I wonder about the relationship of landscape to inner life. Specifically, I wonder if each of us has an internal landscape. For me, the landscape of my childhood forms a part of my inner life, a larger part of my inner life than any other landscape, before or since.
When I was eight, my mom moved us to rural upstate New York, more than a mile up a dirt road, near the top of a hill, no other houses in sight. Our little red house perched on a knoll facing south. The valley, a mile down the hill, cut from east to west. Indian Brook ran through it, past the cemetery where my mom now lies. Rising beyond it was a long row of hills, the tallest of which had a fire tower at the top, visible in different lights as a faint “thumbs up” on the mitten of the landscape. To the southeast, through a gap in the hills, you could see, faintly, Fog Hill and then a blur of other hills leading toward Massachusetts. I let a kite string go in a fierce wind once and watched the kite disappear over that gap. To the southwest, virtually at my feet, Rattlesnake Hill rose on this side of the valley, a bump with portent just because of its name. I hiked it years later and found lots of rusty junk—the remains of a model T, pale glass fragments, and other refuse of the early 20th century—but no rattlesnakes.
Before the house, stretching down the hill and south for a couple of hundred yards was a broad, grassy field. My grandfather mowed it once a summer with a brush cutting bar on the back of his old International Harvester tractor. When he died, my mom did the same. We moved before it was my turn. At the bottom of the field was a thicket of sumac and thorny vines, probably blackberries, although we didn’t spend much time down there. The field was crowned, sloping down to the east and to the west. A hedgerow bounded it on the east, and another field, not ours, peeked through. We never planted our fields, but the field to the east grew cow corn each summer, gradually altering the backdrop beyond the hedgerow from rich brown to pale green to gold. To the west, the land was forested. When the leaves were off the trees in winter, and the sun was low, orange on the horizon, violet sky overhead, you could see a beckoning glint off the ice on the Hudson River, fifteen or twenty miles away, and you felt, standing on our tiny back porch, like you commanded vast and beautiful realms.
If you headed west and downhill you found an old logging road that curved north, down to a stream. A pocket of huge glacial erratics, at least five of them, sat in the woods just off the road before you got to the stream. The largest, squarish and flat-topped, was nearly the size of a house. You could scramble up from two of the four sides and sit on its mossy top, reading comics, playing cards, examining the lichens, or lying on your back watching clouds slide past the waving branches of the trees all around. Another, smaller rock was shaped like the Matterhorn. You could straddle the top like riding a horse, and climbing it was a challenge, seeking hand and toe holds for routes up. Another rock was balanced across two more, creating a small cave—or tunnel, really; you could enter at either end, but it was pretty dark and sheltered in the middle—with a floor of oak and maple leaves. We melted candle bottoms to a ledge inside, but it wasn’t really dark enough that this was necessary. We stored Mad magazines and comic books in a cranny, but they got dirty and damp, so we removed them. One winter the snow was deep and soft enough that we hurled ourselves off the largest rock, ten or twelve feet down, into drifts of snow, over and over.
Northwest from the house, a trail ran down the knoll to an old pump house—no longer used—next to a swamp full of cattails, dragonflies, and mosquitoes. We stayed away in the summer because of the bugs, but in the winter the trail was a perfect toboggan run. We started on a slant-roofed cistern next to the house, shot off the side onto the knoll, and then plunged down, shot to the left, and curved to the right, all the way to the pump house. A few runs packed it down, and then it was ready for wooden sleds with metal runners, face down watching the ice scream under you, or sitting up, steering with your feet, flying through a tunnel of winter. At the end of a run you could hop right up and run back to do it again, or you could lie in the snow, catching your breath and wondering if that lazy feeling was the onset of a numb death by freezing, which you’d read about. Then you’d trudge back up, towing your sled. When you peeled your jeans off in the bathroom, later, your thighs were dyed indigo blue over the bright pink of your cold skin.
Straight north, at the foot of the knoll, was the foundation of an old barn, cut into the hillside and now penned in for chickens. Running just east of that was the tractor road up the hill to the north past a row of pine trees, planted as a windbreak. Another field stretched north almost a quarter of a mile to a birch woods at the top. From the top, you couldn’t see the house. You could hear wind in the trees overhead, the rustling of birch leaves, and the shushing of the long grass. You were alone with your thoughts. We spent hours building miniature villages at the edge of the birch woods, using twigs, pebbles, moss, birch bark, and little red-capped British soldier lichens. We didn’t destroy these settlements; we’d leave them and repair them the next time we played there, or watch them disintegrate as nature took its course.
Another logging road ran into these woods, heading straight north, but then gradually curving around west and down as the woods changed from birch and moosewood back to oak and pine. After a few hundred yards, you left our land, but the trail was unused and there were no houses for a long way. We’d walk it to the backyard of an old hunting shack, skirt that clearing, and wend our way back, across the stream, up past the glacial boulders, and home.
On the east side of the north meadow was a strange grove of pine trees, planted in a grid, eight feet on a side, about ten trees west to east, and many more south to north. Perhaps the former owner, a retired Colonel, had planted them out of some military conception of tree planting. If they had been a different breed, they might have been forgotten Christmas trees, but they were far too ungainly and scraggly. The lower branches died and broke off—often with our help—creating interesting sight lines through this geometric forest. Once, we decided that a square of these trees near the center could be the corner posts of a fort, and we nailed branches on three sides to create low walls, but these never rose more than a couple of feet, and we abandoned the project. The floor here was bouncy with inches of pine needles, and the place smelled wonderful. Walking out, your hands would be mottled brown with pitch and dirt.
Just to the east of the house was a grassy lawn with our swing set—nearly 20 feet tall, built out of galvanized pipe. I’ve never seen a taller one, at least not for kids, and one arc on the swing took several seconds. We had a sandbox there, under a large pine tree, and a basketball backboard and hoop, although nothing but grass around it. We could shoot, but we couldn’t dribble the ball. Although this was an area created for us, as kids, it was the least interesting and the least alluring. The rocks and the edge of the birch woods were our real playgrounds, and, although I doubt I’ll ever see either again, my mind rests there frequently, calm and happy.
If an education consists, in part, of meaningful experience from which we draw sustenance, then my mother’s moving us to that little red house and giving us years of that landscape was one of the greatest educational gifts I received.
Years and years later, when my mom was dying of lung cancer and living in my house, she and I talked a lot, about life, memories, and, toward the end, less about this world and more about her perceptions of the world she was entering. Hallucinating or not, she could see the world to come for several days before she left us, including her happy parents. Her assurances then have fairly removed any fear of death I may have had.
During one of our talks, I thanked her for the landscape of my childhood. I didn’t quite know how to say it—I’ve tried to put it in words here—but what I said was that I believe that that landscape is now a part of me, something on which I can rely; that, because it had been “out there” during my childhood, its richness and beauty are now “in” me. I can’t remember what she said then, but I wanted her to know, before she left, how much it meant to me.
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