Eleven years ago, I quit writing about the West. This was after having made some portion of a literary reputation based on a first novel, Leaving the Land, perceived to be an elegiac evocation of the vanishing agrarian culture of the Midwest and West, telling the story of its disappointed and heartbroken inhabitants who, due to the machinations of a big business economy, were forced to pull up stakes and abandon the land. The book sold through seven printings in three editions and is still in print after twenty years. Related to it, I wrote The Turkey War—a parable of capitalism set in a Dickensian nightmare of the meat packing industry in South Dakota during World War II—which sold embarrassingly few copies despite good reviews. By then, I was traveling around the country, making part of a profession from speaking out about disappearing farms, ranches and small towns in the American landscape. After eight years of this, experiencing both exhilarating literary success and a depressing marketplace flop, that voice inside stopped speaking, ceased writing.

Talking about the West, it felt as though my throat choked up with alkali dust all gummed into a ball by self-hating bile. Writing, no matter how hard I tried, nothing more about the West would come out on the page. Fiction was the least of it, since most of this writing was issue-related editorializing, "sustainable agriculture" perspectives drawing upon wise, eloquent citations found in books by Wendell Berry, Jim Hightower, Wesley Jackson, Mark Kramer, William Kitteredge, Dan O'Brien and many others, attempting to argue in layman's language for the common sense of smaller-scale, diversified farming and the rural communities it sustains. Working against this advocacy was the complex and politically corrupt government crop subsidy and price support system within a larger agenda of federal "free market" policies that stimulated "economies of scale"—the continuing overgrowth of farms into huge monocultural enterprises increasingly dependent on herbicides, pesticides and petrochemicals killing the soil, and, much to the detriment of small town communities, on transient laborer like a great migrant army ever on the move across an increasingly depopulated rural landscape.

The words just blew away. Mainly, I was fed up and frustrated. I'd been making appearances on a dozen or so TV programs, playing the professional role that PBS producer Michael Joseloff had assigned—"preservationist spokesperson for the American farmer"—beginning with our "essays" he produced on "The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour" in 1984-85. And I had quit counting past thirty-something of those call-in radio programs spent fast-talking in an increasingly desperate way until I lost all patience and even started insulting the callers. Larry King got into what amounted to a name-calling shouting match with me on his radio program when he kept insisting there was no real difference between a ranch or farm going bankrupt and "Meyer's Dry Cleaners going out of business on a city street corner." Add to this that I was chippying around earning pretty good checks as "story consultant" for two ridiculously conceived "farm movie" projects, flown coast to coast playing a different role—glad-talking producers and kissing ass.

At the end of this road, I'd lost myself. No matter any noble or resonantly moral value in the messages—save the environment, value the earth, learn to treasure the real and heroically stubborn people who spend their lives on farms and ranches or just barely holding on in the dwindling small towns across the farmbelt, and, more importantly, that we must keep fighting to preserve the health and safety of our food supply when it's turning increasingly poisonous due the practices of an agribusiness economy that's slowly wasting the planet, "this economy that's killing us," as Barry Lopez complains—no matter any possible social value in the words, I felt most often like a fast-talking patent medicine salesman on a Christian Radio talk show, as on the last call-in gig I did on the subject (and now can't recall the name of the show or the station, only that it was based somewhere in Alabama): "Look. It's simple. Jesus loves all those who want to save the land. And, by the way—don't mean to be too self-serving bringing this up—but it might be purty durned nice if you good country shit-kickers out there would buy my books."

So I quit talking. How I justified this silence: hopelessness and helplessness, trying to explain preservationist farming to an urban America that, like Larry King, had no patience or willingness to listen; that the message was futile at best, a waste of time to argue against an unstoppable big business machinery that seeks to induce, as Herbert Marcuse says, "the surrender of thought, hope and fear to the decisions of the powers that be." And, rightly or wrongly, what I saw happening was the commodification of my own life experience being marketed in an inauthentic way that made me suspect what I was saying was becoming hatefully fake, reduced to one-liner slogans and sound bites emptied of relevance, and, worse, violating the more complex truths of real farmers and ranchers who were losing their way of life. I was supposed to be speaking for them. But I felt less and less as though I were really one of them.

