|
|
|
Introduction
(continued)
In my early twenties I came upon
Erwin Raisz’s hand-drawn maps of the continental United States,
done while he was teaching at Harvard in the 1930s and 40s, a kind of
cartography that bordered on fine art. His creations are distinguished
by a level of detail that is almost bewildering, by an absence of
roads, and by a variety of typefaces (including his own hand-printed
letters) that tend to disappear into the maps’ shaded contours,
enhancing the sense that you’re looking at a document in which
the authority of the place, the physical eminence of it, overwhelms all
else. The one I have in hand now, drawn in 1941, was issued in a
revised edition in 1965, a few years before I purchased it. It’s
called Landforms of the Northwestern States and includes Washington,
Oregon, Idaho, and the mountains of western Montana. It measures about
three feet by two. Its white paper is soiled from handling and worn
through at its creases from refolding. These flaws, however, only
intensify for me a sense that Raisz’s depiction is of a fabled
land, a place that, like a palimpsest, lies invisible beneath all the
commercial roadmaps I’ve used over the years.
It would take hours, and something
akin to insatiable curiosity, for someone to pore over each of the
map’s revealing nib strokes. (Some of its features — the
drainage of the Wounded Doe River in Idaho, or Mission Bottom, situated
below the Eola Hills in western Oregon — are best brought to life
with a magnifying glass and, overall, the task of full comprehension is
nearly impossible without some sort of imposed grid, to keep one from
getting lost in the pen-and-ink work.) The map suggests a novel, though
it has neither narrator nor time line. Start your examination anywhere
and you are soon impressed by how neatly all the pieces come together,
the almost eerie continuity of it all. Raisz’s approach to
landscape here is of a fit with J. B. Jackson’s writing about
America’s vernacular landscape. Raisz illustrated and Jackson, a
cultural geographer in New Mexico, wrote with affection for the
unpretentious.
Raisz employs two sorts of
language on his Northwest map, colloquial and formal. In an unnamed
valley east of Poker Jim Ridge in central Oregon, he uses the
generalized descriptive “rolling sagebrush land, low
relief.” In eastern Washington, he labels an immensity of
thousands of square miles “Channeled Scablands,” a
technical term geographers use to describe a singular landform, one
created over several centuries at the end of the last ice age, when a
glacial lake the size of Lake Huron repeatedly formed in Montana only
to burst its western ice dams and roar again across southeastern
Washington, creating a scoured landscape and deepening a gorge in the
Cascade Mountains through which the Columbia still flows to the Pacific.
Raisz’s language
pulls one as deeply into his maps as his graphics, which seem such a
mysterious form of storytelling. There is no end to the allure of the
names he placed on this particular map — the Horse Heaven Hills,
Disgrace Creek, Craters of the Moon. Each is a unique place though, not
a generic entity. Looking to other Raisz maps, I would wonder what a
“scalded flat” might be, or a “pimple mound.”
And what about a “pencil bluff,” an “eyebrow
hill”? Some of these expressions I couldn’t find in any
book I consulted, though people somewhere probably used these words
every day to designate a feature that oriented them in space, like
“hole,” “basin,” “fork,” or
“meadow.” This was a fundamental language. Something or
other had a hole in it, or it split apart like the tines of a fork, or
it looked like somebody’s eyebrow. Like Jim Kari’s
Deni‘ina map, the language on Raisz’s maps radiates a sense
of belonging.
Raisz’s maps lack
the high resolution, scale, color, and specificity of modern U.S.
Geological Survey quadrangles, but they are intimate and neighborly
where the latter are cool and analytic. They are in harmony with the
unprecedented views humans first experienced in the initial decades of
the Age of Flight, when pilots navigated by looking at the ground
below, when they became the first of us to take in entire creek
drainages at a glance, when, like Beryl Markham and St-Exupéry,
they were dazzled by the scope of what they could see, by the detail in
it, not yet obscured by speed, greater altitude, and fouled air.
