The core insight of the sustainability revolution is that before making choices we should carefully consider whether our actions can be perpetuated over time without causing excessive harm to the natural environment. I suggest that we also apply this reasonable standard to ourselves and our work, asking whether our current approach to environmentalism can be sustained, or whether our relentless solemnity now threatens to become a liability to our cause. It is precisely because we are serious—because our task is so difficult and the stakes are so high—that we should recognize the value of humor in helping to sustain both the natural environment and one another.
During the Q&A session following a recent reading of my work, an audience member asked me what I see as my main objectives as a writer. My unscripted reply was that “I want to make readers laugh. And I want to make them think. But I’m happiest when I help them to do both at the same time.” Reflecting on this spontaneous answer later that night, I added the following to my journal: “I also want to help readers think about laughing. And, in a perfect moment, I would also get them to laugh about thinking.”
A sense of humor, like a sense of place, is challenging to define precisely (as the term sense suggests), but we should be suspicious of folks who lack it, because laughter is an indispensable mode of self-reflection. Humor, like love, is fundamental to our humanity. It allows us to understand ourselves in a new way, to bond with other people and with the more-than-human world, to embrace with genuine humility the natural forces over which we exert no control. Most important, laughing matters because we recognize in laughter something essentially restorative and uplifting. In focusing only on what has been wounded, we risk forfeiting this regenerative potential of laughter. Humor, by contrast, can be a surprisingly powerful agent of both resistance and resilience.
It is in this spirit of renewed resilience that I share with you the twenty-nine small stories that comprise How to Cuss in Western. I hope they will give you an entertaining glimpse of our unusual life in these high, dry wilds, and also that they may serve to remind you of the sound of your own laughter.
THAT WE ARE SO FEW and far between in this big, wide-open high desert profoundly conditions our modes of communication, which in turn increases our dependence upon each other even as it intensifies the isolation we have intentionally chosen in coming here to dwell. Our challenge is to affirm the bonds of community to have them ready in times of blizzard and fire, while simultaneously protecting each other’s elaborate fantasies of radical independence. This is more difficult than it might sound, and it accounts for the ubiquity of discussions about the weather, without which my neighbors and I—there are only eight of us strung along this terrible, 2.3-mile road snaking through the sage and juniper hills—would have a rough time getting along. We are all isolatoes out here, distinguished primarily by our reclusiveness. Ironically, the only thing we all have in common is that we each retreated to this remote desert to get away from other people—a shared passion that lays a crooked but necessary foundation for mutual aid in times of trouble.
The dominant ethic on our road—and the key to preserving harmony in our remote little desert kingdom—is unflinching, stoical restraint. One of my neighbors will use his tractor to clear our ditches after a flash flood, but not if we embarrass him by talking about it, never mind if we were to insult him by offering money. Another will sometimes plow us out after a big snow, but never if we ask or expect him to. Above all, we adhere strictly to the cardinal rule that there is to be no discussion of anything outside the immediacy of our local circumstances: weather, animals, and plants are permitted; religion, politics, and economics are not. What each of us does to make a living in the distant city is vaguely understood and never spoken of. The fact that 97 percent of topics common to human social discourse are strictly off-limits obviously necessitates conversations that are delicate, resourceful, and extremely brief. And this is just how we like it.
This ethic of restrained communication may be seen in the greetings we offer each other as we drive along our road—greetings that are confined entirely and inflexibly to the wheel wave. That is, we lift one or more fingers off the steering wheel of our trucks as we roll by each other in the mud, dust, or snow. This is a rich and subtle form of communication, with a complex variety of nuanced, unwritten rules, but I’d summarize it this way: You lift only your pointer finger off the wheel for a routine “howdy” to a neighbor. Raising the pointer and middle fingers in the two-fingered salute is appropriate when greeting a pickup carrying kids or older people, but it is best to flash the fingers at an oblique angle to avoid having the signal be misunderstood as a peace sign—which, in a sideways sort of way, it is. Under no circumstances do you ever allow your palm to leave the wheel, which would be a greeting so effusive and emotional—so perfectly hysterical—that anyone foolish enough to display such a loss of self-control would never regain the respect of their neighbors.
The complex, invisible protocol for wheel waving constitutes an interactive social symbol system that, like other kinds of coded language, appears inscrutable to outsiders but is highly functional for those of us who employ it. In a world replete with ambiguity, miscommunication, obfuscation, and deceit, this system is crystalline in its clarity, elegant in its simplicity and directness. You might object that the desert, so dry, has made us dry as well, and you may wonder if the wheel wave is a human-scale gesture on the order of the more demonstrative greetings that are regularly exchanged in town. And yet, in a high desert landscape that is so full of space, light, and wind, and so empty of confusion, misunderstanding, and noise, a sideways peace sign is sufficient—at least until the next blizzard or wildfire rolls in.
