The West Will Swallow You
by Leath Tonino
Trinity University Press, 2019
Review by John Yohe
Leath Tonino is an essayist and freelance journalist whose new collection of essays, The West Will Swallow You, showcases the Western landscape with a wide range of style and tone. The book is divided into sections based on the various western states where Tonino has adventured: California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado. There's also a last "Hither and Yon" section devoted to musings on his writing process, followed by more political (though always humorous) essays about the politics of the West.
The title essay comes from the accusation of one of Tonino's friends—that once someone from east of the Mississippi River (in his case Vermont) lives in and explores the open spaces of the American West, they don’t come back. Tonino turns the accusation into a reflection on the death of a fellow Vermonter who ventured west. He explores why we go west, and why we undertake potentially dangerous activities. His answer?
A young man like me is indeed interested in beauty and loneliness and powers he does not understand. A young man like me sleeps in a sleeping bag as often as he does a regular bed. A young man like me climbs mountains in poor weather to learn what that entails. He sleeps on summits. He rises at down. He sets hammocks high in trees and sleeps in swaying crowns. He sleeps in canyons, by rivers, on schist. He sleeps in snow caves, in imitation of bears.
The beauty is worth the danger. The beauty is part of the danger. Or, the danger is part of the beauty—not that it's all danger. Tonino is an explorer of the mind, and curious about everything related to the outdoors. In one essay he's "creeking"—exploring various creeks and drainages right in the middle of Colorado Springs; another, he's sleeping in trees in the middle of San Francisco. In the middle of a wilderness, he's putting on a blindfold in order to better appreciate the sounds of the wild. In “Wild Reading,” he discusses a madness that I share: carrying books on backpacking trips:
For years I've been intrigued by wilderness reading, asking myself the meaning of lugging literature into the backcountry....why did I once allow David Foster Wallace's 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest to ride my achy back like some kind of evil monkey for two straight weeks? It was waterlogged from having been fumbled into a stream. It was splotchy with mold. It was...welcomed?
The West Will Swallow You is actually the ideal book to bring for your own "Wild Reading" in the backcountry, though also perfect anywhere an outdoorsy person might find themselves, including a cold, wintery city.
Tonino tends to veer away from commenting on politics in most of his essays, though his second Outside piece, "The Unknown Country," suggests that the Trump administration wants to cut the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument into three sections, reducing it by 50% and opening the de-designated areas to mining. Tonino sets out to backpack this whole area, to see the land, and along the way gives the narrative over to the voices of the people he meets. Tonino is obviously pro-monument and is against de-designating, but he is sympathetic to the people who actually live in the area. Like them, he feels anxiety, fear, and even anger about land politics. He presents this frustration in the essay "Doug," which is about his relationship with a Douglas fir.
Opening the newspaper, clicking the laptop's news, it's too damn easy as though what's holding your life is a complicated wrong, that you reside amid horror, that the hug of your habitat, your home, this world, is all toxic waters and flaming skies and gape-mouthed children stabbing fingers at their dusty bellies. And drone strikes committed in your name. And blatant thievery. And loss.
For Tonino, the alternate, grander truth can be found in the Doug—in the forest. I too think this is a higher truth, though I'm not sure it's a solution. It's a solution to despair though. Tonino reminds me that I'll feel better once I do get outside. I may even become a better person, since my anger and despair tend to dissipate out there. I'm certainly more content.
The West Will Swallow You leaves me wondering what Tonino could (and, I assume, will) do with a full-length book. Will he delve into a solid, though still spiritual, exploration of a place like Barry Lopez? Or, write a more wild-ride memoir like Cheryl Strayed's Wild? Maybe he will become the next Jon Krakauer or Ed Abbey? He is certainly capable of any of these possibilities.
Tonino's writing exudes contentment—he writes like he's always smiling (even if his author photo looks sort of serious). As he says himself, he is "a wandering fool." Like the Tarot card character, The Fool, coming down the mountain to share with us what he's learned up there. Out there.