The maps, then, I began
studying as a child, the country I started driving through as a young
man — a maze of winding, unpaved roads in the Smoky Mountains,
the redrock canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, the farmlands of
the San Joaquin Valley, with their windbreaks of lombardy poplars
— and, finally, the local speech that might be overheard in rural
cafés or elicited by a traveler seeking directions: all this
combined to prompt questions about what, in the end, one could really
know about the larger home land. What was the difference between a cove
and a hollow to West Virginians? How many types of flats were there in
the West — creosote flats, gumbo flats, antelope flats, tidal
flats? Would trying to sidle through terrain vague (the narrow space
between two city buildings) tell you something about the stark nature
of a city, in the same way squeezing through a slot canyon in Utah
would be revealing about the Colorado Plateau? And what was a ronde (as
in Grande Ronde, Oregon), a yazoo (Yazoo, Mississippi), a vega (Las
Vegas, Nevada)?
One windy day after a week of
rain I was driving east across the Llano Estacado in panhandle Texas
with a local man. He said, “Look yonder at them white caps in the
bar ditch,” and I caught a sense of the open ocean on the Staked
Plain of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. When I traveled to
eastern Washington late one summer to see for the first time the
unbroken expanse of wheat growing on low, rolling land there, a stretch
of loess hills local people call the Palouse, it seemed an erotic
landscape to me. What would a child’s erotic landscape be?
During a long period of field
research that brought me into regular contact with wild animals on
their remote home grounds, and after decades of living in a place where
wild animals from deer mice and dusky shrews to Roosevelt elk and black
bear are common, I’ve wondered what they see that we miss. Or
what we so frequently miss because we are impatient and cursory. The
human eye is sensitive to a narrow range of electromagnetic energy; and
we’re predisposed to divide the whole of a landscape into objects
of a certain size and limit — a gulch, a woodlot, a pond. Much
that would be arresting to an animal’s eye is not apparent to us.
How is the land we see divided and composed according to the way we
see? What draws our attention?
It’s hard to see deeply into a
landscape that, at first glance, appears to be without distinction
— the mixed woods monotony of a New England hillside, for
example. After a patient and close look, however, one might
nevertheless be able to pick out clusters of the same species of tree
emerging from that visual chaos. Logic suggests some quality of the
soil favors the presence of this species over others in that particular
place — a trace mineral or marginally better drainage. It’s
just these slight variations in the chemistry and texture of the soil,
in fact, that give a particular stretch of woods its distinctive
regional look, that allow someone to say with authority,
“That’s a Berkshire hillside.”
The subtly discontinuous
nature of a hillside forest or a prairie grassland is often due to the
presence of a catena. When bedrock begins to disintegrate — an
early stage in the development of soils — its homogenous raw
materials are affected differently by such things as drainage patterns,
contours, and the degree of the slope on which they rest. The debris
produced within a limited area by a parent rock eventually becomes a
closely associated set of soils, each one taking on an individual
identity as it matures. A trained eye infers the existence of such a
catena — a drift of adjacent sibling soils — from the
color, general health, and spacing of different species of trees and
grasses across a hillside.
Many landscape features
that initially seem identical in our eyes to landforms we’ve seen
elsewhere turn out, on close examination, to be unique to a place. In
part this accounts for the large number of differing regional terms
used for similar landforms, many of which have never been written down.
And it helps explain why a creek in Wyoming is not the same thing as a
creek in Maine, and why there is such a large family of dunes, from
medanos to lunettes. If you are hiking in northwestern New Mexico,
someone local might guide you through a tsegi. Tse is the Navajo word
for rock, and tsegi the generic term for canyon. Similarly, an
Iñupiaq hunter in Alaska might guide you through a landscape of
pinut (pingos) on the coastal plain or nunatat (nunataks) in the Brooks
Range, Iñupiaq terms familiar in their anglicized form to many
Alaskans. While some regional non-English terms have come into
widespread use — bayou (Choctaw), esker (Gaelic), arête
(French), cripple (Dutch), playa (Spanish) — other regionalisms
such as delmarva bay and sasset remain opaque to an outsider. How a
particular culture or subculture divides and names the features of its
homescape, and the way it perceives how one thing grades into another
— when exactly a draw becomes a gulch or a tarn a lake — is
in the end peculiar to that culture. Thus, it’s hard to be
certain about what someone else’s word for something might be. Or
even what that word might mean.
