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Placer, Bench, Point of Rock:
Grappling with the language of land
by
Debra Gwartney
“Words became, as they were in childhood,
beautiful things--except this is better, because they're crosshatched with a
complexity of meaning, with the sonorities of felt, sensuous thought."
-- From Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
But I was well into my forties when I made my
first trip up the mountain. On our way up, my grandfather--who at
eighty-six had left the state of Idaho only once or twice in his
life--asked my dad to stop the truck so he could get out and show me
the collapsed gold mine where he'd worked as a teenager. "See those
placer rocks?" he asked, one hand stuck in a back pocket of his jeans
and the other gesturing up to a lump of gravel and boulders settled on
top of the hillside's slope. "That's the last of the operation."
I climbed the hill to have a closer look, stepping
across a trickle of water that flowed around and through the pile. I'd
heard the word placer a few times but I wasn't sure what it meant. A
few days later, back in my home in Oregon, I read a definition and
understood that my grandpa and the other miners had sorted through
deposits-- placers--for gold that had washed out of a nearby ore vein,
carried and laid down by water from what must have been a much
faster-running stream in those days. Placer deposits are at or near the
surface, the definition said. "It's placer mining that gave rise to the
enduring image of a lone prospector panning for gold along a western
stream."
The three of us got back in Grandpa's Scout and,
about an hour later, we came upon a truck traveling out of the woods
toward town. Both vehicles pulled over, and the men got out to chat and
dig the heels of their boots into the gritty road.
When my dad slid in behind the wheel again, he
mentioned that they were the Anderson father and sons, a family that
lived "on the bench." When I was a girl, my grandmother had taken me to
Ikey's up on the "bench" to get my haircut. We'd gone to picnics up on
the "bench" with the Dell Jones family and Bill and Billy Cannon, but
I'd not until this moment wondered, "What bench?" This term, too, I
looked up when I got home, discovering that a "bench" is a "length of
floodplain parallel to and stretching away from a riverbank. ... In
Idaho and other parts of the West, a bench is any flat surface that
provides working access to a mine and, often, any of a series of broad
terraces adjacent to a large river." Our river is the Salmon, the River
of No Return, which muscles its way through town, and "the bench" my
family members have long referred to is the flat stretch of land at the
top of the slope that parallels the waterway.
When we finally made it to hunting camp, at
the end of a stomach-churning drive on windy, rocky roads, I stood in a
shadowed clearing that was both cool and soft because of the altitude
and the thick circle of lodgepole pine trees. I tried to pick up on a
little family history, tried to imagine the talk around the campfire,
my dad playing his harmonica while Ron strummed a guitar, the smells of
damp saddles and fresh meat. I wandered around while my dad and grandpa
made notes in preparation for the real trip in the fall, when stoves
and bed gear and guns and ammunition--pack horses squeezed into metal
trailers, steam rising off their warm backs--would be transported to
this dry, bare spot of ground that the men in my family were so
attached to.
Later, when the three of us prepared to head
back home, Dad asked Grandpa if he thought we should return the way
we'd come or try another route around the back of the mountain. "Well,"
Grandpa Bob said, pushing back his soft leather hat and rubbing his
whiskers, "we could go that other way, but we'd run into that point of
rock and things could get dicey." I could tell he meant that I'd be
frightened by the narrowness of the road or perhaps the staggering
descent. My father nodded and turned toward the safer path, and I
listed point of rock in my mind along with placer and bench. When I
looked up the term, this is what I found:
Travelers
tend to identify the point of rock as that place where they encounter
an elemental difficulty. ...Horse packers in mountain country sometimes
refer to the point of rock as the place where footing becomes
treacherous on exposed bedrock, or where passage is tight at a
precipitous turn in the trail.
Placer, bench, point of rock. As a child, I'd traveled
infrequently into the thick of the forests and ranchlands near my
hometown, preferring instead my grandmothers' houses, so I'd let such
terms swim by me, part of the vernacular of my people. But now, having
traveled into the mountains and having followed up the trip by reading
definitions of these terms, the words stuck; I had quite suddenly come
to realize that part of belonging to a place is knowing the regional
expressions that tie those who live there to their waterways,
mountains, valleys, fields, and plains. Making that connection, the one
between word and place, was a feeling akin to when the optometrist
drops the correct lens in front of your eye and a fuzzy image suddenly
becomes clear. Like many other middle-aged people, I'd discovered in
myself a longing for such clarity, for more intimacy with my childhood
home. For me, the connection had gone a long way in making me finally
feel as if I fit in my home territory--that place in the world for
which I have an abiding, though complicated, love.
