Dear Reader,
I am writing from the small town where my dad grew up. We buried my aunt in the cemetery where she joins her siblings, parents and grandparents. The place names all tell of the past. How things were and no longer are. Cedar Swamp Road. Horse Hollow Road. Ryefield Lane. Beaver Dam.
The road trip to get here is not the sort that inspires. We really needed one of those cars from the Jetsons to levitate over the not-remotely-expressway. But we gathered as a family to celebrate a great life, and that’s all that matters.
Also, behold! Your 100% natural, subscriber-sourced, GenX-inflected Frugal Chariot Road Trip Summer ‘21 Playlist. Sing along in good health, and don’t forget to procure ice cream bars when you stop for gas. That’s how we roll.
And here’s a book made for this peripatetic time of year . . .
Review
Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape
Barry Lopez & Debra Gwartney, eds.
Trinity University Press, 2006
578 pages
$18.95
If ships have libraries, why don’t cars? My station wagon has a bird guide and a wildflower guide stashed in a door pocket, but it would be great to have something a little more capacious, neat, and protective. I googled “bookshelves in cars” with extremely disappointing results. Isn’t this what Late Capitalism should be good for? I bring this up, because you really shouldn’t take a serious road trip without Home Ground, which is probably just a bit too thick to fit in the glove compartment.
In his introduction (which alone is worth the price) to this dictionary for the American landscape, the late Barry Lopez explains that
a community of writers has set down definitions for landscape terms and terms for the forms water takes, each according to his or her own sense of what’s right, what’s important to know. . . . In concert with each other, they wanted to suggest the breadth and depth of a language many of us still seek to use purposefully every day.
Lopez with his co-editor (and wife) Debra Gwartney convened forty-five eminent poets and writers known for their commitments to writing about landscape. They asked contributors to define geographical features based on their regional expertise and other interests. It’s fun to look up terms you know to see what a great writer does with them. One favorite of mine is Gunkhole, which is captured to perfection by Franklin Burroughs, who has contributed some doozies (see also, Guzzle).
In coastal New England, a gunkhole is a small, out-of-the-way harbor or a nearly unnavigable shallow cove or channel. . . . the word connotes greasy, gooey, yucky mucky stuff, whether found in a tidal marsh or in the sump of an engine. Gunk hole seems uncomplimentary, as though implying the deepwater sailor’s disdain for the shallows. But in fact the term is generally used affectionately, and gunkholers constitute a secret fraternity of navigators who happily abjure marinas, mooring fees, and the beaten track.
Unless you majored in geography in college, however, most of these terms will be new or newly illuminated. Ever heard of an Armored Mud Ball? It’s “the compact lithic record of an ephemeral journey, whereby a mud glob gathers a crust of stones that together metamorphose into rock.” (Kim Stafford)
Some of the terms present etymological puzzles. Is the word Shinnery (Barry Lopez), “a low brush thicket” common in New Mexico and Texas derived from the common shin oak whose low branches are hazardous to the lower legs of those who try to traverse them? Or does it come from “chênière, Cajun French for a hummock in a swamp with a dense growth of . . . oak (chêne in French)”? Choose your fighter.
Mythic, historical, and literary references abound. Did you know a Witness Tree is a large tree that is used as a reference point in surveying? Some giant trees only survive because they were used to mark lot lines. Robert Michael Pyle cites Robert Frost, who writes that these trees allow truth to be
established and borne out,
though circumstanced with dark and doubt.
Pamela Frierson quotes poet Galway Kinnell’s lines on lava. Bill McKibben reminds us that Moby Dick’s blowhole created “smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled around his great Monadnock hump.” Arthur Sze quotes Navajo legend and Willa Cather on Ship Rock. Robert Hass’ entry for Cranny distills English poetic tradition from Arthur Golding through Byron and Tennyson to the iris (“The Flag in the Bog”) of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Holds Heaven not some cranny, Lord
For a flower so tall and blue?
While the entries in Home Ground were reviewed for accuracy by a team of scientists, they serve as meditations, evocations, celebrations, laments and sometimes warnings. With every indigenous place name cited, you can’t help but grieve the harms done to native languages and their speakers. And consider Barbara Kingsolver’s entry for Derelict Land, which calls us out for our self-exonerating self-deception in relation to environmental harms.
Land that has been used, ruined, and consequently abandoned by humans is peculiarly described as derelict—as if the land itself had become careless of its duties.
The joy, and sometimes sorrow, of Home Ground is in the constant movement of place words between meanings and across time. It’s as if the words themselves are on a road trip through the Anthropocene. Barry Lopez puts it like this:
To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features—the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach against a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain. One must wait for the moment when the thing —the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada—ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.
Maybe this is what we’re really looking for when we go exploring: some new flare or beam of recognition, some new way of saying with surety that we belong to the earth, not it to us.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Reading Home Ground made me think about the Land Art movement, whose diverse members have given us chances to think about art not in relation to landscape but as landscape, to rethink perception, and to move us toward deep time. Phaidon have several great volumes on site-specific art if you want to learn more, or plan a Land Art road trip.
As I move through the utterly changed world of my father’s childhood on a farm on Long Island, I think of an artist like Agnes Denes, who bravely planted a two acre wheat field in New York City back in 1982 as the Reagan Era kicked off decades of unceasing development in the Tri-State Area. The team at The Shed created a fascinating look back at that project.
Poem of the Week
Here’s a poem called “Road Trip” by Kurt Brown, who like my dad and his siblings, grew up on Long Island.
For Your Reading Radar
Some Land Art is designed to disintegrate or disappear. Lots of other places are going to disappear because humans have designed an economy that runs on C02 emissions. Christina Conklin and Jeremy Lent have created a new book called The Atlas of Disappearing Places. According to the publisher, “[t]hrough a rich combination of place-based storytelling, clear explanations of climate science and policy, and beautifully rendered maps that use a unique ink-on-dried-seaweed technique, The Atlas of Disappearing Places depicts twenty locations across the globe, from Shanghai and Antarctica to Houston and the Cook Islands. . . .Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now.”
For Your Calendar
Point Reyes Books is hosting Conklin & Lent on Friday, July 23rd at 12:00 PM Pacific.
Bookstore of the Week
Staying on Long Island . . . just across from the train station, and nestled next to an excellent coffee spot called The Karmic Grind in Locust Valley, NY is Locust Valley Bookstore. Their instagram feed has a fun, perhaps Covid-inspired, feature called Books on the Bench, showing off customers with their purchases just outside the shop.
See you next week for a big, beautiful book of poems. xo Nicie
Hi Nicie! Nice post. My car bookshelf is an old milk crate or a large canvas bag with the books lined up neatly in side so I can see them all. Thank for the playlist. I am headed to Colorado at the end of the month and need musical (and audiobook) suggestions. I already have a copy of home ground.