Still, this beach encounter was unique enough. Nothing proclaimed that times had changed more than the art collective’s choice of roles. The Rangers and Regulators who prowled the eighteenth-century Carolinas and nineteenth-century Texas were not especially helpful. They were violent enforcers, the last people you would stop and ask for directions. The National Park Service played on that tradition when it dressed its field employees in boots and Stetsons. The costumes communicated power backed by violence. Not until female rangers put on these outfits in the 1920s did the ranger image move in a friendlier direction. Women smoothed the edges off the vigilante antecedents. They represented the values—knowledge, competence, hospitality—that came to define the modern ranger. The four women who founded the Urban Rangers imbued their characters with bold geniality borrowed from those pioneers. For their performance art, they had to act as if rangers had always been courteous. To fully grasp the political nuances of their outings, beachgoers needed not only a Malibu beach app, directing people to territory that swelled and receded with the tide. They needed a frontier history app—a book, perhaps—that could explain how bloody avengers became plucky service-industry professionals.
The West and its people connected with longer regional and frontier histories, even as they displayed the hallmarks of globalized existence. The proliferation of data and the speed of its transmission fractured the homogeneity of the Sun Belt suburbs. The West became the dominant region in the United States only to disappear into the trends it unleashed. The centripetal forces that unified the postwar period—Cold War politics, lavish government spending, manufacturing-based corporate capitalism, and broadcast entertainment and news—spun in reverse, flinging jobs, voting blocks, and cultural touchstones into unfamiliar orbits. The result was a society and a culture that lost the pretense of being a single society and a single culture. Multiplicity, the defining feature of American frontiers all along, staged a comeback.
Global networks of information connected human beings while reinforcing their isolation. Americans could still find the West, if they set their search preferences for regional content. But they could sift the same information through alternate filters. The Malibu beach conflict, for instance, might reach networked friends and followers as a celebrity Tweet, a real estate post, or a “Doonesbury” link. The same facts—the 1964 median-high tide law, Geffen’s 1983 agreement, the 2013 beach access app—streamed through multiple channels. Networks spread the data to millions and splintered it into stories about nature, greed, privacy, bikinied actresses, and cheeky art collectives. Visitors, followers, friends, and internet surfers could locate the story in Los Angeles, California, or the West, or they could ignore the geographic coordinates altogether.
Regions, cities, houses, and beaches—actual places—existed in tandem with virtual locations. A person could buy the Malibu beach app and participate in the free-range fight without ever having to visit the ocean. At least since the ancient Greeks, the West had been an idea as well as a place. The internet revolution rendered the distinction moot. People once boarded ships and hopped trains to find the West in their heads (and were often let down by the reality they found). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, they repurposed actual places to decorate and enliven virtual creations like websites, feature films, television programs, and video clips. Regions, cities, neighborhoods, and stretches of sand might infiltrate Facebook posts or Twitter feeds without consumers noticing or even caring that they were corporeal things with complicated histories.
. . .
