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EXCERPT KEY
RELIGIORaised up in a rural and conservative part of Pennsylvania, I could not say for certain that my mother was a Christian. I knew that she would read for an hour or more each night before drifting to sleep, and that one of the books on her nightstand was a Bible. I knew that she felt the need for all of us to attend church from time to time. My memories of those Sundays arise less from sermons or sonorous voices in the choir, than of afterwards heading across the road to the country store for cinnamon rolls and comic books. Back home, I’d pick raisons out of the goopy confections and pore over my new Tarzan, Turok (a Paleolithic eco-avenger protecting his people), or Tomahawk (leader of a Revolutionary war ensemble of courageous patriot misfits). If I thought of Jesus at all, it was in terms of a comic book superhero. I imagined a long-haired, rippling-muscled giant, smiting the heathens or throwing the moneychangers out of the market.
What little I learned about Jesus came from the Bible study sessions that were all but forced upon us at the Laurel Lake Elementary School one Friday each month. Though these were not technically compulsory, those who did not attend one of the denominational sessions had to sit in the principal’s office and do homework; not much of a choice. I gravitated then to the Methodist corner, where the religious fervor seemed somewhat more subdued.
We were required to memorize Bible verses to receive stars which could be turned in for illustrated comics depicting various Biblical stories (so much more befuddling than my usual fare). Not only did we have to recite our verses to perfection, we also were forced to discuss these cryptic passages ad nauseum. Growing up, not an only child but a lonesome one, roaming the wild woods by myself with my imagination for company, Tarzan and Turok made a great deal more sense to me than Jesus.
I recall being especially confused about the concept of a ‘Second Coming.’ I’d gathered that Christ had been put to death for some reason, and that he had somehow overcome this to be up in heaven looking at everything we did. I knew that crows always scrutinized me on my Snake Creek rambles, and that red-tail hawks often circled me with seemingly riveted attention. I speculated that Jesus must possess wings and eyes like that, scattered among all the beasts of all the valleys like mine, in order to take it all in. But if Jesus was already present in the white-tail deer, porcupines and chickadees, then what was this Second Coming all about?
During those Friday church indoctrinations, our leader told me that God was in each of us. I naturally extended this existence to the plants and animals I’d encountered on my rambles through my hills, woods and fields. Lingering on a favorite large sedimentary outcrop behind our house, it was not a stretch for me to imagine that God was even in the rocks and that land and I were inseparable.
As ecological consciousness began to take root, TV news of toxic rivers and skies, and reports on rare and disappearing species from shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on NBC and PBS’s Nature taught me that humans yielded a largely negative influence on the planet. My mother tuned us into other shows that described the horror of the Vietnam War, the burden of overpopulation, and the massive resource imbalance between our country and others.
These were not easy thoughts for a child to wrap his mind around: war, famine, desolation of cultures, despoiling of environments. I climbed my favorite trees. I sat on the flagstone outcrop. I tried to figure all this stuff out. My notions of God being part of everything still made sense. Every walk I took outside seemed to glow with a vital luminosity. But I struggled to meld this model of experience with the world shown on TV. Maybe, I wondered, Jesus had left the world in disgust because we’d turned our back on the little pieces of God in each other. Maybe, I postulated, he’ll only arrive in the triumphant return of the Second Coming when all the little pieces learned to come together again.
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"You got to beat the devil out of you! You got to beat that devil down!" 5:30 am. Startled from sleep by the booming voice of next door’s evangelical preacher through the plaster walls of my Ohio motel room, I flashed to another rude religious awakening from a lifetime ago it seems, a memory burned into skin and psyche. In the King James Bible, book of Matthew, I recall the phrase “seek, and ye shall find.” I’d been on a quest for personal restoration, but it had not appeared in a guise I recognized. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” says a preceding passage in Matthew, though remembering the time the devil was cast out of me, it is difficult for me to reserve judgment.
Graveyard shift, IBM, Endwell NY; on a stultifying summer job held while studying undergrad math, I was longing for redemptive connection in the land of machines. Then I met Dwight, another loner at the lunchroom. In a room of pasty white men garbed in geek casual he stood out, a young black man in a crisply pressed white shirt, red-striped tie and a conservative blue blazer. Over the next weeks Dwight and I progressed from wary nods in the hallways, to brief chats by the copier, to spirited conversations with each other across the lunch room table. Talk turned to spirituality. One day I told him I was looking for a church where I could feel connected. Dwight invited me to join him that next evening before our work shift started for a special guest presentation at his Pentecostal Church.
Reverend Stoner, a visiting pastor from southern Ohio, possessed a commanding presence. His voice boomed the wonders of coming into Christ, of the miracles that would course through our saved souls. Stoner worked the pulpit like a man aflame. At the end of his sermon the reverend made an altar call, asking if anyone was in need of the special touch of Jesus. When no one else volunteered he turned his gaze towards me. “Young man, you look like you’re searching for something. Won’t you come on up here?” I shivered, hesitated, frozen to my pew. Dwight gestured a thumbs-up, smiled, and tilted his head toward Stoner.