I'm the son of what Annie Proulx calls, with no little contempt, a "suitcase rancher"—someone who buys a ranch mainly for its recreational and speculative value, moving on and off the land with his suitcases for part-time, summer-home type residencies. In my father's case, he made efforts through subcontracting and crop leasing, and by making use of the considerable free labor of his sons, to maintain these places as "working ranches"—cattle and wheat and alfalfa for the first two, sheep and corn for the last he owned—always struggling to make at least a small profit with them beyond the tax write-offs.

My brothers and I grew up spending summers and most winter "vacations" on these ranches. The first was set in the rugged ridge country and scrub oak foothills midway between Steamboat Springs and Oak Creek, Colorado, on a wild stretch of bottomland along Trout Creek. The view out east an ugly horizon of huge, carbon gray, barren mounds like a bizarre anthill farm made by giant industrial insects—slag hills and refuse left over from the reckless destruction caused by strip-mining coal. But to the west, and along the bottomland, that ranch was a spectacularly gorgeous spread—rich with alfalfa and oat fields, aspen-covered draws, a hundred-acre ridge-top seeded to thigh-high pasture. But the old log barn was leaning and about to fall over, and the house had no foundation, was infested with mice and chipmunks, and had no indoor plumbing. This was outhouse living, and we hauled buckets of water up to the house, drawn from a well with an old long-handled pump that never kept its prime. Our mother couldn't stand the place. She attempted suicide three times. In part because of their divorce, my father sold that ranch, but for other reasons, too, connected to his perpetually restless temperament. Today, most of the area has been redeveloped by the transformation of nearby Steamboat Springs into a prime ski resort. The land is dotted all over now by overpriced condo villages and hobby-horse mini-farm "ranchettes" as recreation for the wealthy.

The second ranch my father bought was located in the brushy drylands—hard red wheat and cattle-range country—eighteen miles north of Craig, Colorado, at the lonely end of a gravel road spur that tracks off east from a seldom-traveled two-lane that shoots in a straight line up toward wind-blasted Baggs, Wyoming. This was more of a pure cowboy-country cattle ranch, with a BLM grazing permit attached. That area saw the boom then bust of oil and gas exploration in the mid-1970s, then was more or less bought up at basement prices by big land-holding corporations. The model back then was the Baggs Land and Cattle Company, with its hundreds of thousands of acres, one of whose major investors, we heard tell, was the comedian Jack Benny, though we never once heard of him setting foot on the place or landing on its private airstrip. Today's model would be Ted Turner's millions of acres bought up in a patchwork of mammoth spreads all over the West. And the family-owned ranches that have kept adding to holdings over the years until they've become like the big corporations themselves.

My father could have made a real estate fortune with his Colorado lands. Instead, it seemed he kept fleeing real estate development and the people it brought, two steps ahead of the coming ski-resort and oil-speculation booms, selling his ranches well before the peak of optimum land prices, which made no financial sense whatsoever. This was part of his point—"too many people," he would complain, then he'd up and sell off for this and other reasons, some related to his multiple divorces, but mainly due, I believe, to a perpetual impatience in his nature, an ever-discontented wanderlust that kept him obsessively driving around in his pickup trucks hundreds of thousands of miles all over the West for most of his life.

The last ranch Dad owned was up in the short grass prairie country north of the Black Hills, near Newell, population 312 (and less now, last time I checked) in South Dakota—a corn, hay and sheep operation miles away from anything or anybody, but it had a decent house, a sound barn and corrals, cottonwoods and choke cherries in riparian draws, and, unlike the sagebrush country near Craig, despite its mournful isolation, at least the place had dependable irrigation water running through it on a ditch system fed from the Belle Fourche River. My father sold this ranch off in pieces, holding the mortgages himself and having to take them back several times when well-meaning buyers went bust during the farm crisis years of the 1980s. After attempting a few winters there of his retirement, it turned out that not even he could take such blizzard-stricken isolation.

