thetelling

The Telling Takes Me Home

When I talk about the West, I don't mean anybody's West but my own. I don't think about it in terms of the movie and tv westerns, or even in terms of the standard histories, the "Westward, Ho!" a highly romanticized and highly publicized view of the West.

I think of Ernest Wilkinson, back in his lawyer days before he became president of Brigham Young University, suing the Federal government for millions of dollars on behalf of the Ute Indian tribe. For want of having a tribal council they simply divided the money among all the people in the tribe, and they all went out and bought Cadillacs. You go down to Nine Mile Pass and Indian Canyon and you can see the remains of those Cadillacs just scattered all over hell because that kind of car just wasn't made for that territory.

I think of the 40,000 migrants who work through Utah every year, mainly Chicanos who come up from south Texas. The people who work our crops, our sugar beets and our peas, are working at the lowest wages and under the worst possible conditions on land that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers once owned. That's the part of the history you don't get.

And of course I think about the parts, especially of my own state, that are pretty much untouched by the tourists and the developers, large primitive areas and wilderness. Not that they're areas people wouldn't want; it's just that they're hard to get to. Up in the high Uintas, the highest mountains in Utah, there are a thousand little lakes and great pine forests.

There are other parts of the state nobody would want on a bet; nobody would take if you gave it to them. That's the red rock country. Parts of it are national parks now. There's no water out there, nothing will grow, there's almost no wildlife. It's a part of the world that used to be inhabited by the old Anasazi, the ancient ones, "basket makers" the anthropologists call them. There was a twenty year drought that killed them off and drove them out. Nobody's been back there since. You can go in there and see their remains in all that red rock. You can see where they've chipped their story in the rock in petroglyphs. Newspaper Rock has the writings of four or five different cultures, one chipped over the top of the others. A hard place to get to, but worth visiting.

That's the West I grew up with, and it's not the West you would know about unless you went and looked for it.

Come along with me to some place that I've been
Where the people all look back and still remember when
And the quicksilver legends like sunlight turn and bend
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

I could tell you all some lies that were just made up for fun
And the meanest, loudest brag could beat the fastest gun
I'll show you nameless graves that tell the way the West was won
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

We'll travel down the wagon roads or along the iron rail
Past lines of rusty Cadillacs that mark the boom town trail
Where dreamers never win and doers never fail
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

I'll sing of my amigos who come from down below
And whisper in their loving tongue the songs of Mexico
They work their stolen Eden, lost so long ago
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

I'll sing about an emptiness the East has never known
Where the coyotes don't pay taxes and a man can be alone
And you'd have to walk forever to find a telephone
It seems sad, but the telling takes me home.

Repeat first verse.

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