“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 across a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain,” writes Barry Lopez in the introduction to “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape.”
Four years of effort by Lopez and his co-editor Debra Gwartney culminated in this 2006 book, which speaks to the elongated love affair between a language-making creature and its world. It is a decade, then, since Gwartney and Lopez conceived of the project, a decade since classes of eighth-graders in Seattle, expressing their feelings about the September 11 terrorist attacks, used one phrase more than any other: “On our own soil.”
It is a comfort even now to think of home ground, not of ground zero. It helps, even now, to read William Kittredge writing with fleet concision—no entry in “Home Ground” exceeds 200 words—of basin and range, the 400,000 square miles of the American West where the graben of a down-faulted valley marches north alongside the uplift of a horst such as Steens Mountain. One who knows that migrating wildfowl long found refuge and food in the Malheur wetlands where the runoff from Steens collects might muse on how our planet’s geology is in an eternal dance with ephemeral surface life. One aware of how invasive carp in their millions have now wreaked havoc in the nurturance of the birds might give a long sigh, and turn to another page.
And there’s the wonder of “Home Ground.” From the wide, gracious margins, in which one may read resonant quotations from fiction and poetry, to the charm of words like “krummholz” (the contorted vegetation of alpine transition zones) there is always another voice, another opening vista for the reader. This is a book to read not cover-to-cover but in which to wander and emerge refreshed.
There are deeper implications beyond the effortless acquisition of an evocative language of terrain gained while following one’s curiosity from canyon to cleft to cranny and crevasse. “Home Ground” has also been a boon for attorneys, land use planners and others addressing environmental issues in North America. “If you will be having a conversation that’s going to show up in a court of law, you’d better have your terms straight,” Lopez told listeners gathered at Graham Oaks Nature Park in Wilsonville, Oregon in late July, 2011.
At the event, co-sponsored by Oregon Humanities and Metro, Lopez and Gwartney encouraged participants to spend time experiencing the nature park, most of it now being restored as an oak savanna after a century and a half of other ways of relating to the land. Returning from the group’s walkabout, one woman spoke of encountering a point where fingers of cool air from an evergreen grove reached into the hot rustling dryness of a midsummer field.
Lopez smiled. She was describing an ecotone, he said, and then spoke of how such nebulous zones between habitats hold some of the greatest diversity of life on earth. Writing in “Home Ground,” William deBuys points out that ecotones are “human constructs, which derive their shape and character from the qualities their observers find most salient.”
Have we, in the last jumbled and distraught decade, been passing through an ecotone in American society? What other metaphors might we draw from the landscape to help us understand both the past and the future into which we now gaze, here on our own soil?
