The Rediscovery of North America by Barry Lopez

Author:Barry Lopez [Lopez, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

CAMUS SAID THAT certain cities—he had in mind Oran on the Algerian coast—exorcised the landscape. We have a way of life that ostracises the land. Cadwallader Colden, John Bartram, Peter Collinson, Mark Catesby, Thomas Say, John Kirk Townsend, Thomas Nuttall, John James Audubon—all were able at least to describe what they found. But this extensive knowledge was ultimately regarded as only a kind of entertainment. Decorative information. A series of puzzles for science to elucidate. It was never taken to be what it in fact is—a description of home.

How, then, do we come to know the land, to discover what more may be there than merchantable timber, grazeable prairies, recoverable ores, damable water, netable fish?

It is by looking upon the land not as its possessor but as a companion. To achieve this, one must I think cultivate intimacy, as one would with a human being. And that would mean being in a place, taking up residence in a place. Let us choose, for an example, a residence in the basin of the Kentucky River, a tributary of the Ohio. Because we ourselves are recent arrivals, we would have to read local history, would have to find a memory of the place through the journals and records of those of us who first came across the Alleghenies and over the Cumberland Plateau—Thomas Walker through the Cumberland Gap for the Loyal Land Company, and residents of the proposed colonies of Transylvania and Vandalia—would have to read these observations against each other. And then read in the anthropological and archeological literature about those we moved out of our way—the Shawnee and Miami; and about those they followed here, the Hopewell; and those they followed, the Adena—as far back as we could go. And then we would come forward, looking in the archives of towns and counties for records of observation that spanned enough years so that the human span of three score and ten was not the span we measured the country by.

We would have to memorize and remember the land, walk it, eat from its soils and from the animals that ate its plants. We would have to know its winds, inhale its airs, observe the sequence of its flowers in the spring and the range of its birds.

To enquire after this knowledge is to make our proposals, to answer the antiphony. To be intimate with the land like this is to enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, to include it in the meaning of the word community.

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