Re-inhabiting Our Landscape
…and the romance of place
I was driving down a local expressway recently, talking with a friend on my cell phone. Heading east, traffic was light in the early hours of a spring evening here in Michigan, the trees just coming into flower and leaf, the sun going down behind me. For a long stretch, office buildings of various kinds lined the expressway. All were basically square, blocky buildings, about four to six stories high, surrounded by parking lots. Predictable, minimalist landscaping surrounded them. At highway speed, I’d pass several of these complexes every few seconds.
As that was happening I described to my friend on the other end of the cell phone connection another driving experience, this one in England, with my wife and younger daughter taking a rented car down the narrow, two-lane roads that took us between various sites of historic and archeological interest. Along the way were charmed by the fact that every half mile or so, it seemed we’d pass a sign with a place name. There would be a cluster of houses, sometimes only a few, sometimes a place of business. Sometimes not.
I just looked at some maps online to verify this recollection. We’d landed in Bristol and drove to Glastonbury, site of the famous Chalice Well and Glastonbury Tor, Glastonbury is also associated with the fabled Avalon of Arthurian legend. After a few days there we headed east to see the stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge. Reviewing the online maps, sure enough, if I zoomed in to the scale where the map showed 2000 feet as the base distance interval, I saw that yes, there are quite often named localities, little villages spaced at only about 2000 feet apart. 2000 feet is 0.37 miles, so, think of it as a bit less than a half a mile between them. On the online map I saw place names like Hayat, Oxbridge, West Pennard, Sticklinch. All of these appear to be spaced a mere few thousand feet or so from the next.
Feet, you understand. That’s a whole different scale than miles.
And when I reflected on this afterward, I realized these places were probably named at a time when most of the travel occurring between them was on foot. It makes sense if you’re traveling on foot to be operating on the scale of a foot as a unit of measurement. Which means you’re going slower. More likely to notice things. More likely to be on intimate terms with the landscape. That pace and that scale make for a whole different way to inhabit a place. Going slower makes things bigger. It’s a different level of magnification. At that level we see things not visible at larger scales.
Of course, I was describing this English driving experience via cell phone while traveling through a thoroughly engineered modern landscape at 70 miles per hour. At that speed, in the time it has taken to read just this far in this essay, one might easily have passed through a half dozen or so of such quaint little villages. Whoosh!
Still on the phone and another few miles down the road, I continue seeing all these Michigan buildings going by — buildings where days are spent, fortunes made and lost, disappointments, triumphs, good news and bad, places of modern life and modern death and destiny. Clinics, advertising firms, insurance, finance, logistics. “Professionals.” And as the pavement passed in a blur beneath me, I said: “We live in an uninhabited landscape.”
I hope that doesn’t sound harsh. But if I’d been standing on the side of the road as I spoke those words, the noise from the tires on the pavement would have made a sound like a very long piece of paper being torn, played through a loudspeaker. Skkkkkkkkchhhhhhhshhhh! Perfectly normal.
Most of us probably don’t think about the noise we’re making as we cruise the expressways, but that’s one reason people prefer not to live near them if they can find an alternative.
And yes, it’s probably a bit of an exaggeration to call such a landscape ‘uninhabited.’ Aren’t there a handful of cars still in the parking lots out there, and homes and neighborhoods in subdivisions beyond? But at 70 miles per hour it certainly felt uninhabited. And I imagine if I took an exit and pulled into one of those parking lots, it still would feel mostly uninhabited. And I think if I followed one of the people who spend their days in such buildings to their home neighborhoods and surveyed the blue light flashing on the curtains of the windows of apartments and living rooms — TVs, personal computers, and cell phone screens replacing the other computer screens people use at work — it would still seem mostly uninhabited.
Yes, people are still “here.” We haven’t left the planet. It’s just become increasingly abstract. Although, it’s worth remembering that even here when we’re indoors we are surrounded by nothing but products of the Earth: the gypsum in your drywall left a hole where it was mined. The wood in the framing our homes left a hole in the forests somewhere from which the trees were taken. And so on down the list: the copper in the plumbing and wiring, the petroleum that was polymerized into carpeting, the sand that went into the glass. Even the rare metals that make our screens and electronics work. Yep, they’re Earth. But in some important ways we’re really not connecting with our planetary partner in all of this. The Earth is present at all times — omnipresent, really — funny how easy it can be to lose sight of her. A mountain and a mine are not the same thing.
The cell phone conversation continued as I drove on with the quiet air of a warm April evening hitting the auto glass with hurricane speed, thanks to the teams of engineers who designed the car and made that possible. And I mentioned to my friend something I’d read in a book she’d given me by David Abram. It was about a Native American tribe in the desert southwest and how they had names for all kinds of places: little ridges, little hollows, a particular rock that served as a landmark, a place known for an injury, stoke of luck, or unusual event that had befallen someone there, names of places where certain spirits came, or animals. Places where food plants could be found. I’m making up some these examples but this was the gist of it. Again, as in historic Great Britain but on a yet finer scale of resolution, this is an intact culture that has long inhabited the land by walking it, and as long as such cultures persist, places will gather names and associations, and the names will often stick. It’s just easier to notice things and be in relationship with a place at lower speeds, and to really be present.
As children we know places by feel. Children find little places outdoors if they are allowed to settle into, explore and really inhabit a place. There is indigenous wisdom in every small child. They discover and build places of refuge, places of interest. They also notice when places that don’t feel good. Especially when we are very young, as children we are in touch with our worlds, and we know that we open the world and even space itself just by occupying it. I’m reminded of this once again with my granddaughter. It’s interesting when children invite us into their “little worlds” to discover how big those worlds really are.
Don’t let their size fool you: Children are magnifiers. Reminds me a bit of the tiny glass spheres I used to make, a children’s project from an old Scientific American book. You’d make a microscope by melting a piece of glass tubing and then drawing it into a fine filament, then feeding the filament back into the flame to to make a tiny bead much smaller than a BB. The smaller the bead, the higher the magnification. By mounting such a simple little lens in a piece of aluminum sheet metal, I could see the cell structure of plants. Tiny lenses can greatly expand our range of vision. We just have to get close.
Planet Earth, likewise: viewed on a cosmic scale, it’s a tiny bead through which we can see things, maybe the whole universe. If we get close enough.
Years ago while walking through the woods with a friend, he stopped and gently placed his hand on the trunk of a very large old oak tree and said, “They miss us.”
Strange how I’ve thought about this for years, but suddenly I am not sure if he was making an observation of his own or translating for my benefit what the tree was telling him. Either way, I think he was getting close.
So in the last couple days, after having that cell phone conversation about connection with place while zooming anonymously past everything and everyone in it, I’ve been thinking: What happens when we ignore our lover, when we zip past people like they aren’t there? What happens to a relationship of any kind when we stop listening, sharing, responding, and offering the gift of our presence and attention? What happens to a relationship when we treat our friend or partner as either exploitable or irrelevant? What happens when we’re not close anymore? Don’t those kinds of things tend to erode relationship? So wouldn’t that apply to the Earth?
Do the trees really miss us? Does the sky want more of our attention? Are the weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement there to trying to remind us of something?
And now here in the Northern Hemisphere it’s spring, one of the many moods of Earth. Here she is in all her loveliness and generosity, her humor, and the fierceness of her love. Maybe it’s time to slow down a little and pay attention to her.