In “Descriptive
Topographic Terms of Spanish America,” an article that appeared
in the September 1896 issue of National Geographic, Robert T. Long
laments a lack of English-language descriptive terms for land features
in the Southwest, offering his praise for the far greater range of
Spanish terms with which he had become familiar. In How the Canyon
Became Grand, Stephen Pyne traces the evolution of the notion of a
“grand” canyon on the Colorado River, starting with the
first Spanish perception of it as no more than a huge, inconvenient
ditch, thwarting the advance of explorers not at all familiar with a
cañón on this scale. In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac
McCarthy’s riveting evocation of the west Texas borderland
through which he has his protagonists moving is so strong it nearly
eclipses the presence of the two riders. In each of these three works,
one is aware of the intensity of the author’s connection to a
particular region, and of the great array of terms we use to locate
ourselves in such potentially effacing landscapes. We employ domestic
animals (hogback ridge), domestic equipment (kettle moraine), food
(basket-of-eggs relief), furniture (looking-glass prairie), clothing
(the aprons of a bajada), and, extensively, ourselves: a neck of land,
an arm of the sea, rock nipples, the toe of a slope, the mouth of a
river, a finger drift, the shoulder of a road. We do this
intentionally, to make what is separate from us a part of where we are.
We put a geometry to the land — backcountry, front range, high
desert — and pick out patterns in it: pool and riffle, swale and
rise, basin and range. We make it remote (north forty), vivid (birdfoot
delta), and humorous (detroit riprap).
It is a language that keeps us from slipping off into abstract space.
The pockings mountain sheep
leave behind when they nose snow aside to get at buried grass are
called feeding craters. When a rainbow trout strikes a mayfly on the
placid surface of a creek, the departing ripples mark a fish strike.
These things are too ephemeral to be taken for landforms or waterforms.
For the scorched earth that forest fires leave behind, however, we have
a word: brûlé. When a meandering river cuts through a
point bar and leaves behind a meander scar, and the scar fills with
water, we call it an oxbow lake. We try to slow and steady the temporal
and spatial scales of the Earth’s dynamic surface, to have it
conform more closely with our own scale of living and understanding.
The language we employ
to say what we’re looking at or to recall what we’ve seen,
for many English speakers, is now collapsing toward an attenuated list
of almost nondescript words — valley, lake, mountain. Used along
with “like a,” these words now stand in for glade, tank,
and escarpment. Most of us today are more aware of brown lands than
wetlands, the former an expanding urban habitat, the latter a shrinking
natural one. Fewer of the people who once made up the country’s
farming cultures are now around to explain what an envelope field is.
The old-time loggers have taken the cowfaced slopes with them into
retirement. And the jackass miners of the Mojave are no longer around
to tell us how an adit differs from an aven. At a time when the
country’s landscapes are increasingly treated as commodities,
subjected to a debate over their relative and intrinsic worth, and when
city planners, land conservators, real estate developers, and
indigenous title holders square off every day over the fate of one
place or another, this can’t be good.
Once, on the upper boro river
in botswana, traveling in dugout canoes with local tribesmen, I went
ashore with ten or twelve others to rest in the shade of acacia trees
during the heat of the day. The men conversed quietly in Tswana. The
sound of the language was so beautiful in my ear I turned on a portable
tape recorder so I could listen to it again in the years ahead, or
maybe play it one day for Aranda people in Australia, whose language I
also like to hear, the run of it, mellifluous, like birdsong.
We have a shapely
language, American English. A polyglot speech, grown up from a score of
European, African, and Asian immigrant tongues, and complexly veined
with hundreds of expressions native to the places we now occupy —
Uto-Aztecan, Eyak-Athabaskan, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Caddoan, and
Salishan. We have named the things we’ve picked out on the land,
and we’ve held on to the names to make ourselves abiding and
real, to enable us to resist the appeal of make-believe lands, hawked
daily as anodynes by opportunists, whose many schemes for wealth hinge
on our loss of memory, the anxiety of our alienation, our hunger after
substance.
In the pages that
follow, a community of writers has set down definitions for landscape
terms and terms for the forms that water takes, each according to his
or her own sense of what’s right, what’s important to know.
The definitions have been reviewed for accuracy by professional
geographers, but the writers’ intent was not to be exhaustive,
let alone definitive. In concert with each other, they wanted to
suggest the breadth and depth of a language many of us still seek to
use purposefully every day. Their intent was to celebrate and inform,
and to point us toward the great body of work which they perused in
their research and which, along with a life experience of their own,
they brought into play to craft what they had to say.
It was my privilege, and
that of Debra Gwartney, the managing editor, to have worked to bring
their conception to these pages.
Barry Lopez
McKenzie River, Oregon
|
|