The Modern West

 

The Modern West Podcast

Somewhere on the great prairies of Wyoming, Montana or South Dakota, I reach for my Spotify phone. The hum of the highway, the whoosh of the constant wind and the crackling of my blown out truck speaker have kept me in a borderline-meditation state for the last three hours of driving, but now I have resurfaced and need entertainment. 

I pull off into a truck parking area and rummage in the console for the old Samsung with no calling or texting capability, a cracked screen, dying battery and only two important apps; Spotify and Voice Recorder. The device is slow as molasses and the touch screen is fading, but this little black box holds an entire roadtrip soundtrack. I have my playlists of all genres from Montana songwriters to New Orleans Jazz, all with silly names to help me remember which is which. Motor Breath is the heavy metal playlist for traffic jams and thunderstorms. Hobgoblins is the underground hip hop playlist for late nights. Johnny Bicycles is indie country, Nostalgia and Nihilism is pop punk, Outbacking Vicariously is Australian country and folk. The list goes on. 

Beyond the music playlists are my podcast playlists. Deep in the boondocks of the high prairie, FM radio is unreliable. The calming voice of a nerd with a microphone in some tiny office on a college campus in Chicago or Denver, San Francisco or Minneapolis can help me pass an entire day behind the wheel. I am not into the true crime genre that has made a name for podcasting. I prefer social science and information; Ted Talks and Hidden Brain; podcasts that unearth knowledge and different viewpoints. Sometimes they get a bit too caught up in the agendas of their subjects, spewing word vomit that makes them feel smart, and I skip ahead. But most of the time, I am captivated by the steady voice. I really am captivated, captive in the cab of my truck, with nothing to focus on but the horizon and a few semi trucks. This helps me deep dive into these podcasts and apply what I hear to my world. 

Very rarely are the best national podcasts about topics that relate closely to rural Montanans like me. I love Freakonomics Radio Podcast, exploring the hidden sides of our economy and financial systems, but nearly all of their episodes are based in a Wall Street bank or an Ivy League professor’s classroom. Radiolab tells amazing stories of woe and triumph, but these usually center on the protagonists’ struggles in urban society. Against the Rules by Michael Lewis and Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell make me think hard and deep about some of the illusions of control in our society, but again, those often take place in brainy laboratories and important sites of international significance. I love learning about the whole world and contemplating all facets of society and existence, but sometimes, those kinds of podcasts seem very distant when all you are surrounded by is sagebrush.

So I was pleasantly surprised to stumble onto the Modern West podcast; produced in Laramie, Wyoming and cultivating stories of the modern, rural west; the oft overlooked area of the United States and my particular demographic. I was immediately hooked because these episodes talked in great detail about problems and solutions that I encountered everyday, but are foreign to a majority of my fellow Americans. The tales were told by people who know what it is like to drive forty miles across empty land to get groceries or auto parts; people who wear many hats in a small town because there are more duties than there are people. They tell the tale of Walden, Colorado; classically Western and charming, and dealing with problems like my region faces; like mental health services, lack of elder care, rich newcomers playing cowboy, predatory corporations, methamphetamine and more. 

There are now four seasons, each with central themes like individualism, ghost towns and wilderness. The makers of the Modern West, Wyoming Public Radio, travel from New Mexico to Montana, Nebraska to Eastern Oregon, covering stories about the people who live and work in the Rocky Mountain and High Plains regions. They deal with uncomfortable stories that many people don’t really want to dredge up like the genocide of Native Americans, the massive mental health crisis of middle aged single men or the increasing wealth gap between the poor residents and the rich vacationers. They hit on hot button issues like the American Prairie Reserve or the water wars of Southern Colorado. And they bring along the real characters of the American West who still ride horses but also run irrigation pivots from their smartphone. They do what they say they are going to do; explore the evolving identity of the American West, without sugar coating it or making doomsday prophecies. 

As the Black Hills line the skyline and Devils Tower stretches for the sky, or the Missouri River rolls lazily eastward beside the two lane highway, or the lush fields along the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone flash pass outside my window, the Modern West is my go-to podcast. I am transported to the scene of the investigation; I just may stumble across a story out here in the vastness because things are happening here. They may not be important in the global scheme, nor will they likely affect the halls of power, but they will affect me, so I am going to listen in as I drive on…