Inscripted Land

During the ten years I  lived in Eastern Oregon while first serving a church in Heppner and then a church in Joseph, I traveled frequently alongside the Columbia river while traveling to and from Portland.  Usually I traveled by car, but occasionally I caught the bus.  When I rode the bus I had the grace-filled privilege to look out and ponder the landscape.

Columns of basalt line the crests of hills like so many battalions of foot soldiers forever awaiting the sound of the trumpet. Deep gullies and canyons have carved their way into these witnesses to an earlier era of geological activity.  Each canyon and valley has its own creek or stream, swelling with the spring runoff and dwindling during the hot, dry summers. Deep gorges split the rock in two, while a forest of oaks and sumac spring up out of the cleavage.  Sagebrush and an occasional juniper gradually make way for Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Sumac, Ash and Poplar.  It is a sculptor and painter’s paradise.

There is a starkness to the stone.  Ravens fly in and out among the basalt palisades.  The wind froths the water into whitecaps, and bows the trees into obeisance at its bidding.  But the stone stands silent -- chiseled and molded, the crystalline product of cooling lava and centuries of winter ice followed by summer baking.  The only thing that matches the cracked cragginess of the land is the dried apple faces of the long-time ranchers and cowpokes who range their cattle amid the cheat grass and sagebrush that cover the hills like a thin velvet cover. The sensuous undulation of the velveteen hills is punctuated periodically by an eruption of crumbling basalt -- ridges of earth-bone breaking the blanket-soft skin of the earth’s surface.

I have traveled through this landscape for the bulk of my life.  Having been raised on the part of the Snake River Plain that abuts the uplift of land known as the Boise Range in Southern Idaho, my earliest memories are shaped by the play of light in the dry Western sky, the undulations of the foothills to the North and the open expanse of desert to the South. Camping in foothills as a Boy Scout, I would often find myself alone while playing a game of Steal the Flag, hiding furtively between bush and pine. I would lie down and listen to the sotto voce whispering of the wind through the needled branches of the trees around me. Or when we camped out in the desert, it was the smell of sagebrush and the gritty crunch of rocks and dirt that punctuate those memories.


This land has shaped and formed me in the deep recesses of my psyche. It is a land through which my ancestors have wandered for at least five generations, perhaps longer. It is called the West, and I claim that peculiar identity known as Western. My own family history is woven into this larger human and ecological history from the time my ancestors left Europe or the European-American cities and towns of the Eastern United States to settle and make a new life in the Oregon and California territories. In every story of my family, there is an encounter with the land, whether ranching on the lower Salmon River in Northern Idaho or in the hills of the East Bay settlements of Castro Valley, Hayward and Livermore, California, or sitting on one of the East Bay hills watching San Francisco burn after the earthquake of 1906. 

As I travel through this landscape, I struggle to find words to describe it.  The land rolls and heaves and thrusts, the water roars and dances in the wind, trees bend and flex, sunlight burnishes the leaves with gold -- and my own body is painted, blown, caressed and tossed about.  I drink the landscape in as if it were a liquid presence.  Nonetheless, with all the wonders of language at my disposal, I am still at a loss to articulate fully the effects of the land upon my being and consciousness.   

Description, and the act of describing, call to mind the involvement of the scribe, the one who takes chisel to rock or quill to paper. Within its metaphorical universe of definition and meaning, the act of describing remains attached to the act of drawing marks, of sketching boundaries and limits, of capturing events, meanings and explanations within the corral of language and line. 

It is in this scriptive process where at least two problems lie. One problem is epistemological: the act of forcing entire catalogs of experience into the narrow confines of scratches in the sand, grooves in the rock, marks on a page.  

The other problem is related: the nature of our relationship as human beings with our environment.  We have struggled to inscribe ourselves -- our lives, our culture, our values -- upon the land. We talk about “making our mark,” and it is often that we do this upon the land itself. As my ancestors traveled West, they were guaranteed land through the Homestead Act of 1862, provided they “improve the land” in some way and built a building. 

This idea of “making your mark” was echoed in the expression, “Go West, young man,” which is a phrase my own ranching grandfather quoted to describe what lured his own parents out from Wisconsin to settle on the Joseph Plain, above the tumbling waters of the River of No Return in Northern Idaho. “Going West” evoked a spirit of exploration and innovation. It was a chance to prove oneself by taking what was imputed to be untouched

land and convert it into something shaped and formed according to human desires and imagination. New things could be tried. Innovation was not only possible, it was often necessary in what came to be called “the Frontier.” When my grandfather invoked the expression of “Go West, young man,” he invariably framed it in terms of progress. Progressive persons left behind the staid conventionality of Eastern village and city life and set out to create a new future with their own bare hands, hard work, ingenuity and imagination. To be a pioneer, in his casting of the story, was also to be progressive. Of course, we retain some of the sense of that venture in our use of the word “pioneering” to describe the latest innovation in technology or social thought. 

