Before Covid, I was a person who spent a lot of time on the road. There are now only a few states that I haven’t visited; of those I have, I’ve driven through and within and across nearly all of them. I can close my eyes and see landscapes linked by roadways: Chinle to Flagstaff to Phoenix. Colorado Springs to Raton to Albuquerque. Salt Lake City to Carson City to Donner Pass. Knoxville to Asheville. Albany, Utica, Rochester, Buffalo. Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, Pensacola.
I know what these places look like, and I know how in this decade one might easily chart a course between them. I like planes and I love trains, but driving, as humans have known for more than a century, is a self-directed adventure. To drive oneself is a convenience and a luxury, a monotony and a pleasure, an escape and a road home. And it’s not lost on me, truly, that what I celebrate here is tied impossibly tightly to what we must grieve and release, from the centering of individual convenience to the low-density landscapes invented for automobiles to the places, wild and otherwise, that cars have destroyed.
The thing is, it’s possible to really see things while driving, and sometimes, at least a bit, it’s a pathway to an understanding of place. As I kid I used to feel frustrated when my parents took the long way around, or brought us along for a detour. Why would anyone make a long trip take even longer? And yet as an adult I am a person for whom most things involve a scenic route, or at least a noteworthy diversion and such scenes as might unfold along it. I prefer the views, and often the venues, available away from the throughway, and it’s not mere novelty I’m chasing. I am truly trying to understand. What is this place I am visiting? What has it been? What might it be next? To whom does it belong- to what sorts of people, and to what sorts of gods?
I ask this about mountains and deserts, but I also wonder while considering cracked parking lots and abandoned gas stations and the collapsing spectacles of those stadiums and shopping malls that were supposed to hold our coming together and instead bear witness to our abandonment. What was, what might have been, and what never should have happened: these are the exhibits of this testimony. There are so many ruined places. There are so many ways to wreak destruction upon a landscape. And there are, it appears, few or (at least under market analysis) no options for putting things to rights.
And large-scale destruction pops up everywhere. In the Mad-Max style structure abandonment and aircraft boneyards and halfhearted attempts at a collective survivalism that lie between Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona. In the desecration and scarred earth wrought by Granger Mine and Solvay Chemical along I-80’s Red Desert in Wyoming, and on smaller byways by coal and trona companies across the Great Basin. In the hulking ruins and contaminated waterfront in the New England town where I live now, a picturesque fishing village with a superfund secret.
Even as something of a scholar of these places, or at the very least as a freaked-out connoisseur of them, the truth is that I don’t really understand. How did we do this? How do we keep doing this? What are we, in the end, supposed to do with this?, by which I mean with the rubble and the poison, and with the way our imaginations and consciences arise in confronting these specters.
The legacy that we have written in asphalt, steel, concrete and chemicals across the American continent reads, if we’re honest, as horror and heartbreak as much as it does freedom or opportunity. And this discrepancy matters to me, matters in a way that I feel in my bones and chart in my family stories, in the tales that even as a white person descended from settlers I inherit and use to make sense of the world.
I grew up outside, and of Wyoming in the 1980s that statement is about as literal as these things get. I spent much of my childhood on former ranch land north of Cheyenne; western meadowlarks woke me up in the morning and the night sky was so dark and cloudless that tales of light pollution and kids growing up without a clear idea of what a starry sky looked like bewildered me. We hiked in the Medicine Bow range and climbed at Vedauwoo and traversed the state from Torrington to Laramie, Cody to Evanston, Rawlins to Ten Sleep and Thermopolis. Writing these words feels like home.
As an adult, I find connection and meaning outside as well. The car treks, and particularly the urge to leave the interstate and have a more a local adventure, are part of this yearning: what I actually want is to walk, to run, or to hike. I come to know a place through my feet.
And here in Massachusetts, that’s true as well. I visit these trails all the time, in all seasons. This ground is protected; it’s trust land. And even here, all is not well.
The creek foams some days, and I don’t want to know why.
Wendell Berry reminds us of what we have across every century of white rule on this continent refused to know: that there are no unsacred places. Only sacred places, and desecrated places.
It’s hard for me to share the full heart geography of what it was to grow up loving the land and taught respect for it, and to have come into adulthood with the sudden understanding that my dad’s ferocity on these points: common access, leave no trace- was my education wrapped in his own grief. Or to recognize that it was this same grief that inspired Edward Abbey’s pragmatic instruction to environmentalists and activists and lovers of this land:
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
It’s grief, friends.
We have lost so much. More than you know. More than you are supposed to see. More than they, every level of they, would allow you to understand.
This is some of what’s at stake for me in the way we play ball around property rights. And I wonder: how is it for you?
Where does the fact of desecration intersect with the stories you hold and the places you love?
My heart breaks for all that I cannot save.
--Adrienne Rich
(How do our awareness and thus, inevitably, our grief, serve us as we reconstitute the world?)
j