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Go East Young Man

It's 10 a.m. Davis, Calif., time and Brit Mclin, a cowboy for the modern era, is trying to explain why he's moving to Colorado. He's talking about how the "new frontier" is actually a combination of the mythical and the modern, about East meeting West, and about something called the Turnerian thesis. Halfway through the thesis, which is vaguely about Manifest Destiny, and about two points converging on a center, Mclin senses that he's losing his audience.

He settles into his easy chair and sticks his feet beneath the well-fed belly of his ancient labrador, Lucky, who belches in appreciation. He runs his huge hands through hair that looks prairie-windswept, yet never moves an inch out of place. Then he clasps both hands over a big brass belt buckle and fixes his listeners with a stare.

"It's like this," Mclin says. "California is like a big bowl of granola. Nothing but a hell of a lot of nuts and flakes."

After two decades of living on 20 acres of what many people consider to be the best farm land in the country, Mclin has decided to reclaim the soil by pulling up stakes and moving to Colorado.

To hear him tell it, the best way to get back to the true West is to move east.

If the East is urban slickness, and the West is rugged individualism, then Mclin is an amalgamation of the two.

In the den of his ranch house are books with titles like "Practical Blacksmithing," "Raising Sheep the Modern Way," and "Guerrilla Marketing Weapons." He's equally at home navigating a skittish colt as he is navigating the internet.

And then there's the jargon. One minute, Mclin's talking in the abstract language of a biochemist, and the next minute he's jawing in the down-home slang of a cattle herder.

So when he starts going off about the endless amount of "detritus," that will have to be moved, he pauses and then translates.

"You know what I'm talking about. Goop. Shit. Stuff like that."

The rains have left most of Mclin's land mired in mud. Puddles that look like small lakes reflect bits and pieces of the terrain: endless wooden fences, rusty plows and Ford trucks with personalized license plates.

"If you don't want to walk ankle-deep in sludge, keep along the tire tracks." Mclin doesn't have to worry about being ankle-dirt in anything; he's wearing thick rubber boots that would do a fly fisherman proud.

"See over there?" Mclin points to a barn barely visible beyond huge oat fields. "And right there?" More oat fields. Tractors. Stables and corrals in the distance. "This area covers 36 square miles. Not long ago, every one of the people that lived here volunteered for the Fire Department. The principle was that if you can't count on me to save your life, how can I count on you to save mine?"

Mclin stops and perches on a fence. "Now I'm the only one left. That should tell you something."

It's a constant theme with Mclin: the land, the laws, the town of Davis, the state of California. It's all changing. For the worse.

He ticks off a list of good things come and gone: knowing the neighbors, respect for property, great hunting grounds ("they've all been replaced by Lucky supermarkets"), and something called the Clamor Club ("Every Tuesday the locals gathered at the bar and bitched about politics.").

Mclin has one more point to hammer home before checking in on the blacksmith who's shoeing his horses. "Every state in the West wants to avoid being Californicated. Do you know what that means?

"Let me put it this way. A little while ago, I was harnessing my horses, and a couple of bicyclists rode by me and started hooting and hollering and shouting obscenities. Two hours later, the Humane Society shows up and wants to investigate. Turns out that they had complaints of horse bondage.

"That's California, in a nutshell."

The afternoon sun is providing little relief from the bitter wind that swirls around the inside of Mclin's barn. The air smells like a combination of manure, fresh hay, rotting wood and burnt horse hair.

Mclin and three other people are watching a man named Stan Huggins shoe a jumpy mare. Nobody says a word, partially in deference to Huggins' skill as a craftsman of a lost art, and partially because any sudden outburst could send half a ton of jittery horse flesh into Huggins' ribs.

After using hand-crafted razors to scrape away shards of white, spongy stuff called "frog," Huggins takes a pair of thick iron tongs and presses the red-hot shoe against the horse's hoof.

The horse gives a start as wisps of foul-smelling smoke dart out. Huggins strokes the horse's mane and whispers in its ears. The horseshoe is stuck into a furnace, where Huggins pokes, prods, and flips it over from side to side until it has the desired shape and consistency.

He then takes a large hammer from a rack and forges the metal over an anvil. The sound of steel striking against steel fills the barn and sparks shoot out everywhere.

"Those sparks are indiscriminate about their trajectory," Mclin says matter-of-factly. Loosely translated, it's a warning to get the hell out of the way.

Watching the rhythmic motions of Huggins' pounding, Mclin launches into the biochemistry speak again. He says something about the centrifugal acceleration of the hammer and how it alleviates pressure on the muscles.

But muscles aren't in short supply for the blacksmith, whose shirt sleeves seem to be losing the battle to contain his bulging biceps. In fact, everything about Huggins seems to have been culled from the pages of the Old West, from his droopy mustache down to his leather chaps and vintage Tom Petty background music.

Mclin cracks a joke that only blacksmiths could understand, grabs a wheelbarrow and leaves the barn to the strains of Tom Petty's "The Great Wide Open."

Mclin's map says the sagebrush sea between the Rockies and the Sierras is the best chunk of land in America. And Silt, Colo., population 800 something, and Mclin's soon-to-be hometown, is nestled right in there.

But even Silt seems to have its problems.

"Because the town is so small," Mclin says, as he picks up rotted hay and loads it onto a compost pile, "the family trees don't branch out real heavy."

"But on the other hand, there's a dance hall, a bar and a grammar school nearby, so what else do you need?"

Mclin stops to give directions to a young college student who does part-time work on the farm. The kid looks like he escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with fuzzy blond hair, freckles, and ruby cheeks that few grandmothers could resist.

The kid grabs a pitchfork, and they head over to the barn where Mclin keeps his stable of draft horses. "You like music?"

Mclin uses a huge rake to brush the mud out of a horse's mane. "This horse used to belong to Ted Nugent."

It turns out the rock star who Mclin calls the "Nuge," known mostly for his leopard-skin lycra tights and for sensitive ballads like "Wang Dang Sweet Puntang," is a big fan of the horses that have epitomized English civility for centuries.

The horses, which are similar to the Clydesdales often seen in Budweiser commercials, are bred and sold by Mclin for as much as $15,000.

Taking a hose to rinse the congealed sweat from the horse's back, Mclin ruminates over a Native American concept he calls "the collective conscious," and its importance to the West.

"It's something you feel in your bones. It's nothing you can explain. It just feels right. It's why some people tend bar and other people herd cattle."

Mclin hitches up his jeans and scrapes the caked mud off his boots. "The Old West will really never disappear. It's a way of life that's too important to people."

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