Cars are the new horses, and the new cowboys a breed of vehicular nomads cruising the Interstates looking for better lives and new beginnings. But while it is obvious that much has stayed the same, the myth has also changed with the times. The real West is, after all, what makes the West of myth, not the other way around. The American West is no longer a frontier so much as a space between, not just the part of the country lying west of the Mississippi but the entire wasteland stretching from New York to Los Angeles. It is the Empire Wilderness that Robert Kaplan described in his recent travelogue, a vast region of deserts and highways populated by a nomadic, Greyhound underclass.
Poverty is the norm.
Lives of isolation and routine lead to closer personal relationships than are found in the city. Even the drugs of choice are significant. You might as well leave those amphetamines at the disco, you re in laid-back weed country when you enter the West. In terms of its writing the West is clearly the land that hip forgot. The shallow but entertaining banter that characterizes so much of today s urban writing has no place in its landscape.