Hesitantly, I approached the rock-solid preacher. Resting two surprisingly cool palms on either side of my face, he looked at me me intently. “I want you to speak in tongues,” he commanded. “I don’t know how,” I whispered. “Let the spirit take you, let it move through your tongue.” “It doesn’t make sense,” I stuttered. “The ways of the Holy Spirit aren’t supposed to make sense,” he replied. Under his urgent tutelage, I began to babble, “La la la la, blal lal lah.” To me it sounded like a baby’s meaningless prattling. To Reverend Stoner and the rest of the congregation it was the sound of salvation. Beaming strangers pumped my hand and praised me. I stood in a daze and tried to count my blessings.
That next day, Dwight glowed. “I’m so glad for you! You’ll have to come back to church tonight for part two of Reverend Stoner’s talk.” Overwhelmed, I nodded, busied myself with my food. “I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind but now I see.” Lyrics from Amazing Grace came to me as I reflected on my recent spiritual and emotional whirlwind. “What have I found,” I wondered to myself, “what do I see now that I’m saved?”
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That evening, I felt unaccountably vulnerable. Reverend Stoner strode purposefully to the pulpit and launched into a fire and brimstone evocation of the dangers of Satan. “There’s evil spirits fighting for your souls,” he boomed, “right here in this church! I see them up there in the rafters, stalking you right now!” I shivered and slumped lower in my pew. The mood was dark and foreboding. This wasn’t the ecstatic inspiration of the previous evening. This did not feel like my spiritual home.
After the end of Stoner’s ravings, I noticed the regular pastor slip into his chambers. Ever polite, I wanted to thank him for his hospitality. I skirted the milling crowd to his door. “How can I help you?” he asked warmly. “I’m very grateful for all you’ve given,” I said, “but I think I need to check out some other churches before I decide which is right for me.” Kindly eyes grew frantic. The old preacher looped around me and swiftly closed the door. “Young man, I think an evil spirit has possessed you and is lying to you about us,” he roared, “If you walk out now then you’ve lost Jesus, and salvation!” Taken aback, I turned, opened the door, and abruptly exited. The frantic minister burst out of the office behind me. “Reverend Stoner! Come quick!” he bellowed. “This young man is possessed by Satan! We can’t let him leave!”
The flock clustered around Stoner moved swiftly into action. Like a rabble of amphetamine-pumped linebackers corralling an errant runner, they leaped pews and converged on me as I made my way down the right aisle. As Reverend Stoner puffed up, his beet-red face came close to mine “I rebuke thee Satan! Get thee away from this boy! He’s ours and you can’t have him!” In a panic, I turned to look for another exit. My way was blocked by righteously determined parishioners. I spun back into Stoner, who grabbed me by the shoulders, moved his hands up to the sides of my face and continued his diatribe against Satan. My mind reeled.
Suddenly, some tumbler clicked in place in my whirring brain. “La la la la, blal lal lah…” I babbled ecstatically. “Bibly lah blo lah!” I concluded with a flourish. “Hallelujah! – Praise Jesus! – You’ve saved him!” Hands reached in to touch me, to claim a bit of the miracle they’d just witnessed. Beatifically, I beamed back, calculating how long I would need to accept their congratulations before I’d be able to make my break. “Reverend Stoner?” a meek voice broke in, tugging at the sweating preacher’s sleeve. “Could you help me?” As he turned to take the woman’s face into his healing hands and the rest eagerly gathered around for the next miracle, I made my way unnoticed towards the front door.
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Seeking connection, I’d found division. What I thought I desired was to be at one with God. Could this spiritual community that sought to divide true believers in Christ from Satanic non-believers be truly redemptive? To belong there, I would have had to cut off parts of myself that did not fit their picture of religious conviction. It was not till I found environmental literature that I found language and imagery to comprehend that time in my life. John Muir once said “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That sense of pervasive ecological connection, hearkening back to my childhood beliefs about the pieces of God in all matter spoke deeply to me, and more sensibly than the rhetoric of sin and salvation.
But still I yearned for a kind of union that I could not find in my Peterson guides and wilderness trail books. I’d glimpsed it in backcountry cathedrals and mountain sanctuaries. But most of these sacred times I’d experienced in solitude. For all the blessings encountered in the non-human realm, I hungered for a sense of connection with other people. I still craved a spiritual community. Even after my exorcism, I sought religion, but had no idea what it looked like.
My etymological dictionary notes, perhaps fittingly, that the Latin root of the word religion – religio – is of uncertain origin. However, I detect an intriguing relation with religare – rooted beneath the word ‘ligament’, meaning to bind or connect. Religion reflected as a re-ligamenting force thus has a dual, subtly contradictory meaning. My experience in the Pentecostal Church with Reverend Stoner was one of being bound and tied to the church; God’s will a substitute for my own. However, when I reflect on the work of the ligaments in my body, I find a compelling metaphor of functionality that’s at once connective and flexible. Without the ligaments in my ankles, knees, hips, I could not walk, jump, or even rise from this chair. The tendons in my hand provide the means to type these words.
Having experienced my share of disturbing religious encounters with those who would bind me to their faith, I find intimations of religion as a connecting thread running deeply through us, between us, linking us with every other organism on the planet. Perhaps my lifelong search for that close tie permits me flexibility that has often compelled me to seek the presence of religio beyond the narrow confines of religion.
