Plainsmen

Perhaps no landscape is subject to romanticization more than the American West. Visions of grand mesas, snow-capped peaks and the ubiquitous cowboy on horseback define this vast, complex land. A land that begins on the banks of the Missouri River, unfurling across hundreds of miles of largely featureless plains, clear across the Rockies to the basins and ranges of Nevada, the canyons and deserts of the Southwest, to the Pacific Ocean.

For me, the American West is home and one that has provided more questions than answers. When I was four, my parents moved us from, of all places, Taipei, Taiwan where my Nebraskan-born father was living out his Far East aspirations with a Taiwanese woman he met in Colorado—my mother. This was a confounding experience for me as my reality shifted from a hyper-urban existence to one of piety and hard work on a remote homestead in Eastern Colorado. It was at this time that my grandmother gave me a point and shoot camera, and through the viewfinder, that I began compulsively exploring my new home. Photography became a tool to seek answers, something to hide behind, as well as a way to insert myself into new places.

What I have found in the twenty-five years since is not the land of the Marlboro Man, but one of the Plainsmen. Normal women and men who dedicate their lives to their community, their family, their Church, who lead a lifestyle that remains deeply private, modest and conservative. A life of manual labor that often goes overlooked, punctuated by simple pleasures of the county fair, a twelve seat movie theatre or a game of six-man football. I have also found a less flattering side. One made of insularity, anxiety, substance abuse and social ails that more often than not go unaddressed. Based on today’s trends, there’s cause for worry as the rural West slips deeper into the familiar woes of marginalized America—the youth are leaving for cities, infrastructure is in decline, access to healthcare oftentimes involves lengthy drives and education remains chronically underfunded in these rural districts.

These trends worry me, and with that, I look to today’s kids and wonder what their reality will become.