This story includes an element of serendipity, for
at the time of my trip up the mountain with my father and grandfather I
was about a year into work on a book called Home Ground: Language for
an American Landscape. In fact, it was the partially finished
manuscript that I went to for the meanings of the three terms:
"placer," "bench," and "point of rock." Before my trip to Salmon, my
involvement in the book as managing editor was a job--a great job, an
exciting and scary and thoroughly intimidating job because I have no
background in either geography or geology and hadn't even heard the
term geomorphology before I took on the work. What happened to me on my
journey to and from hunting camp is that the book became intensely
personal--that is, I came to understand how moving it could be when the
experience of a physical place, especially one steeped in family
meaning and generational history, is overlaid with that place's
language.
Home Ground's genesis, which long preceded my role
in the project, came out of a realization that no one had ever compiled
terms for distinctly North American landforms in one volume. For
instance, the term for a kind of dune called a "medano" that forms only
on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Or the narrow waterway called a
"trainasse" you can find only throughout Louisiana's delta. There's a
certain type of hill in New England called a "monandnack," and a
strange jag of land found under the water off the coast of Monterey,
California, that's called a "submerged coast." Grotto, scabland,
kipuka, cascade, barranca, pali coast, morro, fen, looking glass
prairie, drapery, painted desert, sandhill--these kinds of words have
been included in languages since the beginning of human time on this
continent. But now, fewer people all the time know or understand what
they mean. As a culture sliding toward homogeneity, it seems we've put
ourselves in danger of losing the ways we've historically expressed a
human connection with our places.
There are dozens of excellent dictionaries,
gazetteers, and other reference books related to geography and
geology--anyone can go to the library and, in five minutes, have a
stack of well-researched materials that define, say, "rift valley" or
"antidune" or "horst and graben." It's not much of a chore to find
scientific information on the technical language of place. But with
this book, which is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, we wanted
to identify and revive colloquial and regional terms, though technical
terms are included as well. Rather than serve as a definitive reference
book, Home Ground is meant to illuminate and celebrate the ways we've
long spoken about our land and to get readers listening for landscape
terms used in their own regions.
So we went hunting for colloquial terms to blend
with the technical terms, and we didn't go to scientists to write the
definitions. We asked writers to take on the job. And we asked those
writers to bring their full range of gifts to the work--metaphor,
rhythm, meter, cadence, fanciful imagery, a sense of the magical, a
recognition of the quotidian. We also found quotes from a wide range of
American literature--poems, stories, novels, plays, essays--to weave
among and into the definitions. We were after a human and personal
engagement with the language we use to talk about our land.
This led to the trickiest challenge in creating
this book: discovering a way to celebrate the practical, common,
folkloric, and even playful nature of this language of place while
making certain that each entry was scientifically accurate. I went
back-and-forth daily with scientists whose work involves the serious
undertaking of research and field studies related to the physical
environment. The scientists read every term and often made copious
comments. I then took those notes to the writers, many of whom were
settled on the crafting of their definitions and none too eager to add
more technical content or surrender lyricism. Suffice it to say, this
was not always an easy or even a pleasant task to complete, and every
time I served as liaison between board and writer, I wondered to what
lengths we should go to include the intricacies and nuances of
technical fact when the intention of the book was literary, expressions
replete with beautifully shaped sentences and finely sculpted tropes.
I sometimes ran into conflicts between writer and
board when the former anthropomorphized a given term and the latter
objected. For instance, "A river's desire is to be curved," wrote one
writer in her definition for gooseneck, and continued, "Its meandering
pattern forms sinuous, sweeping bends."
One of our board members, who has studied rivers
and other waterforms all his professional life, responded abruptly: "I
object to personifying rivers. They do not desire to be curved.
Physical laws result in their courses, which represent a balance among
channel geometry, water discharge, sediment, and the resistance of the
country rock and vegetation on the banks. Usually that balance results
in a sinuous course as a means of energy dissipation."
The writer, in turn, came back with her own sense
of frustration: "Help!" she wrote, "I don't know what to do here. Are
you asking me to go technical? Talk about discharge, sediment,
dissipation?"
The other editors and I were faced with a decision in this instance
that we would confront other times during the editing of the book: is
it inaccurate to give a landform human qualities? Would our readers
forgive such poetic license and perhaps even expect it? In the case of
the definition of gooseneck we worked out a compromise with the writer.
She agreed to ease up on such emotions as desire but would still
express the river as alive. Here is the finished definition:
That
rivers and streams seldom flow (naturally) in straight lines is a gift
of beauty. Otherwise we would not have canyons that bear the shape of
moving water. A river's meandering pattern forms sinuous, sweeping
bends. Goosenecks are meanders so tight in succession that their bows
nearly meet one another. The goosenecks of the San Juan River in
southern Utah are a classic canyon complex of deeply entrenched
meanders. Here the river coils like a sidewinder through russet,
terraced walls a thousand feet high. From one tight, looping bend to
the next, the canyon layers up squarely on itself, an even set of
folds. The saddle of the high cliff on your left is the saddle of the
next cliff on your right, just around the bend.
