back out west

As I ran through the economy parking lot of the Salt Lake City Airport in black leather shoes, shirt and tie two of the many worlds I live in crashed together. I dashed from the airport bus that had ferried me to the parking lot into a large white Semi pulling a six-horse trailer that had the words 'Pimpin Ain't Easy' monogrammed onto the back in cursive blue letters. My cousin Rob threw open the door and I jumped in to drive with them 3 hours to Burley Idaho where they were roping in the slack the next morning. When we arrived the gates, which had been locked at some point earlier in the evening, had already been ripped off their hinges by a fellow cowboy named Max. This is the kind of pragmatic unquestioned decision that comes from years out on the ranch where no one really has time to debate small issues, in this case vague legalities, because at three in the morning with a rodeo awaiting bright and early they didn't have time to care about anything other than what kind of tools might be in the back of the pickup that would get them into the Rodeo grounds.

When I sat in the stands a mere 5 hours later eating a taco for breakfast I was once again comfortable in my strange little niche of videotaping my cousins for them as they roped that I had carved out in cowboy life over the years. I sat there alone trying not to open my mouth to much and be betrayed as an "eastern city boy" as I had often been called. Now after moving to Chicago and being more characterized as a southerner than an easterner by any means I find this whole situation hilarious.

Three rodeos later I finally found myself sitting in my aunt's house looking at the family photo albums from my great grandparents and their mountaineering trips to Europe during the 1920s and 30s. Sitting there facing a window that looks down the valley from that isolated cabin outside of Kamas, Utah I searched for myself in the faces of my great grandparents hoping to find some advice on what to do with my existence from these people I never knew. The history of these people whose pictures I was now carefully scanning through in a few disintegrating photo albums had always fascinated me. My mother had made them out to be mythic creatures from a Boston that time and the great depression had erased. They lived in a time where real exploration was still up for grabs; their trips to the bighorn mountains wandered through legitimately uncharted territory; they were on the first ascent of various European peaks to ever be led by a woman; even as they did this they remained important members of the Boston intellectual community. Looking at their photos, at their lives, I wanted to live a life that they would be proud of.

Soon enough I was once again leaving Salt Lake City (not without an obligatory trip to Ogie's diner where old friends of my aunt were such good customers that the owner of the diner came up to shake my hand). From Salt Lake I drove and I drove and lost a set of bicycle tires somewhere between Rawlins and Cheyenne Wyoming and I drove until I got to Iowa across the endless expanse of Nebraska, and when I got to Iowa I just drank some espresso and kept driving until the sun had risen to meet my eyes somewhere past Des Moines. I woke up in the truck as it barreled past the endless cornfields of western Illinois just in time to drive myself through sunday morning in Chicago.

I had lost the west long before I entered Cook County. I had given it up as I drove east through that thunderstorm on the plains of Nebraska. Leaving the west behind is always heart breaking for me because the sky gets really small and the mountains and fresh air are left behind you and only get farther and farther away as the interstate passes beneath the wheels of that Toyota pickup truck.