An Open Space of My Own
Back when Pluto was a planet and the moon was made of cheese, I had a very early sense of myself as a Westerner. That is, as a person born and shaped by the American West.
Open Space here I come!
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what it means to “write the West” and what it is to be a Westerner, creating in this unique geographical space. For me, it’s my birthplace and where I feel most clearly myself.
Back when Pluto was a planet and the moon was made of cheese, I had a very early sense of myself as a Westerner. That is, as a person born and made in the American West. At the age of ten, I felt a perfect understanding of what love was all about when I saw Roy Rogers kiss Trigger during a Saturday matinee. I didn’t feel that was weird; I felt a kinship—he was of the West and so was I. And we both loved Trigger with an almost unseemly passion.
I grew up in a tiny farming community in southern California in the fifties. In our town, the crop was potatoes, and the harvest was owned by two or three major farmers. In the western tradition, they called themselves “ranchers,” although their livestock generally amounted to a dozen yard chickens and a couple of beeves raised for the table.
As teens, we had two main choices of places to work: potatoes or food services. The best pay was in the spuds—picking, sorting, or cutting all the eyes out for the next planting (this was “women’s work”), or, if you were a healthy young man wanting to build muscle over the summer, you filled huge burlap bags as potatoes bounced and rolled off conveyor belts and then hefted them onto trucks.
My folks did not see working with potatoes as a part of my future. Actually, beyond becoming a wife and mother (in that order, mind you), they didn’t even see a future for me. I begged and begged—many of my friends made summer money in these jobs—and, finally, one June they agreed. I showed up early on a hot sweltering morning and met with the warehouse foreman. I knew I didn’t want to cut spuds, even though it paid best of all the women’s jobs—it seemed risky and left nasty stains where you cut your hands. Sorting on the conveyor belts seemed easy, so I thought I’d aim for that.
The foreman asked if I had experience and I said, “Oh, yes, sir.” There’s no doubt in my mind as I look back on that day that he was chuckling inside at this pale-as-milk, fragile-looking girl with glasses, probably with a smudge of ink on her nose from addictive reading. But he gave me my chance and waved me toward a massive, steel conveyor belt lined on each side by hard-bitten women in shapeless house dresses. There would be no orientation, just welcome-to-the-world of on the job training!
I stepped up on the wooden platform and we all looked each other over. If they’d been betting women and could have placed a wager before the action began, how long they thought I’d last might have ranged from minutes to maybe an hour. I planted my feet and peered down the belt—suddenly with a great clanking and grinding of metal on metal, it began to move and potatoes began to rumble in waves toward us. I was sure if I just watched closely I’d get the hang of it. Of course, I really didn’t know what “it” was.
The women around me sprang into action, each working their arms like an octopus at a seafood bar, rapidly scooping potatoes into large slots in front of them. Clearly it was something to do with size, but what? Suddenly, I saw the foreman headed our way and sprang into action. Visions of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory flashed before me. The potatoes were thundering like a live herd of cattle down that chute. I took a deep breath and began to churn my own arms, grabbing, tossing, raking in those taters as fast as I could. I had no idea which slot was meant for what size, but I was in motion!
The foreman took one look, hitched his belt over his belly, and jerked his chin toward his office. I had not lasted thirty minutes. Still, I now knew what hard, physical work looked like and was pretty certain, even then, that I was better off sweating and wrestling with words.
Winters in Perris were marked with cold, socked-in foggy mornings and evenings, but only once in my seventeen years there did it snow. That was a wonder and I still have a deckle-edged black and white photo to prove it.
Summers were hot and dry, no smog in sight and little rain, the smell of fresh-mown alfalfa on the air, with skies so intense it felt like you could be sucked into them. There was plenty of space (no one referred to it redundantly as “open space”) where folks could hunt, fish, look for arrowheads, or picnic. Most people were plenty busy making a living and didn’t call walking around on the land “hiking”—you always had a greater purpose. And no one wore special shoes for it.
I thought most families were like mine. Fathers worked hard and brought their paychecks home to full time homemakers who baked regularly, sewed clothes, and got their laundry out on the line on Monday mornings before 7 a.m. We ate lunch and dinner, not supper, and everyone drank milk. The idea of cocktails or wine at meals never came up.
Friday night was high school football; most Saturdays, kids went to the afternoon matinee, Sundays was church. Without it ever being spoken of, there was a sense of physical attachment to the land. If we thought of Easterners at all, which I’m not sure we did, we envisioned them in big cities, all thought and no go. Now and then my dad would joke that “those folks” didn’t even know where their milk came from.
Later in life, it began to soak in that people who grew up in the “East” often looked at things differently than I did. I began to believe our wide open skies and vast expanses of land, unbroken by living too closely together, had an effect on our ways of thinking. That we might be more open to possibility than those in the East. Since its mythic early settlement days, West has been the direction of opportunity, of change, of adventure. The compass point quivered with anticipation when it pointed toward the Pacific. All things might be possible if you left the conventions of the East, the tightly packed expectations of culture and family behind. You could reinvent yourself, escape the old, familiar frame. You could spread out, loosen your belt, wear white shoes after Labor Day, try out some new ideas, seek your fortune, raise whoopee.
I’m a confirmed Western woman. I’m not at home if the sky isn’t big. I have to live where I define my direction by geographical features to the west—the ocean when I lived in California and the Rockies here in Colorado. I’m headed north if they’re on my left and south if on my right. I know where I am, if not where I’ll end up. I like dramatic landscapes—even if they seem flat and rolling, it’s that they run as far as the eye can see and they’re not all boogered up with concrete and steel high rises.
When I’m in the East, I feel smaller, more compressed; there seems less possibility, like someone else has already done everything—named all the destinations, defined all the journeys. The trees grow so close together they become a stockade; they hulk over you in places—suffocating green tunnels that hold you pinned to the road, cutting off your view of the heavens. Every inch of ground holds someone else’s footprint.
In the West, each dusty old road still seems to promise an unexpected bend, a choice not a foregone conclusion. As writers, I think geography helps shape our words. Women and men writing the west seem more optimistic, more able to soar. Our thoughts can ride side saddle, western, or hell-bent bareback across the plains. They don’t perspire; our words sweat. European traditions don’t mean much to us—we mold them to fit our own lives rather than molding ourselves to them.
I wonder if, for each of us, there is a place, or a sense of place, that trumps all others. Virginia Woof wanted a room of her own. She grew up in tradition-bound England. Me? I need a wide open space of my own. # # #