The illustration, right, shows a box canyon, which are three-sided, with vertical walls. Illustration © Molly O’Halloran, Home Ground
For centuries, cultures worldwide have been fascinated by the power and mystique of names and naming. Among some indigenous cultures, the names of certain places or deities held so much meaning that speaking them aloud was taboo. In the Book of Genesis, Adam was given the power to name the beasts and birds of the fields even before he was provided with a partner. William Shakespeare’s love–struck Juliet pondered, “What’s in a name?” In the late 1800s, Lewis Carroll’s Alice asked Humpty Dumpty, “Must a name mean something?” and an ocean away, inspired nature writer Henry David Thoreau opined, “There is all the poetry in the world in a name….The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.”
Writer Barry Lopez is among those who believe that names have the power to connect and preserve, and his forthcoming edited work, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, attempts to do just that for Americans and the land they come from, live on and love. A compendium of 850 water and landform definitions written by forty–five writers and poets, Home Ground invites readers to cultivate a keener appreciation of their beloved landscapes and how deeply that land is entwined with our lives.
“What many of us are hopeful of, it seems, is being able to gain—or regain—a sense of intimate knowledge with our chosen places; and along with it a sense of affirmation with our neighbors that the place we have chosen is beautiful, subtle, profound, worthy of our lives,” writes Lopez in the book’s introduction. “If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better.”
The land, water and ice forms defined in Home Ground span the continent and range from the general to the particular and from the massive to the minuscule. They cover desert landscapes (arroyo, mesa, yardang), river features (eddy, riffle, yazoo) and seascapes (fjord, swash, tideland). There are terms from chilly landscapes (icefall, nilas, sastrugi), hot ones (geyser, mud pot, travertine) and soggy ones (chaco, fen, muskeg). Included are southwestern land forms with Spanish origins (canada, jolla, mogote), as well as terms with origins in Dutch (kill, cripple), French (marais, manche, mofette) and indigenous cultures (nunatak, tseghiizi, unaka, pali, pahoehoe).
The collection also includes regional and colloquial terms that harken back to our forebears. The term “thank you ma’am” might ring a bell for some. Others may recall their local “lover’s leap” or “milk gap” or “desire path.” And then there are irresistible gems such as “singing sand,” “trembling prairie” and “quaking bog.”
Home Ground contributors include some of today’s foremost writers for whom place and landscape is a constant theme, whether in nonfiction work, novels or poetry. Among them are Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams. Line drawings from illustrator Molly O’Halloran make many of the terms easier to visualize.
Although arranged alphabetically, Home Ground does not read like a typical reference work. The directive from Lopez and managing editor Debra Gwartney to contributing writers was that the definitions combine scientific precision with poetic imagination. With some of the terms, science outweighs the poetry; other times literary imagination takes the helm, with writers adding jots of cultural history, folklore, colloquial usage, word origins and literary context to show how these landforms have shaped the vast and complex “ground” that Americans call home.
In her piece about the rather commonplace term “lake,” writer Patricia Hample does not dwell on the countless ways in which lakes are formed, but concentrates on the word itself, finding its origins in Teutonic forms meaning “play, fun, sport, glee, games and tricks.” In writing about “ledge,” Michael Collier describes the feeling of being on a ledge at Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument: “Standing on a ledge, one feels both the precariousness of being suspended above and over a space and the thrill of looking out and being drawn to the beauty and mystery of an expanse.” In explaining “littoral cone,” writer Gretchen Legler describes how lava flows into the sea, hurling fragments and spatters of molten rock into the air which accumulate into mounds up to 200 feet high and 400 feet across. “There seems no more elemental process of creation than that of the volcano spewing forth hot rock from the center of the Earth, giving newly born land up to the forces of wind, water, and time,” she writes.
Federally owned lands comprise a myriad of landforms addressed in Home Ground. Volcanic features such as fumaroles, solfataras, lava tubes and cinder cones can be seen in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. Glacial landforms—moulin, crevasse, ogive, cirque, arête—can be found in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Southeast Utah’s national parks and monuments are a showcase of eroded landforms such as arches, hoodoos and slot canyons. Balds are found in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the country’s best–known example of a caldera lake is in Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park.
Modern life has become more about rushing through our landscapes than slowing down to take them in. The result is that too many of us have become disconnected from the land that nurtures and shapes us. Home Ground holds out the promise that the places we love are still amongst us, and that it is possible to recapture a sense of connectedness to the land that our ancestors—who lived in slower times—took so much for granted.
“To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features, the soughing of the air moving across it, its elevation against a clear night sky, its fragrance after rain,” Lopez writes. “One must wait for the moment when the thing—the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada—ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”
Home Ground, published by Trinity University Press, will be available in bookstores in early October.