“Try this for openers: the art of a region begins to come mature when it is no longer what we think it should be.”

William Kittredge

It is no secret we are a nomadic people. The average American, according to the latest statistics, moves every two years; a questionnaire I recently received from my college alumni office begins with queries about the number of job changes and moves I have made since graduation, underscoring the idea that for many of us mobility has become a central feature of our lives. Rarely do we spend our adult years in the same town or city in which we were born and raised—a fact not lost on writers, who from the earliest days of our history have charted this restlessness, this drive to settle one unknown landscape after another.

For a long time, of course, the movement was westward, the dream of a frontier firing our collective imagination. The writings of the first explorers fueled this migration and helped shape our national identity: what Czeslaw Milosz calls “the great soul of the people” finds new expression in such classics as The Journals of Lewis and Clark, John Wesley Powell's Down the Colorado, and John Muir's The Mountains of California—all of which were soon eclipsed in the popular imagination by the hundreds of Westerns Hollywood produced. How the West was won remains one of our most powerful (and often destructive) myths, influencing everything from fashion to foreign policy. Those who censured Ronald Reagan for sending American troops into Grenada and Central America were probably not surprised to learn his favorite author is Louis L'Amour: we are who we read.

Serious writers, however, have worked since before the official closing of the frontier in 1890 to articulate a different vision of the West. As Thomas J. Lyon, one of the most astute critics of Western literature, has remarked:

There's always been a strong, romantic fascination with the wilds in America. And that's made the West romantic territory. But it's time for that romantic fascination to end. The frontiers have been explored now. ‘Westering’ is over. In America we think in terms of endless expansion, in ‘growth is health.’ But Western writers have been saying the idea doesn't work anymore. Recognizing limits, recognizing the frontier era is over now is the key. That's what makes the best Western literature serious, as opposed to the cowboy, pulp Western things. And that insight is important for the whole world. If Western writers can make a contribution to Euro-American civilization, it's in the recognition that there are limits.

Such a recognition, which for Western writers is both a function of form and a practical necessity, distinguishes their best work. These writers have little choice but to reclaim the frontier in imaginative terms, resettling it in their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in a spirit exactly opposite to that in which it was first divided up: only reverence and humility before the land and its indigenous peoples may counter the generations of abuse we have heaped on them. Wallace Stegner, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey and many others continue the discussion begun by writers like Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck, Willa Cather and Mary Austin, about the importance of recognizing and defining limits on our belief in the frontier mentality.

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[Bass] reveals in his first collection of stories, The Watch, a genuine affinity for life in the West. Born and raised in Texas, he has lived in Utah, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and now caretakes a ranch in northwestern Montana; his stories are set in a similar variety of places, roughly half in the South, half in the West. He is by turns a petroleum geologist and environmental activist, which must give him a broad view of one of the thornier issues facing Westerners—the development of natural resources versus the preservation of wilderness areas. In like manner, his fiction is informed by the sympathy he generates for a wide range of characters. Rooted in the storytelling tradition of the South, he is equally at home spinning tales about the West; his Mississippi stories are as concerned with what [William] Kittredge calls “a necessary wildness” as almost anything found in Montana. That his work has been included in both New Stories from the South and The Best of the West will surprise no one who reads The Watch: his “emotional ownership” of various landscapes is destined to enrich our literary life.

Like Kittredge, Bass probes the limits of possibility, discovering “nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.” His characters are at once damned and redeemed by their faith—in loyalty, in love, in a simpler way of life, in the belief that at certain times trouble “was so far away that it seemed it would never return.” But trouble is often closer than we think. For the narrator of “Mississippi” it takes the form of daily reminders that he was responsible for the failure of his relationship with Leanne, “the fat girl who asked (him) to marry her.” When he said no, she moved to California, leaving him with thousands of bottles of original-brand Coca-Cola, “because she didn't like the new formula.” Like her brother, Hector, who believes their farm is sitting on top of an oil well but who will never get around to drilling for it, the narrator prefers to live in a world of possibility: if Hector strikes it rich, Leanne will use her share of the money to lose weight and he'll get an education … But since he couldn't make a commitment, all he has now are the Coke bottles, three or four of which he smashes “against the rocks in the back pasture” after a bad day of work, and the vain hope that Leanne will return. “If she comes back and asks me again,” he says at the end of the story, “this time I will marry her.”

Oil plays a leading role in the trilogy of stories set in Houston—“Mexico,” “Juggernaut,” and “Redfish.” The nameless narrator and his best friend, Kirby, grew up when “there weren't any wars, and there wasn't any racism, not in [their] lives, and [they] weren't hungry,” realize in their senior year of high school that theirs is a privileged moment in our history. Houston is oil-rich, so rich in fact that it can support not one but two hockey teams; and the boys spend their nights watching aging athletes from the Juggernauts, the seedier of the two teams, fight it out on a rink at the edge of town. “Juggernaut” closes with a paean to that time:

This was back in those first days when Houston was clean and just growing, not yet beginning to die or get old. Houston was young, then, too. You cannot imagine how smooth life was for you, if you were in high school, that one spring, when oil was ＄42 a barrel, and everyone's father was employed by the petroleum industry, and a hero for finding oil when the Arabs wouldn't sell us any. Anything was possible.

But Houston, like so many Western cities, has a boom-and-bust economy. Bass is particularly adept at charting the social effects of such an economy on the skids. In “Mexico” and “Redfish” we find the narrator and Kirby trying to make sense of their lives after high school. Something has gone wrong. The oil boom is over, the hockey teams are gone, and Houston is growing old:

Hell will come here first, when it opens. Everyone here's already dead. The heat killed them or something. People don't even fall in love anymore: it's just the pelvic thrust, and occasionally children as the result. There's no love, and that's the surest sign of death.

To combat their sense of doom, they keep a large bass in Kirby's swimming pool (along with “stumps, gravel, old trees,” and a broken-down Volkswagen!), drink too many beers and an exotic concoction of rum, Diet Coke, and lime juice called a Cuba Libre, or drive to the Gulf to fish—in a freak snowstorm. And they hope something will change: “Maybe there will be a bad hatch of mosquitoes. A thunderstorm. Perhaps the Astros lose. We go to Mexico. The flights cost seventy-nine dollars, one way.”

Odds are, though, nothing will change. The recognition that we live in a world of dwindling possibilities is what unifies this collection. Galena Tom Ontz may have “two girlfriends and a key to Canada,” but he also has a bad heart. And while the narrator of “Choteau” believes Ontz—“the wild man” of Montana's Yaak Valley—still has choices, still has freedom, it soon becomes clear that time is running out for him, as it is for so many characters in these stories, Rick Bass's flair for dramatizing an individual's confrontation with his own mortality makes The Watch a wise and wonderful book.