Orphan Land
A human presence in a place, sustained generation after generation and connected by a thousand memories and stories and place-names, seems to me the only way a piece of land can really be alive, conscious, vital. It sounds funny, but I think land is happiest when people live on it--live on it and love it.
De-populated wilderness may have its charms to some, but to me it is bleak, a truly lonely, empty place. Doubly so if it used to be inhabited--and by inhabited I don’t just mean lived-on. The way we live on land now is not a real, connected way. By my reckoning the vast majority of California is currently de-populated and lonely even in places--maybe mostly--where whole cities now stand. A city or a suburban housing tract is a cut off from the land on which it sits as an airplane flying over it.
Where you now sit today was once living land with a story and a consciousness, given to it by its loving, grateful human occupants. A human community fully engaged with its homeland is like the nervous system of a body. It is what animates the body, makes it sing.
Land or “nature” without such a nervous system is just an insensate body, maybe metabolizing, maybe growing, but not aware of itself and directionless, cancerous. And… A human society without such a full engagement with its land is like a nervous system without its body--twitching and flashing and jabbering to itself but going nowhere and doing nothing, detached, communicating with itself but not living.
Poor California, once so full of life, every cell of its land-body once singing its happy-sad epic to its children, generation on generation, now so cruelly stripped of its eyes and ears and brain, de-nerved and de-storied except for lots of little separate bits and tatters, and not even one of those still has its full story. while some places are slowly, slowly building up a new real human presence and a new story (a few old ranches for example), more places are being de-peopled and de-natured and set adrift on a dead sea of anonymous non-life, smothered by yet another lonely suburb or 3-mile cotton field.
Nothing is so sad as those sweet little oak-studded dells that once meant home. And they never again will mean home until people start living in real communities again, communities that have a life of their own, above all communities defined by place, whose every member feels a gut-level connection to the place. The only approximation to such a thing that our mixing-moving-blending chaos-culture has retained is the family, and family farms and ranches--especially ranches--are the nearest thing left to truly inhabited land, and almost invariably the plant and animal life there is more abundant than on land that has no people on it. Parks are nominally permanent but their people aren’t, and the land is not used for anything and therefore not “managed”--in symbolic terms, such land seems “stagnant” and “unhappy,” as if nature, not being used for anything, feels unwanted and so doesn’t bother to perk up and produce.
Individuals, or most modern families, may have a brief connection to a piece of land, but they come and go and their land loses its story aborning--orphans passed along from one foster family to another.
