Homeground
The idea of local knowledge—what we might gain from close observation and attention to the place where we live—has been crucial, even essential, since I was a young boy, learning the names of trees and plants from my grandfather and father, scavenging for wild edibles and learning the ways of certain animals.
To the west of my house, in the 41,000 acres that comprise Pennsylvania State Game Lands 108 and 158, there’s a crease in the mountains along the Allegheny Front where a stream seeps from the ground and starts following gravity’s trail beneath the branches of eastern hemlock and rhododendron. This stream nurses the lives of native brook trout, a fish that’s lived in these waters for thousands of years—perpetuating themselves in the cold, clean water that they demand. It’s a fish of such beauty and mystery—(How can they survive, hide themselves away, in such small pools?)—that I never tire of seeing one rise, seemingly from the rock bed of the stream itself, transmogrified into flesh and air as they snatch the fly I’ve drifted down the pool.
This crease, along this stream, is one of the places I write about because the sound of water helps me imagine a language that gestures at the mystery of our relationship, our obligation, to other species. I also write about a south-facing talus slope covered in lowbush huckleberries, where hawks drift over my head on thermal updrafts. And there are other places in the woods where I go to sit, to be quiet, to observe fisher or black bear or bobcat. It’s amazing what you can see if you stay still and quiet for long enough.
And while I often write of the beauty in these places, their restorative powers, their rightfulness and right to exist, I must confess that I also write frantically, attempting to quell my anxiety so it won’t consume me as I try to take in with my eyes, my ears, the olfactory powers of the nose, the particularities and peculiarities of these woods, wondering about how I can get others to care about them, to fall in love with them, to maybe want to save this ground for what it is, not what it was in some mythic, pastoral past.
Sadly, the evidence suggests I’m failing at this task. One glance at my small corner of the world and you’ll notice the ridiculous amount of trash that’s dumped along the road; the rumblings of fracking trucks thirty miles to the north; an interstate scaling the ridges, pyrite exposed in its making, polluting streambeds in the valley; and the frightening presence of the wooly adelgid, a non-native, invasive species from Asia that sucks the sap from hemlock, bringing them not so much to their knees but fully onto their bellies or backs, dead as the clear-cut wood that littered these grounds more than a hundred years ago.
My relationship with home ground is no different than my relationship with the human community that I am a part of. Imperfection marks such relationships, but I hope my devotion, in the simple act of attending to both the humans and the land that I love, might offer meaning and make the smallest of differences.
The idea of local knowledge—what we might gain from close observation and attention to the place where we live—has been crucial, even essential, since I was a young boy, learning the names of trees and plants from my grandfather and father, scavenging for wild edibles and learning the ways of certain animals.
To the west of my house, in the 41,000 acres that comprise Pennsylvania State Game Lands 108 and 158, there’s a crease in the mountains along the Allegheny Front where a stream seeps from the ground and starts following gravity’s trail beneath the branches of eastern hemlock and rhododendron. This stream nurses the lives of native brook trout, a fish that’s lived in these waters for thousands of years—perpetuating themselves in the cold, clean water that they demand. It’s a fish of such beauty and mystery—(How can they survive, hide themselves away, in such small pools?)—that I never tire of seeing one rise, seemingly from the rock bed of the stream itself, transmogrified into flesh and air as they snatch the fly I’ve drifted down the pool.
This crease, along this stream, is one of the places I write about because the sound of water helps me imagine a language that gestures at the mystery of our relationship, our obligation, to other species. I also write about a south-facing talus slope covered in lowbush huckleberries, where hawks drift over my head on thermal updrafts. And there are other places in the woods where I go to sit, to be quiet, to observe fisher or black bear or bobcat. It’s amazing what you can see if you stay still and quiet for long enough.
And while I often write of the beauty in these places, their restorative powers, their rightfulness and right to exist, I must confess that I also write frantically, attempting to quell my anxiety so it won’t consume me as I try to take in with my eyes, my ears, the olfactory powers of the nose, the particularities and peculiarities of these woods, wondering about how I can get others to care about them, to fall in love with them, to maybe want to save this ground for what it is, not what it was in some mythic, pastoral past.
Sadly, the evidence suggests I’m failing at this task. One glance at my small corner of the world and you’ll notice the ridiculous amount of trash that’s dumped along the road; the rumblings of fracking trucks thirty miles to the north; an interstate scaling the ridges, pyrite exposed in its making, polluting streambeds in the valley; and the frightening presence of the wooly adelgid, a non-native, invasive species from Asia that sucks the sap from hemlock, bringing them not so much to their knees but fully onto their bellies or backs, dead as the clear-cut wood that littered these grounds more than a hundred years ago.
My relationship with home ground is no different than my relationship with the human community that I am a part of. Imperfection marks such relationships, but I hope my devotion, in the simple act of attending to both the humans and the land that I love, might offer meaning and make the smallest of differences.