Blue Bathtub: Looking for the West

By Ray A. March

There is a blue ring around the bathtub in my Elko motel room. A brilliant cobalt, deep blue. I have washed a pair of new, store-bought Wranglers and I am paying the price for my impulse. The blue stain is like blood on porcelain. I can’t get rid of it. The DNA is there. Scientifically, the dye is Wranglers', not Levi's. I apologize to the housekeeping lady for staining the tub, and keep up my scrubbing.

They say the West is disappearing, that its first death gurgle came more than a hundred years ago when the last of the open range was fenced. I don’t know if that’s true, and I am in Elko to find out. This Great Basin town, I am told, is most like what we think a true settlement of the West is – or was. That’s why for twenty years they have been holding the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering here. If the West is vanishing maybe Elko will be its swan song. On the other hand, maybe the West really is dead. I know the old whorehouse district is not here. I have looked. I know the railroad tracks that once brought itinerant, hungover, boxcar cowboys to work the outlying ranches are not here. There is no banging from neon bar to neon bar, no hustling from ill-lit doorways. No stench of stale, leftover beer and cigarette butts. No stink of sidewalk vomit that shrills the nostrils. No shanghaied payday poke. One cold winter night when no one was out, the town folded in on itself and came up the next morning smelling of vanilla.

In all honesty, I am not certain which West I am looking for, the Old West or the New West. The myths are so mixed and mismatched. But the Elko refrain returns to haunt my ear. Elko is where people of our western landscape mostly congregate in the dead of winter. Yea, but can I tell by their outfits if they are cowboys? I’m now standing with my back to the wall of the G Three Bar looking over the jammed crowd. Everybody knows each other, or will. For now, they sound as if they know each other. A fellow who looks like a cowboy stands next to me. His beer count is obviously higher than mine. We sway out of time. There is no music.

“Did I ever tell you how the earth was created?” he asks me.

It is a thought I have not given much time to, I tell him.

“Well,” he continues. “There was this guy on this river. Fishing, see. And the wind comes up.” He pauses.

As the cowboy talked, I saw a man standing in a river up to his knees, fishing. Maybe he was using real flies, I couldn’t tell at a distance. The river wasn’t wide but it was smooth. Great, tall silver cottonwoods stood shimmering on the far bank. A couple of white fluffy clouds floated overhead in the blue sky. I could feel the wind come up and then I lost the image as it flickered between color and ancient back and white.

“Have you seen my wife,” the cowboy changes the subject matter-of-factly.

“No, sorry, I haven’t.”

“Well, tell me if you see her, will you?”

“I don’t know what your wife looks like,” I say.

“Oh, you’ll know her when you see her.” And he wanders into the crowd. I notice his faded Wranglers are starched-creased front and back.

Buying a pair of Wranglers was something I had to do. I wear them all the time, but not in their death-like store-bought stiffness. I’m on the road. I washed them in the motel tub to bring them to life. The blue dye ran in the hot suds and then left its high water mark like a coyote pissing on sage. The blue ring in the bathtub persists.

It is 1944. I am in the third grade in Carlsbad, New Mexico, one of our wartime residences. Traveling with my mother and my Aunt Lucy, we had crossed into New Mexico from Arizona, passing through Lordsburg and then dipping south to El Paso where the railroad crossed the Rio Grande. In El Paso my mother and I transferred to a bus for Carlsbad and Aunt Lucy continued north and eastward to meet her husband in Virginia before he went to war. It was raining so hard when we reached Carlsbad that the streets were flooded. This would be a time when I would learn about flash floods, dry washes and wading barefoot in warm, sticky mud—and wearing high-heeled cowboy boots. I got my first pair of cowboy boots in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I remember them well. They were black, really shiny black, with slippery leather soles. When I wore them home from the shoe store the boots went out from under me and I landed hard on my rear end. When the boots got scuffed, I restored them with liquid polish out on the brick wall of the apartment building where we lived. I always figured that first pair of cowboy boots was the reason I walk bow-legged today. It was during those days I saw my first mountain lion and my first Indians. The mountain lion was chained to a steel post at a dusty, old filling station. The Indians were living in hogans alongside the railroad tracks.

