Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West, and: Bicycling beyond the Divide: Two Journeys into the West (review)

We have here two travel memoirs based on memorable journeys throughout the American West. One is by a young female art historian, a self-described urbanite now living in Chicago who ventures westward (mostly by herself) in her Volkswagen Jetta to view some of the most famous works of monumental earth art; the other by a young male creative writer who retraces his epic solo trip by bicycle from Colorado to the Pacific Coast and back some twenty years earlier. Each work offers an interesting, if decidedly different, take on the contemporary West through the filters of contrasting sensibilities and personalities.

At the outset of her journey, Erin Hogan confesses that she feels some trepidation about making a several-week journey alone through mostly desolate, unpopulated terrain, referring to the trip as “an unprecedented assault on my own fear of solitude” (2). But the trip serves another purpose, namely, as a way of “testing and challenging myself, breaking out of my nine-to-five routine and trying to find something in myself beyond the ability to answer emails, attend meetings, and meet friends for cocktails” (2). To her credit, Hogan succeeds admirably in this quest, finding and analyzing such famous works of environmental art as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in southeastern Nevada, and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in central-western New Mexico. She also visits and writes about Moab, Utah; Juárez, Mexico; and Marfa, Texas, the latter the site of a massive installation of the works of minimalist artist Donald Judd. Along the way, she meets up with fellow pilgrims to these famous artworks, enjoys drinks and conversations with random strangers in bars and restaurants, and provides some amusing insights into the people and places of the rural West. She manages to blend some sophisticated analyses of earth art and modernism with breezy, humorous observations of westerners encountered at out-of-the-way places, like a fellow at the Saddlesore Bar in Montello, Nevada, whom she initially likens to the actor Harry Dean Stanton but over time finds friendly and funny. While I must admit to feeling some impatience with a person who seems so naïve, helpless, and panic-stricken over something as basic as following directions to a particular site (as I was reading her book, I found myself continually raising the question, “how could anyone so academically smart be so dumb in the practical sense?”), overall I was quite taken with her descriptions of the works of earth art themselves and her accounts of making friends with perfect strangers at motels and campsites throughout the interior West. The book includes some intriguing black-and-white photographs (some whimsical, others more documentary) plus a map of all the sites she visits and helpful how-to information about finding the various artworks.

Daryl Farmer has no problems with directions in winding his way across the back roads west of the Rockies. A native of Colorado Springs, he sets out in May 2005 to retrace his odyssey by bicycle undertaken as a twenty-year-old in 1985. Well aware of the many travelers before him, he occasionally quotes or mentions Steinbeck, Least Heat Moon, and other travel writers of the West. The title of his book has multiple meanings: of course, there is the literal divide he crosses in surmounting the Rockies numerous times, but there is also the West and the United States of 1985 versus the changes to each that he encounters in 2005, and occasionally, he finds the culture of today less friendly and more guarded, attributing the wariness to a post-9/11 state of angst. Like Hogan, he is...