Blue Desert by Charles Bowden

“The man keeps talking, sputtering out whiskey words and I sense the message in the stream of language because I have heard it again and again. In the West, nothing done by Americans is for keeps, everything—farms, cities, towns, mines, everything—constitutes a brief raid on the dry land and then becomes tumbleweed, ghost towns, lost mines, real estate empires that go up in flim-flam, and the like.
”No one wishes to face this fact so they continually search the past for permanence, for memories to anchor their role in a terrain that does not care about them and has never needed them. They get half tanked, drive down a bleak street in a dying town and start talking tents.”

-Chuck Bowden, 1986