Knowing One's Terrain

  

“One must know one’s terrain” - George Garrad 

from The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain

by Colin Monger

It is important to me, as a natural man, to be in touch with the Earth where I live.  This has always been so, though there have been places where I dwelled where I was just not able to establish a connection.  I always was able to figure out the reason that a place wasn’t right for me – at home – but it took me a stubbornly long time in some cases to admit why.

At present I am reading Thoreau’s Country: Journey through A Transformed Landscape by David Foster.  Using Thoreau’s extensive journals Foster relates how the New England that Thoreau knew has evolved from an abode of small villages and farms populated with yeomanry to what we see in our era.  The extensive cleared fields, small managed woodlots, hay meadows, tidy hamlets, and clear flowing brooks of Thoreau’s nineteenth century have given way to forests, cities, and subdivisions.  Only the occasional stone wall running straight and true through the wooded landscape is evidence of the past time.

There is such a stone wall along the back edge of Shamans’ Rest.  It is the boundary between our wooded meadowland and Sherwood Forest, a whimsically named subdivision of houses in cape and garrison style.  That wall prompted me to do some research; what had the land of Shamans’ Rest been before?

It had been part of a ten-acre tract that was subdivided into two, then three, then four lots.   It was open field through at least the 40s; photos from the late nineteenth century show that this was tilled land or hay pasture and treeless.  There was a stone wall along the road, since removed.  The terrain has since begun the process of reverting to mixed oak white-pine forest except where humans have chosen to retard the process.

What about before that?  Sometime in the seventeenth century English settlers began to clear the land, periodically interrupted by war parties from what was then New France. 

Before that?  Well I can only speculate.  The glaciers were here many centuries ago and created the mound that is the sandy drumlin on which our home lies.  (Making possible a good site for a septic system; our neighbors had to blast a cavity in the granite to build theirs.)  Millions of years ago the land shook with earthquakes as it passed over a plume of rising flowing magma from deep in the Earth, a hotspot much like that residing at present under Yellowstone.  And an eon before that Shamans’ Rest was the slope of a continental shelf of the small continent of Avalon, since torn in two to form old England and New England.

We humans like to imagine – that is the right word – that things will never change.  We can control our environment and make the way it is permanent.  That’s arrogant and a fairy tale.  For once upon a time the land was very different, and it is continually evolving.  It responds to what we do, not always in ways that we would like.  This latter judgment applies to the larger Earth, not just the localities where we find ourselves.

So I will love the place I live, much as I did Fletcher Dole’s pastures when I was a child.  And I will let the land be itself and tell me what it needs from me.  We can live together and both be happy.

What is your sense of place where you live?

The night sky is glorious this time of year.  Cariad and I frequently walk out into the meadow, sit by the Faerie Fire, and stare up at the stars.

Venus hangs low in the west at sunset, but climbs higher in the sky each night.  In the evening Jupiter is visible over the woods in the south; he can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to reside with the Ram or the Fishes.

In the morning when I venture out to the deck with my coffee to await the arrival of the birds at the feeders, it is still dark enough to see Saturn cozying up to the Virgin while Mars is tweaking the tail of the Big Lion.

The land where we live is now Certified Wildlife Habitat.  This is a program of the National Wildlife Federation.  Even if you have only a small urban lot, you can still participate in this valuable program.  The smaller creatures such as voles and burying beetles who live with you, but whom you are not trained to see, will appreciate your doing so.