It is summer, 1950. I am sixteen and I’ve taken the Greyhound from my California home back down to Carlsbad. The trip was my parents’ idea. Their plan was for me to spend the summer with a family we knew during those closing war years, a summer of refining my teen-aged rough edges with informal English lessons and instruction in table manners. There was a son my age and a younger daughter. It was a great summer of hanging out on the muddy banks of the Pecos River, listening to Lefty Frizzell over the outdoor speakers at the A& W Root Beer stand, seeing how many sit ups we could do in thirty seconds and getting tan with the aid of a Johnson’s Baby Oil and iodine mixture. We wore homemade short-sleeved cotton shirts and blue jeans. My shirt was a crispy, light yellow and white pinstripe, and we took our picture in one of those photographic booths, hamming it up in our 50s innocence and wearing our new shirts. In the warm evenings we’d borrow the family Ford and joke about buying a six-pack of beer and drinking it under the bridge that spanned the dry wash, but we never did. Instead, we were content cruising the main street and singing along with Lefty and “I Want To Be With You Always” and the “Mom and Dad’s Waltz.” We’d wiggle the skin over our Adam’s apple as we tried to imitate his style of curving those notes at the end of each line. And when Lefty came to town we were there to see his convertible with the rope lettering spelling out his name on the side. When the disc jockey interviewed his brother David on the radio and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said “I want to be just like my brother Lefty.” We thought that was a good idea, too. Those days were my early West. They weren’t complicated.

What was complicated was the segregation of blacks and Mexicans from the rest of us. I came from California, a place more tolerant of all kinds of peoples coming together, and I neither understood segregation, nor the reasoning and causes behind it. It was not natural to me, and I stayed silent when the lifeguards roughhoused and chased the blacks and Mexicans out of the muddy Pecos because they had wandered upstream of us. Their place, they were told, was downstream.

Now, in my looking for the West, I have read Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, John Graves, Charles Bowden, Edward Abbey, William Kittredge, Charles Wilkinson, my high school classmate Alston Chase, and many others.

Jeffers is sort of an old buddy. We came from the same hometown although I never had the nerve as a teenager to knock on the symbolic granite of his front door. He witnessed his version of the passing of the West in writing “The Coast-Road” back in the early 1930s when the lone cowboy of his poem turned his back on the highway builders carving a wedge in the Santa Lucia Mountains. Far below his mountain stance, so far below the cowboy couldn’t hear the Pacific’s sea waves crashing against the rocks, workmen were building a paved highway that would link the south coast with the north and forever change the remote ranch and farmland in between into the Big Sur of today. Jeffers predicted the completion of the road would bring a “rich and vulgar and bewildered civilization” to destroy that landscape. Jeffers’ cowboy, never to be heard from again as far as I know, rode not into the poetic sunset, but eastward into the interior West. Less then forty years later Lady Bird Johnson, in a nationwide beautification fit, rubbed salt into the open wounds of Jeffers’ words when she perched herself on the ledge above Big Sur’s Bixby Creek and grandly christened the Coast Road as America’s first scenic highway. Bumper-to-bumper vans and motorhomes bringing millions of tourists instantly answered her call.

I think I am narrowing in on the West.

It’s easy, all I have to do is take “The Coast-Road” to heart and eliminate the West Coast. The entire West Coast, Washington, Oregon and California, was sacrificed long ago to progress pushed from east to west. It was hung out to dry like bee-sucked jerky in deer camp. Adios, vaqueros, no hasta la vista, amigos. Something of that order. Since the Gold Rush days, the West Coast – particularly California -- has been pasteurized, homogenized, cemented, paved and sky-scraped into oblivion. Washington and Oregon caught the fallout. Washington became mega-Seattle. Oregon rolled over into Portland, and California is one long shopping mall with Fresno in the middle and San Francisco and Los Angeles the anchors. Like the cowboy in Jeffers’ poem, I also look to the interior. I admit I am willing to settle for less, for any fragments of the West I can find.

In Elko I look through old family photos crammed in back room file drawers of the Northeastern Nevada Museum. Over in Eureka, I hear ghostlike oral histories knocking around the acoustical halls of the restored Opera House. In the northwestern Nevada desert I gaze at wagon ruts made by thousands of overlanders trudging the California Trail and I weigh, like they must have, the logic of heading for the rich gold fields or taking the Applegate Cutoff that skirts my own home ground. I try, but I cannot imagine the traffic gridlock of more than 20,000 people and their 60,000 draft animals pulsing west along poorly mapped immigrant routes.