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TIME-TRANSINGShape-shifters in Shamanic traditions morph from one physical form to another. Think of a totem pole. Human rises through raven. Raven dives into orca. Orca swims into the air again as human. What I call ‘time transing’ is the temporal equivalent of shape-shifting. I’m cast adrift in a time trance since arriving in the Pacific Northwest to explore the paradox of restoring wild habitat in a heavily urban locale. Driving from the airport to my hotel earlier in the week, it felt like I’d never left Washington, as if New Hampshire and all my years of living there had somehow been erased. Temperature was in the 50’s. A misty rain obscured perspective. Spectral lights on far hillsides dimmed in and out of view. Moment by moment portals seem to open through time; where sensory memory allows us to step outside the past-present-future continuum; where the distinctions between the three become vague. I am thinking about temporal ecology; wondering if perhaps the healing of place might somehow require a restoration of time.
There’s a little French bakery at Seattle’s Pike Place Market that I frequent when I’m in town. Pike Place, full of Northwest-oriented crafts stalls, local fresh farm produce, raucous fish sellers and simmering ethnic restaurants, represents some of the best that a modern city offers, both aesthetically and culturally. I relish early mornings there, before legions of tourists arrive, while market locals unload their trucks and banter over coffee. At the north end of the Market at 7am yesterday as morning sun broke through tattered mist, I passed a group of Native American men on the sidewalk near Victor Steinbrueck Park. No words passed between us, just simple nods. Then one of them looked at me more intently, in silence his eyes met mine and my entire perception suddenly shifted.
It was 1985. New to the city, I was walking downtown Seattle in the earliest hours of morning. The flow of air on skin, of scents curling around corners, of vistas of water glimpsed through avenues of buildings; all felt fresh and vivid but underneath sensation coursed intimations both ancient and achingly familiar. I became keenly aware that countless peoples had wandered these same hills by the sea for thousands of years. Their footsteps and mine reverberated through the shadowy alleyways. Fog shrouded the upper reaches of the skyscrapers. Anything could have been in that air, soaring through that white shroud. No engine sound split the quiet. Gulls keened – a sound of longing and questioning.
I could not know at that moment that the Pacific Northwest would become my home for a dozen years, only that something far older than the macadam and concrete had made this feel like the only residence I’d ever known. Nor did I know that for all the times I would return after I’d moved, it would seem as if I had never left. It was like that again yesterday as I got lost in the eyes of the man at Steinbrueck Park. Everything became raw, feral, new – yet ancient beyond telling. I walked among the Kwakiutl and Tlinglet, waited for deer at the street corners, watched for bear behind the dumpsters, stumbled over a middens heap of spear points and broken clamshells at the corner of 2nd and Bell.
It was one of those passages when the membrane between past, present and future become thin. At such moments, all that has passed on a land, all that still remains, and all that yet will be are comingled. No one time is any more relevant than another. How could one choose? In the morning mist, Seattle’s present-day sidewalks lay like a thin skin over times beyond my own.
It is good, I believe, to stroll across a place slowly at times, leaving aside vigorous aerobic workouts for other walks, other days. It is good as well to sit at rest sometimes and wait there till boredom disappears. Only then, perhaps, can we suspend our normal framework of present-day tasks, hurries and worries to learn what the land remembers, to hear what it anticipates. When we begin to see life and time from land’s point of view, it inevitably transforms the way we see our own place in time as well. And as we gain more sophisticated eyes in seeing through the veils of time, we might be better able to glimpse the flowing ecological processes that integrate and transform a place over time.
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A trench-coated figure perches on a gold statue overlooking the hazy Berlin skyline, ruminating on sights and insights from his day. Suddenly, he dives towards oblivion, a kaleidoscope of images running through his consciousness as if his life were passing before him. As if, because Cassiel and several other characters in Wim Wenders’ 1987 movie ‘Wings of Desire’ are angels. From the beginning of time, they have been observing, listening, and recording the passing of eternity. “Before humans, we didn’t know laughter” observes Damiel, Cassiel’s best friend and the movie’s protagonist. His yearning to taste the human realm he’s observed for millennia feeds Damiel’s existential angst. One day Damiel sees a trapeze artist in rehearsal, follows Marion into her dressing room, and witnesses her private sorrow. Touched by the grace of the moment, Damiel’s desire crystallizes into a decision to give up his immortal status for human mortality.
We hunger for full, long lives; who of us would give up eternity? But the look of bliss blossoming on Damiel’s face as he sips his first cup of coffee after passing the chasm between angel and human, cradling the paper cup in his hand like a sacrament, suggests that time alone does not richness make. Being sensorially present, alive in each new moment, creates its own kind of eternity. Angels may watch the world forever, but they can never touch it. What is time without relationship? Which would you choose, Wenders asks us?
Afterwards, I emerged from the theatre into an otherworldly urban nightscape. The streetlights pulsed with a hidden light, further concealing the rooftops in reinforced darkness. I imagined angels there musing over my own existential dilemmas. It is not merely the themes of this film alone that inform my thinking about temporal ecology, but reflections from movies in general. Long denied the chance to see a film in a theatre (we did not own a car as I was growing up) cinema for me became suffused with a kind of longing. I’d scan the local TV channels late at night, ostensibly seeking old movies but really searching for a window outside of my own limited time and place. For the duration of a film, I could transport myself to distant landscapes and imagine myself into the past or future. Cinema my have been my original experience of time-transing.
Restoration ecology can be defined as the re-establishment of a set of native species to a particular place from a historical time. Slavish restoration to a previously extant image of an ecosystem is akin to processing a photograph. A fixed picture of ecological composition burns to the negative. We measure success by the accuracy with which the rendering occurs. Such practice assumes that the contextual background and practical foreground of the photo never changes, so that the original subjects will always be held static.
