Shaped by the Land

I grew up in Park Forest, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. Until I was 6, we lived in a neighborhood of co-op townhouses that faced onto forest preserve. That was an early and enduring term for me, “forest preserve.” Later, when we lived across town, a block from Route 30 and with only school parks nearby, we’d sometimes drive to “the forest preserve” to walk the paved loop. By then, though, it had lost its sense of innocence for me, of magic and adventure. It was dense with undergrowth and there was drinking, loud music, some crime at the small lake and parking lot in the middle of it. Much later, a man I knew from the local theater was killed there. It was a more human space, too, like you see in many films and television shows. Shaped more by culture than nature.

As a very small child, I’d venture not too far into the woods in front of our house. I collected and pressed down a little moss floor once for a private space for myself, at age 5, and I often sat beneath the trees looking at bugs. The space felt wild. It was a space that could shape a small person. Once I found a major cache of real red ladybugs (not the persistent orange Japanese beetles we have now that bite and smell bad when you squash them). I put some of those ladybugs in a coffee can, a vivid early memory. Toward the end of our time at the Co-ops, a new neighbor tied his mean dog to one of the trees all day every day and I stopped going there.

I realize only now that I had a longing for natural spaces that wasn’t met in our house on our 1/4 acre plot, where I lived until leaving for college. I didn’t learn the names of anything but locust, maple, and birch, all of which we had. I’m not even sure if the backyard trees I climbed were elm. I didn’t know the difference between any pines or firs or cedars, any “evergreen” trees, though our kitchen window looked out through the carport at a gorgeous pine in the neighbor’s yard. We looked out that window to see if the bus was coming to the corner for school, as we hurriedly chomped on our homemade granola.

Denise Levertov was one of my last poetry teachers, and she chided me for “not caring” about nature, and thought I should be a fiction writer, not a poet, because I cared more about human relationships than nature. I gave her too much power over me and my art, but it’s true that I was shaped by human-made spaces and by human relationships more than any kind of raw relationship to the natural world. All the spaces in my early and even early-mid adult life were spent in cultivated spaces, controlled spaces, lawns and sidewalks where worms congregated when it rained. Bike rides through neighborhoods where all the houses looked the same. Big, empty, mowed parks with man-made sledding hills and man-carved ice rinks on them. Chlorinated pools with hot pavement that immediately evaporated our wet footprints. The library. My childhood was rich and privileged, but with people more than natural spaces.

For the last thirteen years, though, I’ve lived on prairie. It is also human-made, a formerly agricultural space sprayed with herbicides and tilled and sometimes no-till-drilled into prairie, with flowers and grasses. Paths carved into it. Burned and weeded. White pines and red pines planted, and at first two rows of majestic cottonwoods (called poplars here) along the driveway. Red cedar. Arborvitae along the house. Burr oaks coming up in oak savannah in the prairie. Red oaks now planted around the end of the driveway to shade the screen porch and provide privacy.

It took a few years to get used to and truly appreciate the prairie’s wildness. A few winters of cross country skiing and snowshoeing deep into our woods, observing buckthorn, Siberian elms, the invasives, along with the variety of pines and aspen, birch and maple and occasional oak. Observing animal and bird tracks. I cultivated, too, an ever-expanding garden where I hoped to feed at some point all three families on the farm through the summer and us year ’round. I could have done it some years, though my in-laws weren’t so interested in this project. I did keep us fed year ’round on fresh and canned and frozen produce for a time. I scaled back when I got my cancer diagnosis, but even this year, with drought and heat and after taking out a dozen vegetable beds, the produce has been consistently available and sometimes plentiful. There aren’t jars and jars of tomatoes and pickles, but there is tomato sauce and pizza sauce and we’ve feasted on cucumber salads. With the recent change to a rainy pattern, I’ve planted some fall greens and lettuce.

Yesterday I sat in the yard, my chickens around me, and just looked out. Looked up into the branches of a gorgeous white pine, which makes the loveliest sound in the breeze, and the loveliest dappled light. I can see the same pine through my bedroom window. My chickens walked around me, curious and pecking at bits on the ground, or chasing grasshoppers.

The laundry line stood like another small tree, with a couple clusters of purple aster growing alongside the metal trunk. Behind it the single outdoor garden bed and bags of potato plants. The potatoes are still working away, growing, and I can’t tell you how much I love garden potatoes in the fall and winter. Beyond that, around that, the fullness of goldenrod, goldenrod and aster being the last prairie profusion before winter.

I’ve been thinking about this because I watched a DVD a friend loaned me, a pilgrimage to a Celtic landscape, western Ireland, by John O’Donahue. His is a truly wild landscape, and he was shaped by it very deeply. Ancient people’s runes and ruins, rock and fragile-yet-persistent plant life. Bleakness and life alongside one another.

It is like that here in winter– bleakness and life alongside one another. Though the snow sparkles and is bright, too. We Minnesotans (can I call myself that, after 15 years?) love moving through snow. I did as a young adult, too, when we first discovered cross country skis. Most of the snow in my childhood was cleared away before I went out in it. We went out to create– snow forts, igloos, snowmen, angels. But then later we went to golf courses and skied. In America, all my landscapes except maybe a few forays into the Sierras, have felt cultivated and shaped for my access. I am a person who stays on the trail. I like a dedicated campsite. I am also a person who doesn’t seek or respond thoroughly to grandeur. America doesn’t have much in the way of runes and ruins. Petroglyphs here and there. All of those spaces made accessible, too, not often stumbled upon.

And that is what has shaped me and continues to shape me. I swim in an excavated quarry pool, that is cool and deep. Children jump off the rock ledges. They come with their life jackets, floaties, and rafts. Birds, including sandhill cranes and giant blue herons, come closer than I ever thought they would. And I am in awe of the world where I find myself.