Even since Cole Porter and Bing Crosby conspired to convince us that we didn’t want to be fenced in, Westerners have been gazing at the moon until they lose their senses.
Change is threatening the ridge where the West commences. Blight is threatening the murmur of the cottonwood trees, and urban lights blind us to the starry skies above. It’s getting harder to be alone in the evening breeze. Someone is paving the wide open country that we love, and we feel fenced in.
The days of the one-room schoolhouse are over. The country road isn’t taking you home. John Denver might have believed it, but it just isn’t so. Never was. Home on the range, they’re meeting in church basements to rag on what we want the valley to look like in 10 years – as if we have any control. They are making rules about economic development, basin partnerships, growth management, comprehensive plans and community indicators, as if we cotton to rules.
Westerners have never wanted to be penned and herded, and we certainly don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We know the color of the sky, which way the wind blows, and how high is up. We know how to round ’em up and head ’em out. We have survived developers, weather, disease and cabin fever. We can fix anything with rope and bailing wire; that’s how we tamed the West.
Crazydave the Plumber says the only reason Rome wasn’t built in a day is because he wasn’t on that job. Like the rest of the Boys at the Bar, he can do pretty much anything that needs being done before the eight-second bell, with or without a six-shooter, and in spite of the local gendarmerie. We are survivors, or at least we have been up until now, up until we realized just how many, and how important, are the things we can’t fix with hard work, money and legislation.
Today we play a real-life game of “Fear Factor.” We are afraid of phenomena we cannot control: global warming, interest rates, aging populations, the cost of living, limited availability of land and housing, drought and world competition for the recreation dollar. We’re afraid that we’re going to end up working at Go-Fer Foods because jobs selling gas and gum can’t be outsourced.
County commissioners and city councils are not equipped to deal with these things. They cannot wrap their minds around the unmanageable consequences of change, so they obsess about smoking bans, parking restrictions and bids to pave County Road 56. Like the rest of us they are afraid of the dentist, heights, failure and the unknown.
Face it, we all fear change. The old men who kept track of things no longer hang out on the bench in front of the post office. The Daily Disappointment, reports only news what the Chamber of Commerce wants to hear. We have lost the co-op, coffee shop and the local bar, so we don’t know what’s going on and it’s scary.
We are afraid of the future. We feel ill-equipped, endangered and at risk. We’re not sure we can survive without Day-Timers, cellphones and Palm Pilots. The newbies are educated, rich, worldly and computer literate, but some of our plumbers and electricians are not radio-dispatched. We’re still walking ditch lines, and the newbies are collecting economic indicators.
We fear being disenfranchised. If too many babies come to boom here, someone from Texas or California will run for school board, City Council or get appointed county manager and end up making decisions for us.
We are afraid of losing our memories. Who will archive our heritage, traditions, culture? Who will man the winter carnivals, the county fairs and the 4-H programs? Maybe no one will listen when we sit on the front porch telling stories. Maybe no one will tend the graves of our fathers.
We are lonely. The past and the future aren’t talking to each other. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but we still want to live in the mythic West where everyone chews, spits and smokes, and no one gets cancer. Truth of the matter is you can fence in cattle, but you cannot fence out change.
The question is whether we can adapt.
