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+In my usual manner of reading things that have no bearing on where I actually am, I've been sitting in the linger summer heat of Georgia reading Barry Lopez's *Arctic Dreams*. It's one of the finest books of natural history I've ever read and many things have jumped out at me, but one in particular has stuck with me for a while now.
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+I have a tendency to always be defending the way we live. This is the last artifact of a long process of shedding certain cultural conditioning. It's a terrible habit in other words, but one I have yet to break. After all, even I can admit that we are a bit eccentric, those of us who make our homes in small spaces we share with engines.
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+Why do it? What do we get out of it? 
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+Lopez comes to believe that for the native peoples of the Arctic "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." 
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+This struck me because whenever we are around non-travelers I notice how much I talk not just of what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a largely unconscious need to locate my past in both time and space. I have to watch out for this because it is annoying to non-travelers. Space, the land around the event, is information they don't want.
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+But those of us who insist on moving through the land are doing the same thing that Lopez identifies in the Arctic natives, searching out our own sense of scale and history in the land around us.
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+Land becomes paramount to life when you live this way. Where you are is as meaningful as who. Where defines who. Landscapes rise up become more than backdrops against which we live. They are the mysterious aggregations that shape our lives, all our lives, all the time, but out here it becomes so plain, you feel it deep within. It's not something you seek out. It is something that arrives. Slowly, almost unnoticed. Until one day you realize you're not talking to the trees, you're answering them. 
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+You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of  the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone and novelty becomes the grindstone that sharpens the experience of place until it comes to the foreground for our lives. 
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+Out here you mark time by space. The land is always present in you. The smell of wet leaves after a rain. The grit of fresh soil under your nails. The silence of snow. The glitter of water in noonday sun. The small patch of gravel where you first noticed your broken axle. More than the words that describe them, places become real things in which we exist and locate ourselves, our past, our present, and how we measure the scale of ourselves. We speak not of things that happened, but of things that happened and where they happened. Experience gains extra dimensions. Places become a way of locating the self within the world that is either not necessary or not possible when the places in which you exist rarely change.