But piecework needn’t mean empty. Fragmented needn’t mean all gone. Ankle-deep in the Cimarron, I needed to believe this.
*
SILENCE CAN BE a sanctuary or frame for stories told. Silence also obscures origins. My parents’ muteness once seemed tacit consent that generational history was no longer part of life or living memory. That a past survived was best left unexposed or even forgotten as self-defense. But unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.
Yet one idea stood firm: The American land preceded hate. My child-sense of its antiquity became as much a refuge as any place, whether the Devil’s Punchbowl or a canyon called Grand. Still, silences embedded in a family, and in a society, couldn’t be replaced even by sounds so reliable: of water spilling down rock, of a thunderstorm rolling into far distance, or of branches sifting wind.
By the end of the nineteenth century some of my mother’s people had left rural Alabama and Virginia behind for the capital of Pennsylvania. How or if Oklahoma entered, or what existed before plantations, I don’t yet know. Scattered elements of language, like Momma’s Pennsylvania thee, touch me. Dad’s forebears took different paths, known and unknown, through the Chesapeake tidewater and Piedmont. Choices both parents made cast long shadows over me. The unvoiced history of this continent calls, too. It may ground all.
An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. The past looms close, as immediate as breath, blood, and scars on a wrist. It, too, lies hidden, obscured, shattered. What I can know of ancestors’ lives or of this land can’t be retrieved like old postcards stored in a desk drawer. To re-member is to know that traces now without name, like the “unidentified” subjects in O. E. Aultman’s photographs, still mark a very real presence. To re-member is to discover patterns in fragments. As an Earth historian I once sought the relics of deep time. To be an honest woman, I must trace other residues of hardness.
Far from any real town, my house sits at the edge of a field cleared two centuries ago, bordered by relict stone walls and wooded, worn-down hills. So different from the Devil’s Punchbowl or Cimarron plains, this landscape is yet kin and reminder. I like to walk through hemlock, white pine, and hardwood cover to the top of Long Hill, the ancient rocky mass behind my home. It’s on rain-soaking walks especially, when drops strike exposed schist, that tracing hardness seems most necessary.
ALIEN LAND ETHIC: THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
When I was a horse, a wild Appaloosa full of speed, I’d run up and down sidewalks, around playgrounds and our yard—just to feel wind rush with me. But once the world moved beyond sense, I began to run from what I feared. Riots near our new home in Washington, D.C., left burnt, gutted remains of buildings I knew. The “war” in Vietnam joined us at dinner each night as TV footage of wounded soldiers, of crying women and children, of places with names like Khe Sanh, My Lai. Assassinations of men my parents called “good men” meant anyone—my parents, my friends, or I—could disappear at any time. Even the familiar Good night, Chet. Good night, David, and good night for NBC News no longer comforted.
I learned by the age of eight that hate could be spit wetting the front of my favorite, mom-made dress. Hate could be a classmate’s sing-song “never saw nothin’ as ugly as a nigger, never saw nothin’ as crummy as a nigger.” His eyes on me.
I ran not just to feel wind, but in hope it would blow away whatever it was about me that was bad and hate-deserving. Safety lived in my room, in my mother’s arms, and outdoors on a land that never judged or spat.
Does your child-mind haunt you, too?
Confusing doubts pushed and pulled. Whether vestigial or preparative they held on. I donned silent passivity as armor—and avoided mirrors. Only teenage encounters with writings by authors who also seemed to be searching prompted me to speak. I met them question to question.
THE SISTERS OF Providence and lay teachers of Immaculata Preparatory School assigned four summer readings to my section of the entering ninth-grade class. They’d be part of the coming year’s courses. Although the fourth book is lost to memory, the other three—Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold—struck me deeply. The worn copies still sit on my shelves within easy reach.
A Sand County Almanac was published in the autumn of 1949, more than a year after Leopold’s death. That his work was hailed as landmark or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles,” I knew nothing about. Nor did I know that this forester, wildlife manager, educator, conservation leader, and writer born in Iowa in 1887 was called by some a “prophet.” What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place: an atom’s recycling odyssey through time; the chickadee, “so small a bundle of large enthusiasms”; the crane’s call “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” And my favorite passage, from “Song of the Gavilan”:
This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
What also appealed was the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In “The Land Ethic,” Aldo Leopold enlarged the boundaries of “community” to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Though I couldn’t find words then, his call for an extension of ethics to land relations seemed to express a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this country but embedded in many Indigenous peoples’ traditions of experience—that land is fully inhabited, intimate with immediate presence.
These ideas prompted new questions. If, as Mr. Leopold wrote, “obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land,” then what part of this nation still lacked conscience broad enough to realize the internal change of mind and heart, to embrace “evolutionary possibility” and “ecological necessity”? Why was it that human relations in the United States I knew at age fourteen could be so cruel?
Other passages in A Sand County Almanac confused: “The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless—to us—if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know.” Why not know “things Chinese”?
I couldn’t understand why, in a book so concerned with America’s past, the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece.
What I wanted more than anything was to speak with Mr. Leopold. To ask him. I so feared that his “we” and “us” excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America. Only uncertainty and estrangement felt within my teenage reach.
Did Aldo Leopold consider me?
JULY 8TH. THE initial phone interview went well, so well my prospective employer wanted to meet in person that afternoon just as a formality. A collector and trader of Civil War memorabilia, he’d advertised in The Washington Post for a summer assistant to help him catalogue and work