Prologue (3-5): Imprinting the Land

In Annie Dillard's Prologue to An American Childhood, she writes about what the land is and what it once was, tracing its genealogy back through the ages, where only woodpeckers and the occasional "gang of empty-headed turkeys" came through the quiet forests of Pennsylvania (4). She seems to take meaning for her own life from the land she inhabits, writing that "when [all] else has gone from [her] brain," including the faces of her family, "what will be left [...] is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that" (3). How does land touch us so--make us feel grounded, concrete, real? How is it, when we touch the earth, it reaches down inside us, grabbing onto some oft forgotten core? And how is it that despite all the changes the land sees, it still remains the same underneath the frantic rat race of life?

Dillard's passage inspired me to revisit the land with my own brood. Maybe something would leave an imprint. At the suggestion of Sydney's physical therapist, the uphill hike around Cress Creek gave direction to desire.

When we arrive, I close my eyes, blinking at the bright sun that glints against interpretive signs along the trail--signs imprinted with discoveries about the faulted land near my native Rexburg. Cress Creek tells the story of the land along the South Fork of the Snake River in Eastern Idaho. Cottonwood trees, some housing eagles' nests, surround the Snake, their leaves shaking with bright yellows and oranges in the late fall wind. Cattails rest in the low marsh. Along the trail, we learn that Indians used the land for food, trappers for pelts, and later settlers for homes and farmland that now expands across areas neighboring the Cottonwoods. At each subsequent age, the land has served a new need, but part of it always remains unchanged.

An old stagecoach trail intersects the same vision as distant, dormant volcanoes, volcanoes that once rained ash across the landscape. That same ash now composes a large portion of the rock along Cress Creek. Tuff, with its various fragments of fused detritus, tells a story entirely its own. Earlier than the Indians but sometime after volcanic eruptions, the creek comes running down the mountain. Sagebrush, Bitterbrush, Utah and Rocky Mountain Junipers arise from a seemingly dead environment to feed deer and other mountain animals. Watercress grows in the creek water, warmed by geothermal heat, and moose arrive to feed.

In the present, my kids run from post to post, searching for tracks, doo-doo, what Liam calls, "Blue's Clues" --anything that might denote an animal roamed across the same dirt. They identify some excrement along the trail as coyote scat, and I don't have the heart to tell them that it most likely came from a species of domestic dog: "Watch out; I think I just heard a coyote in the brush!" They scream and scatter.

My kids would have given their snacks, shoes, siblings to have glimpsed live animal inhabitants, an eagle, rabbit, lizard--anything. Wrong day? Wrong time? Should we have hiked with those trappers of old in order to make that stable and unchanging connection we're so eager to feel with the land? Like my children, I too long to visit some earlier time and place, be transported to experience June rhododendrons in early settled Pennsylvania, where Annie writes, "tall men and women lay exhausted in their cabins, sleeping in the sweetness, worn out from planting corn" (5). I have planted corn; I have slept, exhausted in my bed--but I would give something spectacular to smell those June flowers. We look to the land for comfort, but sometimes what we're searching for isn't there. The eagle passed at a different time of day. The flowers on Cress Creek faded in late summer. If the routines of my life don't organically intersect with settlers, summer, sweetness, I can close my eyes, wait nine months, two years, a half an hour--and suddenly the world is a new place with new possibilities. This is my latest discovery.

Wait for it. We close our eyes, and the world turns around again.

I've seen it happen over and over lately. Each day brings brilliant new surprises. Everything on the land changes for Dillard, from one space of time to the next. Yet across all those passages of time, there are connections, just as Dillard connects the spaces of time during her childhood into one vivid and amazing tapestry, a tapestry as brilliant as each of our own lives. One minute I'm tickling my kids before bed, the next I'm researching scholarly articles, shaking off single guys at LDS dances, responding to student grievances, planting corn. If only I could take a step back and view the marvelous pattern of it all--the landscape not of Cress Creek in the 1800s, 1925, or Pennsylvania in the 50's, but the landscape of my own life. It is the landscape, the topology, that gives meaning and purpose, guidance and direction to our lives. The tapestry, the topology, the hill's curves and juts, the winding river, the cattails in the low marsh, the "land as it lay this way and that."

