Geography and the landscape of the heart
Home is two places, and anybody can see a heart leaned up against itself leaves a gap in the middle. There is the Cumberland river country, a wrinkled bit of geography in southcentral Kentucky where steep hardwood ridges cradle skinny hollows pushed out by enterprising settlers. The other place is subarctic Alaska. One is mine because it chose me, where my mind first stirred and began to see the world beyond it but from it. The other is still only becoming mine, because I am choosing it.
Memory is altars, memory is touchstones, memory is the binding of generations, part of what makes us whole. Is it possible to preserve a whole memory that is not linked to place?
I bought this Kentucky farm when I was nineteen years old, 9.2 acres for 26,000 dollars, and immediately began dreaming on it. Our inability to live ecologically responsibly, Wendell Berry says, is a failure of imagination. I know precisely what he means. I have walked this sliver of earth a thousand times, looking, imagining, of what it might be like to hear the whistle of a wild Bobwhite quail on it. I have walked it on rainy summer days when the rain played on the leaves like a piano played by an invisible hand, have walked it in the fall when the squirrels were in the market for acorns, have walked it in the winter when there was not a living thing stirring, and in the spring when the entire ecosystem was stretching and turkeys were gobbling. We made our lives there, reading books in the evenings and on the porch on sunny days, working, building, dreaming.
In the summer of 2020 I built a wooden canoe that we would take down to the river on Saturday afternoons in summer. We would take fishing rods, Melanie would fix sandwiches and a jug of tea. It became our place. Young marriage, river, hot and still July afternoons. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor.
In the second autumn after our marriage, I jacked up the barn and dug footings under it, laid cinder blocks and set the barn on its new legs. Dad and I bought a portable sawmill and pulled it back into the hollow and cut down some arrowy poplars, like Thoreau with conveniences. I sawed them into rafter blanks and siding boards. The smell of Yellow poplar sawdust still transports me to that field, early Saturday morning, late summer, the sound of the blade whistling into the wood. It was one of the happiest times of my life. I partitioned off a section of the barn, lined it with plywood, and winched the wooden canoe against the rafters. Out of beetle-killed ash, I sawed two inch blanks and built a workbench that would hold anything I set to it. A woodstove lived in the corner, which was only fired once. It is a labor of love, the restoration of this barn.
This little farmstead is not worth much, economically. It is only a mobile home set into a notch in the hill, hillbilly style. The barn is not fancy. But this place grew up with me, and everything here I did in the quiet, in the evenings and Saturdays, with an active mind and a loving heart.
On August 2, I finished staining the barn, the last item on the renovation to-do list. We left for Alaska on August 15. I never built anything in this barn, except a canoe paddle for a friend the following summer when I was back. The barn still smells new.
Human lives are transient enough. But it seems that an unwillingness to develop a memory with a place only shortens our life instead of giving us a place from history to the future; it makes us isolated articles of action, like flotsam picked up by high water. We have no lineage in the line of memory. Dad did this, but we did that. How else will we take our place in the history of the world?
We drove to Alaska with a Jeep pulling a small travel trailer, through the Midwest and into Saskatchewan and British Columbia. This is new land, intoxicating, big, intimidating, and I am adrift in it. I have no memory with it. No favorite places, no secret places. In Kentucky, I was angry and irritated when a new Dollar General appeared on a neighbor’s pasture where previously he kept Angus beef. Desecration; the pastoral to the consumerist. I boycotted the store for several months out of principle. (As if they would miss my business.) I flinched when I saw, in a lovely hollow, some businessmen putting in cheap housing. These were fields that I would never own, or even work on, but my memory of that hollow was that it should be a field.
In this new place of subarctic Alaska I have no memory, and do not have the limitations of the caring. I see how easily good men can become exploiters: the land is here, the economy lies fallow to transact private business. Who cares if you make a neighbor mad? You don’t even know his last name. If I had grown up here, perhaps I would feel differently about it. If I have no memory of a slice of land, I suffer no qualms about cutting down its trees or watching someone else do it. I have no relationship with it, and what love I claim to have for the wilderness is a kind of infatuation, and not a love that can be shown by careful labor. At least not yet. How do you participate in wilderness? You participate in the land by farming, if you can.
There is a cushion of ignorance that follows you into a new community that is a comfort and a curse. I wonder if chronic movers do not move for that cushion of ignorance as much than for the things that are there. It is a distance from yourself as much as a distance from the people you were with. With people that know you well it is impossible to be a fraud, the people who know you won’t let you lie to yourself. But in a new place? You can be anybody, maybe even somebody you are not.
Standing on a mountain, or fishing for salmon, or flying over a glacier I get that feeling. An oceanic feeling of bigness, of the incomprehensible cosmos. Pride makes no sense when inhabited by such a feeling. When I’m on a mountain or in an airplane, I can see the Alaska mountain range with its volcanoes to the west, Kenai mountains to the east, lakes and saltwater and migrations and all the things. This is home now, I tell myself. Look at it. Isn’t it great?
We took a red-eye flight from Anchorage to Nashville and were back at our house in Kentucky by noon. Melanie and Raelyn sheltered up in bed to sleep back some of the lost night, and when they were both sleeping I pulled on my boots and a jacket, filled a water bottle, and walked down to the barn. I wanted to cry. Stop it. I turned and walked into the woods.
I ascended the ridge and knew before I was at the top that the jacket and water bottle were a mistake. I hung them on a limb and walked over the undulating ridges. Something leapt up in me. This was my land. Not mine in possession, but mine. Every time I come back to this land, there is a deep pull toward it, a spiritual connection. There is nothing special in this geography to distinguish it from Anyplace, Arkansas. But for me? Every ridge holds a memory, every hollow holds a track.
Everything here holds the underpinnings of thought and imagination. When I laid the stone wall below the driveway, it was infused with the philosophy of good work and honest labor. (This was my Wendell Berry phase.) The barn, especially, holds in it much more than being a little barn and shop. It was the embodiment of an emerging philosophy of land use and care, it was a token, maybe an altar.
Now, when I approach this barn, sitting empty, it is as though I abandoned part of myself. Part of my dreams, and I don’t know if I can ever be complete without it. That’s maybe a bit dramatic. It seems as though many people live good lives without having a connection to a piece of land. But then again, do they know what they don’t have?
My friends tell me I need to sell my land—you’ve moved on, they say, it’s like keeping in contact with an old girlfriend after marriage. They even suggest buying some other land, in a different state, to ameliorate my homesickness. That is nonsense, this much I know. It is not a matter of consumerism, where one piece of land is as good as the other. The memory stands as its value, as the antithesis of consumerism.