Park Slope Book Groups and Binge-Watching Longmire: Western Men and Silence
We read Snow Falling on Cedars in my women’s book group in Park Slope in the 1990s. David Guterson could write sex scenes. I looked forward to discussing the book. Before I could say anything, the attacks began.
“All the men are the same,” said one woman.
“Yeah, he really can’t characterize men well,” said another.
“The men were all so similar, they were boring,” a third added.
“What?” I said. “One is a Japanese-American strawberry farmer, another is a reporter, and then there’s the German-American fisherman.”
In my mind, these were three very distinct types of men, and their Pacific Northwest qualities reminded me of growing up south of Seattle between Sea-Tac Airport and the Tukwila Valley, which was then filled with Japanese farms.
“All he says about them is that they are silent,” I heard. “He categorizes them all as silent!”
I was puzzled by this. I hadn’t noticed it as I read, because where I was from, describing a man as quiet was kind of like describing water as wet.
Later, I saw a monograph by Teddy Roosevelt in which he describes his years ranching and hunting in North Dakota. He explained that the men out there only trusted you if you were capable of holding your tongue. Easterners were known for running their mouths. Then I listened to Nanci Griffith lyrics characterizing a guy who talks too much and doesn’t wear work boots as “some flat-shoed fool from the East comes a-runnin’, with some news that he’d read in some St. Joseph paper.”
In 1978, when I arrived in New York City, there were still many strong regional differences. Men wore long coats — wool in the winters or trench-coats as in the scene below.
In Seattle and the outlying areas, men dressed for the outdoors in shorter coats they could drive in — ski jackets, Pendleton wool coats. And in New York, men with big voices, lawyers and fast-talkers, were successful.
I came from multiple generations of ranchers, hunters and fishermen who lived in Eastern Montana near the Wyoming border, close to South Dakota. Men only opened up when they were drunk, and you usually lived to regret that.
My relatives settled in the Powder River valley as one of the first white families; pretty close, in fact, to the fictional Absaroka County where Walt Longmire is sheriff. Walt drinks Rainier beer in cans and calls his daughter Punk. Every time we drove north to Seattle along I-5, we passed a cannery with a huge red R on top. My father called me Punkin and well, there was a lot of cases of Rainier beer in our house.
In my experience, Walt Longmire is pretty well-behaved for a Western man who drinks dozens of cans of Rainier at one sitting.