A second challenge that came up during the process
of creating this book involved the fact that many of the terms have
official applications. That is, laws are written about them, and
they're used in litigation and public policy sessions. Terms such as
wilderness, groundwater, forest, and prairie are heatedly discussed in
meetings of county commissioners and activists. So, what was our
obligation to legal terms?
This issue came up with the broad and oft-used
term wetland. In the draft of the definition sent to the board, our
writer observed,
Wetland
covers a constellation of names and traits, though all generally refer
to land covered by shallow water. A short string of wetland forms:
swamp, cienega, marsh, fen, tulare, pocosin, vernal pool, sponge bog,
quaking bog. A wetland may be freshwater, saltwater, or brackish.
Permanent or not wet all of the time. Found in the full swath of the
continent, from Alaska's muskegs to the South's cypress swamps, with
the inland marshes of the Great Basin in between. Found along lakes and
rivers or in isolation, a pothole on a prairie, restless with skeins of
birds. By instinct we give wetlands implicit diversity. In -- A Sand
County Almanac -- Aldo Leopold frames such an image: "Out on the bog a
crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly bulk into the
air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings."
Lovely, well written, engaging. But our scientific
advisers were concerned about the lack of at least a nod toward the
official meaning. One board member wrote,
We
should be careful because the term wetland has legal standing in the
United States. First, a wetland is an ecosystem (more extensive
definition than land and water). Second, wetlands are sometimes wet all
year round, but others are periodically wet. The National Research
Council of the National Academy of Sciences has created a generally
accepted definition. Home Ground's doesn't have to be this stuffy in
its expression, but it should not contradict the following: "A wetland
is an ecosystem that depends on constant or recurrent shallow
inundation or saturation at or near the surface of the substrate. The
minimum essential characteristics of a wetland are recurrent, sustained
inundation or saturation at or near the surface and the presence of
physical, chemical, and biological features reflective of recurrent,
sustained inundation or saturation. Common diagnostic features of
wetlands are hydric soils and hydrophytic vegetation" (page 3, National
Research Council. 1995. Wetlands: Characteristics and Boundaries.
Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 307 p.)
This response was met with some consternation by our
writer, who told me, "I avoided the legal definition because it put me
into a coma. It demands that I become what I fear most: dull."
We worked on this important Home Ground entry for
hours--going back and forth between writer and scientist to find the
right mix of words to convey the legality of this term, which we wanted
to recognize, without sacrificing the writer's voice. This is what we
settled on:
Wetland covers a constellation of names and traits, but
all generally refer to an ecosystem, land covered by shallow water and
dependent on constant or recurrent inundation. A short string of
wetland forms: swamp, cienega, marsh, fen, tulare, pocosin, vernal
pool, sponge bog, quaking bog. A wetland may be freshwater, saltwater,
or brackish. Found over the full swath of the continent, from Alaska's
muskegs to the South's cypress swamps, with the inland marshes of the
Great Basin in between. Found along lakes and rivers, or in isolation,
a pothole on a prairie, restless with skeins of birds. In A Sand County
Almanac, Aldo Leopold frames an image of wetland diversity: "Out on the
bog a crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly bulk into
the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings."
A final challenge, one that caused a certain degree of
tension, occurred when the editors had to decide just how technical a
technical term must be. It's easy to slide into jargon that the average
reader doesn't know or care about when it comes to complicated
language. We wanted to prevent, as much as we could, such semantic
puzzles. For example, our scientists objected to this first sentence in
an early draft of the definition for the term till: "Till is soil
transported directly by a glacier, rather than soil transported by the
meltwater and runoff associated with a glacier, which is called drift."
The main problem here? The word soil.
"Till is definitely not soil!" wrote one scientist.
"The first sentence is wrong!" wrote another, going on to say that "it
should be 'sediment' rather than 'soil.' Soil is a term used for
combinations of organic and inorganic materials that have evolved in a
particular place."
Now, back to the first scientist, who soon dug
deeper into problems she had with the definition: "Actually," she
wrote, "current standards use 'drift' as a generic term that includes
both 'till' and 'outwash,' the latter meaning sediment deposited by
running water associated with ice."
What a mess! I thought when I read these comments.
Does it matter to the average reader if we use soil instead of
sediment? Would a novelist worry about such a distinction? Would a
poet? And how far do we go in explaining the shifting nomenclature of
science--that till and drift were once thought to be different, then at
some point it was decided that one was a subset of the other. The
geographers/ geologists/geomorphologists continued to do the job they
were assigned--devotedly pushing us toward the hard nut of fact. The
writers felt they were also doing what they'd been assigned--to write
as elegantly and lyrically as possible about these land and water
forms. No one, least of all the book's editors, wanted to lie or even
fudge, but the fine-tuning in the name of accuracy could sometimes
start to lean too much in the direction of easily accessed reference
books. How were we to blend the scientific with the literary?
