Place
Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
“Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.”
Years ago I taught a course on representations of the natural world in literature. We read Thoreau and Muir, talked about Dickinson’s birds and Cather’s desert sunsets and Hemingway’s “hills like white elephants.” The students wrote about the flora and fauna they associated with their childhoods; some wrote about how little of it there was outside an apartment window in Trenton.
One day I asked the students to write instructions for a stranger that might guide them from a place on campus to a place in town using only natural landmarks. For some it was the most difficult assignment of the semester. They knew where to turn at the Sunoco station, or the MacDonald’s, or at the old yellow clapboard house. But they were hard pressed to remember where you might be navigating what was once a creek bed, or where a dogwood was in bloom this time of year, or where one might see forsythia blooming in a vacant lot. We were just outside Trenton, capital of the “Garden State.” The students had taken the class because they were earth keepers, most of them, and most wanted to be teachers. The conversation that followed that exercise was one of the most sober and sobering of our few months together. They realized—and I did—how seldom we even referred to the life forms around us, let alone getting to know them more intimately. So much had, as Berry put it, “obscured the place we were in.”
Years later I still think of those conversations. I thought of them yesterday as I pointed out to a seven-year-old, who asked how far it was to school, that we were going by a Trader Joe’s with which she was familiar. Oh, she said. Now she knew about how long the trip would take. But I looked at a flaming maple and wished I’d pointed that out, instead.
Or that if she looked to the right when we reached the intersection, she could see the Sierras and know we were going north.