I, too, am a wanderer. And I am filled with mournful respect for the pioneer men and women who optimistically, alone and unto themselves, kept handwritten diaries as they journeyed west. I can envision them hoarding writing paper and pencil. I commiserate with them in finding the time to write their thoughts. I share their fear and doubts while looking over their shoulders for “savages” and twinging at the thought of a silent arrow piercing its way in their direction.

Fragments of the West collect, but without cohesive form. Items, like tattered black and white photographs partially torn from the pages of an old album, filter into focus. I search for their meaning. The blue ring in the bathtub won’t go away.

Item. A humorless and fearful man from the East reads histories of the West and believes absolutely that Custer, Colt pistols, Winchester lever-actions and any Saturday night in Cody, Wyoming are personifications of the true West and that is his limit. Well, not quite. He is not an Indian, but he knows the original, traditional and adopted names of every Indian tribe, their sub-tribal names and derivations. Nadouessioux, Teton Souix, Yankton Sioux, Santee Sioux, Oglala, Lakota, Shoshone, Paiute. He knows names Indians gave themselves and names we foreigners gave them. He can pontificate endlessly on the West, as he has read it. But he is afraid of the desert, of something mysterious and invisible out there that might befall him if he were to walk the heat of its surface. He once stopped overnight at a roadhouse on the western edge of the Great Basin and ordered chicken fried steak. Medium rare. When it was placed before him, he complained the “steak” was over cooked. Full of fear for the blackness outside, that night he slept fitfully in an upstairs room wishing he hadn’t left his pistol in his car. And what would he have done with it? As a hobby this non-Indian makes imitation tomahawks and places them for sale at a local shop.

Item. It’s now late 1969 or early 1970. Those years collided when the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz stunned the imagination of the West. It’s winter. The damp air off the Bay of San Francisco burrows into the bone and blows down the concrete corridors of low-income apartment buildings off 19th Avenue. I am with a magazine editor who is wearing Indian moccasins. He’s asked me to write about the Indian occupation of Alcatraz. In this wind-chilled temperament it’s the vodka that keeps him warm. He’s wearing moccasins because we are at the converted ground floor apartment of the Indians of All Tribes press headquarters. I’m here to pick up my credentials and my editor wants the Indians to know that although his magazine is read exclusively by San Francisco’s corporate leaders, he is simpatico with their cause. He’s a journalist and a liberal at heart and he thinks the Indians will be more willing to permit me to go ashore at Alcatraz because he is wearing moccasins. He thinks the moccasins are symbolic. I am credentialed. The Indian press rep does not look at his feet. None of the Indians are wearing moccasins.

Richard Oakes, a student at San Francisco State and one of the Indian occupation troops, said Federal Alcatraz was not so much a symbol, but an inspiration, a way to control Indian destiny. Tricky Dick replied, “You may have self-determination without termination.” Under his breath there was the stale promise of trust me, this treaty will last as long as the grass shall grow. Then, true to our government’s long history of violating promises to Indians, he pulled the plug and ordered an invasion by the federal army. In a rush they removed six unarmed men, five women and four kids. Another all-out victory for the Great White Father. The Indians picked up the pieces and moved onward. It’s all there, resting in five acid-free boxes within the tomb of the San Francisco Library’s history center. Like the pocket remains of unidentified bodies found abandoned in a skid row gutter, you can go through the loose change if you want.

Item. I read in a “sportsman’s” magazine that since 1891 a half million coyotes have been killed in the West at a cost of thirty million dollars. Sixty bucks a head for more than a hundred years and ol’ wily is still out there howling.

