Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places
Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places
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| ISBN-13: | 9781574415629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Zen of the Plains
Experiencing Wild Western Places
By Tyra A. Olstad
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2014 Tyra A. OlstadAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-562-9
CHAPTER 1
Shortgrass / Semi-Desert Shrub-Steppe
1.1 Terra Incognita
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Before desire and before knowing, how can I say I am? Consider. Dissolve in the beauty.
—The 72nd of Shiva's 112 ways to open the invisible door of consciousness, trans. by Paul Reps
The wind was whipping fiercely. Grey clouds hung low over a rugged expanse of scraggly sagebrush, sandy arroyos, and the occasional tumble-weed or dust devil or raven swooping by. Because I didn't yet have the words for "sagebrush" or "arroyo" or "raven" on that cold November morning, I was left with nothing but an empty horizon and big black birds.
I had been driving for hours, following Interstate 40 into northern Arizona, where I was to report for an internship at Petrified Forest National Park. Although I sought a bit of adventure—anything other than another long cold winter at college in New Hampshire—I was beginning to wonder just what I was doing, where I was going, how I could possibly pass the next four months in such a place. (Such a place! Were there any people here? What were those birds?) Having spent my life comfortably surrounded by roads and rivers, trees and buildings, I was both intrigued and terrified by the yawning desolation of the landscape—what was out there but cold, windy, open space?
Space.
When I finally saw the big brown sign for Exit 311, I pulled off the Interstate and slowed from 70 miles per hour to 30, then 10. The slower I went, the more ragged, dusty, and bleak the place looked. Interpretive displays at the visitor center tried to convince me that the semi-desert shrub-steppe brims with wonders, but a few paragraphs of text and a few minutes' worth of introductory film hardly gave me time to internalize information. (Antiquities Act? Artemisia? Aur-o-car-i-ox-y-what?) My mind was whirling as I got back into my car and started to drive down the park's twenty-odd miles of neatly paved road.
Then it happened. A half-mile or so later, just before the first scenic overlook, I came around a curve and the earth dropped away or the sky lifted up and I felt the delicious, dizzy onset of agoraphilia.
There it was: the Painted Desert.
The Painted Desert is a land of rusty clay hills, sharp sandstone ledges, winding washes and pockets of grass that stretches in a polychromatic arc across northeastern Arizona.
By formal classification standards, the region is not technically a "desert" but rather a shrub-steppe or shortgrass prairie, marked by an arid climate and predominance of low, woody vegetation. Long before ecological equations and regional maps could inform the public of this fact, Spanish explorers affixed the term "desierto"—"El Desierto Pintado"—to the barren but beautiful land they encountered on their quest to locate the Seven Cities of Gold for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives and his Colorado River Exploring Expedition formalized use of the toponym "Painted Desert" in 1858—five years after Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple wrote about "quite a forest of petrified trees" he had discovered while surveying the 35th parallel.
By the turn of the twentieth century, these fossil forests had become an attraction for railway travelers. An increasing number of early visitors were so intrigued and delighted by the colorful crystalline wood that they arranged to cart large chunks back home. Afraid that the dwindling deposits might disappear altogether, local enthusiasts—including John Muir, who spent several years in the area—urged President Theodore Roosevelt to exercise the power granted to him by Antiquities Act of 1906 to preserve sites of superlative cultural and/or geologic merit for all present and future generations of American citizens. Thus Petrified Forest National Monument—one of America's first national monuments—was born. Congress conferred National Park status in 1962, protecting the jumble of geologic curiosities as well as a diverse array of other significant resources: fossils dating to the dawn of the dinosaurs, artifacts from eras of Native American inhabitation, intact tracts of shortgrass-steppe, and, encompassing it all, breathtakingly beautiful scenery.
The Painted Desert. To the Diné, or Navajo people, the southwestern swath of their reservation is not a noun but a clause: Hal chiitah, "amidst the colors." Hopi and Zuni descendants of earlier inhabitants—the Ancestral Puebloans—consider the region Assam unda, or the "country of departed spirits." Meanwhile, if you look at a park map today, you'll see not just "Petrified Forest" or "Painted Desert" but two units of capital-"W" Wilderness, established "for the permanent good of the whole people" by Congress and National Park Service officials on 23 October 1970.
Shrub-steppes and Spaniards; spirits and skeletons; Wilderness. That's what I was looking at on that Novembery morning—Wilderness. Wildness. I knew no names, nothing about attributes or management plans or preconceptions of "place," just tangled-earth, stormy-skied, meaningless, memory-less space.
Space.
Of course, there's no such thing as "wilderness" or "empty space," no terra incognita wholly unknown to and unaffected by man. Scientists and surveyors, settlers and travelers have traipsed about if not tried to live on nearly every inch of the earth's surface, including the Painted Desert. If the long legacy of place-names isn't proof enough that people have known the area for ages, it's open for public consumption in professional journals and postcard booklets, photo albums and travelogues, satellite images and a 1:24000, 7.5 minute topographic map, available for purchase at the Painted Desert Visitor Center. Moreover, the land itself is riddled with physical traces of inhabitation and use— petroglyphs and pottery sherds, stone tools and building blocks, railroad tracks and Route 66, roads and buildings and bridges. The Painted Desert is not a geographic unknown. But it was unknown to me.
