True West

I’ve been doing some reading in the last few weeks, both in preparation for a class I’m teaching in the spring and in support of some writing projects I’m working on. My class is going to focus on literature that examines our evolving relationship with the American west, from frontier to New West. But the reading has started me thinking about why I identify myself as a westerner, and what exactly constitutes “The West” in contemporary culture.

I’m planning to ask my students that question next semester, to give them each a map of U.S. and ask them to mark off The West, then discuss how they came to a decision. How would I mark that map myself? To be honest, I’m not sure. Certainly the Midwest is part of the western U.S., part of the frontier that people were exploring as our country expanded westward—but is it a subsection of The West now, or is it something else, something of its own? I spent twelve years in various parts of the Midwest—Kansas, then Iowa, then Missouri—and I have to say that none of those places felt like Idaho, my geographical home. But does that mean they didn’t feel like The West?

I didn’t expect that Texas would feel like home either—it was just below Oklahoma, certainly part of the Midwest. By the time we moved here from Missouri, after I’d finished my Ph.D., my husband and I had moved enough times that we knew what to expect: we’d hate our new location for awhile, identifying all the ways in which it failed to measure up to our old stomping grounds. Eventually we’d forget to hate it, though, and start to focus on the things we liked. We weren’t even planning to live in Texas long enough to get used to it; we’d live here only as long as it took for one of us to find another job in a more desirable location. Texas was never a place we’d imagined ourselves living for the long haul.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we found ourselves immediately delighted by just about everything we discovered in San Antonio. Excellent Mexican food on every block! (We’d never been able to find even passable Mexican food in Missouri.) Fresh tortillas made daily at the grocery store! A festival for every imaginable thing—books, strawberries, accordions! Add to this the fact that winter lasts for about two weeks in January, and it didn’t take long before we started telling people that we were never, ever leaving Texas.

My husband and I have often wondered why we felt at home here so quickly. The only explanation we’ve come up with is that Texas felt familiar to us in ways we didn’t expect, ways we still can’t articulate clearly—ways that would seem to include the Midwest, too, though we didn’t have the same affection for that region. (The fact that my husband grew up in Kansas, that it’s his geographical home, just complicates matters further. Can it be that Texas feels both like The West and the Midwest? But if that’s the appeal, why does my husband prefer Texas to Missouri—which also must have felt like the Midwest? Shouldn’t Missouri, Kansas’s next door neighbor, have felt more like home than Texas?)

I guess there’s no accounting for what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, the emotional connection between people and the spaces they occupy. Perhaps it's just as irrational as most emotional bonds.

All I know is this: I love The West. I know it when I feel it, and I miss it when I don’t. And here in Texas, for whatever reason, I find myself at home.