The Romance of the West

I’m not from the west. Far from it, in fact: I grew up in New Jersey (exit 131). In 1978, upon my graduation from high school, my family moved to Dallas riding the crest of the oil industry boom. Our move meant I could go to college at the University of Texas where people were paying an astonishing $4 a credit hour. But I moved to Texas at an odd point in time. My east coast, New York City suburban mentality never could reconcile with tooled cowboy belts, mechanical bulls and “who shot J.R.?”. I high-tailed it back east three months after graduation with no job and $300 in my pocket.

For seven years I sowed my wild oats – mainly in the shadowy recesses of Manhattan nightclubs. It was in the city that my journalism degree took me through public relations to advertising. It is where I honed my craft by day and choked out the last breaths of my adolescence by night. And then I was done. I missed my family. I missed having money in my pocket. I looked up at those skyscrapers, at the hundreds of windows behind which thousands of people moved through their lives. And suddenly the city was way too big for me. I needed a city that was manageable. A city that gave me choices but not quite so many. As the 80s drew to a close and Dallas emerged as less hick and more hip, I again headed west.

But I never truly felt a part of “The West”. My husband grew up in Oklahoma on a farm. With horses and cows. He knew a gelding from a stallion, a bull from a steer. But not me. As his family got to know me in our early years together they would collectively giggle at my attempts to pull something out of the fishing hole or keep my children’s white shorts from turning red in the Oklahoma country dirt. Don’t get me wrong – I have come to appreciate the subtle beauty in that part of the country. The vastness of the sky, the rolling fields changing colors with the seasons and even with the movement of the sun each day. The rough-hewn fence-posts connected by prickly barbed wire. The majesty of an ancient Live Oak. The vibrancy of a roadside field of Indian Paintbrush.

In the Wet Mountain Valley, the fields are as long as the mountains are high. The geography is less gentle than Texas and it just feels more western to me. Less a melting pot of American southwest and Mexican cultures and just pure American West. Wagon trains and cowboys. Bears and Indians. I can’t say why but this appeals to some part of me more than Texas does. I look forward to the solitude of winter. Coming from the east coast, I’m not afraid of the snow and the cold. I never moved away from the weather. Just the crowds.