My father, Maurice A. Unger, was a transplanted Westerner who grew up in Patchogue, Long Island, about as far in the East in this country as it's possible to get. Still, after World War II, he transformed himself completely into Western traditions and cowboy costume, right down to his Stetson hats, snap-button shirts, bolo ties, stovepipe Tony Lama boots, and the fancy Western-cut Gross suits he wore for business and special occasions. He was an attorney who had hated practicing law, so he turned to teaching at universities and wrote textbooks on real estate, real estate finance, and business law. To give him proper credit for the depth and sincerity of his passion for the West and all things cowboy, he was, while an assistant professor in the college of business, also the first ever rodeo coach at the University of Idaho. Later, he would teach for twenty years as Professor of Real Estate at the University of Colorado. He married and divorced three times, but his sons always say four times, including another long-term relationship with a much younger woman that lasted seven years and was packed with high drama and violence in the ranch house. When she decided to leave him, suitcase rancher that he was, my father pulled out his revolver and emptied all nine rounds into her suitcase, blasting it full of holes in the driveway.

This happened at high noon, during a heat wave July on that ranch out in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota. My brothers and I barely paid attention to his silly gunshots. We were used to them by then. He had on occasion shot his guns at us, or, more accurately, pulled the triggers while aiming in our general direction, off on one of his rages, popping off shots in a fury at his fragile finances, or when he thought we had disobeyed, or, worse, when none of us had the mechanical aptitude to fix quickly enough some busted tractor or hay bailer with its parts spread out on a tarp in his sweltering fields. Some nights—especially when he was worried about money, which his ranches were eating through steadily, or after one of his prized Charolais calves had died or his hay was drying out because of machinery breakdowns—after the inevitable shouting bout with his wife, he would settle into a simmer-ing depressed mood and set a bottle of bourbon and his nine-shot revolver out on the coffee table, like equal threats, as if daring us to say something. He played a drunken game of Russian roulette in front of us more than once. As younger kids, we grew up terrorized by these moods, jumped up at his shouts. By the time we were teenagers, we were numbed. Or we conceived this gunslinging to be a way Dad played out at his role as cowboy. So we just shrugged at each other that day he filled Jill's suitcase full of holes, finishing our meager lunch—slabs of bologna slapped between spongy white bread—then we lay on the living room carpet under a fan, hardly listening to their final shouts, her car engine winding up, the tires grinding away. The temperature outside was 103 degrees. We were trying to cool off as much as we could before we had to trudge back out into the old man's hellish, thistle-infested hayfield and continue stacking the heavy bales.

All during those years, my brothers and I lived a split-up, tossed-around life between our father and mother, shuttled back and forth on airplanes between Mom's East and Dad's West, until, by the time we were teenagers, we were more or less independent operators, running away whenever we felt like it into the youth culture explosions of the 1960s and early '70s spread out about equally between urban street scenes—the East Village in New York, Kenmore Square in Boston, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco—and communal tent villages in the Western mountains—ones scattered up Boulder Canyon and above the little towns of Nederland and Wall in Colorado, also one above Saratoga, in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, and another installed along the Truckee River near Lake Tahoe. As was the youth culture fashion then, we grew our hair long and started doing drugs, and, when we were back in the small towns near Dad's ranches—back in Craig or Newell—we occasionally had to defend ourselves with fists for our counter-cultural appearances. We gradually tended to avoid going into town. We grew local reputations for being loners, non-conformists, "hippies", or for being just plain weird birds, which we surely were.

This transient youth could hardly form much of any authentic, country-western background from which to be able to speak or write with authority about Western rooted-ness, the values of "family-farming" or of the ranching life. In my opinion, such regionalism had already become a nostalgic cliché, and its strong assertion signifies its ossification into mythified history. Like people who lived in cities, we hardly knew our neighbors, other than the few who worked on share arrangements with our father. Years later, the way I wrote and ran off at the mouth about "family farming" and "the West" and let other people believe my words had the biographical authority of a mislabel—"farmer turned writer Douglas Unger"—drawn from a feature-profile published in The New York Times Book Review which I never made any effort to correct, aware even by then that I was the kind of guy who had trouble keeping houseplants alive—all this posing and "farm crisis" talking I was doing seems to me now both fraudulent and embarrassing.

