FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL JULY 13, 1999

The westerner has the landscape

and vistas to capture the imagination - the west's ruggedness and wildness. The middlewesterner faces no such sweeping landscape; our stories are more the stories of people, the stories of people in struggle with the land, perhaps, of people on the land. The land here has been tamed. Ours is not "nature" writing here in the middlewest, so much as it is deep history, memoir, romance.

A gauze of clouds this morning, with blue sky behind. Sunlight heavy on the greenness of tree. Again a moistness, unusual for July.

Patterns. Patterns and repetitions. Our habits mark us, and they mark the land around us. From the way we work it, the soil develops a grain like the grain of wood. Unbroken sod has a different grain entirely. Our lives have tooth and they mark everything we touch. Having touched the world, we cannot plead innocence. Every step damages something, to some degree. We are physical beings, so damage is to be expected; but we go beyond the natural bounds and do damage exponentially. Even the sweet and simple become poison. Man is the thinking animal with a wrecking ball.

In Ripon, I see that a house is now being built south of Grace Lutheran Church, next to where the dog marked out its circle last winter, the winter before. Today: part one - digging the basement.

Comments

[Dave]

"Man is the thinking animal with a wrecking ball."
Nice update of Aristotle!

I like the line about the soil developing a grain, too, though in point of fact I suspect the opposite may be more nearly true in respect to what happens beneath the surface after land has been plowed: a structure that developed over centuries, including an intricate meshwork of macropores from roots and mycelia, is destroyed.

[Tom Montag]

"I suspect the opposite may be more nearly true in respect to what happens beneath the surface after land has been plowed...." Certainly that's what happened to the prairies. Worse, a very productive ecological community was reduced to what - CORN. My prejudice is that the folks on family farms are being better stewards of our land than the folks at some corporation in the UK.

Of course we still have sodbusters who are doing no better than mining the land, unfortunately. But I am heartened by some of the folks who are hanging on....