What happens to a dream deconstructed?

I have been stuck on westerns recently. Stuck. I might as well be trapped in a horseshoe canyon with no way out.

Ever since my recent posting on The Pioneer Woman, I have been thinking about what my life would look like in the Wild West. While brushing my teeth, washing the dishes, walking to the bus stop, petting the cat, calling a friend, reading a book, typing an e-mail, or driving the car to meet with friends, I have been thinking about its western look-a-like. There usually isn’t one.

My life would be an impossible western. First, the fact that I live by myself would be a bit ridiculous on the western frontier (although a good beginning for a Louis L’Amour plot-line). Second, the fact that I spend more time studying than surviving would be a luxury not found on the rugged terrain of New Mexico. Third, this instant communication thing is a bit far-fetched. Fourth, my car would be replaced by a stinky, sweaty, albeit beautiful, horse—named Shakespeare, Hamlet, Tennyson, or Lancelot.

The only two things from my last week that would look similar in the Old West are handwriting a letter to an old friend and petting the cat. Oh, and swatting fruit flies. Three things.

The day after I wrote the Pioneer Woman post, as if the universe were trying to respond directly to my Louis L’Amour allusion in that posting, I came across this quote in Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez, a Californian writing about racial stereotypes, the definition of race, the Continental Divide: “I was trained east. Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey wrote ‘westerns.’ Westerns sold for twenty-five cents to old men with wires running from their ears down to the batteries in their shirt pockets; men who would otherwise spend their evenings staring at the linoleum.”

Oh, Louis, you were just deconstructed and I didn’t even see the attack coming. (Neither did you, or you would have feinted and swung a left-handed uppercut.) This is how Rodriguez sees you: a pastime for old men with nothing better to do. A depiction of a west that was romanticized as wild only in relation to its potential to be tamed. As a perpetuation of the divides between black and white and brown. Poor Louis. You were just trying to teach me plot that was a bit more complex than Nancy Drew. And these people who critique you, they never read Last of the Breed. You proved could write more than the common penny novel.

My freshman year of high school, near the end of my year-long obsession with L’Amour, I wrote the first short story I was ever proud of—it was a western called “Drusilla’s Justice.” But when my sister cried reading it, I gave it up, preferring poetry, where traumatic melodrama was expected. (Louis always tended toward tragic drama at the beginning of the story.)

Lately though, the idea of writing westerns has picked up again. Maybe this is due to visiting my parents in the rugged, sandy terrain of New Mexico. Or maybe it was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that I found in the $5 bin at Walmart.* Or maybe it was because my friend JBB was recently pulled through a time vortex in his computer into a L’Amour-like shooting match with only his iPod to protect him.

Regardless the reason, I’m stuck in my horseshoe canyon, writing the western clash of cultures… Thanks to comments from Rodriguez and some Colonial Latin American history knowledge, I tread carefully, knowing that each romanticized step treads on someone’s dreams.

What happens to a dream deconstructed? I guess it becomes well-informed fiction.

Be on the look-out for the latest adventures of Renee in her one-room school house: teaching eight grades at once, killing large spiders, keeping her cat away from coyotes, firing up the wood-stove, cooking over an open fire without a microwave for the leftovers, and reading by candlelight into the wee hours of the morning… oh, and don’t forget her trusty horse named Shakespeare. Tennyson’s the dog.

*to hmbu: please don’t be mad that I was in Walmart. I was in a strange city and it was the only store I could find. I’m sorry I was there, but I’m not sorry I found a very attractive Clint Eastwood! And just imagine the poetic irony of a moment finding a classic western film in the bargain box of one of the nation’s largest colonizing retailers? Rodriguez would have great fun with that one.