Biological succession and evolutionary process are more like moving pictures than fixed ones. Living processes are not static and inviolable; we measure ecological success as much in terms of flexible resilience as in species persistence. The notion that climatic, geologic, hydrologic and biologic conditions, let alone pertinent speciation, never change becomes especially ludicrous from an expanded lens of time. What does indigenous mean on time scales of 10,000 years or more? How long does an invasive need to be present before it’s seen as native? Move back in time long enough ago wouldn’t even salmon be an invasive? Complicating matters, many reference ecosystems have disappeared or been severely negatively impacted. In casting characters to fulfill complicated and ever-changing roles in urban habitat restoration, who is to say whose story of preferable?
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Some slopes in Washington’s Central Cascades resemble mange-ridden dogs more than picture-postcard mountainsides. Clear-cutting will do that to a place. It must be duly noted that Northwest lumber companies vigorously protest that they do not practice indiscriminate razing of entire tracts of woods; after all they leave buffer strips several trees thick along drainage areas. Perhaps the mangy dog metaphor should be changed to a classroom of teen boys with thin mo-hawk haircuts.
A friend and I walk trough a clear-cut, to immerse ourselves in that pained landscape and try to put a close-up ecological face on the rage and sorrow we feel when we see such places from a distance. I nearly cry when I see the twisted remains of a slash pile near where we parked the truck. I gaze up to a long thin line of trees angling up the hill, probably tracing the route of a feeder stream to the river we’d passed in the valley below on the way in. We skirt around the slash and walk up into the middle of the cut, parting there each to be alone with our thoughts. I find the remains of a Doug fir stump and sit down with my journal. A butterfly lifts over a nearby downed log and floats towards me. Small birds rustle in the berry bushes already sprung up in the space created by last year’s logging. A raven lazes overhead, gurgling its call.
I’m surprised to be feeling tranquil, not enraged. I try to summon my righteous wrath but am distracted by a columbine rising to the right of my stump. The homily “hate the sin, but love the sinner” came to mind. I can respect the hard work and obligations of area loggers, but can’t muster much affection for the CEOs of multi-national logging companies squeezing every board-foot they can out of these lands while just barely following the law. But what of the sin? This land seemed intent, if not on forgiveness, then on going about the business of patching over the wounds and getting on with the business of ecological vitality. The visit reminds me that even the most egregious human-caused disturbances can be ameliorated with time, sometimes less time than I would imagine necessary given the severity of the wounds.
But despite the short-term vitality of this clear cut and hopes for long-term resilience, it’s difficult to project a mid-term prognosis. Evenly placed evergreen seedlings throughout the clearing bear witness to the likelihood that this area is intended for future logging once these young firs reached adolescence (maturity would be deemed too costly to the lumber conglomerates). How much damage can a place undergo before it loses its ability to tell a coherent story? A forest is not just its trees, but the watershed that nurtures them. A river is not just the bed it runs in, but the land it travels through.
Along with humans and salmon, thick-trunked Douglas firs and western red cedars colonized the post-glacial Northwest. Shading the adult spawning and fry feeding grounds, these trees ameliorated the temperatures of shallow up-slope waters. Some like it hot, but not coho and Chinook. Without the protective cover of the tall trees, salmon may literally cook. And when salmon thirst for fresh-water habitat, they want it clear, and they want their gravel out in the open and easy to move. Silt from denuded forest slopes wreaks havoc on the salmon’s preferred setting. If Oncorhynchus could forgive, I’m not sure they’d offer it to logging operations. On the other hand, if butterflies could speak, they might sing hosannas to the chainsaw.
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There’s a stretch of old railroad tracks paralleling the Lake Washington ship canal from the University District, through Fremont, past the Ballard Locks, to Shilshole where it joins the mainline Amtrak commuter and industrial lines heading northward. Long-abandoned when I first discovered them, they became a place of respite for me from the wear of crowded urban existence. Others might consider these rails snaking through old warehouses and vacant lots an urban blight, but for me it was a kind of paradise. On any given walk, it was rare that I’d encounter another person. Non-human pursuits now replaced human commerce. Both sides of the tracks burst with wildflowers and berry bushes; some plants persistently pushed through the cinders and wrapped around the ties. Songbirds preened amid the tangle of shrubbery. Muddy footprints on the rails bespoke the passage of skunks, opossums and raccoons.
On any given stroll in the central Cascades, it’s not unusual to pass several dozen other hikers, even mid-week. We traverse carefully maintained trails past areas cordoned off for restoration work. There’s no denying the grandeur of older growth forests and mountain pass vistas, nor of the grittiness of an urban industrial railroad corridor. However, I wonder whether my abandoned rails weren’t less trammeled by human kind than the designated Cascades wilderness, with its un-manicured byway a place of primeval natural expression, a paragon of non-human influence.
When Thoreau wrote “in wildness is the preservation of the world” he was probably not imagining the gradual reclamation of railroad tracks by the likes of scotch broom, Himalayan blackberry, chicory and teasel as a means of natural preservation, but I find comfort in the wildness of these plants – introduced species all – of their unmanaged rejuvenation of this human-marred place. If an old-growth Sitka spruce falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If no one notices a forgotten landscape restoring itself in its own time to its own expression, does it not constitute a wilderness?
