when I was a child growing up on the outskirts of Houston, I believed that I had just missed it, the West, by only a single generation, or at the most two—as maybe every generation believes it has just missed the West. Perhaps not just heat-washed, clodhopper farm boys standing discontented hoe-side in gypsum-strangled Utah, or wildcatters dreaming fevered uranium dreams or visions of oil-laden anticlines like sugarplums, but maybe residents of all centuries have stood on a mesa and wondered at a farther, deeper wildness—over the next range of mountains, if not also further back in time. And even then, might they have understood or intuited that their place in that time, believed to be enduring, would in fact prove to be far more prone to disintegration than the physical elements of mountains, forest, plains?
A hundred and forty years ago, Major John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who explored the Grand Canyon and much of the rest of the West, said the unifying thread of the West was water, or the absence of it, and for sure that was, and largely is, one of the major physical threads. But there is something else too, some unseen thread of spirit.
Perhaps it’s best not to pick or pluck at that thread too closely—perhaps what we perceive as spirit in the West is really only something as heartless and lifeless as geology, with the rock outcroppings of the East being some several million years older, so that the half-life decay of sun-burnished ions in the West seems still to radiate a bracing and at times intoxicating freshness, able still to be felt and noticed, if not yet measured, by even a species as insensate and oblivious as our own. Perhaps science will one day ultimately be found to be at the heart of religion, or faith, as almost everything, it seems, is eventually discovered or named or measured or otherwise colonized. For now, no such explanation or discovery exists, only the inexplicable awareness that there is a difference between the West and the rest of the country, and that it is no less profound for its ungraspable immeasurability.
So powerful can be this bond between Westerners and landscape that it’s possible to believe that the West might have existed in our brainpans long before the first paleface ever dreamed of conquest, possession, and that shadowed and seemingly illogical and inconsistent paradox, freedom. Human culture in the Deep South and the East stacks in vertical layers of time, like geological strata. Perhaps the building blocks of West, particularly today’s West, the New West, arrange themselves more horizontally across physical space: basin and range, sunlight, boulder, forest, river, desert.
To say the West was always in motion would be conjecture. What can be said confidently is that it is moving now—moving with such alacrity, like an animal getting up from a daybed and traveling for a while, that almost anyone can see it, and that even in those places where we cannot see it, we can sense its movement, its possible going-away or leave-taking. We are made uneasy by it, even as we are still, at this late date, yet unable to name or measure that going-awayness, that freshness and wildness, that Westernness.
Certainly in 1960s Texas, that West was going away like a horrific backwash. Each Sunday on our way to church my family would pass the informally named Wolf Corner, where I would lean forward in my seat to see the corner fencepost where ranchers had hung that week’s bounty, the little coyotes and the larger red wolves, by their heels, for all the honest world to see. It was out by Highway 6, which was once gently waving grassland. Some weeks, there were more carcasses than others, and over the years the offerings gradually declined, though almost always there would be at least one, as if the ranchers were trawling the grassy sea, and as if their nets would always find something, some wildness deep within that green grass. As if that country to the west, just beyond the barbed-wire corner fencepost, would slow, but never entirely cease, in giving the wolves up.
This was the daily life and drama of my childhood, situated peculiarly between the Deep South and the Far West, in oil-hungry, oil-rich, brash and arrogant and violence-born Anglo Texas. The vertical currency—the strata of time—mattered, but the story, the myth of the westering frontier was also present, just over the horizon, and just beyond the field from which those wolves and coyotes had been gleaned. There was not just the echo of it; there was still, barely, the real and physical essence of it. We saw it, every Sunday. In those first few years of the 1960s, while the rest of the country broiled over civil rights issues, we were attending the premieres of movies like How the West Was Won (1962) and The Alamo (1960). Those films depicted a vast territory that existed for the taking and, quite naturally, force was the way to take it, particularly since it was inhabited by Mexicans or Indians. Let Mississippi stew over drinking fountains and bus seats, and Boston and New York argue over segregated schools and busing; in Texas, we were busy looking longingly to the past, and to the West.
So with this background, maybe I was always secretly summoned to the West, but a movie—art—helped fuel me. And in Utah, as a student, whenever I’d haul off into the Wellsville Mountains and scramble across the slatey talus slopes, examining the fossils of trilobites from half a million years ago—when I’d splash out into the Bear River marsh, chasing giant carp, or when I’d hunt wild pheasants in the cattails—I would be aware, even as a young man, that all of that bounty came basically from the genesis of having sighted, and been touched by, the view of those same mountains, in a film.
After college, I would work as a geologist in Mississippi, a life that suited for a while. But that first, fierce vision of Utah’s mountain landscape was held within me, as were held the countless subsequent visions, memories, and images of physical engagement that followed from that initial heart’s response. When my girlfriend Elizabeth and I looked for a place to settle, we began in New Mexico, didn’t find it—looked in Utah, almost found it—and then headed up into Idaho and Montana, before wandering across a summit and looking down onto a small green valley with a winding little river carving through it, and smoke rising from a few chimneys, even though it was August, cool blue August. We had no way of knowing then that the initial homestead we looked down upon from that summit where we first fell in love with yet another new landscape was the home of Mr. and Mrs. McIntire, whose son Tim had written the music for a movie called Jeremiah Johnson.
Maybe in our olden lives, once upon a time, thousands of years ago, grace and bounty did not seem miraculous, but were instead commonplace. But how rare, and how treasured, bounty seems these days: bounty of any kind. And every
time I look at these mountains where I live now, I remember debts. Debt is an awkward enough word, which surely does not exist in the relationship between mountains and humankind, but which is as close as I can come to describing the imbalance between what I think the mountains give us, and what we give back.
Sometimes I forget about the great good luck of art, of seeing a certain movie at a certain time, or about lessons and ideas from those writing classes taught by Tom Lyon and Moyle Rice: the notion that art is selectivity. Are we drawn to certain places, and certain other lives, or does the world squeeze and shape and sculpt and direct us—often via our predisposition toward those places, and those lives? I do not think it is a question that either scientists or artists will be able to answer. The forces of nature are huge, and we are tiny, and in the mountains it’s easier to remember this. I don’t think we’ll ever figure out for sure if the details of our lives, or even the patterns of them, are the result of intricate, foreordained design, or simply the exquisitely random windblown flutterings of grace and confusion. Some things are meant to remain a mystery, and might even possess shifting answers, with one aspect being true on one day, and another the next … as even the seasons, despite their connections to one another, are always shifting, always living, and moving.
Rick Bass is the author of 24 books, including Where the Sea Used to Be and Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. His stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in the Yaak Valley of Montana.
