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| Visiting the legendary Lepine sisters... |
During this penultimate leg of our winter journey, we studied the many facets of the concept of landscape: landscape as recreation, as profit, as habitat, as aesthetic, as history, as a watershed, and many others. We studied the relationships between landscapes, habitats, and the human and geologic history that defines those connections. We studied the history of the Vermont landscape, and how human forces have influenced it, and how that landscape has, in turn, influenced art and literature.
Out of a metamorphic
fissure
I spring like a
fluid bullet
Down the
mountain I cascade
Freed by
March’s flow
From my crystal
Palace
Overlooking a
bountiful kingdom
As I roll down
I feed this
beautiful place
In about 8500 BC,
Paleo-Indians roamed a glaciated Vermont, surviving by hunting caribou. As the
glacial ice receded around 5000 BC, hunter-gatherer societies began to develop,
hunting, fishing, and gathering plants. Several thousand years later, between 1300
and 1000 BC, agricultural management of crops, especially corn, became critical
to native societies, who used fire to clear land to cultivate.
French settlers arrived in Champlain Valley in the late 1600s AD,
followed in the 1760s by economically motivated settlers from Connecticut, who
traveled into Vermont via eastern New York and the Connecticut River. The
construction of military roads and canals in the 1820s led to the rapid
development of agricultural communities, and to the sheep boom that occurred
between 1820 and 1850. In this time, Vermont’s land was largely cleared: in
1620, ninety-five percent of the state was forested, compared to only
twenty-five to thirty-five percent by 1850. (In the late 1990s, approximately
seventy-five to eighty percent of Vermont was forested.)
Railroads were developed in the late 1800s, and the sheep industry
failed. Dairy farming took over in the early 1900s, creating the rural
landscape that is the popular image of Vermont today. The creation of the
interstate system in the 1960s also helped contribute to the tourism industry.
The concept
of landscape as artifact is strange but makes sense when one observes the stone
walls, old trees, tree plantations, or young growth as objects to learn about
the past. On the ninth of March, we saw this big gnarled sugar maple standing
in a relatively young growth woods. We also skied through a Norway Spruce
plantation that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal to put people back to work
after World War I.
The sisters were inspiringly youthful and energetic when we met them,
enthusiastically bustling about and presenting us with delicious milk, cookies,
and maple syrup. Their unique radiance and the wonderful stories they told us
gave us a wonderful level of insight into the world of Vermont’s past.
Wearing all Baby Blue
hunched over
quite the nose
slight
Sunglasses —
with one lens bedazzled
energy radiance
happy to see
us.
big hands —
gnarled, working hands,
soft, warmed
jean cuff,
rolled up, workboot house shoes
lots of smiles,
teasing and pinching each other
siblings
jovial,
youthful
genuine
welcoming
content
Why did they
never marry?
Spinster, rich
and giving
Humor
Throughout the leg, we
also studied literature and art, and the role played by the Northeastern
landscape in forming them. Concepts of wilderness have also evolved,
concurrently with the dominant movements in nature literature and art.
In the 1500s, native peoples of Vermont and the Northeast had an
intuitive connection with nature, not making any conceptual separation between
humans and the world around them. The first European settlers, in the 1600s and
1700s, saw wilderness as something to be feared and fought. They strongly
associated wilderness with the concept of being lost, connecting it to moral
fears, as well: fearing their “bewilderment,” or moral confusion and despair. Philosophers and artists of the Enlightenment and later the Romantics, ending in about 1850, including Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and William Gilpin, still saw
nature as something daunting, something to be conquered, while simultaneously
lifting it up, and seeing God in it.
From the mid-1800s to about 1910, the Transcendentalists, such as
Thoreau, Muir, and Emerson, reacting, in part, to the Industrial
Revolution, were considered the first environmentalists, recognizing the threat
to nature from industrial development, and viewing its continued preservation
as a human right. Recreation in the wilderness expanded in the 1860s, with the
construction of country houses for the wealthy, and the establishment of
national parks. Increasing urbanization led to the view of wilderness as an
escape from the cities.