Next week--Prologue (7-9): Play Me Some Soul Music

Embracing the Fall

Look around; Fall descends. Gathering in the rest of the garden's produce (three weeks ago), I realized that years have flown by since I last experienced the fullness of summer, fat and pregnant with life, with love. Over twelve years ago I remember visiting the Pacific Northwest, living in a summer daze of butter and banana pancakes--filling my thoughts with hazy July poetry, a daydream of sunlight resting heavily on leaves, as glinting glares and shadows played across my closed eyelids. Not even so long ago--nine or ten years perhaps--I rode motorcycles, climbed cliffs, filled my rooms with green, growing things, bathed in icy rivers, watched fireworks, and laid content in a twin bed I shared with Summer and the full August moon. I sighed, heavy with satisfaction those summer nights.

Years pass as I keep waiting to feel that same fatness, that same content-ment in the heat of July and August. Yet year after year, the warm weather burdens rather than relieves. I wonder now if the summer of my life will ever return--if fall and winter have become my permanent realities. Still, I've found peace in those non-anticipated months and seasons. I may no longer experience Summer as I once knew her, at least in my current time and space. Yet God has compensated with a fullness of fall and winter, unexpectedly so.

Can fall--a season personified by death and decay--truly be enjoyed? Can such a thing be embraced? Certainly. Most of my favorite metaphors involve food. When my daughter, Eden, spotted a chocolate bar last week, she remarked, quite frankly, "I like chocolate..." and after a considering pause: "Pickles are icky and yucky." She spoke candidly, with no pickles in sight. Life, as Eden has begun to observe, can be chocolate one moment and pickles the next. What reaction is more human than to desire the sweet, the summer in our lives, while dreading the bitter and acidic? Perhaps strangely, then, I've observed my own appetite for vinegary foods. Maybe my taste buds predestine me for sorrow; I have, after all, always enjoyed pickles, lemons, and sour cream. Fortuitously, the Lord called me to Romania, a land filled with sourness, and sadness.

Roman-ians pickle their summer harvest to savor through-out the fall and winter months. Pickled peppers, pickled cabbage, pickled beans and carrots, even a kind of pickled potato salad. In ways, we store the summer produce in our lives to feed on during winter months--even if the sweet has turned a little sour. The trick is enjoying that bitterness as much as we can enjoy a pickle, borscht, lemon curd, or sarmale with smantana. We can savor the sour even more than the sweet pepper when it's the only fruit available to put to our lips. The trick is to still eat, to still devour life, despite the current flavor.

So, rather than holing ourselves up at home, I bundle the beasts and head out to harvest mazes where we easily lose ourselves in the dark--and we embrace the cold, the unknown, the fear, if just for passing moments. I walk with young ones out to our frozen garden, tearing the last summer fruits from their vines. We mulch leaves and spread them over the now barren earth, hoping that some day in the future the dirt will bloom again with life. We venture out to barns together, taking candid shots of our new family, thanks to an extremely talented and giving sister (I love you Megs), and we walk as Adam and Eve--thrust into the stark realities of life. Still, we do so smiling.

I once believed the term "Fall" (as in the season) originated from the action of leaves descending from trees during the cooling period that precedes winter. Upon further reflection, however, I recognize tangible links between autumn, death, and the Fall of humankind. When God thrust Adam and Eve from paradise to tough things out in a dry and unyielding environment, they experienced a dramatic shift from sweet to sour. They descended, just as the leaves do, from paradise to earthen reality. As the melodic Danny Elfman croons, "Whoever said that life on this planet would ever be paradise?" I guess I never had that promise of paradise--none of us do. And that's the way life goes... everyone around us ends up feeling the same sensation of pain, sooner or later. At some point that pain will end; at some point spring returns. Apart from the seasons, however, it's an elusive, mysterious return. What do we do in the intervening minutes, months, years? As I await a return to the plump, heavy ripeness of summer--the easy joy and laughter, the days of skinny-dipping and sandstone hikes, when visions of dancing in a summer dress beneath swaying boughs of a twinkle-lit backyard tree could become a reality--I enfold myself in the engulfing, bitter wake.