On the other hand, I don't blame Herbert Mitgang, writer of the New York Times feature. When he conducted the phone interview, I was neck-deep in helping to beat back federal inheritance taxes from my late wife's and her family's heritage property in western Washington—Amy Burk and her sisters, and the Burk family estate—land that had been in her family since the original homestead papers signed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1886—once a small dairy and fruit-growing subsistence farm but mostly ragged timberland by then with precious few cleared fields into which daunting plagues of blackberry brambles and seedling alders were encroaching all the way up to the rickety back steps of a three-room trailer in which Amy and I and our daughter, Erin, had been scratching out a modest life. So, in a sense, that label had every right to stick to a previously unknown author talking straight out of a remote swampy forest, and who had the bad press sense to complain about its thorns and how his boots were sinking up to the ankles into a blue clay soil that, under relentless Cascade rains, turns to the consistency of tapioca pudding seven months a year. Amy's family owed $148,000 in inheritance taxes, the IRS was putting on the pressure, and these grim facts were let slip to a journalist. Big pieces of this land were going to have to be sold to pay taxes, eventually re-zoned and broken up for development.

Even then, I was going back and forth in my head over the question of regional authenticity and whether I really did have the authority of experience I was claiming. Yes, my brothers and I grew up as ranchers, but only in part, ever ready with our suitcases and what fit in them. Due at first to our fear of him, then later to an enduring loyalty to our father, no matter where we found ourselves hitch-hiking around in our peripatetic teenage years, and no matter where else our life journeys took us, we made sure to land in summers and whenever else Dad asked for help on his suitcase ranches. We put in our labor and time, not for any genuine affection for that body-smashing toil or for the earth, but as our way of pleasing and honoring him. We worked his livestock, did the branding and castrating and dehorning, the doctoring and shearing. We hauled posts and post-hole diggers and barbed wire on horseback up into rugged, rocky crags to fix his fences. We drove rounds after dust-eating, monotonous rounds on his rattletrap, cranky tractors, dragging sweeps and harrows through his fallow wheat fields, or we raked up his hay into windrows in a green, fermenting heat. At dawn and dusk, we shoveled reeking, sloppy mud to make dams in his irrigation ditches amid the relentlessly stinging thick of the mosquitoes and deerflies so as to direct precious flows onto his fields. And always, for at least four weeks steady, plodding away like exhausted marathon runners in a long-distance race against weather and time, we spent our free Julys, well through our college years and after, bailing and stacking his hay.

And, yes, like fully outfitted cowboys, we rode horses, cared for them and knew them up close, not so much for recreation but as part of our daily work, especially on that ranch north of Craig, checking the cattle daily up on BLM grazing land my father leased—a two-hour roundtrip ride, or longer on those late afternoons we spent cutting out calves or cows from his smallish herds, forty or so mostly Charolais mixes with calves at side. My brother John learned early that mysterious interspecies command of them so that, with just one touch of his thighs on their backs, he could make them do whatever he wished. I was not so fortunate nor skilled—the old man's horses kept throwing me off, or flopping to their sides, called "sunfishing," attempting to roll over on me. One of them fractured my right wrist. It healed slightly crooked, that arm still just a little bit shorter than the other. Rodeo coach that he had been, our father encouraged us kids to compete in "Little Britches" rodeos. John seemed to have fun enough with this, ride out his eight-seconds most of the time, finish up in a way that kept him laughing, gobbling hotdogs and washing down sodas at the fair grounds the rest of the day. With me, it was different—a dislocated shoulder and a concussion. And so, I'll admit it—I dislike horses, never cared about them; they're just too dangerous, skittish and stupid all at once. What I always say: "Never trust any animal that big that has a brain the size of a walnut."

No matter this distrust of horses. What I'm beginning to realize is that the self-doubt that silenced me for years about the West, born of cultural neglect and a gradual marketplace exclusion of my books and their social issues, might really be unfounded. Despite being sons of a suitcase rancher, my brothers and I were significantly steeped in the Western agrarian traditions of hard ranch work. Our father taught us something of the frugality and toughness of that life. We were fully enough exposed to the sun and chafing weather of the open spaces, and we grew up knowing cattle and sheep and horses and what it is to till and harvest fields. We spent a great many early breakfasts or noons at the cafes in town, listening to our father talking weather and livestock, grain-futures prices, and the basic concepts of parity and price-supports, as he was making his deals to lease out land on shares to other ranchers. From these ranchers—Irwin St. Louis and Pearly Green, Les Crozier and Pete Bosserd, and their kids and wives, and from half a dozen cowboys or ranch laborers who worked for us and who generously taught us everything they knew—at least we can lay claim to growing up with some indirect understanding of what it was: that very much less than mythic, physically punishing, hardscrabble ranching life out West. As for me, I was relieved and grateful to get away from that life as fast as I could at summer's end. This is the story of the twentieth-century West—how the youth of my generation turned their backs on the land.

