Our week in Lone Pine was spent writing. This opportunity to focus so deeply on the written word, than speak with Paul about our thoughts and ideas, was wonderful. On our last night, we shared our longest piece to the group. Here is my first epiphany:
Epiphany #1
We are attracted to topography. Dramatic peaks and vast canyons steal our gaze and direct our cameras as we drive or hike throughout the West. Perhaps this attraction lies in our inability to see the effect of our own hand on these landscapes. It is the level lands we have tried to master. On these desolate flatlands we try to mimic the creations of the earth – building infrastructure where we perceive none, chasing our surveyors scopes with asphalt trucks and backhoes.
I sit on a ledge above a lake high up in the Sierra-Nevada of Southern California. My feet hang over thirty feet of empty air and my heart races as I survey the landscape below me. From this vantage point I can see for miles, I can hear the quiet. Dropping away below me are scree-laden slopes, lake basins and trees. Above me, ridgeline, landslide chutes, the sky. My lungs feel tight both from the altitude and the knowledge that one false step will send me careening down to meet the boulders hundreds of feet below. I slowly become accustomed to the sight and my eye is drawn up, from where each throaty gully deposits her mouthful of gravel and dirt, to the sky. I follow the jagged serration of the ridgeline until it becomes imperceptible in the blue depths beyond. These lines for the architecture of this place – the sand and rock an eternal foundation on which trees and the trail of a falcons flight act as scaffolding to the ceiling of blue. These lines for my understanding of this place – the contours of the skyline, my rooftops and chimneys decorated by a wallpaper of rock columns. These lines converge to create a topography unknowable to the cement and steel of man.
Half a state away, the landscape tells a different story. A map of Reno and the surrounding area reveals a peculiar spectacle. A checkerboard overlays the city and nearby countryside. Little quarter mile squares dot the page like tiles on a kitchen floor. Over the checkerboard lies a spider web of crisscrossing, zigzagging lines. But as I walk away from Reno, these squares and cobwebs do not appear to me on the land. It stretches out in front of me as far as the eye can see, and obstacles only arise in the form of mountains or the blazing afternoon sun that burns my skin and forces an averted gaze. My only clue as to another hand at work is precisely that which keeps me moving – the road. It cuts like a scar across the great basin. A map of Reno is dominated by lines of our own fabrication. The checkerboard – an alternation between private and public land ownership, imaginary lines that cannot be seen on the land itself. The web of interwoven lines that tightens and multiplies to a point of confusion as it nears Reno – the system of roads and highways we’ve built to facilitate our movement between and beyond our life-sized board game. Even the few naturally occurring lines we’ve left compelled to claim, so put hash marks and unnaturally arranged arms across rivers to denote our dams and irrigation canals, then run lines parallel to them which serve as the railroad. Our townships and allotments divide the landscape, and we place our state lines across countryside that sometimes follows geographic features, but often doesn’t. Rather than a blueprint of connected, interdependent lines and systems to attach our world to Cronon’s “first nature,” our map looks like an etch-a-sketch left in a little boy’s backpack as he scampers, pauses, winds and cartwheels his way home from school. Not so for Mother Nature, earth’s grand engineer. Her lines follow and build upon one another.
From high up on my vantage point in the Eastern Sierra, the distant layers of mountain ranges give contour and dimension to the landscape. Time and again, we try to manipulate this masterpiece to fit our model of efficiency, order and ownership. But Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with. Each landslide, earthquake and flood is not a natural disaster but a natural renovation, a remodeling of an already well-crafted landscape. Typically a generous landlord, the problems arise when we try to manipulate nature. When we overuse a resource, Mother Nature grounds us. When we become overconfident in our design, she strips us of our privileges and reminds us that her hand, not ours, put this world together. Each ridgeline, creekbed and hilltop was placed deliberately.
Our maps help us move from one place to another in this geometric, parceled existence we’ve carved out for ourselves. But these maps don’t tell the whole story. They reflect only the two-dimensionality of a world that daily confounds us with its three dimensions. Hold a map flat and you strip the world of the character bestowed by a force more creative, more meticulous than man. Instead, climb a mountain, a high one so that man’s lines blend imperceptibly and irrelevantly against those crafted so studiously by Mother Nature.
Atop my vantage point, I inspect the convergence and divergence she has made and realize that each line does not lead to a destination, but to another line, another drainage, another mountain range until my gaze is lost in the infinite blue beyond the horizon. Standing up, I briefly let my eyes drift once more, then follow the trail down.