The unusual restraint that characterizes wheel waving may be related to the larger question of how we desert dwellers are influenced by the extraordinary land we inhabit. I am fascinated by the proposition that people who dwell in any physical environment long enough are inevitably and profoundly shaped by it. Out here in Silver Hills, we are buffeted by uncontrollable natural forces—from drought, wind, and blizzard to flash flood, earthquake, and wildfire. But we are also deeply affected by the crisp, thin air and the unique quality of the light, by the unforgiving openness of the land and the immense quiet it engenders. Even on a still day, a wind-canted juniper embodies the force of the Washoe Zephyr; even when it is desiccated, an arroyo is an expression of the sudden power of flood. In a similar sense, learning to live in the high desert might be described as the slow, humbling, graceful process of coming to realize how the high desert also lives in us.
I am certainly not the only writer to be fascinated by this question of environmental determinism in the arid West. Desolate as their reputation remains among folks who are looking for a handy place to test weapons of mass destruction or dispose of nuclear waste, American deserts have had as allies an impressive bunch of talented, passionate writers. Among these lyrical defenders I would include John C. Van Dyke, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Ellen Meloy, Charles Bowden, Ann Zwinger, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Nabhan, Terry Tempest Williams, and Craig Childs. And at the headwaters of this dry river of sparkling prose I would place Mary Austin, the early-twentieth-century writer who once described the arid West as “forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.” We do not need to agree on what God might be to recognize how powerfully this expresses the exhilarating experience of desertness. In her 1903 classic The Land of Little Rain, Austin writes of the desert, “There are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers.”
One of the habits forced on us by these expansive arid lands is a special kind of silence, one that mirrors the vast quiet of the landscape itself. Lately I’ve been thinking about this profound desert silence—how it might be shaping us even as we speak, or choose not to. I have observed that coyote and even raven talk more than we laconic Silver Hillbillies do. The few folks scattered along our rutted rural road seem to h
ave agreed tacitly that language is a thing best left in town, and most of us ration words as we would a short supply of whiskey during a blizzard. Here in Silver Hills, we’ve reached a tacit agreement that the wheel wave is a sufficient expression of social connection.
To illustrate how this desert silence conditions our social interactions, I offer three small stories of unusual encounters with my rural neighbors.
The first occurred atop our home mountain, whose base is several miles west of our home on Ranting Hill and whose summit ridge runs north–south at a hair below 8,000 feet. To appreciate this story, you must first understand that, in fifteen years of walking these hills, canyons, and valleys—around 20,000 miles of tromping around my home desert in all seasons and all weathers—I have seen a grand total of three recreational hikers. When you run into another walker only every five years or so, you forget that such a meeting is even possible. Although I walk every single day, US presidential elections come and go more often than I encounter another desert rat like myself out in these inaccessible hills and canyons.
One bright morning in early fall, I had made the 1,800-foot ascent to the mountaintop and was picking my way south along the boulder-strewn crest of its summit ridge. As I came through a rocky notch in the ridge, I looked up and, to my great surprise, saw a man about 100 yards ahead, making his way toward me. I thought to myself how unlikely this meeting was and how much we two must have in common. Clearly, this was a guy I would want to talk with. On the other hand, I felt unsure about what I should say to him, since life here in Silver Hills has taught me deep respect for a kind of inviolable silence that now seemed oddly threatened by this chance meeting. We two came closer and closer to each other as we both walked carefully along the crest of the mountain, each of us glancing up occasionally at the other. At last, we came face-to-face on the narrow ridge. The guy looked at me and smiled.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied, returning the smile.
Neither of us broke stride.
The second encounter happened one October afternoon, as I was coming home from the Sierra with a load of white fir and ponderosa pine for winter fuel. I had just banked my pickup and dump trailer through the sharp double curve out on the paved road several miles east of Ranting Hill when I decided to pull over and check the load before starting up the washboarded gravel road to our house. As I tested the tension on the straps that secured the logs, I heard a vehicle enter the double curve, and I could tell from the gunning engine and squealing tires that the driver was taking the upper hairpin too fast. I looked up to see a pickup blast out of the top curve, leaning dangerously on its shocks and fish-tailing. The driver managed to straighten it out, but the wobbling caused two boxes to fly off the full load in the truck’s open bed. The first box turned out to be a cooler, which I discovered when it hit the asphalt, exploded into pieces, and sent a shower of beer cans skidding toward me. The other box was a plastic pet carrier, which bounced a few times before sliding across the road and coming to rest a few yards from the toe of my left boot.
The truck shuddered to a stop and out climbed a stocky guy wearing brown Carhartt pants, a Nevada-blue T-shirt, and a yellow tractor cap. He slalomed toward me, gathering the beer cans into his T-shirt, which he used as an improvised brew hammock. By the time he reached me, he must have had eight beers cradled in his shirt, and his belly, which was impressively hairy, was folded over the pewter oval of his big belt buckle. He reached casually into his suds pouch, pulled out a can of a local brew I recognized as Great Basin Outlaw Milk Stout, and handed it to me with a grin.
“Here,” he said cheerfully, as if to apologize for nearly clobbering me with flying beers and pets.