Quincy is an edgy place, not cool or hip like Berkeley or Brooklyn, just out there like Fargo. One resident described the central Washington town as “a farming community in the middle of a desert.” In 2007 the Microsoft Corporation purchased seventy-five acres of bean fields and erected a giant shed to house hundreds of massive computers, a data center servicing various internet activities, including the Bing search engine and Hotmail. To run them, Microsoft tapped into the resources of the Grant County Public Utility District, owner and operator of two hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. Soon other tech giants like Dell, Yahoo!, and Intuit built data centers of their own nearby. The energy needs of such high-tech server farms were enormous. In 2012 the cluster used nearly 42 million watts, four and a half times the usage of all the homes and businesses in Quincy. These numbers represent only a trickle of what’s to come. The state of Washington has issued permits for the data centers in Quincy to use up to 337 megawatts, the equivalent of the output of a small nuclear power plant.4
Microsoft and the other tech firms touted their use of hydroelectric “green power.” If users moved their applications and data to “the cloud,” the company argued, their “carbon footprint” would be greatly reduced. But not all the juice to power the server farms came from the Columbia. The firms also installed dozens of mammoth diesel generators for backup power, and during a single year Microsoft ran its diesels an astonishing 3,615 hours, spewing deadly exhaust over the town, including a neighboring elementary school. The constant roar of the generators confounded officials of the power district. They were providing electricity at half the national rate in exchange for the software giant agreeing to purchase a specified amount of power. But instead of using all of its allocation of “green power,” Micro soft regularly switched on the generators. Chagrined, the power district levied a substantial fine. Microsoft put the blame on the construction of new facilities, although an investigation revealed that the company was running generators at its other data centers as well. Whatever the rationale, the episode demonstrated the willingness of a sleek, modern, environmentally conscious corporation to gorge on energy, spew pollutants like a smokestack dinosaur, and act with an arrogant public-be-damned attitude. Microsoft bullied the power district into rescinding the fines, but the kerfuffle brought attention to the environmental costs of data storage. When Quincy’s third-graders sucked in diesel fumes at recess, their inhalations confirmed the materiality of the cloud.
Quincy, Washington. Photograph by Ray Bouknight, 2013. Creative Commons.
The Quincy server farms recall the many political struggles over industrialization, pollution, and idealized landscapes that stretch back at least as far as the gold rush. In a region defined by extractive industries that produced booms and busts, determining who or what would suffer during the fat times and who would clean up when the profits thinned was old sport. The Quincy example, however, supplied a new twist. Americans had a long tradition of expressing concern when industry blackened skies, fouled waters, and denuded hillsides. While air pollutants and waste figured in the case of Quincy as well, it wasn’t the destruction of a local habitat that prompted the New York Times to send a reporter to the middle of Washington. The story attracted the media because the diesel engines and corporate bullying soiled the image of the cloud. The internet itself was the ideal landscape under attack.
The information revolution prompted dreams of a New West. Instead of a cowboy, a miner, or a lumberjack, the new westerner was a telecommuter. The internet freed professionals from their urban workplaces. Instead of crawling through Los Angeles traffic to their cubicles, creative types could move to a cabin—or more likely a McMansion—in the Interior West and work from home. Dressed in pajamas, they could enjoy a spectacular view and sip a latté, the drink of choice in the New West, before journeying a few steps to the home office. Equipped with a laptop and broadband, workers could choose to live in places they only used to visit on vacation. But the telecommuter fantasy placed enormous pressure on western environments. While they spent many hours plugged into virtual worlds, the new migrants still needed to be hydrated and fed, heated and cooled. They needed services to carry away their waste and transport them to occasional flesh-and-blood conferences and meetings. These transplants brought lofty environmental expectations with their giant resource footprints.
. . .
Americans cherished glorious western vistas and struggled to balance their desires to pro
tect, enjoy, and exploit them. In the postwar period Congress created twenty-one new national parks, increasing the oversight of the National Park Service to eighty million acres, nine-tenths of it in the trans-Mississippi West and Alaska. The breathtaking scenery of the parks drew armies of tourists. The number of visits to national parks rose dramatically, from 30 million annually in 1941 to a record 292.8 million by 2014. During that period the nation’s population increased by 150 percent, but the recreational use of federal lands increased ninefold. Federal parks earned millions of friends and followers, but popularity threatened to under cut the qualities that thrilled so many. The majesty of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon was corroded by traffic jams and gift shops. The danger of Americans’ loving the parks to death confronted National Park Service leaders with a fundamental dilemma they are still trying to resolve.
