Oh, I don’t deny the existence of all that land between the Pacific and the Mississippi—there’s a reason St. Paul and Memphis aren’t oceanfront cities, right?—but I’m talking about the popular conception, the mental image, that most of us (especially us Texans) carry of what it means to be a westerner, to inhabit those arid lands between roughly the 100th and 120th meridians.

But the image we all hold of the rugged, independent loner is largely a myth. It’s an important myth, no question, and one that has exerted a powerful pull on the American imagination for well over a century; cultural icons such as Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Frederick Jackson Turner, Frederick Remington, Charlie Russell, Zane Grey, Tom Mix, John Ford, John Wayne, Gene Autry, Louis L’Amour, Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood, Larry McMurtry, Robert Duvall, Cormac McCarthy, and Jeff Bridges have all contributed to or partaken of it (or both). Many of us, especially in Texas, like to imagine ourselves as squint-eyed, leathery cowboys (or, depending on your gender, cowgirls) living freely under the vast western skies, far from the corrupting influences of cities and corporations and government bureaucrats. That’s why so many of us still drive steroidal pickup trucks and wear cowboy hats and boots, even though we live in cities.

This myth has also, I believe, been a dangerous and tragically destructive one, because it has allowed us to confuse selfishness with self-reliance, and place individual liberties and property rights above collective obligations.

The result has been a century and a half of ecological exploitation and devastation: overgrazing, strip mining, erosion, aquifer depletion, clear-cutting, fracking, and so on. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons,” wrote Garrett Hardin (a native Texan!) in his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” According to Hardin, multiple individuals, each acting independently and rationally, will inevitably destroy a shared resource—which, in a nutshell, is pretty much the story of the settlement and development of the American West. As historian H. W. Brands points out in his American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900: “Individualism had sufficed to develop the East, but individualism would fail in the West.”

One of the first to see this truth about the West was the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first expedition to float the Colorado River (the other Colorado River, as far as Texans are concerned) through the Grand Canyon.

Powell’s exploits are among the most spectacular, and quintessentially western, in American history. And yet the man himself saw clearly—more clearly than many who have come after him—that the ecological realities of the region meant that the type of individualistic culture that prevailed in the well-watered East would be a catastrophe in the West.

In his 1876 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, Powell argued that settlement of the American West required a sort of enlightened communalism in apportioning the land and water; specifically, “the residents should have the right to make their own regulations for the division of the lands, the use of the water for irrigation and for watering the stock, and for the pasturage of the lands in common or in severalty.” Individualism (as manifested in dammed streams and fenced rangeland) would lead irrevocably to disaster. Mark Reisner summarized Powell’s views in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water: “Powell was advocating cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth, and—implicitly if not explicitly—a return to the Jeffersonian ideal.”

But the government ignored Powell’s pleas for new policies adapted to the peculiar conditions of the West in favor of Business As Usual, and the Jeffersonian ideal—a republic of smallholders, the proverbial yeoman farmers, free from the domination and corruption of big-city corporations—morphed into the grotesque belief that every individual has the right to exploit and devastate his or her own land regardless of the long-term effect on it, or on his or her neighbors, however defined.

The final irony of the myth of Western individualism is that many of the region’s defining characteristics—the long stretches of interstate highway, the massive hydroelectric dams, the vast national parklands—are in fact the product of collective action, as manifested in the kind of Big Government that cynical politicians like to condemn. The traditional western insistence on private property rights and individual liberties thus flies in the face of historical fact; is, perhaps, a reaction to it. Most of those cowboys whose rugged independence we so admire? Well, they were actually working for enormous corporations. Here’s Brands again:

To a far greater degree than in the East, settlement in the West reflected the influence of corporations and other institutions of capitalism…. Westerners were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams (and the dreams of their Eastern and foreign admirers); in real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.

In his 1992 essay “Coming into the Watershed,” the Beat poet, Zen Buddhist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder makes the same point:

Many a would-be westerner is a rugged individualist in rhetoric only, and will scream up a storm if taken too far from the government tit…. [M]uch of the agriculture and ranching of the West exists by virtue of a complicated and very expensive sort of government welfare: big dams and water plans.

Well, yippee ki-yay. If the myth of the old West is useless, not to say downright pernicious, then we need to envision a new West: a West where courage and determination manifest themselves in generosity, innovation, stewardship, and the acknowledgment of limits both personal and ecological—a West, in other words, like the one envisioned by John Wesley Powell, marked by “cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Martin: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (still)

Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.

Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. Owen Wister and Zane Grey helped establish the archetype, and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert a powerful pull.

All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of Luccheses—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:

I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with a certain professional football team based in Dallas.

Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the Great Plains of footdom. My footprints resemble the round tracks of a hippo rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s Kings Road, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.

A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.

But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.

How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like this guy than this guy. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.

The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.

Next on my shopping list: a Nudie’s suit!

What we’re reading
Heather: William H. Eddy, The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature
Martin: Philipp Meyer, American Rust