Digital Collage © Laura Carl.
What does it mean to belong to a place? And what do we owe in return?
BY RUTH WILSON, PH.D.
Restlessness and a deep yearning for something that, at times, seemed nebulous inspired me to take a road trip from my home in Los Lunas, New Mexico (just south of Albuquerque), to Surprise, Arizona (just outside of Phoenix)—a journey of about 400 miles. I don’t know how to describe this yearning other than to say it was a longing for intimacy with the land.
When I say “the land,” I think of how Aldo Leopold described it in A Sand County Almanac. Leopold refers to the land as a biotic community in which soils, waters, plants, and animals interact. He also refers to the land as “a community to which we belong.”
I started my road trip on a Sunday morning in January. I checked the gas gauge on my truck and saw that the tank was almost full. Fuel for my spirit, however, was running low. I had moved to New Mexico 13 years earlier but still knew little about the American Southwest. This left me feeling estranged from the land.
In earlier times, I had known intimacy with the land. I grew up on a small farm in Ohio where I was immersed in the world of nature. I picked tomatoes, fed the chickens, and played in the woods. We took care of the land, and it took care of us.
Intimacy with the land, however, wasn’t just a childhood experience. I remember with great fondness other times as an adult when being immersed in nature filled me with joy. One such occasion occurred in a park near my home when wildflowers were in bloom. I bent over to smell the flowers and to get a closer look at their delicate petals. I felt an invitation to get even closer. I responded by lying on the ground right next to the flowers. Seeing them from that vantage point was an entirely different experience than viewing the flowers from above. I wasn’t hovering over them; I was lying in bed with them. This felt very intimate.
Over time, my sense of intimacy with the land began to fade. Perhaps this was due to a shift in focus. I was devoting my time and energies to a career, family responsibilities, and what Rachel Carson refers to as “the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial.” In The Sense of Wonder, Carson describes how a child’s world is “fresh and new and beautiful,” but that as we become adults, this way of knowing tends to become dimmed or even lost. I knew this loss applied to me, and I think it applies to the larger society, as well.
Now 83, I have witnessed dramatic changes in the way we live. Many of the changes separate us physically and emotionally from the natural world. Interstate highways, airplanes, and generic hospitality amenities allow us to travel across the country without experiencing the tenor or mood of the land. Most of our food travels long distances from the factory farms where it is produced. Work, education, and much of what we call “recreation” tend to take place indoors or in large outdoor arenas devoid of plants and animals. It’s not surprising, then, that we no longer know the world as “fresh and new and beautiful” or experience an intimate connection with it.
SETTING OFF
Being estranged from the land gives me an uneasy feeling. That’s why, as I planned my road trip, I looked for alternatives to the freeways and gave myself the gift of time. I ignored what others were telling me about the shortest or most convenient route to take. I wanted this trip to be a soulful trip where I could, once again, experience joyful connections with the land. I thus packed accordingly. I took hiking shoes, a notebook, a book of poetry, and binoculars. I also gave myself three rules for the road: Pay attention, go slow, and don’t let the map or the clock set the route or the pace.
For me, paying attention meant far more than watching my speed, road conditions, and the behavior of other drivers. It meant being attentive to where and who I was. I was aware, even before I started the trip, that I was on stolen land. The original human inhabitants of what we now call New Mexico and Arizona were Native Americans. Some of their earliest permanent settlements, called pueblos, date back about 1,500 years. I wanted to keep this history in mind as I searched for intimacy with the land.
I was only a few miles from home when I started to notice contrasts, which I later discovered would help define my trip. The first contrast I noticed was between “the old” and “the new.” The “new” includes a huge Facebook data center under construction along Highway 6. The “old” includes the Saint Augustine Mission Church on the Isleta Pueblo. This church, originally built in 1612, still serves as a gathering place for the people of the Isleta Reservation. The data center, on the other hand, isn’t a gathering place for people. It’s simply a physical location that stores computers and equipment. I started to wonder if what is old fosters far deeper connections than what is new.
Other contrasts came in the form of artifacts left behind by people, including junkyards and cliff dwellings. The junkyards are full of cars once used by people but then cast aside to be picked over or rusted apart. Cliff dwellings, in stark contrast, are niches or caves in high cliffs used as dwellings by earlier people of the Southwest.
SACRED SIGHTS
My trip included a stop at the Tonto National Monument near Roosevelt, Arizona. Here, I explored the remains of cliff dwellings constructed by the Salado people many years ago and found them hauntingly beautiful. They were formed within a natural alcove in Cholla Canyon using natural materials from the surrounding Sonoran Desert. I felt inspired and humbled by the simplicity and beauty of these dwellings. They reflected an intimacy with the land seldom found in buildings we construct today.
I also made a stop at the Petrified Forest National Park, where I learned that the fossilized remains of trees many years ago were carried by rivers from distant mountains to what was then a low-lying swamp. Over time, cells in the wood were replaced with minerals, transforming the logs into brightly colored quartz crystals. These remains—so unlike the junkyard remains—added awesome beauty to the desert environment. I found myself wondering if the remains of our current civilization would add to or detract from the world we leave for future generations. I also wondered about what I, as an individual, would leave behind and if it would add value to the world.
My last stop before returning home was at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. I felt a strong sense of disconnect as I entered the visitor center. Here, I found 28 giant telescopes aimed toward the sky. As I stood on the observation deck overlooking the array, Laurel Clark came to mind. She was an astronaut on the Columbia space shuttle launched in 2003. One of her messages from the shuttle back to Earth focused on a moth and whether it would hatch from its cocoon while in orbit. Clark shared her observations with a reporter on the ground: “There was a moth in there, and it still had its wings crumpled up, and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing.”
Clark, along with the rest of the crew, died when their spacecraft broke apart during reentry. I met her mother about 10 years after the Columbia disaster. She described how her daughter had always loved both the Earth and the universe beyond.
As I looked at the telescopes and pondered what Clark had said about life being “a magical thing,” I realized that we don’t need to travel to faraway places to discover the beauty and wonder of the world. It’s all around us. I also thought about the contrasts I had encountered on my trip in addition to the new and the old: noise and silence, being away and being present, feeling alone and feeling connected. I realized then that life doesn’t have to be about experiencing or choosing one over the other. Life is more complicated and richer than that.
The first thing I did when I got back to my truck was to check the gas gauge. It registered about half a tank—plenty of fuel to get me home. I then checked my “spirit gauge.” It registered close to full. I knew this fullness came from a renewed intimacy with the land—not the farmland I knew as a child and not the kind of intimacy I had experienced when I lay in the bed of wildflowers. The intimacy I now felt was wrapped in tenderness and in a way of knowing that assures me the land will endure. We will come and go, and the way we live with the land will change. But the magic of life will continue.
My trip taught me that the longing for intimacy with the land is universal. It’s in every human soul and every element of the Earth. I saw it in the fossilized trees of the petrified forest and in the saguaro cactuses of the Sonoran Desert. This road trip showed me that intimacy with the land is not a “thing” to be discovered or a reward to be earned. Intimacy with the land means knowing we are a part of a larger community and it is our privilege and responsibility to preserve the integrity and beauty of the world in which we live. &
