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Views and opinions: There’s majesty in all parts of U.S., but I like West best
 

I've been in every state, but feel most at home on the left side of the Mississippi. I've climbed all over the 17 western states, floated the Rogue, rode horseback on the Borderlands, know how to pronounce the capital of South Dakota, visited Cabela’s in Nebraska and watched a rodeo in the Astrodome and the first World Series game in Kansas City.

I froze my butt off in Aberdeen, been to a Fourth of July rodeo in Prescott and the parade in Cayucos. I've never been to the Egyptian pyramids, but I've been to the one in Las Vegas – where I also visited Paris and Venice, albeit with slot machines ringing.

I've haggled with Native Americans selling their jewelry at Four Corners, been to the castle in Castle Rock, slept out with the cowboys on the Bell, been to the top of the Space Needle, unknowingly fed the bears in Yellowstone and fished in the shadow of Half Dome.

I've seen and felt the West's haunting beauty in the Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion, and I know you can't possibly understand my part of the world by just visiting Disneyland on vacation.

This doesn't mean I don't appreciate the East. I spent a week on the beautiful beach in Rehoboth, traipsed all over Florida and visited my brother at West Point on the Hudson.

It may be a glittering generality, but there are more symptoms of civilization in the East, more tall buildings, toll roads and government offices. The East is more about history, while the West is more about the landscape. The East is Arlington and Gettysburg, while the West is the Little Bighorn.

Nature's handiwork is more on display in the West. It's Carlsbad Caverns, the Badlands, Black Hills, the Redwoods, Mount Whitney, Lake Tahoe, the Oregon seacoast and the Great Empty – a name given to Montana that could apply to the entire West. It's God's backyard.

The East was built by people like the Amish, the pilgrims, the millionaires on Jekyll Island and the great southern plantations. The East is architecture, history and all the wonderful monuments in D.C. There's more things to do in the East.

The West is the oil patch, cowboys and farmers. The East is more inside; the West, more outside.

The East is brick, the West is adobe. The East has more and better museums and high-brow culture. I've spent days at the Smithsonian, been to Ford's Theatre and saw Henry Fonda in a play at the Kennedy Center, but I also thoroughly enjoyed the barbed-wire museum in Emporia, Kan., and Georgia O' Keefe's home in New Mexico.

The East has Cooperstown. The West has the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I've never been to a Super Bowl in New Orleans but I don't see how it could possibly compare with Friday night lights in Texas. I liked Mark Twain's cramped and dusty office at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nev., better than his eastern mansion.

I feel closer to nature in the West. I felt the ground shake when Old Faithful erupted and witnessed the destruction when Mount St. Helen's blew her lid. I was also present when my wife did likewise, when I lost the car keys in Death Valley in July. She didn't speak to me for days after I insisted we take a plane ride and dive-bombed the Grand Canyon.

Whenever I visited the East, I felt a divide between the North and South that still exists 150 years after they supposedly settled their differences. The same can be said about how the West feels towards the East. That's because the feds own far too much of the West and have too much say on how we Westerners must live our lives.

The West is far less dense and people are more spread out here, so that when we do make human contact we tend to be friendlier. Westerners are also more independent, have a stubborn streak and tend to mind their own business.

That's why we resent Congressmen and eco-snobs from New York City, who've never earned an honest day's wage, trying to rid the world of Oregon loggers, Utah miners and cowboys and cows, lest they supposedly destroy the world with their flatulence.

The only disgusting aroma Westerners smell emanates from the much-too-powerful people on the Potomac.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers may log on to www.LeePittsbooks.com to order any of Lee Pitts’ books. Those with questions or comments for Lee may write to him in care of this publication.

2/21/2019