The Rural Life Read Online Free

subdivisions and trailer parks and RV resorts that line the roads north and south of the Superstition Freeway, places where Iowans who are fifty-five and older and their counterparts from Minnesota and Saskatchewan convene for the winter. Nearly everyone is here because of the ice at home. They come and go, a bonus army of retired men and women, seeking traction, a foothold. When they want to remember the feel of ice they go to the shuffle-board courts and watch the shuffleboard disks glide back and forth over the waxed lanes, as frictionless as time itself.
    Within the walls of these retirement parks, you can hear greater and greater Phoenix, the sirens and the endless rush of traffic. The sound still calls to mind a stiff wind blowing in from the desert. There are ironic allusions to northern lives—an ornamental push-mower bearing the sign RUST IN PEACE , or brightly painted waterbirds welded out of a shovel, a hoe, and the tines of a manure fork. But the desert prevails. Ceramic coyotes and their pups howl silently at the streetlamps all night long. Quizzical ceramic burros ignore their loads and lock you in a sentimental gaze. Ceramic Indian maidens bend low to the water and fill their unfillable ollas.

    T he premise of the American West has always been that there’s another West lying just over the horizon, a place to annul the past, to reoriginate. That premise was never really true, but it was a way of making sense of such a vast quantity of land. Now the next West lies well within the circle of the immediate horizon. East of Denver, heading west, you almost hate to come to a ridgeline on the prairie for fear of what will unfold before you. First a lone outpost of houses clustering on a slope, still raw from the earthmovers’ work, then garrison after garrison of signature subdivisions closing in on Denver itself.
    For many Coloradans a kind of geographical fatigue has set in, fatigue being another word for a sense of helplessness. The old wounds—the places where a megamall or a new crowd of houses has replaced hay fields and pasture—don’t necessarily heal in the minds of some of the drivers inching through Boulder. The shock of the new doesn’t necessarily go away when the new turns less new. All around the fringes of Denver, you come across roads like one I took through Lafayette a few weeks ago. On one side of the highway, the old pattern of land use was still visible. Aging farmsteads, mostly shorn of their outlying acres, sat back from the pavement among mature windbreaks. On the other side, the bare earth was glazed with freezing rain falling on a circuit board of newly built houses, already hardwired for an alternate reality.
    I often think about some words written a few years before the Ghost Dance massacre at Wounded Knee, more than a century ago, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a Scots horseman, essayist, and politician. Graham, who had spent years in Texas, Mexico, and South America, was commenting on the Indian question in the
Daily Graphic.
“The bulk of mankind,” he wrote, “declare that a prairie with corn growing on it, and a log house or two with a corrugated iron roof, is a more pleasing sight than the same prairie with a herd of wild horses on it, and the beaver swimming in every creek.”
    But these scenes—the log house prairie and the wild $$$horse prairie and even those farmsteads near Lafayette—are now so distant in time that they almost seem to be the same place. In America we’ve learned to locate the meaning of rural life in the past, thereby dismissing it. That’s one of the premises behind the sprawl now girdling every city in this nation. Where asphalt-shingled houses spread across the horizon, it sometimes looks like the ash a prairie fire leaves behind. The houses spread almost as fast as prairie fire, but their effect is longer lasting. They are monuments to incomplete arguments, to false assumptions about economic progress and demographic necessity. The strange part is