Not Yet West

University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA | I-29/MB-75, between Grand Forks, ND and Winnipeg, MB

I thought everything west of Missouri, where borders changed into squares and trees were planted in lines was The West. Between the squares was wild and abandon, unlike back east, where lobster cities and Chicago buried order. Here, the middle was empty, it pulled and tugged at my mind to fill the space.

But to Arwen, the reluctant debutante from Chapel Hill and the latest prospect in a long line of PhD’s, The West was anything past the Mississippi. Of course, this was ridiculous. Minnesota was North, and the Indians in the phrase ‘Cowboys and Indians’, weren’t exactly the fighting Illini. But in a traditional sense, perhaps, she was correct. St. Louis opened the west with a giant arch and fur traders had spotted the wilderness long before settling down to agricultural catholicism. Maybe, she was right about The West, but wrong about The Frontier. The Frontier was the Front of The West, marked with guns, prostitutes, Disney World and Daniel Boone, but The West was families, failed crops, locusts and dreams. When people brought The East and absorbed The Frontier, it became The West.

Natalie grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Pa Ingalls, Per Hansa and Wall Drug all abided in that same state, so by narrative, epic and six-year-old dreams alike, Natalie should have lived in The West. Yet even she, when we were all shooting across the prairie in a Chevy Colorado somewhere between Grand Forks and Winnipeg, we asked her where The West began, she responded with a nonchalant shrug. Without ever taking her hands off the Colorado’s steering wheel, she responded, “I don’t know, somewhere near Wyoming, I guess”. Wyoming was where cowboys marked the highways. Wyoming was rangeland. Wyoming started with the letter W and sounded like a wolf howl.

Natalie also thought Iowans were stupid and dirty. They had the World’s Largest Truck Stop but didn’t know how to drive in Sioux Falls, presumably since the roads were paved. Earlier that year, when it was November and there were still plans to be made, I stood on the second floor concrete balcony outside the University of Iowa’s death star of a law school and looked at a river dam. Iowa City felt like a liminal Illinois, the same but stretched, like there were too many cows, too big of a sky, and not enough people for the grandeur of the courthouse and city buildings. The school colors were yellow and black. Black, because, and yellow like the sun that silhouetted the hawk eye.

There was a vague stench in the air, the kind only there when the wind blew just right or you thought something nasty. Natalie said it was because Iowa City is surrounded by miles and miles of cow shit. It was also probably caused by the small puddle of vomit in the balcony corner, perhaps deposited after studying law drunk in this liminal Illinois. Drunk and going too far. Public intoxication, illegal. Maybe this was where The West began, since here, with this puddle of vomit, the law ended. Maybe Natalie was right, Iowans were stupid and dirty. After all, they had been too comfortable and established to Go West when it was Time to Go and instead opted to live in this too big farmland and fill it with cow shit.

But what did I know, I wasn’t from Iowa, and none of us, Iowans and Arwen and Natalie and I alike, were from The West. Yet, all of us except Arwen were from somewhere west of each other. When the sun set, at the end of the day, we came to realize that The West was always somewhere else, somewhere further beyond the horizon, where the land changed to something we didn’t always look at and we didn’t actually know anyone. It took more time than we had today to get there. The sun set in The West, because then, one day, the day would be done. We could, satisfied and happy that we had Gone Somewhere We Hadn’t Been Before and Done Something our Mothers Hadn’t Done. For us, living intimately familiar with The West of some other day, The West still existed, and we weren’t there.