January 2007, The Country Today
We Are Where We’re Home: Reflections on the Land
By Dena Wortzel
It is thirty-six miles from the bottom of my farm’s gravel driveway in Iowa County to the Madison beltline. Once you hit the beltline, miles don’t matter. Half of my drive is on winding roads past still-operating dairy farms as well as some, like mine, that have been adapted to different uses (training horses, in my case). As I get closer to Madison, there is new evidence that split-levels and asphalt are continuing their relentless march across some of the nation’s best soils.
The view of a suburbanized landscape, and the density of vehicles that accompanies it, is less than relaxing. The first half of the drive, however, is generally a good time for constructive thinking. Something about its familiar beauty calms my mind so that even if, five miles from home, I remember something I forgot to do before I left, I can’t get too wound up about it. (Besides, it’s hard kick yourself when your foot is nailed to the accelerator.) So, given all the givens, this morning’s drive seemed like as good a time as any to think about what I wanted to say in my first column for this paper.
When I asked The Country Today editor, Scott Schultz, whether he would consider giving me a bit of space to start a conversation with other rural residents about how we all live on, and with, the land and our neighbors, I waited until I had him where I wanted him: at the top of the field road that rises out of my valley to one of the two ridges that define my farm. I figured that he might be too busy enjoying the centuries-old burr oaks, prairie grasses, and the view across the Pecatonica River to say “no.” (Scott, like me, is a real sucker for that combination of raw natural beauty and the touch of the human hand that, together, make the Wisconsin landscape what it is.)
Standing on the ridge top, I wondered aloud whether it was views like these that inspired the extraordinary number of Wisconsin historians, novelists, poets, farmers, and scientists whose writings about the natural world and rural communities have shaped the way we see this place, and whose voices have often reached far beyond Wisconsin. Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Lorine Niedecker, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Laura Ingalls Wilder are just a few of those who contributed to national policies and the nation’s imagination. In more recent years they have been joined by the voices of William Cronon, Jane Hamilton, Curt Meine, and Justin Isherwood, to name but a few.
Munching on a crumbling piece of applesauce cake this morning as the brown winter landscape streamed by beyond my windshield, a phrase popped into my head. Perhaps because I was feeling virtuous about the cake (homemade, with my apples) in a “you are what you eat” kind of way, the line that presented itself was a kind of geographic equivalent of that old saying. What occurred me was the thought that “we are where we’re home.” Pondering this rather odd turn of phrase, it struck me as shorthand for my belief that the more a place is home to us, the more that place works on us, making and re-making us into who we are. And the reverse is just as true. As human beings, we have more power to rapidly change the places that we live than any other creature.
Glaciers and human activity both have had their say in Wisconsin, in ways that are etched into the landscape. UW–Madison historian William Cronon has much to teach about our ways of living on this continent, focusing on what it means that our efforts have been shaped both by the land itself and the stories we tell ourselves about what the land means to us. In The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature Cronon ponders one of the myths most deeply ingrained in Americans’ consciousness, that of wilderness. Cronon explains that the nineteenth century saw a dramatic change in the dominant cultural idea of wilderness, from a biblical vision of it as a terrifying wasteland, often filled with evil, to one of wilderness as a sacred place of infinite value. Whether as a place to experience the sublime, to escape from the ills of industrial cities, or to test one’s ruggedness, wilderness—in this version of the myth—is seen as a place to be visited, not inhabited. In fact, the sacredness of wilderness is seen precisely to the extent that it is pristine and un-peopled.
Cronon sees a risk in the power of this most American of stories. By suggesting that “real” nature must be untouched by humans, the American myth of the wilderness can discourage us from taking sufficient responsibility for the much more domesticated, peopled, and equally natural landscapes were we spend our daily lives. “Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others,” Cronon points out. But to live well and sustainably in those places that we inhabit, “we need an environmental ethic that will tells us as much about using nature as about not using it,” he cautions.
I share Cronon’s concerns, and his love of the domesticated beauties of the places we call home here in Wisconsin. In future columns I will touch upon the work of other writers who have jogged my thinking about the natural features, manmade structures, and communities that we make here, and the stories that we tell about them. I hope that, if you haven’t already, you will search out these authors for yourself, since you will probably get something different out of them than I did. And I would really love it if you would call me, or drop me an e-mail, to tell me what you think.
Dena Wortzel is co-director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and makes her home on Birch Run Farm in Iowa County. 608-265-5593, dwortzel@wisc.edu.