While teaching a class in
Gardiner, Mont., I asked the teenagers for adjectives to describe
their lives.
“Boring,” one called out, because I sensed
the kid knew that teenagers were supposed to be jaded. It was a
cloak he could easily don, and by pretending to be bored he
wouldn’t have to work very hard. Who knows, it might turn into a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
He may have been testing me,
too: Many grown-ups get infuriated at the notion that teenagers are
bored. They say, “How can you be bored when you’re surrounded
by beautiful mountains like this?” Then they go away and leave the
teenagers alone. But I just wrote “Bored” on the chalkboard, and
held the chalk waiting for another adjective.
“Desolate,”
said somebody else, a strong word, at least. But then we got down
to business.
“Mountains,” said somebody; “wildlife,” said
another; “sagebrush,” said a third. These weren’t adjectives, but I
didn’t want to get hung up on grammar. Not when I had a chance to
learn about the lives of rural teenagers.
“Driving”: the
kids drove everywhere. “Basketball”: the Gardiner boys’ team was
currently advancing in the state playoffs. “Skiing,”
“snowboarding,” “hunting,” “desert,” “drought.”
I was
there to talk to them about Mildred Walker’s novel Winter
Wheat, thanks to a statewide program sponsored by the
Montana Committee for the Humanities. I was afraid they’d find the
book boring since I’d found it a little bit boring myself,
until about halfway through when its carefully crafted momentum
propelled me to the end.
The book is set on a 1940s
Montana wheat farm, and I asked them for one-word descriptions of
the lives of its characters.
“Boring,” the same wag said,
and we all laughed. But soon we came up with a list: prairie,
quiet, cold, wheat, community, deadly, spare time.
With
it going so well, I decided to test out a theory of mine. “How many
of you are familiar with cowboy novels?” I asked. “And John Wayne
movies?”
Enough nodded their heads that I plunged in.
“Let’s do the same for those.”
Our results: outlaws,
romantic relationships, violent action, sheriffs, suspense. Mindful
of “community” on the previous list, I suggested adding
“individualism” to this one; they agreed. It was a little vague,
since we weren’t examining a specific text, but the result still
looked remarkably different from the other lists.
The
list demonstrated that in the real West — now or 60 years ago
as portrayed in a realistic novel — outlaws, sheriffs and
romantic relationships don’t seem that significant. The
deadliness comes only from weather and driving. The tie to
landscape is deeper and more rewardingly complicated than
moviemakers portray.
This difference between movies and
real life isn’t surprising and has often been written about.
Of course, no Hollywood genre fits people’s real lives. Your love
life is nothing like a romantic comedy, that classroom was nothing
like Dead Poets’ Society and reality is nothing
like reality television programs.
At the same time,
everyone in our culture understands the themes of cowboy books and
movies. We know that iconic set of adjectives. We quickly grasp
those mythologized images. They’re an easy set of stereotypes.
So when we as Westerners interact with “the grown-ups” in
the form of the local and federal government, corporations,
environmental organizations, “Easterners,” “Californians” or anyone
we see as being from that other culture which seeks to control us,
I think we sometimes reach for that easy stereotype. We pretend to
be cowboys, individualists, stoics — not necessarily because
we believe the stereotype ourselves, but because we hope the
grown-ups will buy it.
Then, we hope, they’ll go away and
leave us alone.
It’s a teenager’s response. Sure, it’s
slightly immature. But it comes from an aggravation at being
condescended to, which I think is often justified. If the adults
would sit and listen, our conversations might get beyond the
tough-guy stereotypes.
But too often they don’t. The
dialogue just gets frustrating — leaving us with a problem,
too. As Westerners, we have to live with the consequences of our
pretensions: we have to continually live up to that lonely
celluloid image. And, like teenagers, we also have to live with the
moments of desperate doubt, when we wonder why it is that we’re all
alone and not growing up.
John Clayton is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hnc.org). He lives in Red Lodge, Montana, and his
new book The Cowboy Girl, a biography of the
writer and rancher Caroline Lockhart, is due out next
year.
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