The Final Country

The country is most barbarously large and final. It is too much country – boondock country – alternately drab and dazzling, spectral and remote. It is so wrongfully muddled and various that it is difficult to conceive of it as all of a piece. Though it begins simply enough, as part of the other.

It begins, very much like the other, in an ancient backwash of old dead seas and lambent estuaries…

Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley