There are some places and some times in the west when things can feel as crowded as any city. Slotting your car in among the Winnebagos at the eastern entrance to Yellowstone on a July afternoon is about as much fun as crossing the Triborough Bridge at rush hour. Only slower.
But you don't have to move too far from the tourist spots -- either in space or in time -- to find solitude. Come back to Yellowstone in late winter and you'll discover that you're sharing the park with no one but thousands of elk wandering down the roads between walls of snow (elk that are in no hurry to move when you approach). A winter visit to the Navajo Nation Park in Monument Valley will find the stalls closed and the guides absent. You'll be left to either risk your own suspension, or your ankles, picking your way along the rutted dirt road between the walls of ocher stone. Visit Devil's Tower on a crisp fall morning, and you can tromp all the way around the basalt tower with no one to see you but some porcupines nibbling away at pine bark. Visit the Little Bighorn Battlefield in October, and you'll have only the wind through the high grass for company.
And at any time of the year, you only have to move a few miles from the tourist zones to find endless miles of rolling prairie, or the tight walls of many-hued canyons, or the snow-spattered heights of a stony mountaintop. Take a short hike off a highway and you can come across a circle of stones placed on the ground more then 4,000 years ago by people unknown for reasons unknown. Or a cabin made entirely from the fossilized bones of dinosaurs. Or the rain-worn marker left by sodbusters mourning the passage of their youngest child, the words still barely visible in the pale stone: Light of our lives now extinguished, and the whole world made night.
When I was a kid, it seemed like westerns were everywhere on TV, at the movies, on the bookshelves. I couldn't stand them. It was my grandfather who always had a tattered Zane Grey or Jack Schaefer paperback in one hand and a fondness for Gunsmoke. It wasn't until I'd spent years working my way across the west that I picked up some of those old novels and read The Code of the West, and Shane and Riders of the Purple Sage.
Once I started reading them, I never stopped. They make me think about cold streams and high places. About alkali flats under an August sun. About stubborn cottonwoods waiting patiently along a dry arroyo. They make me think about my grandfather. And they make me want to leave behind the house and the car and just walk, walk, walk.
Here are some of my favorites.
True Grit by Charles Portis
If you can't think of this work without seeing John Wayne, that's understandable. But throw away your image of Rooster. Pitch out Kim Darby's spunky rendition of Mattie. And for God's sake, don't bring Glen Campbell into it. This is a nearly perfect novel. Maybe the best I've ever read. Not my favorite western, my favorite book. The Rooster here is less a lovable scoundrel and most plain old scoundrel. The prose is sharp, hard, and as efficient as a Henry rifle. It's written from Mattie's perspective, and it's really Mattie who is a revelation. Somewhere in the book Rooster is described as "pitiless." Maybe so, but Mattie is driven, determined, and a damn sight harder than any of the men who cross her path. She does what she needs to -- anything that she needs to -- to extract every ounce of justice from Tom Chaney. She is a force of nature, and both her actions and the prose are straight as an arrow. Remember that team of trackers and bounty hunters that get sent after Butch and Sundance? The "who are those guys" guys? Yeah, well, I'd rather have that whole crew after me any day of the week than be crossways with Mattie Ross.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
There are some books that make me smile in admiration, and a very few that make me gawp in astonishment. This is one of those few. Read the first chapter. Now read it again. Yeah, there's hogs going after a snake, and an old man lazing on a porch, and a couple of other men and... wait. What kind of viewpoint is that? It's not cold and remote, not omniscient. But not limited. We slide from behind one pair of eyes and off to the next as smoothly as a flowing stream. How'd that happen? That kind of casual treatment of POV should have been confusing, but it wasn't. As a writer, it's like watching someone do a really delightful bit of close-up magic, and do it again, and do it again, without ever giving away the trick. No matter how closely I read it, I can't see how McMurtry works his card trick, but it's there and it's wonderful. With that trick well in hand, Lonesome Dove paints a story that is (forgive the trite phrase) as big as the west. Melodramatic. Tragic. Hilarious. And if there's one character in all of western literature that might be the match of Mattie Ross, it's Augustus McCrae. The two of them ought to sit down for a drink sometime, or at least a glass of buttermilk.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
A lot of people would argue that All the Pretty Horses is really McCarthy's best (and it's at the top of more than one Best Western Novels list), but I like this book better. Unlike most of McCarthy's work, the plot here is right out in front of you, easy to grasp from start to finish. And yet there are plenty of things that go unsolved, evil that goes unpunished, and dramatic tension left unresolved. At the center of the story is a Vietnam vet who comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He's competent, thoughtful, and decisive. And it's not enough -- not with what he's up against. Likewise, the local sherriff is understanding, caring, and able to see the truth of what's happening in his county. And it doesn't help. And the bad guy... is something else. Every Cormac McCarthy novel is a new revelation, and this one offers more than what you'd think from a description of the plot.
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister
If you take the road northwest out of Laramie, Wyoming you'll come across the little town of Medicine Bow, the setting for much of Owen Wister's 1903 novel. Wister was writing at a time when the "wild west" was a very recent memory (Butch, Sundance, and Etta had sailed off from New York but the "Bandidos Yanquis" were still running around Bolivia). The fictionalized version of the Johnson County War that formed the middle of the novel were only a decade in the past. In a lot of ways, this book is the foundation stone for everything that comes after -- the ur-western. Sure, you can fault it for championing the cause of wealthy landowners and their hired guns, but... you better smile when you say that, partner. If you want to get some idea of what things were like at the time, you can stop at the little hotel in Medicine Bow and select a room full of period furniture. But be warned: the experience may be a little too authentic, as in no facilities in the room but a rusty washbasin and mattresses on the beds that were last turned around the time Annie Oakley was shooting glass balls in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.