How is it, then, that this land of progress has bifurcated into a region containing tremendous political, social and technological innovation as well as staunchly conservative, if not reactionary, political sentiments and practices? How is it that this region gave birth to the personal computer, the environmental movement, the human potential movement and the entertainment industry with all its attendant innovations and inventions but also provides a haven for right wing militia groups such as the Aryan Nations, at times was ruled by the John Birch Society, nurtured Mormon polygamists, and fosters a rabid religious devotion to guns and the NRA?

I have a nagging suspicion that part of the answer lies in the fact that the land inscribes itself upon us in deeply subtle and yet profound ways, most of which we are blithely unaware. This was as true in the late 1800s as it is now. I see this bifurcation expressed in stories of my father’s family, who settled in the San Francisco Bay area of California in the 1840s and the stories of my mother’s family, who settled in Oregon and Idaho in the latter part of the 1800s. Land and weather each presented their own set of circumstances with which my ancestors reckoned. While both sets of ancestors were cattle ranchers, ranching in Northern Idaho differed significantly from ranching in the East Bay hills between Castro Valley and Livermore, California. The verdant hills East of San Francisco provided constant pasturage for cattle whereas the Northern Idaho extremes of weather necessitated moving the cattle each year between the higher elevation summer range and the lower elevation winter range. 

Each place, being a mix of earth and sky, land and weather, presents its own set of challenges and obstacles to overcome, or to submit to. As time goes on, innovations arising from necessity give way to time-proven habits and customs. The need to survive often hinges upon decisions made at crucial moments during the year, and tried-and-true solutions along with the mindset that nurture and preserve those solutions prevail over constant innovation and risk-taking experimentation. 


This is only one example of the interdependent dance between land and humanity. This dance has historical consequences, as well as spiritual implications. Nonetheless, it is hard to fully put into words the profound effects that being embedded in a landscape make upon one's psyche and spirit. with all the wonders of language at my disposal, I am still at a loss to articulate fully the effects of the land upon my being and consciousness.  

This is precisely the quandary of those who would try to marshal the meager resources of religious terminology to describe experiences which lie beyond the confines and comprehension of rational terminology.  Poetry approaches it, but only when it juxtaposes a jumble of images and sensations like a child playing pick-up sticks.  

I sit and watch the sun set red and vermilion upon the river’s dimpled surface.   I simply sit in order to see -- to watch, but more than simply observe.  It is seeing as being.  It is beyond philosophy and before philosophy.  Philosophy and religion emerge as an attempt to describe -- to formulate into words and concepts -- experiences of being.  Experiences which are the property of being a being.  To be and to ponder that state of being -- that is the question of philosophy and religion.

But the land is not simply an abstraction to be pondered. It is a living reality, a reality that exists to be lived in, as a participant, as a presence as embodied and physical as rocks, streams, grasses and trees. 

One day in Heppner, while I was putting the finishing touches upon my doctoral dissertation, I took a walk down to a small park situated at the confluence of Willow and Hinton Creeks which commemorates that flood.  I sat alongside the small triangle of land marking where Hinton Creek flows into Willow creek.  The willows growing alongside the creek were gilded by the late afternoon sun.  A moth fluttered and drunkenly zigzagged along, swerving unexpectedly downward to ricochet off the surface of the water.  Nearly invisible insects flitted busily among the waist-high grasses growing at the water’s edge,  straying occasionally to alight upon the water as well.  Somewhere a fish spied them and feasted.  A kingfisher flew the length of the creek with its staccato call ratcheting the air.  At one point, it spied a fish and feasted as well.

Water, grass, bird and fish were all bounded by the human community – roads, bridge, picnic tables and a pile of yard and construction waste.  I knew many of the people whose automobiles sped them past the jubilant laziness of this spot.  I stood to return to my office and the waiting computer at my desk in order to inscribe the last few black squiggles upon the bounded white flatness of the page.  I stepped out toward what looked like a small tuft of grassy earth hoping to jump across the creek. Placing my foot on what should be solid earth, my boot sank instead into the creek bottom and the rest of my body followed suit.  Pants, shirt, boots and socks suddenly became one with the creek.

Scrambling back to dry land, I removed my drenched boots and socks.  I started to laugh at my situation.  There I was, writing about Deep Ecology and the experience of connection with the natural world, posturing presumptuously with philosophical treatises concerning the imagination, biocentric identification, performance and hermeneutics, ecology and epistemology – and I had just been embraced by this creek with all the gleeful mischief of my two and a half year-old daughter during one of our teasing games.  There was wonderful humor in my position, and it was a humor that the creek and I  improvised together on the spot. Spontaneously.  Chaotically. And with aplomb.  

As I returned home, the sunset fading from vermillion to sapphire, I paused to watch the chimney swifts spin and spiral around the church across the street, preparing to make their spectacularly choreographed descent into the tall brick chimney which has been their night’s abode for years.  How I wish I could fully describe this moment and this experience, that I could depict it in its fullness in brush strokes of pigment and paint upon paper and the effulgence of poetry upon the printed page.  But all attempts fail and fall short of the glory of the moment.  For it is, like all things, beyond and before description.