Geographer J. K. Wright happily champions the place of the imagination: "[w]hether or not a particular area may be called 'unknown' depends both on whose knowledge and what kind of knowledge is taken into account." Observed or derived, physical or abstract, personal or cultural, what do people "know" of their backyards much less the entire globe? Society in general may be aware of the existence of a place called the Painted Desert, but that doesn't mean everyone can locate it on a map; scientists may be able to list species and soil types, but will never be able to identify and explain all of the phenomena that make up the smallest patch of prairie. I could spend the rest of my life exploring the northern wilderness unit's 43,020 acres, hiking every wash, touching every rock, greeting every bird every bush every rare and beautiful raindrop and there would always be more to see, to learn, to know, to feel.
Feeling is believing; philosopher-geographer Edmunds Bunkše plays with a multiplicity of "feelings": "feeling" as the sensory process by which a person experiences the external environment and "feeling" as the emotional expression of an individual's inner way of being. Emotions are tactile, he suggests—based in real-world phenomena.
I agree. When first I stood at Tiponi Point, awed by the spare, rugged beauty of the landscape—a low sky, a labyrinth of color, and a big black knoll defining and dominating the border between the two—something caught in my heart. The lines? The textures? The allure of unexplored terrain? I wasn't expecting, much less aspiring, to fall in love with the Painted Desert—to return to it again and again; to have it haunt my dreams. Had I stayed up at the overlook, merely ogling the scene from above and afar, I may not have. The place couldn't become part of me until I touched it; felt it; knew it in my bones.
Visitors can access the northern wilderness unit via a trail starting just west of the Painted Desert Inn Museum, about two miles into the park. "Beware of rattlesnakes," reads the informational / warning sign located at the trailhead, "Never reach where you can't see. Wear sturdy boots," and, in bold, "you must be prepared." Taking the advice to heart, I filled my water bottle, laced up my boots, zipped on my windbreaker, and slipped off the edge of the flat, shrubby plains. The path switchbacked me down through dark outcrops of basalt, pale ledges of sandstone, and crumbles of rust-red clay; down past clumps of grass and brush and three lonely piñon pines; down from the breathtaking plains panorama to a narrow V-shaped drainage, nothing to see but elephant-skin walls of bentonite. Nothing, that is, but mud and stones; petrified wood and weeds and wildflowers. Ten thousand nameless wonders.
I meandered along, marveling at the texture of the clay and the crunch of cobbles—the secrets that each twist revealed. But then I turned a corner and Whoosh! a cold dry wind tore the breath from my lungs. (Couldn't breathe. Breathtaking.) I had popped out of the safe, sheltered channel and stood at the edge of a giant field—nothing but rocks and bushes, cliffs of clay; above them sky. A huge, grey sky. ("And the SKY," Georgia O'Keeffe once wrote a friend, "Anita you have never seen SKY.")
No more trail—just an unmaintained social path, a trace of trampled dirt and a few cairn-like piles. No more landmarks, at least none that I could recognize in that jumble of wildness. Nothing but me and that space. Was I supposed to step out into that? In my thin red wind-breaker, my scuffed and broken boots? I might as well have stepped off into the ocean. Too much. Sensory overload. Cognitive dissonance. (Utter fear.)
Retreat! I turned around, huddled into the drainage, raced back up the trail. Returned to my car, my safe familiar shell from which I could see the remaining twenty-six miles of scenery.
It was magnificent.
Beautiful! Beautiful! Magnificent desolation!
—Buzz Aldrin, the moon
1.2 Can't Get Lost
Painted Desert Wilderness Area, Arizona
Ours is largely a two-dimensional world. We are not creatures who look up often.
—Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
"You can't get lost," the ranger chortled at my naïveté, "you can see where you came from."
True, perhaps. With low vegetation and undulating topography, prairies afford a clear view of the horizon—no need to worry about trees or mountains obfuscating the view. Then again, external sensory cues are crucial for navigation. When in unfamiliar space or when returning to remembered places, people need landmarks or focal points by which we can orient ourselves. Without some sort of geographic marker to tell us where we are—a road, a slight rise, the sun arcing through the sky—we wander aimlessly in circles. (Literally. Psychologists have documented people's tendency to move in loops when blindfolded and clueless.) Unabashedly stark, unforgivingly horizontal, indistinguishably landmarkless plains evoke panic in people who find themselves stranded between infinite empties of grass and sky.
But in the badlands and steppe of the Painted Desert Unit of the Petrified Forest National Wilderness Area, you can't get lost. If you're not sure where you are, the ranger explained, just find the nearest little knoll and look around. The Painted Desert Inn Museum sits atop a large mesa, marking the start of the access trail; you can always see where you came from.