Here is the sentence we finally settled on: "When
used as a verb, till means to work the soil for farming, as by plowing
or harrowing. When used as a noun, till is the geologists' name for the
sediment left behind by a glacier--a mixture of clay, sand, gravel, and
boulders."
It's better--better because the scientists weren't going to let the
writer get away with a less than accurate definition and better because
the writer was willing to make the beginning of his entry less
technical, less daunting to the reader, by including an image we could
all relate to.
Technical terms, in general, were a challenge. It's
humbling to admit how many times I had to call our board members to ask
one or the other to explain again how a glacier's movement leads to an
esker or a kame terrace; to describe the solution-related process that
carves a cenote; to clarify the action of uplift in forming basin and
range country. I found Home Ground's colloquialisms more vivid, more
accessible--I could easily spend all day on definitions of a thank you
ma'am or a hoodoo while avoiding the outwash plain or fault spring
entries; it was simpler editing a description of Detroit rip-rap or
looking glass prairie than to try to wrap my mind around rock glacier
or alluvial fan. Sometimes I wondered why so many technical terms were
included--would these complicated processes be of interest or use to
our readers?
Then last spring, while in Denver at the annual
American Geographers Association meeting, Will Graf, a well-known
geomorphologist who is Home Ground's consulting editor, invited me
along on a field trip he was leading for graduate students. He couldn't
pass up the opportunity to show these southeasterners the
often-startling, stark landscape of the Rocky Mountains; in particular,
his plan was to visit a series of abandoned mines in the mountains,
where the students would see human-made landforms that were more than
one hundred years old, landforms like open-pit mines, adits and avens,
and tailings piles, all dug into or out of the earth.
As we got out of Denver's metropolitan snarl that
day and headed into the hills, I began to throw out Home Ground terms.
"Where's a hogback?" I asked Will, recalling that this form exists in
Colorado. "Is that a flatiron?" He peered sideways at me. We were far
from flatiron/hogback country and would have to travel toward Boulder
to see those. It had taken me all of ten minutes to show my limitations
as a student of geography. Will could have laughed at me, but instead
he called out other names of terms I'd worked on--comb ridge, plateau,
caldera--and my field geography lesson began.
By that point in the book project, I had read and
reread dozens of times the bulk of the 850 entries. But though I'd
thoroughly experienced the descriptive sentences related to these
terms, I'd seen hardly any of the forms with my own eyes. That day with
Will, the language in my head became real. When we stopped the truck
and started to hike through the half-frozen ground, he pointed out many
landforms and processes in front of us. For instance, at the base of a
hill, a debris cone--a bunch of soil and flinty rock that had tumbled
off the side of a dry hill and landed in a cone-like shape. He
explained to me how this was different from an alluvial fan--one of the
technical terms that had earlier vexed me. He explained that while the
pile at the bottom of the hill looked like it could be either, an
alluvial fan is caused by water and a debris cone by mass-wasting,
which is simply gravity pulling loose materials downslope. Easy, right?
But altogether a different awareness when language and experience meet.
The entire trip went like this, with concepts I'd
struggled with such as "fault block" and "uplift" and "plate shift"
coming to life in the Rockies. We stood high on a ridge while Will
described how, over time, a meandering river or a braided stream cuts
the land in particular ways to create different types of canyons or
valleys. For me, the synthesis was powerful. A few days later, I went
back to editing, nearly overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of Home
Ground's terms. How a wave platform contributes to the formation of a
sea cliff and then a sea arch; how a U-shaped valley would not exist
unless a V-shaped valley had been ground down by a glacier; how a river
can't have a cutbank without also having a point bar, and so forth.
The journey with Will surprised me in how it, too,
led to a sense of belonging. Different from how I fit with the small
patch of mountain in Idaho where I'd explored the land with my father
and grandfather--this applied more to my place in the magnitude of
geological processes that formed the continent, if in fact someone can
fit into such scope. I walked away from our field trip that day with an
unexpected awe about North America and feeling more informed about some
of the imperatives of our time: preserving forested lands, preventing
excessive erosion, and keeping waterways open and clean.
Will Graf and I sometimes joke that I've done
enough work in the fields of geography and geology to have earned at
least a master's degree in one of those subjects--it has indeed been an
immersion unlike any other I've encountered as a reporter or editor. In
the end, though, I came away with a profound sense of the power of
language and the need for our culture to preserve and celebrate the
language that tells us where we are: the words that describe the
specific environments in which we nurture our families, do our jobs,
and imagine our futures.
Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities http://oregonhum.org/oregon-humanities-spring-summer-2006.php, the magazine of the Oregon Council for the Humanities http://oregonhum.org. Reprinted by permission.
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