The US West has long evoked fantasies of climatological stability: the aridity of the Southwest; the soggy Pacific Northwest’s endless rain; the “humid fallacy” that Mike Davis has argued inaccurately overlaid a Mediterranean climate onto Southern California. Davis' derivation from a uniformitarian geological model is less apposite for the earthquake-prone landscape of Southern California than the dramatic alternations of a catastrophist sensibility. Davis thus points not simply toward a more accurate description of the material conditions of the US West, but to the narrative rhythm of its climate, which unfolds across long stretches whose consistency challenges narrative interest until punctuated by the sudden violence of a shift in weather. Alongside two other central figurations of the US West – the Garden of the World and the Great American Desert – this chapter tracks this rhythm through western American literary history.

I grew up in one corner of the American West where two events marked my developing environmental sensibility. I had my “machine in the garden” moment in Seattle during the mid-1970s when I was eight years old, the age when geographer Yi Fu Tuan says we begin to develop emotional attachments to places. I remember stopping in my tracks as I passed a window overlooking my elementary school playground. Transfixed, I watched through the frame as a bulldozer chewed aging concrete like a mechanized Cookie Monster. The machine rolled through rusting jungle gyms and tetherball courts and across the painted yellow lines of foursquare courts and hopscotch games. The bulldozer revealed brown dirt just inches below the surface.1