"The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than the American West does. I went last night to a reading by a major figure in literature of the American West, who described the “settling of the American West” as starting in 1849—and I’m like, Uh, buddy when you’re doing all your walks out in nature did you ever find an arrowhead? Apparently it’s still okay for major figures to pretend that indigenous cultures didn’t exist. The way we talk about the California drought has like all the baggage of rugged individualism and Western exceptionalism all over it." -- Claire Vaye Watkins