World Enough and Time

This collection of essays began as a year-long sabbatical project. For some time, I had wanted to write about cultural responses to landscapes–a kind of survey of historical, aesthetic, literary, and personal renditions of what it feels like to be in a particular landscape. One of the joys of academic life, if you can budget for the cut in pay that it necessitates, is that a sabbatical year allows you to step out fully from the day-to-day concerns of campus and classroom, and really travel, both physically and intellectually, into new territory. (The down side is, during the academic year, there is no opportunity to get away–it is impossible to "take vacation time" in the middle of the semester, so any extensive travel is limited to the summer or the Christmas break.) I really wanted to step out and explore, and to see landscapes in all seasons, so the year was a wonderful adventure.

My brother spent several years working for an environmental organization in the Pacific Northwest, devoted to saving old-growth forest ecosystems, so I knew I wanted to think and write about that kind of forest, which I do in "The Kingdom" and "The Scribe in the Woods.".  Though I'd grown up in the woodlands of Southeast Ohio, I really didn't know old growth very well–I mean, trees that are older than the presence of European immigrants on the North American continent, seven or eight hundred years old, even older.  My brother Hudson was a great guide, and took me backpacking into some of the landscapes he'd worked to save, as well as other beautiful wilderness areas. I knew that the great forests of Europe were pretty much gone by the time immigrants began colonizing the Americas; in the British Isles, for example, the deforestation had been going on for literally thousands of years. As I did some serious reading for this project, I realized that the great, intact tracts of land in the northwest were not the only places I'd need to visit. It was time to go home to Ohio and hike in a tiny section of old growth  that was owned by the very university where I'd studied as an undergraduate–a forest now threatened by coal mining. Trees and forests have been such potent symbols for so many cultures, so I wanted to think about some of the writers, through time, who have used them suggestively, movingly. My research included thinking about some of these important texts, from poems in Old English to essays by European explorers in what they called then "the new world." 

Landscape (Land Shape) in Art and Literature

Literary responses to landscape–poems and essays–really was just the start.  That's the language-based attempt at dialogue or conversation–a person turning to words-as-art to express the great complex of feeling that wells up when one loses one's self, or at least part of the self, in a powerful place. The sublime may leave you breathless for awhile, but for many people, the return to language comes rather quickly. I think often that it's a form of call and response–we feel called to, though nonverbally, by the richness and wonder of desert or forest or sea, and so pretty soon we need to try to answer back. That's the basis of the lyric impulse, as I understand it. Answering back to whatever has called to us.

I also wanted to think about art that had become part of a landscape–ancient installations of paintings or pictographs that, centuries or millennia after their composition, remain potent and present in the place. The rock art of the desert southwest was an obvious choice, and I was able to travel off season to a variety of places, from southern California to Arizona, frequently being alone with the carved or painted faces of stone left by the pre-colonial inhabitants of these places. This meant, sometimes, traveling through snow or a lot of  mud to get to places that are more accessible in summer; but I had the opportunity to experience them in solitude, in quiet, which deeply enhanced that sense of lyric call and response I've been after. Of course, I wasn't always alone–friends and family sometimes joined me, or I joined other hikers I'd meet on the way–but often I was off the grid, by myself, and that kind of experience made me feel much more present–an aesthetic participant in whatever the art still had to say. When an April snowstorm hit northeastern Arizona, it drove nearly all the other visitors away, cancelling the ranger-led tour into the Betatakin ruins, and so I basically holed up in my tent for a day, to wait it out. The next morning was a bright, clear day, and the few of us left in the campground–there was a guy who'd slept in his car and a couple with a camper–headed down into the canyon, which was full of the braids and mare's tails of meltwater, as well as patches of ice glistening on the ancient pathways. 

The next obvious place to go was southern France, to see the famous Paleolithic cave paintings . Many of these are open to the public, but I wanted to visit Chauvet, the site of the oldest known cave art in the world. I'd read about these incredible paintings–lions, mammoths, horses, etc.–when the cave was first discovered in the 1990s, and I thought, if only I could get there, I'd be in one of the rarest aesthetically-altered places on earth. Here's where my study of French finally proved essential, and with the generosity and help of several people–from a colleague in the French department at my university to the scholars who oversee research in various of these caves, I got that chance. And I visited not only Chauvet, which still smelled like charcoal, more than thirty thousand years after the soot was used in drawing some of the figures in the deepest chambers, but a few others, too, that I would never have been able to visit as a typical tourist. In the company of scholars, I was breathing in those little atoms of carbon, released from trees cut in the Pleistocene.

Breathing, Breathlessly

Working on the essays of this book, one after another, was like the constant exhalation of all that I'd taken deep into the lungs. I hope, in describing these experiences and shaping these thoughts about them, I have been able to serve as a kind of traveling companion, bringing readers along with me.