“Thanks,” I replied, accepting the badly dented can. With a friendly nod, he leaned over and grasped the pet carrier through its air holes with his thumb and middle finger, as if he were hoisting a six-pack. Walking back to his truck, he tossed the beers and pet box into the cab and sped away. I assume the pet carrier was empty, but I can’t say so for sure.
The third encounter occurred on a breezy, snowless day in early November. I was walking along a dirt road in an open valley about five miles from Ranting Hill when I noticed the high-pitched drone of a small prop-engine plane above me. This was not unusual, since it is only about three miles from there to our local airstrip, which is used mostly to stage firefighting efforts along this stretch of the Sierra front. Soon, however, I heard the plane’s engine surge and then cut out. After a few seconds of noiseless gliding, the engine fired again, but a moment later resumed missing, and then I noticed that the aircraft was losing altitude. Tracing a wide, descending circle above the valley floor, the plane banked behind me, the drone of its sputtering engine irregularly interrupted by moments of eerie silence.
I continued to walk, but now I found myself speeding up, looking over one shoulder and then the other at the plane’s surprising descent. At last, it became clear that the pilot intended to use this dirt road as an emergency landing strip, and so I broke into a run, crashing off into the rabbitbrush to get as far away from the roadbed as I could. The next moment, the plane dropped over me and touched down gracefully in the middle of the road, pulling swirling clouds of amber dust behind it. It coasted to a stop, the door flew open, and a skinny man wearing a cowboy hat jumped out. Instead of coming toward me, though, he marched straight out into the open desert, heading in the general direction of the distant airstrip.
“Sorry!” he hollered at me over his shoulder, as he waded into the hip-deep sage.
“No problem, buddy!” I yelled back, as in the same instant I already regretted the terrible wordiness of my reply.
What is it about this desert that causes us to greet each other without lifting our palms from the steering wheel? How is it that, in a world brimming over with interminable chatter and incessant social media, we Silver Hillbillies became so laconic? Maybe we worry that spouting words might leave us desiccated and vulnerable to dehydration, or that the act of speaking might cause us to shed layers that provide a defense against hypothermia. Or is there simply so much space between us that we surprise each other when we meet and are struck with an aphasia induced by the vastness of the landscape itself? Or, perhaps we hesitate to speak because everything we say must be shouted into the desert wind, which sweeps our words away to Utah or, when the Washoe Zephyr quarters from the southwest, to Idaho. So, we clench our teeth to avoid eating dust and also for a more practical reason: to hold our souls in good and tight.
I think Mary Austin was right. Dwelling in the arid West has made us like the desert flowers, which have lived long enough in this hot wind to have learned the silent value of keeping a low profile.
IF YOU HAVE EVER DRIVEN up Interstate 5 through northern California and into southern Oregon, you may have seen the memorable bumper sticker that Oregonians use to welcome their California neighbors over the state line: “Welcome to Oregon: Now Go Home.” In rural Nevada, our view of Californians is, if anything, less hospitable than that of our neighbors in Oregon. Out here in Silver Hills it can be dangerous to have California tags on your truck, and standard-issue summer attire in these parts is a Nevada-blue T-shirt (with the sleeves cut off) featuring the iconic shape of our state and emblazoned with the slogan, “I Don’t Give a Shit How You Did It in California.” My neighbors here in Silver Hills are about as likely to say something nice about Californians as they are to drive to town and spend their whiskey money to see a performance of The Vagina Monologues.
My own allegiances are more complex. As a Silver Hillbilly, I too must publicly adopt a dismissive attitude toward Leftcoasters, for without an affirmation of this shared disdain there are certain neighbors with whom I would have absolutely nothing in common. My problem is that eighteen years ago, before I fully understood the consequences of my actions, I married a Californian. When Eryn asked me last year what I wanted as an anniversary gift, I requested simply that she q
uit admitting to our neighbors that she was born on the wrong side of the Sierra Nevada. I did not get my wish, but she did give me a travel guitar, which I now use to croon our state anthem, “Home Means Nevada,” each time we head westward over Donner summit and begin the long descent into the Evil Empire.
I think empire is precisely the issue. Why do we western Nevadans deplore our neighbors from the nearby Golden State? Because we exist as a far-flung colony of their economic and cultural empire. It is their prosperity that is generated by provisioning our benighted colony with their vegetables and movies, smart phones and wine. And if it is they who Californicate our landscape with obscene McMansions built where sage grouse once strutted, it is also they who fuel our construction industry, bankroll our enterprise, and pull our slot handles. Because we rural western Nevadans have staked our identity on our fierce independence, we are secretly resentful of our economic reliance upon Californians, in precisely the same way people who live in resort towns want desperately for tourists to visit—and then proceed to despise them from the moment they arrive. This may also explain why so many Nevadans demonstrate a fierce antipathy toward the federal government. Such hostility obscures the awkward truth that without the substantial mining, ranching, and military subsidies we receive from Uncle Sam, quite a few of us would be out of business. And if that happened, we might have to move—to California.
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