Among the cowboys and the coyotes in the Great Basin there is a loose live-and- let-live code. It’s loose because only the cowboy ranchers enforce the code. The coyotes don’t have any say in the matter. The ranchers kill if the coyotes hint at killing. If the coyotes actually kill, they are doomed. The ranchers’ fear that coyotes will bag a lamb or a weakened newborn calf – lost profits if they don’t make it to the supermarket meat rack. I think the ranchers’ contempt of the coyote is in the heart, but their fear is even deeper inside. One rancher I know says he lets the coyotes alone as long as they don’t trespass too close to his livestock, but too close can be within the range of a scoped hunting rifle. Looking for another kind of sport, there’s a rancher who chases them across the crusty open playa on his motorcycle, playing the coyote like a trophy fish on an ultra light line until the coyote is so tired it can't run anymore and then the rancher runs him over with his motorcycle. Thump. A dead coyote is the best of all coyotes. One day a rancher told me he shot one that had been lurking at the edge of his pasture.

“Dumped him on the playa,” he told me when I asked.

I looked. The coyote was stretched out flat on its right side, facing north up the valley, legs looking like they were ready to run. A forming snarl on its rigor mortis lips. He was a red-haired one. I told that later to the rancher.

“By God, you’re right. He sure was a red one. You looked, huh? Did you look at his teeth?” There is no lamenting the coyote.

Coyotes exhibit no fear. That may also be why ranchers hate them -- for their impudence. They will run in front of your truck and then stop a few yards away and look back over their shoulder at you as if curious or daring, and then trot on – if they are not shot down in their tracks. They follow their instincts. Once a lone coyote bitch lured a domestic dog out into the twilight sagebrush with teasing yelps and throaty growls and when the dog followed too far from its safety the coyote family ambushed it for dinner.

Item. Winchester promoters claim their rifle won the West. Perhaps it did, but it didn’t win Sarah Winchester’s peace of mind. I stand outside her mansion and marvel at its pre-modern architecture and the fantasies and illusions it conjures. As I stare, I can hear the incessant fall of hammers on nails, raspy sawing of fresh wood, and under-the-breath murmurs of carpenters. Sarah was crazy, even if she did inherit the profits made from the lever action rifle everybody loves. Permanently distracted by the dead bodies at the end of the rifle’s barrel, she followed the advice of a medium and hired non-stop carpenters to build room upon room at her California mansion. Constant hammering and sawing was supposed to appease the evil spirits of all those killed by the Winchester. Construction didn’t cease, and probably never would have stopped considering the Winchester rifle killed more of everything than any other firearm except the atom bomb, until Sarah, too, died.

The blue ring around the bathtub refuses to lose its cobalt brilliance. It won’t wash out. I am on my knees at the altar, scrub brush at hand.

Tonight I’m in Elko having dinner at the Star with some of the entertainers at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Six big names eating steaks, lamb chops, French fries, beans, Basco salad and drinking harsh red wine from stubby little water glasses. They joke back and forth in their semi-privacy. A maverick singer puts his fork and knife down and hands each of them a business-sized, number-ten envelope with “Special Delivery” written on the front. No one opens his envelope. They go on eating their steaks and lamb chops while good naturally trading jibs and jabs. The maverick singer says the envelope contains a poem he has written although he is not a poet, and he paraphrases one of his lines: “The West is nothing more than a fucking dude ranch,” or something close to that sentiment. I make a note to myself that maybe I do not need to look any further for evidence of the West. A hand-hewn definition has arrived from across the table as we eat a Basque dinner. I shake it off. His reasoning is too narrow. He’s taken the easy way out. Dude ranches are as much a part of the West as rodeos, Wild West shows and Frontier Days. Just because they entertain and pretend doesn’t lessen them. Like the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Gene Autry movies and faux cattle drives, they are the West many of us cling to.

“I’m back in the saddle again.”

You tell’m Gene.

But, isn’t the West so pervasive, as Stegner says of its heart and lungs, that I should at least find one little pulsating organ? Stegner wrote, “The Great Basin is a unifying force; wherever you live in it you flow toward every other part.” The Great Basin, while not encompassing the entire West, is a good-sized chunk. But why can’t I recognize the Big Picture when I see it? I am coming to believe the West is not so pervasive. Perhaps it really is disappearing. Why is this? One answer is we westerners, those of us born to the land of the West, are becoming aliens unto ourselves, alien to the land that bred us, that bred our fathers and their fathers before them. Urbanization, especially from the east, is forcing us into circling the wagons, we might say with a bit of irony. We are getting defensive about our open space and how we use it. In my search, I can find no center to the West, only its fringe – like Elko, swimming in the Pecos, and Indians defiantly occupying Alcatraz.

