“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.”
Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space
“All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”
Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It and Other stories
We moved to the farm 20 some years ago from our home in one of the nicer sections of the city. Our stated reasons were practical: a son needing space to run and ill-suited to do so in the city streets due to a hearing impairment; parents needing routine daily assistance and living close by the farm. But I confess that deep inside where the earliest memories reside, I was desirous of the move for other reasons despite the resulting commute it would occasion as I still worked in the city then.
For I grew up in the West and am a creature of its landscape as only a westerner can be. Not the West crowned by the cloistered sky prevailing here in the Puget Sound region, but the West that lies east of the Cascade Mountains: the West of the semi-arid, expansive basalt plateau laid down by eons of volcanic eruptions lying under skies fully as wide as an uninterrupted horizon allows; the West known only to the plainsman. Life under those western skies is an unending lesson in humility, for nothing can stand up to their drama or to their power – not the landscape nor the life-giving river-god which meanders through its vastness; certainly not something as fragile and as puny as humanity. But the human spirit can feed from those western skies, as mine did; the human spirit can test its potential there, if one is but willing to try.
So our move to the farm was my personal feint at a return to the land – not to the land of my childhood for one cannot go back in time, and I would have little wish to do so were it possible, but to a living, breathing ecosystem which includes humanity as a constituent element. I was happy to leave the city, to leave a place where humanity dominates and is the pseudo-lord of all it can see in every direction it looks. For, if nothing else, my time under those western skies taught me that humanity is but one species among many, all of whom must cooperate to ensure the long-term success of that misunderstood anomaly we have labelled ‘life’. This is a lesson whose impact is much improved when the student is surrounded by a vastness too large to be fully comprehended, a vastness far bigger than any town or city, a vastness capable of swallowing entire towns and cities and rendering them a mere footprint upon the land.
But when we first came to the farm to live, my passion was misplaced for I saw the farm as my home, a mere possession over which Helen and I had come to rule for a time. I was never foolish enough to want to make it over entirely in our image for I haven’t the interest or the ability to attempt such a thing, but I wasn’t cognizant then of just how fragile our hold upon the land truly is. We humans speak of “our home” or “our property” or “our farm” or “our estate” as if to imply that our temporary dominion is really permanent and forever. I admit to seeing this farm initially in that way – until I was taught otherwise by its resident plants, birds and animals, by the myriad varieties of wind and weather which have blessed and cursed the farm by turns, and by the vagaries of circumstance and time.
I have come to realize that ours is a species-specific form of ownership. Vis-a-vis all other human beings, Helen’s and my possession of the land is said to be in fee simple, a legal status which means that other humans must pay our heirs for the privilege of supplanting our right to be the sole human residents of this farm. With respect to all other forms of life contemporaneously dwelling upon this land, we are simply two additional temporary residents in a shared community of life.
For this farm recognizes no ruler and understands nothing of dominion or empire; these are mere human conceits, mere human schemes. This farm is our host, and each living thing resident here is but one guest among many; this land is our god, and each living thing resident here is merely a single subject lost within an entire host of supplicants.
It is the small gods resident here who taught me my place in the order of being present upon this land I define as ‘my farm’. Each resident small god has a distinctive voice to use in offering its prayers and lessons: the mutterings of the small, intermittent brooks; the raucous cries of crows and blue jays and the joyous melodies of songbirds; the subtle rustlings of long grasses; the patient soughing of pines in any breeze and the urgent whispers of maples and alders and other trees in a storm; the choruses of frogs soon to break out in anticipation of spring; the muted mysterious whisperings from unknown and unknowable sources lying deep within the alders carpeting the hillside behind our house; the nearly muted tympani of deer cautiously stepping through fields and forest or the loud flash of white tails as they bound from perceived danger. Only in the relative quietude that a space as large as this farm can provide are the voices of such small gods likely to be heard. Within this space, each of them insists upon speaking out in the perennial hope that we dominant humans might yet learn to listen, might yet learn to recognize that their message is holy and spiritual, might yet come to understand and acknowledge their message while there is still time.
And the most potent lessons I have learned from these small gods is that humanity also possesses a form of godhood just as they do, one that it can use for good or for ill. For humanity affects those living things which surround us just as they affect us, but our effect is much more noticeable because of the enormous power of our collective voice, a collective human voice which is so loud that it not only masks all of the myriad voices the small gods are capable of mustering, but also muddles and interferes with humanity’s ability to appreciate and understand the importance of, and the means of nurturing and caring for, the blessings granted to us by this land, by this planet Earth.
Small rural places like this farm give humanity an opportunity to remember, to acknowledge and to ponder, to recover somewhat from the inebriation suffered when we drink far too long from the fountain of our own, collective voice and only sparingly of the voices of our comrades in life. For these are places where the small gods can still be heard, places where we can learn that we are incapable of owning anything to the exclusion of all other living things than humanity, places where we can find the grace of a silence which allows important quieter voices to be heard.
For some reason, I have been well and truly blessed and I know not why.
Well done oh great scribe. Even with the Walla Walla background you do make some good points as to the Western mentality.