Timothy Egan - Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

Introduction
Jackson Hole, Wyoming

1 Custom and Culture
Catron County, New Mexico

2 Plymouth Rock West
Acoma, New Mexico

3 A Colorado River Town I
Lake Havasu City, Arizona

4 A Colorado River Town II
Supai, Arizona

5 Stone Stories
Escalante, Utah

6 Chaos or Cancer
Las Vegas, Nevada

7 The Empire of Clean
St. George, Utah

8 Ostrich Boy
Highlands Ranch, Colorado

9 The Colony
Butte, Montana

10 Light
Paradise Valley, Montana

11 Top of the Food Chain
Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

12 Homecoming
Joseph, Oregon

13 Nuevo West
Sunnyside, Washington

14 Frontier
American River, California

I n early November, snow muffled the Teton Range, forcing the elk down into the valley and a sudden intimacy on all of us. Outside, a whisper worked in place of a shout and the great peaks had fresh personality, bold and showy in the coat of the coming season. It was that best of all times to be breathing air at eight thousand feet in the Rockies: the few weeks when life is on the cusp of doing something else and the money has yet to arrive and put everything out of balance.

I spent the morning trying to get closer to Grand Teton, and the evening gathered in a circle of people who agreed on nothing about the American West except that we all loved it. The morning had me feeling bouncy, kind of infatuated. I dropped into Jackson Holethe old trapper and Indian refuge, the place where men who smelled of a three-month affair with campfire smoke would scrub the creosote from their backsides in a thermal poolby Boeing 727. Grand Teton is the only national park that has a large-runway jet airport inside its borders. You dont come over the rim or through the valley or past a gateway of gray-shirted park rangers as you enter this home of the natural heritage. It is strictly Thank you for flying Delta when you arrive in the Hole, as many of us do, falling from thirty thousand feet in an aluminum cylinder carrying a years supply of yellow goldfish crackers.

But from there, the generic and interchangeable are left behind. No billboards. No hotel ads. No digital traffic reminders. Fences around meadows are made of wood, split and quartered. The signs just outside the airport are of cedar, with the words carved into the grain; they are polite and trusting in a way that only the National Park Service among all government agencies can still get away with. Please do not feed the animals. Stay on the existing trails. Enjoy your stay. A cynic is paralyzed. Animals? Trails? Enjoy? Are you talking to me?

I found a trailhead at sixty-seven hundred feet, the ground covered by seven inches of snow as light as a tuft of bear grass. Wilderness can cleanse the toxins from a tarred soul, but it takes several days, at least, for the antidote to work. I was in the instant-immersion phase, trying to recalibrate, to forget sea level and the mean politics of the season. I had been around too many county commissioners on rental horses, the cul-de-sac cowboys mending fences for the cameras with their soft hands. I had seen enough senators wearing creased jeans, and ministers blessing snow-making machines. I had heard too many lies about the Real West, flimflam and fraud retold as gilded narrative by people whose grandparents took the land by force and have been draining the public trough ever since to keep it locked in a peculiar time warp of history. I needed a land without filter or interpretationthe West, unplugged.

THE SKIES , now clear, were cluttered with ravens, magpies, and the occasional red-tailed hawk looking for easy prey in the impressionable snow. Jackson Hole seemed to have everything that has been enshrined in Indian petroglyph form or frozen on canvas by Charles Russell. The place was full of charismatic megafauna, as biologists say in moments of attempted clarity. Bighorn sheep, moose, and mule deer were just starting to congregate at the lower elevations, joining an occasional bison. And elk, after six weeks of bugling and strutting, the males with harems of a dozen cows or more, the females shameless in their provocations, were ready to put their sexual appetites aside in search of winter range. The celebrity lawyers, ski country socialites, and cowboy industrialists had yet to follow a similiar migratory pattern; they awaited a signal that it was time for the herd to move.