Wallace Stegner citations are a
commonplace in High Country News. Stegner, a
writer and historian, is our bard (if we have one), and perhaps
most familiar to HCN readers for his call to
Westerners to create a “society to match the
scenery.”
Now comes a Colorado writer who quietly
turns this idea on its head. In his latest book, Soul of
Nowhere, Craig Childs suggests that Stegner’s wish
is as inevitable (and prevalent) as earthquakes, wildfires and
floods. Soul of Nowhere finds Childs chasing
down jackrabbits in southern Arizona, clambering around cliff faces
in Grand Canyon, and navigating sandstone mazes where it takes a
week to go five miles.
In short, there is a lot of Childs
getting into trouble and getting out of it. But this is not merely
adventure-seeking for adrenaline’s sake.
Everywhere
he goes, Childs notes the traces of past desert travelers. In these
remnants, Childs sees a pattern of art and architecture that
mirrors the landscape: High, narrow cliff dwellings tucked into the
narrow notches of central Arizona’s Mogollon Rim; swirling,
psychedelic rock art left by nomads in central Utah; Anasazi
tree-trunk ladders wedged into cliff faces above the Colorado
River.
For Childs, these artifacts are not accidents, but
evidence of a basic force of nature. He maintains that the land
expresses itself through us, no matter what we do. If the pottery
sherds and crumbling ruins of the Southwest are any guide, society
will be brought to its knees and forced into compliance by the
scenery.
Childs thinks on a different time scale than most
of us, but he may be right in suggesting that the land will have
the last word. Even societies that matched the scenery quite well
couldn’t last in the arid West.
— Adam
Burke,
Radio High Country News
A Radio High
Country News interview with Craig Childs is available on CD.
Contact adam@hcn.org, or call 800/905-1155. Craig Childs’
book is Soul of Nowhere: Traversing Grace in a Rugged
Land, Sasquatch Books, 2002. 240 pages. Hardcover:
$22.95.
From Soul of
Nowhere
“These Salado cliff dwellings
are inseparable from the cliffs that they inhabit, as blended and
fine-tuned as a brown moth on tree bark. Pausing in this dwelling,
I understood that I was at the meeting point where land and human
graft into each other. This is where people were formed by the
canyons, driven by their severity and sheerness to build spindles
of dwellings in the rock. The land here changes us into its own
shape. The very mechanics of my eyes and my way of seeing were
being re-formed as I traveled. Wanting to sleep only in canyons.
Induced to climb up into its cracks and hunker there. I was being
taken in, as had the people before me.”
What he’s looking for:
“People seem to respond to the landscape by becoming it. You
can’t defeat this landscape because it is so primal. You have
get in there and bend to it. And the people who painted there (on
the redrock walls), the people who built their dwellings and their
granaries there, they figured out how to bend and match the
landscape with their lives. The landscape just embedded itself in
these people. It was in their blood and it would have come out in
their brush strokes on the wall. I spent a lot of time trying to
see back that far and see what it is that the landscape had done to
them.”
Why he goes to the
edge:
“Your mind just shuts off and
you’re going on something much older and something much more
intelligent — none of this rhetoric of the brain. And that is
what happens to me in those moments, where I am not going through
my usual chatter. That boulder over there? I am the same thing as
that boulder. That wind I can hear in the distance? There
isn’t a difference between me and it. This is a landscape. I
am one of the things in this landscape.”
— excerpts from a Radio HCN
interview
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Author says we’ll ‘match the scenery’ whether we like it or not.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