Walking has become both prayer and an effective practice of meditation. If our movements through place and time, both social and ecological, create a metaphysical fabric, then what do I weave as I walk? I imagine each step of mine as a sensate needle and thread. Just as sustained and careful attention to my natural surroundings as I walk my urban, rural and wilderness paths may weave a kind of thread of integrity through the fabric of the landscape, perhaps the greeting and avoidance of others I encounter on my daily rounds fixes or frays the fabric of human sociability. Might we also need to move like prayers of salutation through the worn cloth of our modern culture, as well as across the variegated fabric of soil, water and air; blood, fiber and bone?
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“She's going to die you know,” the hobo says matter-of-factly, motioning his cup towards the east, where she lives now. We hunker around a fire, jungled up in a rough clearing by the Burlington Northern main line. “That's the way it is!” he says for emphasis, steam from his coffee wrapping tendrils around rough beard and hard eyes. It’s a face I might have known from another more callously held life. The familiarity unsettles, and then awakens me.
The dream has stayed with me for days. The man at the fire somehow knew my sister Ginger struggled for life at the edges of death on the other side of my dreaming. “Got to go on living anyway,” he'd urged me, “Ain't nothing you can do to change matters.” Is the boundary really so thin between dream and waking? The span between what we normally consider disassociated grows infinitesimally small. I think about this intermingling of opposites, a boy who’d wandered thickly wooded Pennsylvania hill country now a man ranging this even Midwestern plain.
I'm poised at the edge of what used to be spacious grassland as if readying for a flight to freedom. Walt Whitman used grass as his metaphor for radical democracy. But Whitman had not traveled the Great Plains when he'd penned Leaves of Grass. Richard Manning points out that Whitman called for large scale forestry efforts to resolve “the tree problem” on the prairies he considered barren. But Manning contends that Whitman's earliest assertions remain closest to the truth. “I believe the grassland was where we destroyed democracy because of our inability to accept and understand freedom” he writes in Grasslands. My journey then conjures not just the pursuit of freedom but a stitching together of soil and soul with integrity.
Alchemists in the middle ages believed they could transform the primal substance of albumen into gold. By turning prairie soil into agricultural riches, one could argue that grasslands have fulfilled the alchemists dream. An alchemical fire ranges through every prairie stand, lent by the sun, rent by humankind in our attempt to borrow that fire as our own. To persist as a species in such places, we might need a reverse alchemical rendering, a co-mingling of soul with soil so that we inextricably belong to the prairie rather than only borrow against it. How do we begin to build more resilient bonds with a landscape we’ve so severely fragmented?
Somehow, my hobo dream, my sister's struggle through cancer, and my hopscotch journey through prairie remnants intertwine like some braided river sloping down to the Gulf. Indeed I must go on living, even if my sister fails to. What I discover from prairie paradox crisscrosses the borders between opposites, where death renews itself in life, solitude restores a sense of belonging, and my questions become perhaps their own answers.
Skin of soil – skin of soul. The industrial plow tore through the skin of these soils, but also shredded the soul of this place. Commodity replaced diversity as the underlying ethos. There were freedoms lost when the sea of grass was stilled and drained. Perhaps the clear-cutting and commoditization of prairie land has also clear-cut and sold out our ideology, religious tolerance, grass-roots politics, and economic sustainability. Perhaps in restoring our relationship to prairie places, we need a soil worthy of the soul we desire.
If landscape processes form a kind of ecological consciousness, then can a place that loses more than 99 percent of its original integrity still claim to possess a mind of its own? And if the soil fundament of this region has been irrevocably changed, have the souls of the people who draw sustenance from it been inexorably altered as well? Here in this bread-basket of the nation, any of us that eat from the Midwest’s provender are implicated.
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Blink and you might miss Oshkosh, Nebraska, population 986. In that blink, you and I both might overlook the casually marked turnoff heading north towards Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Some twenty miles on, a narrow gravel road yields to one lane blacktop (composed of mixed slurry of sand and tar). This is elemental spaciousness. These hills swallow me whole. Gently swelling curves enfold me like a body’s curves – hills like a languorous Sunday morning in bed with your lover. As my rental car glides from one Sandhills dune crest to another, I recall my childhood soaring with red-tail hawks. Driving that one lane macadam for the first time, creasing the luxurious slopes cascading into seeming infinity, I might never be closer to the sensation of a hawk in flight.
At 46,000 acres, Crescent Lake is the largest stretch of protected prairie landscape I’ve encountered thus far, that is if one considers hunting and fishing forms of environmental protection. One of the refuge’s lakes is open to fishing year round while others open only from November through mid-February. Grouse, pheasant, rabbit, deer and coyote may be hunted in appropriate seasons on all refuge lands from September through January. Ducks, geese and coot may be sought on portions of Crescent Lake. While such activities may seem contrary to the concept of a wildlife refuge, heavy regulation helps maintain native populations of both game and non-game species.
From the side of the road just shy of refuge headquarters at Gimlet Lake, I angle up on a trail that promises a hill top overlook. Trailside, spikes of yucca and bristles of cacti strike through scruffy thatches of dried grasses. Some animal has scooped out a burrow just off to the left. If I were an earth digger I might live here too. The sandy soil is easily displaced by earnest effort. Enduring winds from the west and south also make the soil vulnerable.