My friend Dave Hickey often stays, "There are basically two kinds of people in the world—pirates and farmers," then he'll go on to assert an exciting, adventurous aesthetics of piracy as it applies to contemporary art and culture. After resisting this duality for a while, I now believe Hickey is essentially right, except that I'd add a third category to make a paradigm of dialectic: some people are nomads. They buy and sell, and, in journeying from market to market, they aren't nearly as treasure-driven as pirates. On established caravan routes, for which they require no more than hospitable space on which to pitch their tents and fresh water for their thirsty camels, they don't care too much for rapaciousness or pirate raids to carry off slaves and gold. They follow circling roads made by their own tracks. They end up owning little—only what can be easily transported—and they leave almost nothing of the plastic arts behind. But in most cultures they are honored as carriers of the tale, song-singers and storytellers, bearers of tidings and news. For this, they are welcomed. Then they pack up and move on. This three-term paradigm—nomads, farmers, pirates—though the movements span generations, can define a history of the American West.

We were a family of nomads. Along with that ranching experience our father provided us, we also knew a life spent driving, moving. We rode thousands of miles all around central Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, sitting beside our father in his truck, passengers for his restless wanderings. We made the rounds at livestock auctions, especially me, since Dad and I entered into a business partnership as small-scale livestock traders for two summers, investing in a two-ton Chevy stock-truck into which we packed as many cattle or sheep as it could hold. We ground out hundreds of miles through sagebrush and oil shale country down to Meeker and Rifle and Grand Junction most often, or over through the sandstone desert to Vernal, Utah. We made less frequent, longer runs up through the wind-singing rocky spaces of western Wyoming to Rawlings or Rock Springs, or, when we thought we could make a price on animals we'd bought for a song—after figuring in gas and motel costs—we'd take a chance humping them over the mountains, whining our way in that old truck up through pine and spruce forests and past the snow-covered treelines of the blue-gray peaks of Rabbit Ears and Berthoud passes. We'd stop off in the small mountain towns of Kremmling or Fraser for the lunch special, then haul ass down hairpins carved out over the white water rapids of the rivers and streams, the Yampa River, the White River, the Colorado River, foaming gold-muddy Clear Creek. We were always carrying too much weight on the hoof shifting around and loudly complaining in back, making the truck sway side-to-side on its questionable springs. So it was a tense ride on the way down, hoping the brakes would hold just long enough so we could make it into Longmont or Fort Collins or Loveland or a time or two as far east as Greeley—towns that had livestock auctions on a certain day every week in those years, every sale yard now, as far as I know, long ago paved over for housing tracts or Wal-Marts or parking lots, becoming part of the nearly unbroken urban sprawl butted up against the Front Range of the Rockies from Colorado Springs all the way to Cheyenne.

Dad and I worked as a team, with me set up down near the railing of the auction ring as the unlikely, eager, and too youthful seller—some agents for meatpacking companies would take a higher price for a few head out of kindness to a kid, approval for his free enterprise, or encouragement to a young cowpoke they thought was just learning the ropes. Meanwhile, my father would sit up high in the seats on the other side of the ring, pretending not to know me, but every once in a while raising a finger to bid up the price until we made the profit we desired. This was a fun and lucrative con game we played. Only very rarely did Dad end up stuck with the high bid, having to buy back our own animals, in which case we just laughed it off, went out to the corrals, fed, watered, then loaded up the stock once more, nothing worse happening than being out a few dollars in auction fees and maybe having to stay on the road to the next sale-yard town to try the same game again the next day. These are my happiest memories of the West: days spent riding next to my father through that brushy and mountainous landscape, mostly in silence, looking forward to lunch or sated after it, both enjoying a conspiracy of anticipation again of just how we would get away with our stock auction game.

