The Lure of the West

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

My father, who was born and raised in the Catskill Mountains and lived there until he died, loved the West. As a child he read Zane Grey’s novels and other western adventures like those of the X Bar X boys. I still have a tattered copy of The X Bar X Boys Lost in the Rockies. It carries the scent of mildew now, but when I first opened it, perhaps 60 years ago, I was certain I smelled sage and pine, campfire smoke and scorching bacon.

 

There were always paperback western novels stacked on my father’s nightstand, books by Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, and others. If a western played at the local drive-in theater, we went. And he’d watch the programs TV had to offer in the 1950s—although he’d often point out the sameness of Hollywood-back-lot scenery. 

I don’t know if he’d ever intended to pull up roots generations deep, head west, and try his luck on the open range. Perhaps he did. But Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of his life. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was sent east instead. He landed in the China-Burma-India Theater where he maintained planes and, as was required to insure the job was done right, went along on supply missions. Those missions took him over The Hump—the east end of the Himalaya Mountains. To say those missions were dangerous is a gross understatement.

 When he wasn’t flying or fixing, he lounged in his tent, swatting mosquitoes and trying to put aside fears about being shot at and shot down. He often imagined he was on the other side of the world, out on the plains, in the mountains and canyons. He passed the hours of boredom between flights by mentally living the kinds of adventures he’d read about. I imagine he saw himself herding cattle, shooting rattlesnakes, joining a posse, or simply gazing into the depths of a canyon or at the peaks of the Rockies.

 

He didn’t get to see the country he read so much about until the early 60’s when he packed us into the family station wagon, stuffed a small trailer with tents and camping gear, and headed that way. In six weeks, we saw the Mississippi River, the Great Plains, the towering Rockies, the Grand Canyon, and the geysers of Yellowstone. We saw the Painted Desert, Bryce Canyon, a cattle drive down the main street of a Wyoming town, and the Grand Tetons. We saw tumbleweeds and redwoods, bears and coyotes.

 

Oddly, the day we mounted up and went on a trail ride in the Rockies, the man who had imagined himself living a cowboy kind of life as World War II went on around him, didn’t come along. Instead, he waved us off and waited at the car.

Looking back, I like to think he recognized that riding a hired and tired horse with a dozen other tenderfeet would degrade or even demolish his dreams. So, he turned his back. And he preserved the images.