Space in the American West

There was a piece in The New Yorker by Geoff Dyer about traveling around the West looking at land art (e.g., "The Lightning Field" by Walter De Maria in New Mexico and "The Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson in Utah). One particular passage in the article expressed a familiar sentiment and it made me feel kind of homesick (that seems to be the best word) for the West. I guess another way of putting it is that it resulted in me having a longing for the West and its terrain. Here is the passage:

Perhaps it is not the natives of Texas or Arizona who fully appreciate the scale of the places where they have grown up. Maybe you have to be British, to come from a country the size of someone's back yard -- as Lawrence contemptuously expressed it -- to properly grasp the immensity of these Western states. So it's not surprising that Lawrence thought that "New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world" that he had ever had. Unprepared for the "shattering force" of the landscape, "a new part of the soul woke up suddenly."
The paradox of England: a tiny country that is impossible to get around. You can imagine a prospective visitor from Arizona studying a map of England and deciding, "Yep, we should be able to see most of this puppy in a couple of days." But how long does it take to travel from London to Gloucester? Anything from two and half hours to...well, better allow five, to be on the safe side. On the second thought, make that the best part of a day.
In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o'clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria's measuring.

I do appreciate the scale of the place I grew up. Eagan and I, having both grown up in Western states with wide open spaces, have discussed this topic together before. Time-and-Space is different outside of the West. Out here -- due to the roundabout nature of the roads (lots of indirect and twisting roads), the amount of traffic, and speed limit differences -- you don't get as far when you drive. I can drive for 30 minutes and end up only 7 miles away from where I started (and that's when traffic is not bad). In Utah, it takes 30 minutes to go from the city of Logan to Brigham City. That's 30 miles away. In the West, you have more opportunities to reach 30 miles in 30 minutes. Travel feels more substantial. From Logan to Brigham City you actually drive through a canyon and end up on the other side of a mountain range. You don't just end up 7 miles down the road.

Although I can get so much further distance-wise in the West (i.e., a better time-distance ratio), I can actually cover so much more territory on the East (in terms of borders). This paradox is due to the small size of Eastern states in relation to Western states. In Utah, driving for four hours will get me from northern Utah to central Utah. I can get halfway through one state. Out here, in four hours I can drive through six states (parts of six states). To further illustrate, the county I grew up in is almost half the size of the state of Delaware (in terms of land area). In fact, the county that borders the county I grew up in is almost three times bigger than the state of Delaware.

It definitely is an adjustment moving from the West to the East (or from the East to the West than to the East again, more appropriately). In the West, if you drive for 30 minutes you're going someplace 'special'. You're leaving your town. You're headed someplace else. Here, people commute 45 minutes just to get to their office.