Mythologizing the West

From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.