Near the crest of the hill I come upon my first blowout, hollowed out over time by the persistent wind, and home to blowout penstemon, the poster child of Sandhills paradox. From the perspective of many environmentalists and land use managers, the Nebraska Sandhills are an ecological success story. Increased environmental sensitivity, creative partnerships between economic and environmental interests, more careful grazing practices, as well as a relative exodus of human population, have stabilized the rolling dunes of the Sandhills and made them less subject to destructive erosion.
However, from the perspective of the blowout penstemon current conditions on the Sandhills loom as a potential disaster. A deeply rooted perennial herb with slender lavender flowers, Penstemon haydenii is a pioneering species, requiring the tabula rasa of a freshly disturbed environment. Besides those few places scattered throughout the Sandhills where naturally erosive forces still carve out a niche for the plant, it may also occasionally favor sites of human caused disturbance created by overzealous snow plowing, routine highway maintenance or back-country construction. This begs the question: if Penstemon haydenii is to survive and thrive in a naturally rejuvenating place and in a sustainable fashion, should disturbances be intentionally created to provide its necessary habitat?
The ancestral Nebraska Sandhills were a penstemon paradise. Before settlement, lightning or native-set fire burned over habitat regularly and bison trafficked here in their migratory feeding, exposing sand to persistent winter and spring winds. But following on the heels of cattle business and agricultural excesses culminating in the Dust Bowl years, attention throughout the region turned to preserving the fragile soil. We suppressed naturally occurring wildland fires from the early 1900’s onward. Soil conservation science significantly affected the ranging practices of ranchers, leading to greatly enhanced habitat protection. Less fire and diminished impact of Bovidae foraging meant more vegetation, but less prime real estate for the penstemon.
By the mid part of the 20th century, there was speculation among Sandhills botanists that the blowout penstemon had perhaps gone the way of the great auk and the dodo bird. Though some are optimistic about its recovery, I wonder how such a species inured to impairment can sustain itself when its preferred habitat continues to be threatened not by naturally occurring disturbance but by sensibly planned restoration.
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Toadstool Geologic Park sits at the boundary between grassland and badland. It looks like something out of a Flintstones cartoon. At the base of a curving cliff of hoodoos and fractured cliffs, a semicircle of six covered picnic tables and parking/campsites curves away from a restored sod house based on an original homesteader’s design for the first homes cheaply made in Sandhills settlement. A chalky white trail slivers up and over sandstone shelves and around the capstone slabs on clay pillars from which the park gathers its name.
In the last half hour before sunset, I delay dinner and camp setup for the pleasure of a brief back-country ramble. Prehistoric volcanic activity in the area periodically draped this landscape in layers of ash. Weathered into cracks in the clay the ash eventually crystallized. The softer surface material erodes, revealing glasslike gravel and the bones of primeval organisms. The path curves and traverses an old stream bed. Patches of this coarse mix of bone and silica appear where waters have worn them visible. I pick up a fragment of ashen glass, picture in my mind’s eye the original fiery rain, the pressing concerns of centuries of sandstone deposits, followed by eons of watery cascades and caravans of wind, revealing this moment of Homo sapiens grasping a handful of the past within his present.
Around the corner, a self-guided signpost alerts me to the presence of prehistoric tracks. Again I enter the crossroads of my imagination as I rest my palms into the shallow depressions that describe the path of some antediluvian organism. On a balanced sandstone boulder off to my right, I note the tracks of a two toed animal across the ancient mud. My imagination can neither confirm nor deny the evidence of an entelodont’s traverse. I must trust the paleontologist’s call on the passage of this prehistoric giant pig.
Further along the loop trail, I come across more entelodont traces, this time trailing two sets of other tracks. My imagination fails me altogether as I read the guide’s story of two separate species of rhinoceros that had once followed this streambed. Some Dick Tracy paleontologist had speculated that the smaller of the two had crossed the stream after the larger had just passed. Perhaps spooked by the near encounter, it apparently sped off through the mud, leaving splash marks that stained time immemorial.
At the crest of the sandstone ridge I sit on an outcrop and survey the plain stretching south from the campground. In the distance several telltale conical slopes suggest that volcanoes indeed marked time here. From that far vista, sienna and tan grasslands stretch back towards me like a scratchy wool blanket rumpled by windstorm creases and flash flood gullies. Nearer still, and off behind me lie the crushed and crucified badlands that tie all the way back north towards Badlands National Park in lower South Dakota.
At sunset, crisscross ripples of different and diametrically opposite layers of flows of cloud and color perfectly portray a landscape that has learned to hold contradictory forces in dynamic tension. I let Sandhills earth and sky, spaciousness and timelessness, seep into my skin and blood. There’s no one else nearby to verify what year this is, or to declare what organism will next round the rocky bend, or to debate what it would take to keep and restore this grassland cum moon crater. Reflecting on the tracks of a now extinct archaic giant pig and a lumbering rhinoceros, our management plans detailing the denouement of native and nonnative species strikes me as absurd and hubristic. By whose calendar are such things measured? From the calcified perspective of the entelodont, we are all invaders here.
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Gliding from crest to crest on another remote one lane road in the central Sandhills, I feel anxious. This remote by-way, representative of others which symbolize a particular Sandhills kind of liberation, presents itself this morning as a looming threat. For days massive cattle trucks have hurtled past me down the highway, heading to and from the back-county ranches and their resident beef. A few miles back, I saw the tail end of one truck plummeting down one slope as I descended another. As narrow as the road is, there would be nowhere to go should I encounter one heading in my direction. As fast as they move, there would be precious little time to react.