But that nomadic suitcase ranching life we lived was in the main not a sensible one, neither profitable—my father lost money in the end, or at best broke even—nor conducive to harmonious parenting or a stable family. The women in my father's life ultimately went stir-crazy from isolation in the cramped houses with the insufficient plumbing and spare domestic amenities he forced on them, even if they had to live in them, and with us kids, for only four months a year. There was frequent violence, and my father's loud misogyny. When a marriage or relationship would end, we were relieved, though we would have to live then without the domestic supervision of any commanding feminine influence—four slovenly bachelors like four filthy bears, with our disgustingly sloppy ways, guys too damned tired and lazy after a day out in the fields or working livestock to so much as push a vacuum cleaner around. Tracked-in mud and manure dried into hard brown pebbles in the kitchen and on carpets until there was a layer an inch deep. Dishes piled up in the sink on a wash-only-if-needed system. Pneumonic calves (and, once, a very sick pig) would be brought into the only bathroom to be kept in the tub so it was easier to administer tri-biotic injections every two hours all night long. Everything fell into a squalor hard to believe, so bad that we would find maggots squirming on the kitchen counters as we were making our toast in the morning and think nothing of them. At night, little gray mice scampered everywhere—my brother John and I used to sit up late sometimes on the living room couch with our BB guns, locked into a contest in which we took turns popping off mice that scurried along the baseboards, like we had our own live shooting gallery, with scores that could add up to five or six kills before we went to bed. Every once in a while, these sordid conditions would get to us—maybe once a month—and we'd break our brooms and mops, buckets and sponges, spend a dawn to dusk steadily working until things looked more or less clean. Without one of Dad's wives in charge, this was the way we lived.

On the upside: we did learn the skills of cultivation, of animal husbandry, how to appreciate the rewards of hard work and patience from seeding to harvest. And, though we didn't have the opportunity to stay around for years and enjoy the longer-term satisfactions, we left every one of his ranches significantly improved—a foundation for the house near Oak Creek, reinforcement beams enough so the log barn would stand another two decades, forty more acres seeded to grain. On the place north of Craig, terracing for the fields to avoid soil erosion and a spring that my brother John and I discovered one afternoon when we got curious and started digging into a wet spot at the base of a hill that always seemed to be damp. We dug and dug, amazed when we found water actually trickling up through some sand. We boxed in the spring with galvanized sheet metal, then fashioned a pipe arrangement running to it until—there it was—a stream of water about the thickness of a pinky finger falling out the end of a pipe in a steady flow, pooling onto an area of dry grand as barren as a seaside beach. This led to earth-moving improvements for which our father took out a loan, eventually creating out of our discovery a small lake—we called it our lake, though it's really just a pond, shimmering there full of sweet water to this day. In South Dakota, it was better water management, too—improvements to the ditch system—a new plowed and seeded alfalfa field that finally took hold, and more sensibly laid-out fields, the pastures fenced into smaller areas so that it became possible to rotate animals more frequently and give the grass more time to recover from the down-to-the-dirt grazing habits of sheep.

And like a good nomad, our father also spread news: he read, talked on the phone, consulted in Fort Collins and Denver, then did what he could to ranch and farm sensibly, comprehending the possible environmental hazards of too much fertilizer, of overkill with herbicides, the long-term health damage to livestock and humans that could be caused by the wrong pesticides. He talked to anyone who would listen at the cafes in town, though his listeners resisted, the same way they showed some skepticism at the obvious otherness of county extension agents bearing government advice. Unlike them, our father voiced concern about what the chemical future would bring—a future that is all around us now: steroids in the beef industry and arsenic in poultry feed, neither studied enough to be considered safe in trace amounts consumed by humans, and the overuse of antibiotics in livestock feedlots that could result in the creation of drug-resistant microbes that might eventually be unstoppable. He even voiced opinions about the genetic manipulation of grain crops about which he had read and was wary, arguing that there were few safeguards to insure against a tragic mistake in which some monster gene might be let loose with a potential to ravage the whole biology of the planet. And on and on—all matters my father warned about, talking them up to ranchers at the café tables in Steamboat or Craig or Newell, men who shrugged him off politely enough as some visiting nomad, alien among them, his cautionary tales as if from the dark side of the moon, words from a suitcase rancher who didn't know what he was saying. Not that he was any activist in this way, nor any organic rancher, either—we weren't above using weed killers sparingly, antibiotic-laced creep feeds for our calves to give them a boost. More than this, our father expressed by his actions as much as with his words a certain longing for what was, for what the West had been once in a more mythic if less comfortable era. Romantic in this sense, he truly was a cowboy of a kind, following what he believed was a self-sufficient masculine code, with an attitude of cussing skepticism and name-calling belligerence toward the big-business direction of the agricultural economy. He had his own literary sources for this, too: Louis Bromfield, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Louis L'Amour, Rachel Carson, more or less in that order of citation.

