In September, I climbed Mt. Timpanogos for the first time. I've lived in Utah for two years now as a graduate student, and it’s been mostly uninterrupted. As an undergraduate at BYU, I remained a transplant with shallow roots, coming for fall and winter to attend classes but always returning home to California for spring and summer. In those five years as an undergraduate I never climbed Timp. I was always busy, and didn’t know where to even start the hike or who to go with or if I could do it reasonably in a day without technical gear. I was naive. But the desire was there, I just didn’t make it happen until later, when I had done some research, talked with people, and felt physically fit enough to make the attempt. Part of it though, was I had not developed a sense of place in Utah until I finally devoted myself to four seasons here. When I did, I found, to my delight, that I really love this place. Especially the mountains. This love is the best motivation to attempt anything.
I recently wrote in the introduction to my MA thesis for ecocriticism, that to be a student at Brigham Young University, uniquely situated at the base of the Wasatch range, that dates back 800 million years ago to the precambrian period, one must also become a student of these mountains. I began this study of the mountains by doing what the topic of my thesis did--I started walking. Nan Shepherd was a modernist era writer in Scotland, and walked the hills and peaks of the Cairngorm mountains west of Aberdeen where she grew up and worked as a teacher. I remember starting to hike the Y trail in December of 2014, a few months after I had started my graduate program in English and of living directly under the Y in a house on 820 North. My first hikes up were literally breathtaking-- the hike is barely over a mile, but a daunting 1,074 foot elevation gain. It leaves you lightheaded and puffing.
I have hiked the Y trail countless times now in all temperatures. After my first ascent in December 2014, I wanted to hike it faster, making the goal to eventually be able to run up it like I saw some gazelle-bodied (former cross country I assume) runners doing. Some of my favorite times hiking the Y were when the trail was covered in slushy snow and the way down was more of a glacade slide than a hike. My trackless Nike running shoes did almost nothing to keep me sure footed, so between sliding down on two feet, I also slide down on my spandexed backside. It was very fun though, and I kept doing it through the winter, sometimes falling as many as 20 times on the way down (I counted once, the bruises were thankfully many less).
The view from the top of the Y, many will tell you, is worth it but if you keep your eyes trained on the mountain, it seems to open up and out into a far vaster amount of space than it offers simply by looking away from it. I did not know for a long time that the trail from the Y continues above it, and turns to enter Slide Canyon, much smaller by far than Rock Canyon to the north and Slate Canyon to the south. The trail up Slide Canyon is continually pressing upwards in a steep climb but opens onto two beautiful meadows and carries you through groves of aspen trees that in fall are a burst of yellow, and in summer a flurry of green. I have hiked this trail several times alone, and twice back to the saddle before Provo Peak, the higher peak hidden behind Y mountain that is only visible from certain standpoints on BYU campus through the cracks of Slide Canyon, or the two neighboring canyons. So it was a great surprise to climb above the Y finally and gaze back into the space and feel wind blowing from the deeper mountain that becomes so much more than the façade we are used to seeing along the Wasatch front.
When you come to know the mountain by being in it, and not just on it, then place becomes more integral in a sense of identity. This lesson has become crucial to my education as a writer and as a student of the natural world. Especially as I've been writing my thesis on a woman whose prose is a meditation on her love of mountains, I've been more attuned to my own reflection process of writing about the environments that I feel connected to. I can’t say that of every experience out of doors I have recorded my thoughts, but rather I’ve simply made being outdoors a part of my life here. However, this is one of the best exercises for reflective outdoor writing: keeping a journal of time spent in nature. Experiences out of doors. Musings out of doors. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t written about my time in the mountains, it creeps into what I do record probably more often than I have noticed. In truth it is the context and setting for many of my most revealing experiences. I remember several times retreating to a rock that sits at the mouth of Slide Canyon, above the Y as a place to rest and think. I had hiked there with a boyfriend, anxiously awaiting the chance to show him my “favorite” rock only to have him declare the same thing of the same rock once we reached it. We sat there looking down one night over the neighborhoods we lived in, and were surprised when a few minutes later a fireworks show started just below us. He had said only moments earlier that of all the spots to be in together, wouldn’t it be a great place to propose. I agreed in my head, but did not expect a proposal, and none came that night or ever while we were together. The day we ended our relationship I climbed again to that rock to somehow absorb either strength or further sorrow from something that didn’t work the way that I had wanted. Subsequent trips to that rock have been in part an attempt to reclaim the memory of being there for myself, and not just with him that one time. It has become a place that I relate to and is part of my experience; part of who I am.