I slam on my brakes, an obstacle suddenly in my path. Bovine eyes frantic, a flustered black and white steer scrambles off the road and into the ditch-side scrub brush. It turns and looks back at me, its anxiousness matches mine. Other cattle look up from their feeding at our apprehensive tableau. My cow finds a clump of grass to its liking, forgets all about our brief encounter, and relaxes into its eating. Each of us left to our own particular ruminations, I slowly accelerate and move on, reflective, pensive, troubled.
Grassland organisms evolve various strategies for gathering nutritional value from the bluestems and gramas, preeminent plant species on this prairie. Grasshoppers hinged jaws slide back and forth, grinding the silicon-reinforced monocots. Their brown-juicy secretions, like an old tobacco-stained pioneer, further break down the tough fibrous grasses. Even with the aid of specialized teeth, much of the nutritional content of a prairie’s provender is locked up in relatively indigestible fibers. Biologists classify bison, historically the dominant grazing animal on these plains, as ruminants. Cattle ruminate too, whether bred for beef bringing or dairy drudgery. Raw forage passes from the ruminant’s chewing through successive stomachs, each equipped with its own enzymes, gradually rendering the tough grasses into meaningful nutrients.
The Latin verb ruminari – to chew over again, in the lexicon of modern use it has come to refer to thoughtful reflection, a turning over of thoughts in the mind. I consider the organs and functions of the brains as if they were separate chambers on a mammalian ruminant.
In such ways might a prairie’s meaning be rendered into availability, as if to digest both the tough siliceous grasses and the rough-hewn intentions of this place required complementary processing; a passing through different realms of comprehension and knowing. How else might one wrest meaning from the tough and contradictory information encountered in these prairie remnants and flowing hills: a landscape finds stability together from the tenacious rooting of a few persistent grasses but remains flexible through the resilient meandering of hundreds of forbs and flowers; a prairie may be impossible to fully restore, but it’s possible that a people’s desire for a prairie may be enough to manage miracles; agriculture often disrupts ecological flow – ranching sometimes heals, though not for a single plant that requires a freshly disturbed palette; a region formed and informed by a diverse array of plant and animal species balances its precarious economy on the success or failure of a handful of crops?
As I near the end of that long stretch of one lane road, still gripping the wheel tightly in my fear of encountering a rampaging cattle truck, I notice an abandoned farmstead off to my left. Not so unusual, given the number of derelict homesteads through these hardscrabble lands. A black wind moving through the copse of trees planted between the dilapidated house and the stumbling barn catches my eye. I pull over, shut off the engine. The wind launches, spitting sparks of red color, spins up above the trees and into the adjoining corn stubble, then up again as quick as a blink, swirling back and pouring down into the chattering leaves.
Thousands of redwing blackbirds dance and shuttle from branch to branch. For the third time in a week, I’ve encountered Agelaius phoeniceus out on its migratory rounds. They too have been drawn to these prairie places, but unlike me they seem to hold no inherent moral conflict about dining in a cattail swamp one day and a corn field another. Redwings find merit in lands of both diversity and commodity; cows too, for that matter.
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RE-STORY-ATIONLike many individuals born into the predominantly Christian culture of rural North America, I’d learned to pray almost as soon as I learned to talk. I was raised to believe that there was a white-bearded God out there who would listen to and grant my heart-felt wishes if I followed proper prayerful protocol. Sadness could be dispelled if only I entreated reverently enough for happiness. Conflicts would disappear through pleas for peace. That unhappiness and struggle continued post-prayer only indicated that I was lacking faith.
In my early twenties, even after my brush with Reverend Stoner, I was still seeking a religion I could call home. Struggling to accept an evangelical Christian faith, I was plagued with doubts. I still took comfort in the promise of the Second Coming as a metaphor, trusting that if Jesus was immanent in each living organism, that He would return to us here on earth when we all; people, trees, bugs and crawdads, somehow could connect again. But the Pentecostal Church of Dwight and Reverend Stoner had taught me that evil spirits dwelt in the non-believers, and that redemption was available only to a few. Devotees twisted centuries of biblical dogma into justification for human dominion over all living things, including non-believing humans. I could not jibe this with my lingering sense of the equal importance of all beings in the web of life.
My church friends urged me to work through my doubts. "Where are you with the Lord today?" my best friend Michael would ask me each time he saw me. My doubts were seen as a tear in the fabric of my faith; the sooner the rent repaired the better. But I never stopped doubting beliefs which urged me to cut myself off from the fundamental forces of ecological life. I tried to turn my own back on that difficult period of my life. "Don't dwell in sadness or pain", another friend from that time told me, "because that is where the devil will find you."
But I continued to pray, shyly, quietly, not quite willing to let go the vestiges of a belief system I could not entirely dispel or disprove. I prayed for a return of my friendship, for the right woman to enter my existence, for a simple answer to the mysteries of life. Nothing much ever came of my prayers as far as I could tell. If I prayed for happiness one night, I still seemed to wake up sad the next day. My incantations invoked no discernable interventions.