Thinking back on his life, one of the remaining questions is why he never could stick to any one place, why he was never satisfied with any acreage of land enough so that he wouldn't one day just up and sell it—money not really the issue—so he could move down the road to somewhere else, to some other ranch more remote and overgrown, more fitting to his isolationist, nomadic imagination. Maybe this made him the quintessential Westerner, in the same terms French theorist Paul Virilio uses in his book, The Information Bomb as he speculates about what it is to be a so-called American: "The true hero of the American utopia is neither the cowboy nor the soldier, but the pioneer, the pathfinder, the person who 'takes his body where his eyes have been.'" Virilio's more grandly historical statement also describes our father: "The United States was, then, still hungry—not so much for territories as trajectories; hungry to deploy its compulsive desire for movement, hungry to carry on moving so as to carry on being American."

So our father would pack his suitcase. His sons would follow, protesting each time, in grief at the loss of the results, our hard-built monuments—our small green lake—from our best labors. Still, we eventually resigned ourselves to helping him make a fresh start somewhere else, on some new piece of land. We learned an existential futility about any lasting achievements from our labors that remains with us to this day. When I consider why I quit writing about the West and turned to other subjects—documentary stories set in Argentina, tales from urban jungles in which I now prefer to live and make source of for their richness of characters and fictions (part of this essay is being written in a high-rise apartment overlooking the crowded skyscrapers of Hong Kong, their mercurial facades rising up all around like gigantically shimmering plasma TVs)—what I understand now is that almost everything I was saying about agriculture and the West was an extension of my father's words, of his postures and attitudes. What I owe to him in acknowledgement are the sources for two novels, much of which came from his influence, based on his long-winded, colorful narratives, even to a significant measure on his cautions and complaints. Why I quit writing a preservationist story of the West: the realization that it was no use anymore, that ranching and farming in America, as with so many gainful pursuits in this wide world, had been conquered long ago by a culture of piracy.

My father was a man persistently uprooting himself, taking his body where his eyes had been, heading toward that glimmer of something he had seen while driving through the open spaces. He kept moving into them, onto a new piece of land, knowing all along it was a place where he could live for but a brief time. He bought smaller places than real ranches after he sold out in South Dakota—pieces more like mini-farms, land sized so he could manage better on his own as he grew older and his sons drew further away. He kept choosing ever more isolated locations, and he would have kept moving, if age and heart failure hadn't stopped him. He spent his last significant years living all alone but for a beloved dog on ten acres of remote bottomland in Idaho, along the Salmon River, close to the Lemhi wilderness. And this is how I think of him: still restless, still carrying his rage, an old man raising a dozen lambs in the wilderness, his summer days spent complaining, cussing, kicking at the dirt as he wrestles heavy irrigation pipes around, busy transforming nine brushy acres into a big green field. And I've come to a similar conclusion as he did at the end of his days: so little of it makes any difference, as economist Lord Keynes once stated and my father liked to quote: "in the long-term, we'll all be dead." As in the old Irish saying, the West has gone the way of everything else. In sum, everything happened as economist John Kenneth Galbraith prophesized in The New Industrial State: the line between big business piracy and elected government has disappeared. Only the labor itself, with its quest and its movement on any given day, really counts. This is true also of language in the process of composition. Our stories are what we have, what we leave behind-the only evidence that we were ever here.