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.
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."
I think this is true of anyone who frequently moves through the land, you begin to do the same thing that Lopez identifies in Arctic natives, searching out our own sense of scale and history in the land around us.
I've noticed myself doing this more. 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 most of us don't need.
But 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. Land shapes 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.
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.
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.
Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, the middle of Kansas and down from Wichita City Texas to Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West.
There's no real consensus on this line. You'll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops.
Trinidad Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we'd spent any amount of time around trees.
I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests, I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don't know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people in the primeval Beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient Hemlock and White Pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming.
I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension.
Maybe it's the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I'm not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline and other places without trees, so maybe it's not that at all.
Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted.
We often talk about these parts of the world as though they were some separate thing. We say "ecosystem," or more often "nature," as if this were something other than the world we live in.
It's not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to "get out in nature" as opposed to where they live.
I think what we seek when we seek "nature" is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept.
We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this.
We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. Nor more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves.
On the other hand I think it's just as naive to think the world, "nature," needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it's "useful" to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family.
Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we're aware of in the past. This has opened a thousand doorways and done some much good it's difficult to capture in words, certainly not in a few paragraphs. But it's always left us very cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we're aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little.
It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverge from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat.
I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be.
I don't have a solution. Sorry. I don't even think this is a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them.
But this is a problem of grand historical proportions. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come.
Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them.
For us, lately, it's been in them.
From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not virgin, always Europeans with their virgins, but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in.
The heat has not yet broken. The afternoons swelter. The river with its slick, algae covered rock slides is a cool and welcome escape.
The heat isn't gone yet, but you can feel Autumn at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets.
It's coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it's coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South.