On Place

But the sense of the past also gives a deep richness and resonance to nearly everything I see here.  It is partly the sense that what I now see, other men that I have known once saw, and partly that this knowledge provides an imaginative access to what I do not know.  I think of the country as a kind of palimpsest scrawled over with the comings and goings of people, the erasure of time already in process even as the marks of passage are put down.  There are the ritual marks of neighborhood - roads, paths between houses.  There are the domestic paths from house to barns and outbuildings and gardens, farm roads threading the pasture gates.  There are the wanderings of hunters and searchers after lost stock, and the speculative or meditative or inquisitive "walking around" of farmers on wet days and Sundays.  There is the spiraling geometry of the rounds of implements in fields, and the passing and returning scratches of plows across croplands.  Often these have filled an interval, an opening, between the retreat of the forest from the virgin ground and the forest's return to ground that has been worn out and given up.  In the woods here one often finds cairns of stones picked up out of furrows, gullies left by bad farming, forgotten roads, stone chimneys of houses long rotted away or burned.

Wendell Berry - A Native Hill

My own palimpsest of place is not so interesting.  Or it may seem that way.  Its easy to think of Wendell's words as aesthetic novelties that have no bearing on reality: on my reality.  But when you really start to do some speculative wandering with these ideas in mind you'll surprise yourself.  There are different levels of place in my world and this idea will be a continuing experience for me.  These are my places as I see them.

There is home: the house where I live with my boys and my wife in the city.  This is a new place.  Or new by Wendellian standards.  We've been here eight years.  That's old by Capitalistic standards I suppose considering how many different neighbors we've had in those eight years.  It may be my naked wanderings in the evening or the large pile of garbage in our backyard but I'm more inclined to think it's a mobile dissatisfaction that pushes people onward to new places and different neighbors. 

There are the ranches.  These are the places my parents grew up and my grandparents lived and where my parents live now.  I've a longer history there as does the family.  Both my parents came from the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains.  This is the land I think of when I think place.  It is the hills under the feet and the mountains on the horizon.  It is the wet cooley bottom and the dry rocky rise.  It is a land immediately apparent and a land slipping away. 

Most the places of my childhood are gone.  Asphalt and cinderblock cover the fields, the gravel pits and the ponds that spotted the edge of town where we lived.   

There are the three rivers: the Bighorn, the Yellowstone and the Stillwater.  There are few places I've studied more intimately than these waters.  They change.  They change on the season, on the weather, and on the inexorable wearing away of the land and yet they are always the same.  There is nothing untoward about them.  They move with highways and bridges but are separate from our machinations.  They spew from the bottom of damns but move with their own music despite the incompetency of their "managers."

And there are the mountains with their wilderness.  I've spent many years wandering them from the earliest time I could walk upright.  My feelings for them are varied and intense.  It is a vast measuring and a wild place.  I've struck out on all their trails and in some places where a trail doesn't exist.  I've caught their fish and tracked their game.  It is not a palimpsest.  It is a place I seek to be void of human touch and to find my way home from.