In the 1950s and 1960s was another significant environmentalist
movement, in the wake of World War II, with writers such as Rachel Carson and
Aldo Leopold expressing fears about the effect of rapid technological progress
on nature and the environment. Widespread pollution and the development of new
chemicals prompted some of these fears. Beginning in the 1980s, a return to
post-Romantic and Transcendentalist mindsets has become dominant, with the
growing environmentalist movement focusing on land preservation, creating
islands of nature for the future.
We wrote poems, inspired by some poems by Muir, creating verbal pictures
of how the concept of the ‘flowing’ of nature plays a role in many natural
systems in which it may not be obvious at first glance, such as in the
evolution of boreal forests and in the development of geologic formations.
Born from the earth, in
the form of a spiderweb of cold rivulets, water seeps out of high granite and
meets in low valleys. The first miles are youthful, dancing playfully amidst
boulders and cobblestones, ripping around serpentine corners, and tumbling over
waterfalls. Steep banks attempts to control spring torrents, but erode, exposed
roots dangling, pleading for help amidst the roar. The temperamental creeks
converge in wide glassy pools, the brook’s older brother. They gently flow,
caressing islands and shaping sandbars. Soon, the more mature river ebbs and
flows, influenced by the silver moon. The deep, dark curls and ribbons of green
reflect the colors of the hardwood hillside on a fall day. Sailing smells soon
meet the nose, and a white crust forms on the rice lining the shore.
Bottlenecked into little rivers, grass waves from the dunes. Shelled creatures
skirt underfoot, and waves begin to lap at the shore. A haze rises, and the
raindrops return to the sky.
We also studied the landscape as place, looking at the place we’re in,
and connecting it to other places we have been. Memories of place influence how
we see places we are at any given moment, because when we look at the world
around us, we relate it and contrast it to the world in our past.
O dear rock,
fine grained
coarse grained meta
morphic
and
sedimentary,
your intrusions
and
extrusions
are a flow, a
moment washed by
raindrops large
& small
like the ocean
like a drop of
dew
frozen in time
in this moment
you are one
with the tea
house that once stood on you
now demolished,
thanks to
vandals
who never
mattered
to you
and who might
never realize that they
are part
of you
and, dear
moment O Rock,
maritime boreal
forest a rock
moving fast
upon you
flow in this
moment
and though I
have not set foot
upon you
in months
and I
miss you
and rock, my
spirit stands
on you
and my heart,
part of me, is
with you,
and I am
of you,
dear rock.
...And then
there is my new home, here in the North-East Kingdom. Not just here though,
everywhere here in the North-East. Seeing the landscape as contrast to my prior
gives me clarity. I feel very at peace often in the tall stands of spruce, in
the dense Boreal thickets, behind the curtain of green. I feel challenge at the
cold, of the wind hitting at my face, nipping my nose. I enjoy it, the hardship
and the simplicity of the land. Of rolling hills, often not changing enough for
notice, yet being a subtle painted background, always there for reference.
So my home is
neither here, nor there. I am always longing in the city to go to the wild, and
after a fair stretch I long to go back to my city. My home is where I make it,
where I lay my head most often. And my home of late is the small towns we pass,
in the dairy pastures, the hardwoods, the wetlands, and the cotton wall tents.
In my mind, on the trail I am at home, in the sleeping bag and on the sidewalk
in downtown. Home isn’t a place, but it can be, and it is more often a time.
Later in the leg, we had
a group solo — a time when we traveled for a few days with minimal supervision,
and we had to be self-motivated and perform all of our work ourselves. It was a
special time, because it represented a turning point for the group, an end of
the phase of learning the rhythms of trail life, and a beginning to the process
of learning independence and group unity. We will use those skills when we
arrive at our next layover, at the Northwoods Stewardship Center in a few days.
Here at Heartbeet Lifesharing, we are preparing for our small-group
solos: a four-day leg in which we will travel in groups of three students, and
the group leaders will travel a few hours behind us, and, except in event of
emergency, have no contact with us aside from the notes we will leave along the
way informing them of our continued safety. These four days will undoubtedly be
a very special and transformative time as well, preparing and strengthening us
for the spring semester.
Thank you to Heartbeet Lifesharing, our hosts at this layover. Heartbeet
is a biodynamic farm and intentional community working to provide a supporting
environment to adults with special needs. We enjoyed being here greatly!
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| Kai's Beatles Band at Heartbeet Lifesharing |