Historian Samuel P. Hayes argues that the enormous popularity of outdoor recreation in the postwar period was part of a broad change in values, from an obsession with production to a preoccupation with the “quality of life.” New environmental values, he writes, “were an integral part of the continuous search for a better standard of living,” which also explains the movement of millions to the suburbs. The wilderness acted as both an extension of and an antidote to the suburbanization of America. Expanses of “wild” nature provided Americans with geographic frontiers where they could regenerate. “Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans” resulted from “the impress of the wilderness and the life that accompanied it,” wrote naturalist Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac (1949), a text that helped inspire the environmental movement. Robert O. Marshall, along with Leopold a founder of the Wilderness Society, wrote that only by setting aside wilderness areas could “the emotional values of the frontier be preserved.” In the early 1960s the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club lobbied Congress for legislation that would protect large areas of undeveloped country in the West. In 1964 Congress passed the Wilderness Act, initially setting aside 9 million acres of undeveloped federal land and gradually raising the allocation. By the early twenty-first century wilderness acreage stood at 110 million. The American, wrote novelist Wallace Stegner, “is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.” By preserving wilderness, “the hope and excitement can be passed on to newer Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier.”5
Tourists at Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park. Photograph by Acroterion, 2010. Creative Commons.
The problem with Stegner’s argument is that frontier can mean different things to different Americans. It can evoke the fantasy of lone men wrestling bears or shooting rapids in birchbarks. What was “characteristically American” about our civilization, insisted Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, was that it had been shaped “in a battle with nature.” Alternately, it could stand for the process of development that had produced the powerful American economy, providing the standard of living that allowed Americans to live in suburban surroundings and spend their vacations at the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone. Indeed, most postwar encounters with nature involved families in automobiles trying to find a parking space. National parks became creatures of auto tourism. The windshield, not the eternal masculine struggle for supremacy, framed the wilderness experience.6
To escape the crowds and re-create the frontier dream of a lethal showdown with nature, some Americans upped the ante of their outdoor activities. In addition to beholding mountains, outdoor enthusiasts shimmied up rock faces and skied down hillsides. They risked injury or death to test the outer limits. Through acts of derring-do, outdoor athletes redefined the wilderness and the frontier into settings of extreme exertion. They adrenalized nature to escape the encroachments of tourism—roads, hotels, and amenities—that threatened to break the wilderness mood and the American frontier tradition.
For more than a century Americans had camped, hiked, climbed, skied, canoed, and hunted in remote places from Maine to Minnesota. In the West, outdoor enthusiasts in cities like Denver and San Francisco formed groups to teach and promote hiking, skiing, and mountain climbing. These early recreation clubs included both men and women. They undertook vigorous exercise in a social setting more like a picnic or ice-cream social than a hypermasculine throwdown with bristling nature. These coed voluntary associations and their middle-class values receded in importance after the war, when western outdoor recreation veered toward the extremes of corporatization and countercultural rebellion.
Billy Kidd statue, Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Author’s collection.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, creating the interstate highway system, he redirected Colorado’s future toward the mountainous backcountry. Cars streamed up I-70 from Denver and through the Eisenhower Tunnel to reach slopes heavy with several feet of powdery snow and traced by miles of tasty runs. Previously known for its ranching and mining, Colorado became synonymous with beautiful scenery and outdoor fun. Postwar ski towns like Winter Park, Vail, and Aspen created a Rocky Mountain high that many tourists chased when they visited and then purchased first or second homes in the Interior West.
With his cowboy hat, corporate ties, and skiing championships, William Winston “Billy” Kidd embodied the rise of the western tourist industry. Born in Vermont, Kidd learned to ski and take care of tourists in the resort town of Stowe, where his parents ran a motel. A gifted athlete, he rose through the ranks of American youth skiing. He competed in the 1964 Winter Olympics, winning a silver medal in the slalom. He skied on the World Cup Circuit until 1970, when he retired from amateur competition, moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and began a forty-four-year association with the Steamboat ski corporation. Like a modern National Park Service ranger, Kidd took to wearing a Stetson to signal his western amiability. He had lucked into a name that recalled one of the West’s most famous men—William “Billy the Kid” Bonney—but he and his corporate sponsors invented a persona for him and the ski town that synchronized skiing, resort development, and the American West. Billy Kidd made selling lift tickets and condo timeshares seem like stereotypical western behaviors. His hat turned an athletic pursuit, imported from the European Alps, into a home industry.
