My Own Private Idaho

The enormous space of the West brings on an overwhelming bout of desperation like that captured so well by Gus Van Sant in his films like “Mala noche,” “Drugstore Cowboy,” or “My Own Private Idaho,” or an innate sense of unbridled optimism and confidence like that exhibited by the Lewis & Clark Expedition in their voyage across the great expanse of land. Members of the Corps of Discovery ate some 10 pounds of meat a day as they trekked across the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It was a stroke of luck and a calculated shrewdness on the part of Jefferson. It was a will and divinely ordained destiny to strategically occupy the Western territories to create a continent-wide US of A and thereby prevent possession by the British and Spanish or any other powers. It is moments like these that defined the nation. And when you drive through the sparsely populated mountain states, crop dusters dipping over the interstate, wildflowers blooming among the sage and basaltic rocks that seem driven into the land like meteors, the large nameless mountain ranges popping up out in the distance that both garner a sense of amazement in the bigness of it all and repel you with their hostitility and barren wildness. And you have to think about the oft-repeated cliché, freedom, used as a battle cry and a desperate yearning for unity. This freedom is described so well by Sarah Vowell in her description of Lafayette’s giddy return to the States. As a beloved hero of America’s independence, the French general was welcomed with a parade of 80,000 (the population of New York at that time was 120,000). Songs and marches were composed for his return. Lafayette statement that America was the only country whose indepedence was based on the inalienable rights of man. Vowell points out that Lafayette would know why it is the ONLY country whose social order was based on freedom. Witnessing the 1789 revolution that guillotined his fellow citizens along with its hopes for American-style civil liberties, then lived through the restoration of the French King and subsequent dictatorship of Napoleon, and finally, the restoration of another king, Lafayette was in a special position to appreciate the beauty of America’s freedom. Even at that time, with so many battles for liberty left to fight (the biggest one being the war to end slavery), Lafayette’s return however was a reminder of the bravery of the revolutionaries. Lafayette’s prophesy was that one day the US would save the world. And he was right. Every so often, America has saved the world even as we muck it up every so often as well. Lafayette’s understanding of freedom has marked our own sense of freedom. But I’ve always liked Kris Kristofferson’s weighing in on freedom as “just another word for nothing left to lose.” But that’s always been a hard concept to swallow in the land of SUV payments and 30-year mortages.

And when I look at the big mountains and open plains that streak across America’s West, I have to ask myself: Could anything but freedom exist in these wide-open spaces? On a tactical level, How could tyrannical forces shut down and repress a revolutionary militia outposted in the wildnerness of the Lemhi Mountains of Idaho? At a metaphysical level, how could one contain the ospreys and eagles that hover the sky, the fish that swim across the rivers and the antelope that run over the prairies? Yet it is in the effort to contain these great expanses that we find the desperation, the failures of those that came to these open lands either to conquer or just plain survive. And they fail or don’t fit in, falling on their faces, left to drift in the open highways, thumbs up, shirts off, shoulders the blackened the color of molten lava, bags over their shoulders, those that refuse to be scattered like detritis in the colonies of manufactured homes, both of the trailer variety and those of the speculative boom cookie cutter type equipped with standard issue resource-wasting vehicles. The West’s “freedom” is big and easy like a California sunset or a Golden Ages RV park and it is hard like nails, like a buck and pole fence facing a blizzard, or a night in the Tenderloin district of SF, lying in the gutter, needle trcks up the arm, passed out face-first in a puddle of raw sewage at 4 in the morning. It is a land of boom and bust, magmanimous growth and precipitous destruction at the hands of its own inhabitants and events controlled by forces greater than human. The West is a land of tolerance for new ideas and xenophobia directed against new peoples or peoples perceived as alien even though their ancestors have been there longer than those brewing the hatred.It’s a land of bigness and a land of freedom, whatever that means. And a land with an independent spirit.