On terra firma

SCHOLARS may be right when they say language creates reality, but can writers shove words down our throats to create the reality they believe should exist? As teenagers gather by the thousands to lose themselves in virtual reality, National Book Award-winner Barry Lopez has tried to revive a calmer existence based on an intimate knowledge of the physical world. With managing editor Debra Gwartney, Lopez has collected geographical terms like “chaco,” “cenote,” “prairie,” “prado” and “bogue,” and assigned them to 46 contemporary writers to create an illustrated, multi-voiced dictionary called “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape.”

It’s easy to write off the attempt as merely quaint. Three-fifths of the world’s mammal species are circling the drain while kids wheeze asthmatically in disturbing unison. What’s an environmentalist to do? Yet here we have Lopez and company smiling and waving like grizzled veterans of the Confederacy, positively glorying in their irrelevance. There is genuine beauty in landscape terms: cowboy-sounding phrases like “buckbrush coulee,” technical words like “foreshore” and many in between. Certainly, Lopez’s goal is noble, to counteract the sense of loss that pervades America as we cannibalize our landscapes. He is a graceful writer, and this is a timely enterprise. But what’s missing from the book often speaks louder than what is there.

“Home Ground” is informative, surprising, chilling, poetic and occasionally funny. It is also often quite dull, although the dullness is relieved by transcendent moments. The book may be most important, in literary terms, as a mark of how far we have come from the days of Faulkner and Hemingway, those quintessentially American authors for whom landscape was paramount. “Home Ground” implicitly asks: Where should American writing go now? And yet, no answer is delivered here other than an implicit suggestion that we get back to our roots, which any sensible person realizes is impossible.

Where “Home Ground” does succeed is in the sheer pleasure of its words. Writer and marine biologist Eva Saulitis informs us that other names for “anchor ice,” the skin that forms on the bottoms of chilled rivers and streams, include “depth, underwater, and lappered ice.” Arturo Longoria quotes Jack London’s obscure socialist novel “The Iron Heel” to describe a “barranca,” which is the Spanish word for cliff or precipice. “A quarter of a mile from Glen Ellen,” London writes, “after the second bridge is passed, to the right will be noticed a barranca that runs like a scar across the rolling land toward a group of wooded knolls.” It’s too bad that the brevity required by a dictionary entry keeps Longoria from mentioning that Glen Ellen was where London built Wolf House, a mansion that burned to the ground soon after its construction. Its ruins are preserved in a state park today, a monument to the tragic underside of California’s particular brand of landscape triumphalism.

Several contributors transcend the limitations of the dictionary form quite handily. Interestingly, these tend not to be “nature” writers but simply “writers.” Joy Williams makes barrier islands sound both playful and ominous (“The most dynamic of all coastal systems, barrier islands constantly shift at the whim of wind and wave, in time actually rolling over upon themselves”), while Kim Stafford defines beach cusps as “a series of rhythmic shapes in beach sand, where water’s deft knife scallops the coast.”

Many of the more appealing entries tend toward writing of the flash fiction variety. Luis Alberto Urrea, a poet, essayist, fiction writer and practitioner of New Journalism, delivers the book’s knockout punches. Tijuana-born, Urrea knows about dispossession firsthand and is the only contributor whose definitions seem to have any relationship to real life as most of us experience it. One gets the sense that Urrea wandered off task, but I, for one, am grateful: “Huerfano is Spanish for orphan. In this case a perfect description of the landform -- a solitary spire or hill left standing by erosion apart from kindred landscape features. Also called a ‘circumscribed eminence,’ a lost mountain, or an island hill, it is a kind of existentialist monument, an island in the sky: no man is an island, but a huerfano is. You could make the argument that Devils Tower of Wyoming is the mother of all huerfanos.”

The writers here are an impressive bunch, despite several curious omissions. Rebecca Solnit, an important author who produces cultural commentary on nature, doesn’t show up in these pages; neither does Jim Harrison, nor, sadly, T.C. Boyle, who writes about nature with full consciousness of its imminent dissolution, and would have contributed a few needed laughs.

The fact that I was so desperate for a laugh, or any human contact, compels a question: Do all these “saddle dams” and “salt domes” succeed in making us feel as though we’re back on terra firma? In other words, does “Home Ground” restore to Americans a sense of place, of region, of landscape?

Ultimately, I don’t think so, and not just because it’s unprepossessing, with lackluster illustrations and uninteresting design. The most vivid way to read “Home Ground” is in tandem with Margaret Wertheim’s 1999 book, “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.” In this brilliantly original work, Wertheim postulates that the Internet fulfills the promise of early Christianity by offering mortals a chance to transcend their animal bodies; in essence, to ascend to heaven. Wertheim wrote at the height of the dot.com boom -- a time that seems quite distant -- but her ideas remain relevant today, when a very real apocalyptic seam has started showing in our First World lives. As we spend ever more of our waking hours leaving our bodies, it is safe to assume that we also leave behind the tangible world of desert pavement and glacial drift, which is just the point Lopez is trying to make. Geography is destiny, Jared Diamond and others have pointed out, and we ignore this to our peril. But if apocalypse is truly on our minds, and we need the right words to describe it -- or stave it off -- a genteel dictionary does not strike me as the most effective strategy.

If Wertheim is to be believed, humans crave a transcendent narrative, and the key word may not be transcendence so much as narrative. Narrative rules in nearly every form of writing except environmental literature, which may be why no one reads it anymore. If one wishes to be lyrical, as many nature writers do, narrative is not necessary. But if one wishes to gain support for a cause while pursuing an aesthetic ideal, eschewing narrative seems a bad idea.

In fact, “Home Ground” has lovely moments, but there is a whiff of arrogance about it. Virtually none of its contributors is under 40. Too many belong to America’s version of landed gentry, and there is a disturbing tendency on the parts of these squires to idealize agriculture, which is a tough sell if you’re not Thomas Hardy. As a result, “Home Ground” is about a certain kind of home, the home of a person who is not in imminent danger of losing it, selling it or mortgaging the hell out of it. That is not most Americans, or most people. A sharper awareness of diaspora might have made the book a compelling document. This is not merely a matter of cultural diversity. Wallace Stegner was a white Western male, but diaspora was something he understood to the core of his being.

By contrast, “Home Ground” is a tasteful, occasionally rewarding exercise in nostalgia, and a disturbing indication that environmental writers have not yet shaken the cloying muck of Romanticism from their hiking boots. Many of us who still care about the environment, despite asthma, despite Target, despite the disappearance of rhinos, eagerly await books that will move the genre forward rather than mire it in the past. After all, a lot of things about the past weren’t really that great. Hemingway and Faulkner -- and, yes, Stegner -- understood this too. *