West ‘Wind’ Timothy Egan Surveys Evolving Landscapes Of The New West In Eloquent New Book

Journalist Timothy Egan is not alone when it comes to writing about the so-called New West. The list is long and distinguished, ranging from British expatriate Jonathan Raban, who like Egan, lives and works in Seattle, to Salt Lake City-based Terry Tempest Williams to Rick Bass, who writes from the Yaak Valley in Montana.

Egan, though, might lead the list of those having the broadest-reaching voice since he works for The New York Times, and he’s certainly on the short list of accomplished writers trying to define what it means to live near the western edge of the continent.

Egan’s newest book, “Lasso the Wind,” is his second tome exploring Western themes and issues. His first was “The Good Rain,” published in 1990. His other book, published in 1992, is “Breaking Blue,” the story of the 1935 murder of a Newport, Wash., marshal, allegedly by a Spokane police detective.

A native of Spokane, Egan returns to his hometown Friday to read from “Lasso the Wind.” The writer graduated from Gonzaga Prep and the University of Washington before joining the staff at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In 1984 he quit his reporting job to work on “The Good Rain” and five years later took a job in New York with The Times.

He had little doubt, though, that he’d return to the Northwest to live and work. Now, he is the New York Times Seattle bureau and travels throughout the West. And that’s what makes him qualified to write with authority about life in the West and what issues will define the dialogue here in the next century.

Egan worked on “Lasso the Wind” for about seven years, gathering stories, defining his thoughts as his duties for The New York Times took him to places such as Lake Havasu City, Ariz.; Bozeman, Mont.; and Las Vegas. These cities and others become chapters that look at how communities are struggling with Western issues.

“My thoughts kept changing because I was trying to expand on ‘The Good Rain,”’ Egan said in a recent phone interview from his Seattle home. “I kept searching for a sense of the true history of where we live and kept running into cooler stories. I’m a fast writer, but I couldn’t find the structure for the book.”

Finally, Egan took a leave of absence and went to the Tuscany region of Italy to write the book.

“I had to have that sense of distance. I had to cut off the ability to keep going out and getting more material, and I had to write the book or give back the advance,” he says.

Where “The Good Rain” was limited to the Pacific Northwest and was a well-crafted celebration of life here, Egan expanded his territory for “Lasso the Wind.” The content encompasses the area west of the Rockies, and he paints life in the West with a less cheery hue. He reaches back through the past century for the events, the philosophies and the turning points that defined the region. Then he looks at what’s ahead.

“The most obvious issue is that we all have a stake in the huge swath of public land outside our doors. We have public land the size of Germany that belongs to all of us,” Egan says.

“The one thing that unites us, whether you are in Las Vegas or in a quaint, planned community in the Willamette Valley, is the escape hatch, and that’s our land. Most Westerners are city dwellers; 86 percent of us live in what is defined as a city. The unifying thing is that we have this land. The way we treat that land is one of the themes of the book,” he says.

Another theme that Egan used heavily in “The Good Rain” and returned to in “Lasso the Wind” is how we treat our Western history.

“We have been given a pitiful excuse as our history,” he says. “We had the gold rush and then closed the book. But we live in nine of the 10 fastest-growing states in the nation. I look at the overlooked bits of history, and those have more resonance in our lives. Even the Native history has resonance. In one chapter I explore the oldest continuously inhabited town in America, and it was inhabited by Native Americans.”

Both in his job for The New York Times and in researching his books, Egan spends considerable time documenting and discussing current issues in the region. What he sees now is what he calls a broad movement to restore the original and authentic West.

“You look at the West 150 years ago with the bison. Every river west of the Bitterroot crest had salmon. There were wolves in every state. The Native people had cultures we all celebrate now. We erased the authentic West. We killed nearly all the salmon by damming every major river but one and removed most of the Native people, including the Nez Perce, which we moved to Oklahoma, where half of them died.

“The unifying effort is to restore that. We don’t want to live like every other place. There are bison popping up all over; a lot of tribes are raising bison. People who used to have cattle have bison. Wolves have become the number one attraction in Yellowstone (National Park). And there’s a strong sovereignty movement. Europeans are coming here on vacation just to visit Indian reservations. It’s a broad historical thing.

“I see an effort to restore the West. A growing number of Westerners won’t accept a narrow view of history based on cowboys and cattle and sprawling out into the land.”

The other change Egan sees as he travels throughout the 10 Western states is the diversification of the people.

“Something akin to 40 percent of all counties in the Inland West now have Latino populations greater than 10 percent. The West, before our eyes, is overnight becoming the most ethnically diverse area in the U.S. Here, we have a huge social experiment going on in the formerly all-white West, this transformation of our ethnic diversity. It’s going to be a huge issue.”

And there’s the sprawl as a result of growth, which isn’t a new issue but one Egan sees the communities in the West still grappling with. “The West is the fastest-growing region in the country. There’s a big effort to make cities livable. Phoenix is now bigger than the state of Delaware. They lose an acre an hour of desert to their sprawl in Phoenix. In Bozeman, they have sprawled into the Galatin Mountains as ranchers come in and build trophy homes. There is a huge effort in cities to figure out how to contain themselves, to preserve the reason we live here: the open space and the drama of the terrain.”

Those top Egan’s list of why he lives in this corner of the country.

“My two passions keep getting stronger, and they are very simple: the outdoors and history,” he says. “These are the things I really care about, and they dominate my life. I love to fish, hike, raft, climb mountains, pick huckleberries.

“I realized when I was in New York I couldn’t live anywhere else than the West. Writing ‘The Good Rain’ made me realize there’s terrific history. A former New York Times writer, Anthony Lukas, called me when he was in Idaho researching his book ‘Big Trouble’ and said there are incredible stories here that have never been told. His comment had resonance. For a writer, there’s a lot of open ground here.”

For his next project, Egan is again looking east to Spokane. He’s still nurturing the idea, but he did say it will be a novel set in the Lilac City.

A READING Timothy Egan will read from “Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West” Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington. It’s free.