This Here Town Ain't Big Enough for the Two of Us....

Since we discussed the demise of the Western in class last week, I have been wistfully recalling the dusty streets of Dodge City and the rustlers who would head into town at high noon.

Mind you, I am not a fan of Westerns per se. I like a twist on the Western just to see where the genre can go. Think: the flashback scenes in Holes between Patricia Arquette (Kissin' Kate) and Dule Hill. I even was somewhat amused by Cowboys vs. Aliens.

I think I will miss Westerns because I equate them with my dad, who will be gone seven years in September. He had read literally every Louis Lamour title in my hometown library. I really think he had exhausted the whole Western genre.

Westerns make me think of Matt Dillon and Festus on Gunsmoke, watching this Western on TV when I really wished the networks would move the Carol Burnett Show up earlier, so I wouldn't fall asleep.

Westerns appealed to my dad because he was a rugged individual. He looked like Paul Newman but was wired like Clint Eastwood. My mom even decorated the house in a Western motif (not horsey salt and pepper shakers, but tasteful paintings and sculptures of bucking broncs). When she passed away in January, my sister and I fought over who would have to claim the various saddles, lassos, and other geegaws. I felt a bit sad as I dropped the longhorn skull at the Salvation Army as we cleaned out her apartment.

My folks were raised in a different era--one where kids watched Tom Mix movies and Lone Ranger episodes on TV. My mother attended a one-room country school. Hey, she didn't have running water in the house until high school; instead, a pump sat on countertop.

To them, the Western mirrored their experience. The frontiers had yet to be won.  America was filled with possibilities that stretched further than a Wyoming landscape: Sputnik, the Apollo missions, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc. In so many ways this era seemed as long ago as the age depicted on the Westerns themselves.

When my dad's time in hospice care was nearing a close, a hardback book lay open on the nightstand--likely another Western. I had found some rare, first-run printings online and gave them to him for Christmas. When the pain of his cancer was severe, we sought anything to distract him. When my mother asked him if he wanted to read his book, he replied, "I don't think I will finish it."

Not to be too sappy or semiotic, but to me, that unfinished Western novel (not to mention the demise of the Western on the silver screen) says so much about the end of an innocent time in our country where we actually believed the West could be won and that it was worth it to explore.