hanging on

Wildflowers unfailingly shock me with their abundance, their fragility, their tenacity: the nodding heads of yellow glacier lilies above dried vegetation still matted by recently melted snow; a sloping meadow brilliant with paintbrush; corn lilies with lush, poisonous foliage; mountain heather clinging to the base of the most barren of scree slopes. This profligacy defies altitude and exposure, the winters that arrive early and linger late, the carelessness of hikers. My mind fumbles with the categorizations of habitat, range, color, shape, scientific and common names. Each recognition, whether haltingly retrieved from my guide book or identified by a companion more capable than I, brings a tiny thrill of belonging, the small sense that I am more of this place.

return

Upon beginning William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth, I sank into a tide of memory. It is no longer lonely homesickness that I feel, but rather a love for the place, for the colors visited upon the prairie in the fall, the late-afternoon sun on wheat fields laid bare by harvest, the sky, the wind.

give me a home

There are those times when I lunge wildly for the city, for something beyond the breadth of rural life. Having grown up in the sort of town that movie heroes leave behind, I wonder what it must be to gaze upon iconic places and buildings and to call that city home. Then too there is the cultural life, the galleries and concert spaces and bookstores, the creative and commercial energy welling up and making things happen.

But, inevitably, there rises a swell of longing for the silhouette of a Ponderosa pine limb against a cloudless sky; I am struck dumb by the sight of the Big Dipper suspended low over the distant mountains, transfixed by the greenish play of light through cedars and moss. Mountain heather catches my eye, and the silver arc of clouds backlit by the moon. I crave not always wilderness, exactly, but an abundance of natural life and the depth of experience conveyed by the natural world.

The trick of this duality has yet to be unraveled. I can only say that immersing myself in the details of nature feels something like love.

lou the blacksmith

As a kid, I rarely slept on the long car trips that ferried us between one set of grandparents and the other. Much of that time was spent either reading or staring out the window, daydreaming, but the rest was spent talking to my dad. As my mother and sister slept, I’d pester him with questions about why things were the way they were, about combines and cows and what exactly barley looked like. I especially loved it when he talked about his childhood and the friends, relatives, and ruffians who populated the small Nebraska town he grew up in.

The world of his childhood seemed to exist at a distant remove, even from the small Kansas town in which I was growing up. In that world, people used things like cream separators, and they did things like make bridles and trade horses. His own grandfather, my father often pointed out, was a veteran horse trader who frequently used Sunday’s reprieve from labor to lay the groundwork for a trade, but who was loath to close an actual deal on the day of rest.

One of my favorite stories involved an encounter between the Lakota chief Sitting Bull and the proud father of the first white child born at Fort Randall, South Dakota. A local blacksmith, already in his eighties at the time my father first heard the story, recalled his own father having boasted of showing him around as a newborn baby to everyone at the fort. Sitting Bull was being held prisoner there, and at the sight of the baby in his happy father’s arms, the story goes, the famous warrior reached through the prison bars and chucked the infant under the chin. As for the veracity of the blacksmith’s story, my dad only shrugs and notes that it’s chronologically plausible, given the ages of those involved.

With the most recent telling, my dad digressed into a technical explanation of forges, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wagon trains. The pace of generational change is dizzying: Sitting Bull, the leader of a nomadic people faced with devastating social change; Lou, among the last blacksmiths to ply the trade that made westward expansion possible; and my own father, a civil engineer charged with building and maintaining the modern highways that have facilitated mobility. There are various ways to make this story coherent, I suppose, and each has appealed to me at different points in my life. As a child, I thrilled to the spark of adventure, the history-comes-to-life nature of it all. At other times, the story has seemed a cautionary one about the restless tide of technological and cultural change, each generation outpacing the last. This time, though, what resonated most with me was the gracious tenor of memory: the sweetness of hearing a favorite childhood tale retold, my father’s own gentle longing for a time and a place before him, and the lives that emerge through shared stories.

where the wild things are

The water pools at my ankles, icy cold and glacier fed. It’s still early in the day, but the summer sun is high, the view expansive: Mt. Baker is just visible beyond the ridge we’re scaling, the boulder field below gives way to forest at the tree line. My husband stands with one of the dogs, waiting on the opposite bank. I take another step deeper into the current, and my sandal slips against the wet rock. Panic washes over me, radiating out from the pit of my stomach and tingling down my arms and legs. I freeze, unable to move forward or to turn back.

On the surface, the nature of my fear is easy to understand: the rushing water, the jutting rocks, a single misstep, and incapacitation could easily ensue. Not solely a fear of physical danger, my streamside anxiety has more to do with faulty interpretation. Habitat shapes human society, but culture just as surely creates nature and the systems for relating to one’s environment. I am no less a weakling in Kansas, no more capable of coping physically with a sudden blizzard or hailstorm, but I have absorbed the life experiences and social interactions that render the plains comprehensible. In this mountain stream, by way of contrast, I am patently out of my element.

Kansas, like the Great Plains in general, is best known as a place of transit, typified by generic remarks about “fly-over country.” Much of the area is too arid for traditional agriculture, and the indigenous inhabitants lived off the region’s iconic herds of bison. As European settlement advanced westward, the plains saw traffic along the California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, and new travelers seeking fortune beyond the western mountains; only later did people come to try their hand at agriculture. The plains, however, are not a place given to permanence. Tornadoes, prairie fires, hailstorms, swarms of locusts, and the incessant wind impressed upon these settlers that their existence was fleeting, their material presence upon the plains transitory. Today, many a former homestead site is marked only by a lonely stand of trees, a vain attempt at endurance, that remains long after the house has fallen to ruin.

If physical structures on the plains are fleeting, social ones are enduring, developed over generations as a buffer against the real dangers and the sense of isolation induced by the vast expanse of treeless prairie. There are stories of solitary homesteaders going mad listening to the wind in their dugouts, and of wayward children becoming lost in blizzards and freezing to death just outside the door. Inhabitants of the Great Plains tend toward the taciturn and the practical, and they gather to themselves the folds of family and community that make life there possible.

These regional differences strike me as I reflect upon that moment of panic, stranded midway across a mountain stream. Nurtured in a social environment composed of people who made a living off an arid, often inhospitable land, I grew up believing in the American myth that nature can be conquered. In Kansas, this conviction takes shape not so much as reliance upon technology but upon collective faith: in fences, in neighbors, in the future, in belief itself. Tractors and irrigation equipment domesticate the landscape and render it usable, but it is shared customs that provide solace against a bitter winter or a drought-stricken summer. Stripped of my frame of reference for comprehending nature, wilderness seems that much wilder, Washington that much riskier.

In the end, however, I made it across the stream, aided by two kindly fellow hikers who rigged a rope line to help me cross. Neither Midwesterners not Westerners, they were from New Jersey.