Introduction 

(continued)

            As a boy growing up in the San Fernando valley of southern California, I found solace in the way big winds blew through groves of eucalyptus trees in this — back then — agricultural region. The animated rustling that enlivened those trees. I found inspiration in the stark barrenness of the Mojave Desert, in the way storm surf exploded on the coastal beaches, and in the splendor of Hoover (at the time, Boulder) Dam. Later, an adolescent in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan in the late 1950s, I became familiar with a landscape altogether different from this one. I was sent to camp that first summer on Long Island’s South Fork. Before this, I thought only rivers forked. My family bought a second home “at the shore,” in Bay Head, New Jersey — it wasn’t called “the coast” here. We made family trips to New Hampshire, where there was such a thing as a monadnock; and out on Staten Island, I learned, they called some of the sloughs and creeks kills. I remember speculating then with my younger brother about the formerly enigmatic Peekskill, New York, whether it ­wasn’t named for the kill on which Mr. Peek had his farm.

                My prep school friends on 83rd Street in Manhattan described the Pine Barrens of New Jersey contemptuously as a cultural and geographic extension of Appalachia, accurate on neither count; and they described the Finger Lakes of western New York as a romantic locale, a place you might want to honeymoon. The image of a “finger” lake preoccupied me for a while as a twelve-year-old. Were there five of them in parallel? Did something like a palm connect them all?
                 My roommate in college felt the same compulsion I did to travel and to see the physical world. On any given weekend we might drive as much as a thousand miles to get to the Straits of Mackinac in northern Michigan, or see the woody draws and prehistoric ceremonial mounds of eastern Iowa, the bayous and playrees of Mississippi, and the bluegrass hills of central Kentucky. Was there a season, we’d wonder, when they were bluest?

                Driving the country wasn’t the obsession for us; it was seeing how these varied landscapes followed up on one another, from one side of the continent to the other. Through my late teens and early twenties especially, but down to the present, too, I’d drive whatever distance was needed to actually come up on, for example, the Painted Hills of eastern Oregon. Or to watch light shimmer on windswept sawgrass prairies in central Florida. Everywhere I went, state promotional materials touted their home ground as “the land of contrasts.” Some had more contrast than others, of course, and in a few, like North Dakota, the contrast was subtle. The country as a whole, however, had contrast enough — in its lava fields, alpine tundra, canyons, and barrier islands — to defeat a lifetime of looking. Further, many of these landforms, depending on where you went or whom you asked, were called — the very same landforms — by different and occasionally quite local names. In that lifetime, you might never get it all straight.

                    It had come to me as a fourteen-year-old reading Moby-Dick, a moral drama set in an intensely physical place, that this seemingly unfettered, nearly unmeasureable American landscape I had become acquainted with (Colorado’s fourteeners, Appalachia’s Carolina bays, Manhattan’s tidal races, a complex landscape, robust with suggestions of freedom, power, and purity) it came to me that this particular landscape had distinctively stamped the long line of American literature, starting with Cooper and Hawthorne and coming up through Twain, Cather, and Steinbeck, through Stegner, Mary Oliver, and Peter Matthiessen, through Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. In fact, it is striking the degree to which the work of so many American writers is informed by sentences of wonder, meditation, and confoundment, of ­intimacy, alienation, and homage, inspired by the features — plowed land, deep woods, mountain streams — of American landscapes. In Inheritance of Night, William Styron writes: “You look out once more at the late summer landscape and the low sorrowful beauty of the tideland streams, turgid and involute and secret and winding through marshes full of small, darting, frightened noises and glistening and dead silent at noon except for a whistle, far off, and a distant rumble on the rails.” 

                Whatever their styles and emphases, many American poets and novelists have recognized that something emotive abides in the land, and that it can be recognized and evoked even if it cannot be thoroughly plumbed. It is inaccessible to the analytic researcher, invisible to the ironist. 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 against a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain. One must wait for the moment when the thing — the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada — ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.