Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West.

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan Alfred A. Knopf. 266 pages. $25.00.

Timothy Egan, Pacific Northwest correspondent for The New York Times, knows he's taken on a tough topic in his third book.

"It may be easier to lasso the wind than find a sustaining story for the American West," he writes in the introduction.

Thank goodness Egan doesn't try. Instead, he shows why making sense of the West is so difficult.

There's something about the way writers portray the region that doesn't quite ring true. Maybe it's because the West is just so damn big. My home is western Washington state, where rain, mountain vistas, and evergreens are defining features. These are the things I think of when I picture my West. But all I have to do is cross the Cascade Mountains into the eastern part of the state, and the climate and topography are completely different.

Like me, Egan is a Westerner. His vision of the West is fascinating because he doesn't try to smooth the rough terrain. Instead, he explores the contours and contradictions of the eleven contiguous states on the sunset end of Texas and the Great Plains.

The publisher seems to think the book should be a travelogue, given the subtitle "Away to the New West." The book has that feel in parts, but more importantly, it unmasks the phony mythology of the West, which settles around the idea that cattle and cowboys are somehow indigenous species.

"I had been around too many county commissioners on rental horses, the culde-sac cowboys mending fences for the cameras with their soft hands," Egan writes. "I had seen enough Senators wearing creased jeans, and ministers blessing snow-making machines. I had heard too many lies about the `Real West,' flimflam and fraud retold as gilded narrative by people whose grandparents took the land by force and have been draining the public trough ever since to keep it locked in a peculiar time warp of history."

Chapters take on copper mining, the cattle industry, and federal management of public lands. Egan uses an account of a fly-fishing trip to Idaho with his brothers to write about dwindling wilderness. A story about a Virgin Mary sighting in Sunnyside, Washington, gives way to a history of Latinos' role in building the West.

Some of the most delightful chapters are about schemes to make the West something it's not. Egan takes us to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, home to London Bridge. "Not a faux, Vegas-style re-creation.... But a 700-foot span of granite that has been transplanted, stone by stone, from the Thames to the Colorado." The city, Egan writes, "is trying to be Europe in the West, perhaps, importing grandeur to a land without self-esteem." Las Vegas, on the other hand, tries to be everything, Egan writes, and sucks up a hell of a lot of water in the process.

Most of the false pretense of the West is more subtle than importing the London Bridge or creating a rainforest in a Las Vegas hotel.

In the chapter "Homecoming," Egan looks at an effort in Wallowa County, Oregon, to draft a traditional-culture law in the face of a mill closing and falling cattle prices. Commissioners declared that the county had jurisdiction over federal lands within its boundaries "and any federal action, like restricting grazing in Hells Canyon National Recreation Area to protect bighorn sheep, could be ruled null and void by them ... because the government had failed to respect the traditional culture of the land," writes Egan. "The traditional culture, as they defined it, was a narrow thing, belonging to perhaps a hundred entrenched white families, and it was nearly gone.... The commissioners didn't see anything before or after the cowboy or the logger."

At a meeting of the county commissioners, one logger-turned-environmentalist said, "If you're going to base your decisions on who's been here the longest ... you had damn well better talk to some Nez Perce Indians.... They've been pissed off a lot longer than you have been." Among property-rights advocates, Egan writes, "the indignant never mention the biggest and most flagrant violation of all": Whites running Native Americans off land they had inhabited for perhaps 1,000 years.

In Wallowa County, Egan explores why some cling so hard to a certain notion of the past.

"They do not want to become bit players in a new economy, flipping buffalo burgers for mountain-bikers from the city," he says. "When a new sporting-goods store opens on Main Street, what comes to mind are unctuous urbanites in Lycra. They see the huge, glass-chested homes on the hill, the architectural sketches for Elk Trail Estates going up on the glacial moraine of a lake where they always took their kids fishing, and they cannot find a place in it for themselves."

What, then, do these people think of a latte-sipper from Seattle commenting on their plight? "You're a long way from home," is the polite response Egan gets from those he interviews after he tells them he's from The New York Times. His reply, he writes, is to say he is indeed a long way from eastern Washington state, where he grew up. But so is his current home of Seattle, really, when you consider the divide between urban and rural in the West. His jaunty description of preparing lamb shish kebab with mint sauce while camping is just the sort of thing some of his subjects would scoff at. Even so, he seems earnestly interested in their fate.

Egan doesn't say what the New West should be like. His effort is mainly journalistic: to tell stories about what he's found from his travels, interviews, and research. He's not shy of interpretation or of deflating legends. But he leaves his vision of the future wide open.

Erin Middlewood is a reporter in Longview, Washington.