One of my professors, George Handley, author of several books and a blog called Home Waters first taught me in a class on a study abroad to London. It was about humanities, art, and the environment and took us all over England historically and artistically. Great painters like Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner created the picturesque in my mind, and then I had the chance to confirm and alter the images for myself after visiting some of England’s finest landscapes. One of the most beautiful landscapes I came across was in Wye Valley where Tintern Abbey is nestled. I had been in many great cathedrals in the months I had spent in London and Paris. But somehow the ruins of this abbey, blanketed with verdant grass were more spacious and spiritual than any of the stone edifices with their stained glass. What those ruins did was embrace the landscape to make it a part of its view. You couldn’t see the stone buttresses and arches without the green hills of the valley that they framed. It was the landscape overtaking the elementals of the former structure and returning it again to nature. Your focus changed being in that setting, and nature was not just in the background, but was the reason for the experience you were having.
Since that time in London, I have slowly but surely gained a love for ecocriticism and for writing about the environment. This idea though of developing a sense of place is still settling in, probably because it's not a task that can be finished easily or quickly, rather it’s like forming a friendship, it requires devotion, time, and even sacrifice. Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, muses briefly and poignantly in an essay entitled “Thinking Like a Mountain” to try and understand how a mountain views the value of the wolf to its balanced ecosystem. Leopold admits to being trigger-happy as a young man and upon meeting a wolf one day coming out of a stream, is quick to unload his gun at it only to see in its eyes the glowing fire of green slowly extinguishing. It seems that it’s not until he writes many years later of the experience that he is able to gain the perspective that a living mountain has of all aspects of life that are integral in a balance of preservation and conservation. He exhorts us to not only see the mountain as a living organism but also as one possessing a viewpoint and an ethic that we would be wise to adopt—if we gained a more comprehensive understanding of nature’s ecological roles then maybe our place in it would become more apparent and more vital to our own identity.
Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain, also writes herself to a knowledge of the living organism that is a mountain through all its elemental parts. Through her walking, she experiences moments of heightened perception and reaches a shared awareness between her own being and this living being of the mountain. The wonders of a world easily walked past instead of through on the way to a summit or an achievement are studied to a depth and a passion I have not encountered in my brief but studied time in nature writing. That is mostly why I wasn’t able to escape her writing and made it the subject of my master’s thesis. Of the living mountain she writes, “Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience. This is the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at a time to live all the way through” (Shepherd 82). “To live all the way through” is such a beautiful way of teaching the relationship between place and a mind, as she does. I have gained more about place from reading her brief text on the living mountain than any other book.
I'm intrigued how I might teach this concept of developing a sense of place to my students in first year writing at BYU. The writing and rhetoric class once had an emphasis, and mine was the environment, of course. I focused heavily on environmental issues and making them care about climate change and pollution and energy consumption. And very few of them cared or changed their mind. I realize now that what I should have focused on was teaching them to develop a sense of place, like Dr. Handley had taught me. I think what Dr. Handley is effectively passionate about is sharing his passion for the place that he lives in, and other places as well, really any place that he is in. He seems to know you can't win an argument with someone about climate change if said person has no sense of place. So perhaps that is the ideal place to start.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes of place, and quotes Carson McCullers as saying, “to know who you are, you have to have a place to come from” (135). Heaney’s Irish sense of place ties myth and legend to a landscape that is able to remind people of a cultural history that defines who they are and where they come from. Writers seem to give life to a place as they write about it, but arguably that life can be experienced and known simply through experience. However, as a writer, I believe it is enhanced by actually reflecting on how that shapes your own sense of self. By writing through those thoughts, connection is made between your perception of place and experience in it with a wider consciousness of yourself. I wrote earlier of a desire to be a student of the mountain range that I live at the foot of—the Wasatch Range. Those mountains are more than just a feature of the landscape. They act as a compass of sorts, they remain always where they are and we navigate according to their position. We travel over them, around them, through them, and along them and better grasp our own place in relation to the rest of the world around us because of them. If you think about what Heaney writes, his sense of place connects person and history to place through writing. Anyone can do the same as they discover the place they live in by experiencing it and writing about it. They forge a connection between identity, experience, and a landscape that then becomes apart of their own history. That is developing a sense of place.
I’ll conclude with words from Wallace Stegner, an integral voice in land preservation and conservation. Stegner advocates for “[acquiring] the sense not of ownership but of belonging” to the land. I cannot help but think that what prevents us most from developing a sense of place is not considering place something to belong to, but rather something to own and consume from. If this perspective changes, if we can, as Stegner writes, submit ourselves to place, “only…[then] is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established” (206). I believe that is where people will start caring about climate change because they will understand that they belong to the place they live.
