SOMETHING IN THE SOIL: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
By Patricia Nelson Limerick
Norton, 384 pages, $27.95
TAKE THE CANNOLI: Stories From the New World
By Sarah Vowell
Simon & Schuster, 219 pages, $23
ONE DEGREE WEST: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter
By Julene Bair
Mid-List Press, 182 pages, $16 paper
Much has been written about the recent transformation of the American West, and much of it has been written by Westerners. In fact, one of the authors of three books that treat the West that have been published this spring suggests that ” `(it) used to be . . . you couldn’t write about places like this without being accused of regionalism. Now publishers can’t seem to get enough of (it).’ “
Writers of fiction and non-fiction alike tell of the persistent, awe-inspiring beauty of the Western landscape. At the same time they agonize over the booming population, declining water supplies and homogenizing local cultures. However changed the West may appear, the new West nevertheless holds a close relationship to the old. Patricia Nelson Limerick argues that, “As well as rock, soil, plants, animals, water, and air, the American West is composed of layers and layers of accumulated human activity and thought.” History and memory are “something in the soil.”
Each of these books–Limerick’s “Something in the Soil,” Sarah Vowell’s “Take the Cannoli” and Julene Bair’s “One Degree West”–explores the relationship between the past and the present in America, and especially the West, by drawing–albeit with varying degrees of success–on the author’s personal experiences.
Each author’s voice is distinct. Two of the author’s, Limerick and Vowell, are fairly well-known essayists and lecturers; their writing reflects a familiarity with the public mind as well as a self-regard that at times borders on pretension. Bair, on the other hand, writes from nearly complete anonymity, uncertain who if anyone might read her story of childhood on a Kansas farm “one degree west” of the 100th meridian. Because of its very ordinariness, however, her story becomes the most authentic of these three tales. Moreover, because the experience of family farming may soon become an extraordinary one in America, the book may be the most important of the three as well.
Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado, former MacArthur Foundation fellow and chair of the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West, is best-known for spearheading the new Western history with her distinguished first book, “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West” (Norton, 1987). The 16 essays in “Something in the Soil” are loosely organized around five themes–“Forgetting and Remembering,” “Beleaguered Great White Men,” “Environmental Impacts,” “The Historian As Dreamer” and an epilogue on how to become a public intellectual. Together they serve as an excellent precis of Limerick’s work since “The Legacy of Conquest” and of the major thrusts in new Western history as a whole over the past decade. Looking beyond the sunny myths and legends of the pioneer past, new Western historians have instead told of the “harsh realities of invasion and conquest” whose “web of consequences (did) indeed unite the nation.” Hardly a mere academic trend, new Western history has rapidly shaped public thought far beyond the university. Even Hollywood producers have revised their formulas for depicting the American West, basing plots on more complex moral conflicts set in more environmentally and culturally diverse landscapes for films that critics now call the new Westerns.
Given this success, it comes as no surprise that many of Limerick’s essays are slightly self-reverencing. It is surprising, however, how many of them are self-referencing. Indeed, so many begin with personal anecdotes–some closely related to the main subject, some not–that it can be hard to know whether any given essay is about history or about the historian. Limerick explains that she is from Banning, Calif., and thus feels “common cause” with Westerners from other “marginal” Western places. Yet she does not actually need to prove her “Western pedigree” to write intelligent, imaginative and important history. To the contrary, when Limerick relies on personal anecdotes and other writing gimmicks–like lists of themes, patterns and lessons–to hook the reader before moving on to her serious historical analysis, she risks alienating the serious reader, no matter where he or she is from. Why recount a boring visit she made as a child to John Sutter’s mill to explain how fascinating the man was who discovered gold? Why analyze the Modoc War of 1872-1873 through “A Twelve-Point Guide to War”? The history of the American West is endlessly fascinating, and Limerick’s work has made it more so. She needs to believe that they both can speak for themselves.
Sarah Vowell grew up in Braggs, Okla., and Bozeman, Mont., and now writes essays and commentary for “This American Life” on Public Radio International. “Take the Cannoli” (the title stems from a line in the film “The Godfather,” with which Vowell was obsessed in college) is a compilation of her writings, many done on assignment as she traveled around the country, a self-proclaimed “smart-alecky (loner) with goofy projects and weird equipment.” She travels from New Jersey to Disney World to Montana, writing with ease and humor on a stunning diversity of topics: music, politics, religion, gunsmithing and more. The ambitiousness of her work is punctuated by the essay about Chicago, “Michigan and Wacker,” in which she claims she can “tell the whole history of America from this corner.”
Still, like Limerick’s, Vowell’s work is least effective when she uses personal experience not as the primary source for her commentary, but only as a stylistic device. For example, her description of a visit to Disney’s model town, Celebration, falls somewhat short in its effort to discuss general trends in American community life. On the other hand, her journey retracing her Cherokee ancestors’ walk on the Trail of Tears is profoundly moving and disturbing.
Julene Bair’s “One Degree West” provides a truly authentic voice of the new West. While she, too, comments on the difficulties of living the West and writing it, the bulk of her memoir eulogizes and demythologizes the experience of growing up on a large wheat-and-sheep farm outside Goodland, Kan. In words reminiscent of novelists Willa Cather and Ole Rolvaag, Bair feels drawn to the beautiful but harsh climate and knows that, “Land and where you are from are part of who you are.” Nevertheless she knows that neither she nor her brother will carry on the family’s work and that her parents are “the living, beached remnants of our family, whose skeletons lay strewn across the Kansas plain like fossils swept inland by a tidal wave.”
Importantly, Bair makes clear that leaving the farm means more than leaving agriculture. She also describes the rituals of small-town life, especially the monthly meetings of the Sunny Circle Home Demonstration Unit, a social club for farm women. As an adult living in Iowa City, she tries to re-create the sense of community and extended family she had known in Goodland by renting a large house and taking in several borders. Even so, she believes that her son’s life is missing an element of fellowship that she will never be able to replace. Not that small-town life was perfect–far from it. Thinking back, she wishes she could have changed many things about local society, especially its traditional and rigid sexual roles. Yet she admits, “such limitations are what makes this place this place.”
Of all the recent changes in the West, the industrialization of agriculture and the concurrent decline of family farming may have the most historic significance. Families like the Bairs have left legacies not only on the soil, but also in democratic politics. The agrarian ideal of productive work, meaningful civic participation and lively community life is captured and reflected in Bair’s own clear, populist voice. She reminds us that a nation “one generation beyond the farm” risks losing much more than its farmers.
