Changes of the West

“After feeding this morning, I cleaned ditch with the ditcher, also some with the shovel. This afternoon I plowed and harrowed 5 acres.” Those words were my Father’s, recorded March 19^th, 1934. He kept a daily diary that year from his one-room range outpost in Rangeley, Colorado and his description of daily life for him was common and familiar to many of the west in those days.

There was a real sense of independence and can-do attitude back then, pockets of which remain today in the west. The very essence of the creed of 1776 was in his blood, body and mind, his ancestors coming to Chesapeake Bay before 1710.

My Dad was twenty-two at the time of that diary entry and had already spent 7 years working his way around the west. He had by then ridden to California and back in boxcars of lonely freight trains, busted broncos, herded cattle and threshed wheat. He had left home at the age of fifteen to find work so that he would not be a burden to his remaining family. If there was work to be had, he and his kind would find it for they knew nothing else but the purity of hand to land.

His world was largely inside himself where he spent hours in solitary thought, getting to know himself from the inside out; something that today in the age of mass communication is unfamiliar to many. He had no one to ask if he was making the right decision, and often had no one to teach him that if he got to close to the edge he might fall off.

People like him carved out the west with hard work, honesty and guts in a time when a handshake sealed most deals. The very thought of hiring a lawyer was for easterners; the west had little need for them. The west has always held onto innocence and trust that even now gets it into trouble.

Many of us that were born of that old western stock have difficulty understanding the way folks go about navigating life in the west today. There seems to be a need to “win” when there is no point beyond individual greed and in most cases everything to lose.

Looking around at the “no trespassing” signs on fences and the locks on the gates of local land there is no need to tell me of new arrivals to the west. Fences in my Fathers’ era and my growing up were there simply to separate livestock and contain them on the best grasses. Today fences are boundaries to fortresses and land they don’t even use, and tools to shut out the manmade fears many cling to.

 My Father loved the independence and freedom of the natural landscape, the sun and the rivers of the west and cared about them deeply. He felt no need to take over and hide the land from others. No need to fence in his fears for he had none of consequence and certainly no use for ink in making a deal. He needed little, and more than that was a waste of both worry and energy.

The west was a different place then. Water flowed free, intentionally impeded only by beavers or short diversions to nurture the land before it continued its life-blood journey to the sea. Folks walked the paths that were there for, they made sense on the terrain, and they recognized how long it took them to get from one place to another and planned accordingly instead of rushing to an event they were already late for.

I travel the roads today in a different manner than my father and I must dodge the frustrations of folks in a hurry. There are few fields to tend to or ditches to dig for they are being swallowed by concrete before our eyes. As I drive the fast lanes, I see more fences with signs, and houses without lights taking up space once used by the flowers and grass. Our consumption of water makes me wonder what this part of the country will do without it in the next few decades.

People of the west in my Dad’s time knew who they were without asking someone. There was no one to retrieve them from a cliff when they made the wrong choices; they either figured it out or they didn’t. The freedom and independence of one’s mind was a staple of life in the west that many now can’t quite seem to grasp. My thoughts are born from the quiet of the morning or listening to the chorus of frogs at night.

My Dad taught me to take time to smell the July flowers and appreciate why they are here and do everything in my power to make sure the flowers stay here. The west will remain independent and pristine if only people will really remember why they came here and what they left behind.