Steamboat Springs played up its cowboy chic. Yet the buckaroo turn was not the only move available to developers. Aspen exploited its mining town past, refurbishing its West End gingerbread Victorian mansions to house movie stars and its opera house to host comedy festivals. Vail borrowed its style from Bavaria, fashioning a village and a brand more lederhosen than chaps. Through these promotional performances, the Rocky Mountains came to service multiple consumer fantasies. Ski tourists could have their rib-eyes along with their schnitzels. They could imbibe the local histories of their resort destinations through walking tours or antique cocktails served in genuine western saloons complete with spittoons. Or they could strap on their Burton snowboards and ride a lift to a powdery bowl that required them to think only of the next carved turn. They could care deeply about the West, the frontier, the region, and the place. Or they could choose to care not a whit. Recreational tourism would seem the final step in dismantling the regional West. How could any place maintain coherence after global networks of entertainment and information chopped them into commodities and sold them piecemeal?
. . .
Still, many tourists proclaimed a devotion to western places that went beyond thoughtless consumption. They professed a love for the mountains, the rivers, and the oceans. Wine connoisseurs identified with the Napa Valley, surfers with the break at Mavericks south of San Francisco, backcountry skiers with Snodgrass Mountain near Crested Butte in the southern Rockies. They visited these places repeatedly and learned what they could about them. They swigged the terroir, acclimated to the terrain, and organized political associations to protect the sites they adored. They cultivated a sense of belonging and possession that ran counter to industrial tourism’s casual consumption of western places.
Beginning in th
e 1950s a scraggly group of visitors to Yosemite National Park established a special relationship with the park’s “Camp 4.” It was not the most beautiful place to pitch a tent in Yosemite, but the site had several unique attractions. It had toilets and running water, it was secluded from the park’s ranger headquarters, and it was surrounded by giant boulders. Young climbers flocked to Camp 4 to practice their moves on the rocks and party without harassment. Theirs was a rebellious subculture that combined a rejection of mainstream values with the pursuit of outdoor vigor and authentic experience. The congregation of “various risk-takers, oddballs, misfits, and other escapees from social convention” reeled off a series of epic climbs, scaling Half Dome’s two thousand feet of vertical granite as well as El Capitan, the park’s geographical jewel. Working to outdo one another, they climbed more difficult routes ever faster. The “dirt bags” of Camp 4 revolutionized rock climbing, pushing the sport’s athleticism and danger in the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt.7
Tom Frost, Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Yvon Chouinard after their pioneering ascent of the North American Wall of El Capitan at Yosemite National Park. Photograph by Tom Frost, 1964. Wikimedia Commons.
Mountain climbers had debated the acceptable levels of risk for their sport since Europeans began topping peaks for fun in the nineteenth century. The denizens of Camp 4 enfolded these risk discussions into the postwar American context of suburban malaise and youth rebellion. Climbers argued over the purity of one an other’s ascents. To some, technology marred nature and diminished accomplishments. Critics denounced climbers who hammered dozens of pitons into rock walls to secure their ropes, who brought battery-powered drills to screw in anchors, or who used safety ropes as practice aids to retry difficult sections instead of as tethers of last resort. Violators of the climbing ethic might catch a beating in Camp 4. Fists flew because climbing meant more than reaching the tip of a spire or the rim of a vertical face. True climbers, those who used less gear, who left few traces on the rock, who risked their lives for their ideals, got closer to nature, and thus farther away from the stultifying orthodoxy of the American mainstream. The Yosemite daredevils—as much outsiders to the park as the tourists in Bermuda shorts they despised—laid claim to the audacious terrain through a sporting subculture that offered an authentic relationship with nature as long as you followed the prescribed code.
The American West Page 49