As for where you're going? That's another story.
Looking back, I have to laugh at myself too—at my first timid forays into the wilderness.
Was there really a time when I was hesitant to step off the trail? Was there really a time when I couldn't distinguish the tidy rooflines of the Painted Desert Inn Museum from the hodgepodge of hills below? Was there really a time when Pilot Rock—that big, dark, mound on the horizon, Pilot Rock, Pilot Rock—didn't anchor the farthest corner of my geographic self?
Yes.
The second time I went hiking in Petrified Forest's Wilderness, I was armed with a topographic map, a list of destinations, and descriptions of routes out and back. I traversed the first mile with confidence, following the social trail as it clung to the base of the mesa then terminated near the edge of a wide dry riverbed. Aha!, I consulted the map, "Lithodendron Wash"—the "stone tree wash"—an appropriate name for an intermittent waterway winding through a land of petrified logs.
Also, I noted, squinting at the paper in my hand, the only named feature within miles. "Chinde Mesa" sat on the park's northern border, five or six miles away; "Pilot Rock" was even farther, seven or eight miles as the raven flies. Somewhere out there, according to another ranger—a desert rat whose bleached blue eyes had crinkled with delight when I'd asked for hiking recommendations—there were also places called "Angels Garden" and "Black Forest"—wondrous concentrations of heavenly hoodoos and scatters of dark stone trunks. I was aiming for "Onyx Bridge," only two miles out, he'd promised, putting a neat "x" on the map near the second? no, third twist of Lithodendron Wash. For the most part, though, the forty-three-thousand-odd acres of the Painted Desert Unit were depicted as an unnamed tangle of topographic lines. (At a scale of 1:50,000 and contour interval of 10 meters, undulating expanses and tight ridges are rendered illegible.)
Looking up from the map, I realized that the terrain was also illegible at a scale of 1:1. Before me was the indubitable wash. Beyond it? A rise of clay capped with tumbles of sandstone; a stretch of mud clumped with shrubs. Wind, then, beginning to stir swirls of red earth. Clouds closing in, sky sitting down. My faith in names and charts faltered. Almost involuntarily, I turned back to see where I'd come from. True to form, the Painted Desert Inn Museum stood out, a beacon of safety and civilization crowning the switchbacks of the access trail. I looked up at it, then out across the wash; back, out; back, out, around, and—retreat!—followed the social path along the bottom row of clay hills, through a drainage, and up the side of the mesa, grateful for every tiny little cairn.
Once I reached the trailhead and caught my breath, I paused to consult the access trail sign with its bold "be prepared" and optimistic "Use landmarks for direction." In so doing, I realized that, according to official designations, I hadn't even stepped foot in Wilderness. The path is in "backcountry"; true Wilderness starts on the other side of the Lithodendron Wash.
"Maps are geocentric," write cognitive scientists Ranxiao Wang and Elizabeth Spelke, "but the representations that underlie place recognition are egocentric: they specify the appearance of landmarks from the vantage point of the navigating animal." In other words, we live and move within the spatial environment and cannot experience it as if it were a satellite image or geometric chart. Animals' brains are wired to process sensory cues—sights, sounds, and smells, in particular—to determine our location and orientation relative to our environment. We are not meant to live between two-dimensional squiggles on a thin sheet of paper.
Beyond our automatic biophysical response to space, we also engage elements of consciousness—"non-sensory factors such as goals, expectations, and stored representations of the local environment," psychologists John Philbeck and Sean O'Leary call them—to process interpretations of place. Goals, expectations, stored representations: what do people want from a place; what do we think we will find; how do we remember, recall, and recreate our presence in time and space?
In 1975, geographer Jay Appleton revolutionized the field of landscape perception with his "prospect-refuge" theory, which suggests that the minds of modern Homo sapiens contain vestiges of early hominids' evolution on African savannas. We desire, he wrote, to experience "environmental conditions favourable to biological survival," namely a balance between the ability to see (to have a prospect) without being seen (to hide, or take refuge).
Elaborating upon this hypothesis, psychophysicist Stephen Kaplan identified a number of qualities that people seek in a landscape: complexity, for example, along with mystery—allure of the anticipated unknown. Kaplan is careful to distinguish, though, between complexity and incoherence, mystery and surprise. People want and need to be able to recognize some sort of spatial structure in a landscape, he claims; the ease with which a person can interpret a particular space, find their way, and, "not trivially," find their way back determines affective response. According to his research, legibility—"the inference that being able to predict and maintain orientation will be possible as one wanders more deeply into the scene"—trumps interest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zen of the Plains by Tyra A. Olstad. Copyright © 2014 Tyra A. Olstad. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Prologue: Flyover Country; Scottsbluff, NE,
Chapter 1: Shortgrass / Semi-Desert Shrub-Steppe,
Chapter 2: Mixedgrass,
Chapter 3: Tallgrass,
Chapter 4: Shortgrass / Semi-Desert Shrub-Steppe,
Conclusion: A Brief Meditation on Expectation and Emptiness,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
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