. . . .for beauty is God's
handwriting." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first time I flew to England, I woke up from a troubled
airplane sleep and looked out the plane’s porthole. We were over Ireland, the
pilot announced, still pretty high but beginning to descend. I was struck
immediately by the clarity of definition of the fields below. I don’t mean that
they were in some way better focused then what I was accustomed to seeing from
the air in the USA; I mean that their edges were sharp and definite.
Ireland—and England too, once we reached it—was a mosaic, or an opaque green
stained glass window, its leading starkly apparent from the air. I realized
that what I could see was a long history of ownership, of human occupancy. The
outlines of a narrative were deeply incised, and long maintained, on this
earth. Later, when I walked there, I could see the details of it, but not the
underlying form, the skeleton. All of it was symptomatic of a social and a
physical history, one that had been written and rewritten time out of mind, so
many times it would be an archeologist’s lifework to resurrect even a fragment
of the rough drafts.
An aerial view of a typical landscape in the USA—no matter
how complex the natural features may be—has softer margins; parts of the
midwest and south appear almost Impressionistic when seen from the sky. This is
partly because we, the fence-building Anglos, have occupied these surfaces for
a far shorter time than our ancestors across the pond have lived on theirs. We
have fought plenty of battles over ownership, but have had less time to build
stark monuments to what we have won, or stolen, and held onto. Stone fences may
or may not make good neighbors, but in any case we employ them less than our counterparts
in the UK. Our technologies of demarcation are more fluid than theirs; we
expect, I suppose, to live on our land for a shorter time, generationally
speaking. A barbed wire fence is effective, but impermanent, as any rancher
will testify. And a barbed wire fence is almost invisible from the air.
Nevertheless, we have written, and are writing, our story on
the landscape too. The perception that our story is newer than England’s or
Ireland’s is an illusion precisely to the extent that it is an extension of
theirs, a continuation of it, and so it continues to occlude and deny other
narratives that American earth has recorded from millennia of the stories of
societies, technologies, demarcations that were here long before us. But the
story that we read from the air is undeniable: field, rangeland, circular track
of a wheeled irrigation system, yes; but also mounded earth of another people’s epos.
In the agricultural region where I grew up, there were farms
whose fields had of necessity to accommodate remnants of so-called “Mound Builder”
culture: mysterious hillocks on flat floodplains where no such hillocks should
be. From the air, these mounds appear as nodes around which the poem of the
plow divides itself. The effort to bulldoze them away would be great, but I
never heard anyone even speculate about that possibility. Though the mounds
were not burial barrows, they were monuments to the dead. We were capable of
razing monuments to the dead: our history is full of such razing. But why go
out of your way to do it? Better to plow around it. The history that is written
in the earth belongs more to the dead than it belongs to us.
About a mile from our house, on the adjoining farm, there
was a knoll in the middle of a large field; an ancient pine grew from its
center, and that tree was surrounded by a dense grove of smaller trees and
brush. The explorer brave enough to penetrate that hedge would find, at the
foot of the pine, an old graveyard; long untended, its stones were in every
possible stage of disorder and decay, but it remained untouched by generations
of farmers who doubtless “needed” the land. When I was in my teens, I hiked
there two or three times a year. There was an atmosphere of sacred places
there, which presented itself even to the firm agnostic I was in the process of
becoming. That aura did not belong to the gravestones, or not to them only: it
arose from the whole conjunction of the human and natural alphabets that
collided there: eroded stone, decaying pine, plowed field with furrows that
swerved around the place where I stood. It would, I suppose, have made an
orderly and beautiful effect from the air, a juxtaposition of textures what
would draw a hawk’s eye immediately toward the grove’s central tree. I was
often greeted by red-tailed hawks as I approached the graveyard; they roosted
in the ancient pine, and would rise up at my approach resentfully, drawing
their hawk mandalas in the sky around me as I plunged into the grove.
In Ohio I once visited an effigy mound made in the shape of
a hawk, broadcasting its imperious form skyward. There are many such mounds in
the Ohio Valley, including an enormous effigy mound in the shape of a snake,
holding an egg in its mouth. The mound builders, whoever they were, had
intentions of which we know nothing, but the earth retains the stories they
wrote. Hawk, snake, alligator: these characters inhabited a people’s
spirit—their minds, their wishes, their dreams, their nightmares. Were they
writing messages to their gods, or to aliens in fiery spaceships circling in
the sky? Nobody knows. I prefer to think that the story they wrote in earth is simply that:
their story, incised in the most permanent medium they knew, written for no sky
tourists but for themselves and for the generations to come.
Mostly what we write on the earth we write by accident, by which I mean that, intent on a mundane task we contribute something without thinking about it to the narrative: the
script of a plowed field, the tracery of a highway system, hole dug in the back
field for a septic tank. No matter: the story is written, intended or not. The
future will read it, and will judge it for what it is. All the circles I made
decades ago, riding my uncle’s old John Deere, dragging a harrow behind me, are
still there in the earth I moved, however occluded by the circles made before
and after me by others. The mark remains, like a giant fingerprint. And
everywhere we turn, the earth is marked, its poem still being written.