Conventional 'soul-range' management practices might indicate that sadness, for example, would be a limiting factor to happiness. My Christian friends saw doubt as a blood-thirsty scavenger lusting after my faith. Eliminate doubt, or sadness or bitterness, or despair from our lives, and we intuit a higher carrying capacity for faith (or happiness, or forgiveness, or hope). I learned the hard way that denial of one feeling did not automatically lead to an increase in another, just as a young Aldo Leopold learned that fewer wolves did not ultimately translate to more deer.
Far from being a limiting factor, my ability to feel my sadness contributed significantly to my ability to embrace happiness. During the times I was least able to deal with what I considered destructive predatory emotions (anger, fear, pain), it seemed my emotional range were stripped bare. The happiness I tried to muster was a weakened species within an exhausted ecosystem. On the larger scale though, the health of jack-rabbit depends on the health of coyote, just as perhaps, happiness requires equilibrium with sadness. I'm not sure I’d want a life devoid of fear, doubt, or anguish any more than I would want a mountain without its wolf or a desert its coyote.
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Benediction means literally “good or beneficial words.” Throughout this chapter, I’ve undertaken a piecemeal etymological restoration of language and meaning. Biblical scripture proposes “By their works ye shall know them.” I’m beginning to wonder if an equally revelatory maxim might be “By our words ye shall know us.” If words themselves lose their nuances and threaded meanings, then how do we begin to re-story our lands and ourselves reflecting the kind of bio-diversity we wish for both? Stripped of the evolutionary layers that encompass each word’s textured meaning, then our stories and dialog lose something intangible yet vital that crafts the connective tissue of our social fabric.
Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves and one another seem to profoundly inform our beliefs, imaginations and responses to our deeper selves and to one another. Re-storying, I think perhaps, emphasizes not just one kind of story over another but a richly textured tapestry of all narratives that honors the complexity of our emotional, philosophical, and spiritual terrain, recognizing the soul-ecology function of each strand of story within us.
I suspect that what we call our persona operates more along the lines of landscape ecology than the narrow confines of most psychological or religious orientations; meaning it contains a richly textured diversity, where contradictions that abound on one level reveal themselves as complementary on another. My journey through different places of paradox was a simultaneous outer and inner excursion; one which served more to raise provocative questions than to generate reasonable answers. To provide a way of discern patterns amid the inherent chaos, I once again looked outward to see within.
From my sit spot near the Woodland cemetery marsh in Keene one May morning last year, as I listened to the exuberant chorus of songbirds and followed their technicolor flights, I mused about how many baseball teams had chosen small birds as mascots. Unlike their higher-on-the-food chain football brethren (Lions, Eagles, Ravens, Bulldogs), baseball aficionados and owners seem willing to celebrate the less testosterone driven qualities of avian commoners (Blue Jays, Cardinals, Redwings). Oddly, though a big fan of both birds and baseball, I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen an Oriole, Baltimore or otherwise. I strained my memory to recall plumage, size, gait or song. As I gathered my journal and empty coffee cup to head to work, I made a mental note to check my Peterson’s bird guide that evening.
Late that afternoon as I strolled home from work, I heard a commotion in the branches to my right and saw an aggressive jay chase a smaller bird from its territory. The chastened interloper landed on a branch nearby where I could get a good look at it. Indeed – oriole. Sighting it that late in May, I recognize that bird had been in the area all spring. I believe I hadn't seen it because my brain had lost its mental map to the interior habitat of oriole. Having made an oriole-shaped space in my consciousness that morning, it was only natural that I would see a creature that had existed there all along. How many other things had I failed to see in the world around me because my conscious mind had not made room for them to enter? Might making space in my thoughts and perspectives also liberate and renew my vision and experience?
There may be something in the human brain that seeks the simplest view and explanation for any phenomenon it takes in. Polarization and dichotomy yield a simple lens of binary representation of experience. A practice of paradox creates a multi-faceted lens on reality, like a grasshopper’s compound eye. It cultivates wisdom to navigate increasingly complex ecological issues. If the root of religion can be a re-ligamenting of our culture and connection to nature, I now believe that practices of place-based paradox can create space in our consciousness to hold contradictions in creative tension and foster multi-threaded connections in our most polarizing domains.
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Red state, blue state; it was all I saws in the news after the 2004 Presidential elections. Waking the morning after, I sought a more variegated state. At a workplace where liberalism is the accepted political norm and where folks are not shy about proclaiming their beliefs and assuming you feel the same, I figured it would be an uncomfortable place for our resident Republicans. Sensitive to patterns that don’t quite fit, I’d identified those few whom I knew would have voted for George W. Bush.
Arriving at work, I made my way around to each one. Each conversation opened with my congratulations, my acknowledgment that our environment was probably not all that supportive of their choice today, and my assertion that I saw their integrity and thoughtfulness even though I had made a different choice, one which I was not particularly excited about.
To my surprise, each conversation took an unexpected turn. In acknowledging their authority as well as my ambivalence about Kerry, my colleagues shared their own ambivalence about Bush. As we began sharing what it was we wished for in a president and in our country, we found that we had virtually the same set of concerns and dreams. If I’d stayed in my own polarity I’d never have connected to the commonality between us.
Shifting our attitudes, beliefs and ideology in these ways is a matter of creating paradox-shaped space in our consciousness. Paradox, in place and in self, has taught me to enter what I fear, disdain or simply don’t understand, believing that thriving as an individual and perhaps surviving as a species demands such connective flexibility.
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