Returning from my search for the West, I am at home. Home for me is a place on the western rim of the Great Basin. There is a burial ground across the narrow county road from where I live. I think of it as a cemetery although it has the touch of a graveyard without a church. That’s because it is simple in its rural demeanor. Seen from the road its headstones are granite grey, rust and pale white miniature pinnacles in dirt. True to its high desert nature, there is no grass to mark this cemetery although a few plots have little rectangular lawns that are privately sprinkled and mowed in the summer. Others are covered with Astroturf, a sure sign of the deceased’s practicality in life as well as death, or the uncomplicated logic imposed by a surviving family. But most of the graves are bordered by low concrete curbs, borders of boards or nothing at all. Just an upright headstone poking its way out of the dirt. The sparseness of the cemetery speaks to its frugality. It doesn’t need much water in a region that needs all the water it can muster, and it requires scarcely any upkeep although there is an occasional presence of a cemetery keeper and last summer a prison crew scraped the dirt whistle-clean of weeds. There aren’t any trees to speak of, just a couple at the cemetery’s edge and a few that were planted at various plots. Flowers left at the graves are mostly pink and yellow and white and plastic. And when the wind blows strong and indifferent from the west many of the flowers lose their graveside grip and fly across the county road where they lodge themselves in tumbleweeds and mustard or against a four-strand barbed wired fence, silent tributes cut loose and lost of their meaning.

When there is a funeral, which is infrequent enough to be noticeable, an old man drives his backhoe down the county road, usually the day before, and digs the grave. The tailings are unceremoniously piled high at graveside much like at a job site where a hole for a septic tank is dug. Then the old man parks his backhoe off to the side, gets a ride back into town, and returns after the funeral service to put the dirt back in the hole. It’s a routine that goes without offending. These high desert people, dead or alive, are practical and accustomed to work implements. They are of the land and might well have used a backhoe in their own work. Once, a rancher who was thought of by his peers as a kindly man, died. The backhoe was parked at the gravesite, but the gravedigger wasn’t there to scoop out the plot. The morning of the funeral, one of the dead man’s sons climbed onto the seat of the backhoe, started it up and dug his father’s grave. The other day after a funeral a covey of mourners stood to one side after everyone had left and were making their last goodbyes as the old man pushed the pile of dirt back into the hole and slowly drove his backhoe home. I don’t know if anyone wonders who will dig the gravedigger’s grave when the time comes. That is the easy part. There is a ritual and not much ceremony. Perfunctory. Much like the burials of the Old West, I imagine. I can’t be far off in this analogy. Just look at the graveyards that mark the western landscape. Not too fancy. Not too enduring, actually. That’s also a mark of the West. Nothing is too permanent. Keep moving. Don’t let the sun catch you saddling your horse.

The difficult question is how do I fit in? Because I travel by this cemetery daily and often, I wonder if I should be considering a place there for me. But where? It would be intrusive to think I should find a plot for my future in the old section where generations of families are buried. I think I should ask, “Where do you bury the newcomers?” That would probably be best. Besides, I admit to being picky about my neighbors. I once thought I would like to be buried in the cemetery at Monterey, my old stomping grounds, where luminaries like Steinbeck’s biologist buddy Ed Ricketts is buried along with other real characters from Cannery Row like Flora Woods, the whore house madam. I thought it would be an opportunity to conduct some post-mortem interviews. But there is also a rich banker buried there who I knew in life and he always was looking for something from me, and I’m not sure I want to listen to him anymore. And then there is the publisher of the newspaper where I was a rookie reporter. I’m not sure how I feel about him. Besides, there is a busy thoroughfare just outside the cemetery walls and the traffic is noisy. The burial ground across from where I live now is not like that. The county road it fronts is relatively quiet. I don’t know a soul buried there, which could make for some interesting interviews. But death is - at least I think it is in this cemetery - eternal. You just can’t get up and move if you don’t like your neighbors. So, this decision of where to be buried is a serious one, not to be taken idly. I will consider the matter as long as I possibly can before making that decision. And when the time arrives to call for the old backhoe, bury me not in new Wranglers, but wash them first. Let the blue dye run its course.