Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying – the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us?..."
– James Still, 1906-2001 – From River of Earth
In Eastern Kentucky the terrain is so steep that the only decent place to build a house is right beside the creek. Thousands of streams lace the terrain, and houses cluster shoulder to shoulder along their banks. Generations of families have passed on their sparse plots of flatland to their heirs. For the sake of fairness, they give each a sliver of land that fronts the creek. Modern property maps describe a maze of strange shaped lots, like the intricate cracks in the glaze of old china wear – a matrix that is almost organic. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the family doesn't own the stream, but the stream owns them.
The landscape organizes us, even as we try to organize it around us. We can move mountains and tele-commute, but we still live by the will of the land. Our culture is built by the grace of kind topology: New York rises majestically where the mighty Hudson River becomes an estuary; there is a desert river flowing surreptitiously under the freeways of Los Angeles. My hometown, Chattanooga, Tennessee, was founded where some western explorers built a boat dock, a mere addendum to the ten thousand years of human settlement along a wide fertile horseshoe bend in the Tennessee River.
The western territorial boundary of Tennessee is formed by ancient river, the Mississippi. The eastern border is primarily marked by an ancient footpath, the Appalachian Trail. The northern and southern borders were drawn by people who didn't even live there. One side of the trapezoid was created by tectonic geology and the other side human activity. The top and bottom are just lines drawn in the sand. On the U.S. map, all the lines are the same color and they mean the same thing.
Imagine humans five thousand years ago. We wore the skins of animals, and migrated by the seasons. We made camp by the river, and told stories to try to explain ourselves. We dried meat and hoarded seeds. We had ceremonies. We marked territories.
Even though it may be comforting for some to think that we have somehow left our animal nature behind, that we are moving away from the organic and toward the divine, evolutionarily little has changed. Our brains aren't any bigger. Five thousand years constitutes about a drop in the bucket on an evolutionary time scale. The same instincts that define our species still pull us around. Land still means territory, whether it's boundaries are made by topological features or by lines drawn on a map. Perhaps our heritage is more visible on the surface than we think.
We see our landscape as something upon which we act. We can build on it, move it around, or preserve it. Our life is a story and the land is the setting. We try to organize the set to best suit the drama. If, however, you look at human beings as animals, albeit highly sophisticated ones, the landscape upon which we dwell is more of a character in our play than a setting. It is often our advocate; sometimes our nemesis.
The land is active and alive like a river, and it plays upon us even now in our apparent modernity. We make footpaths between sidewalks, we congregate where fish swim, we hunt even though we don't need food, and we search for space, open and wide to play. We all live close to the land, not just farmers and miners, but also children who find themselves at home in a vacant lot, and suburbanites who are affected by the powerful urge to nurture the scraggly vines of a tomato plant.
We may believe that our will to form the landscape around us is an essential element in the power of our species, but we are riding on a river of earth that bends around the seasons and courses through the days. The changing view it offers us is the main force that guides us to adapt and evolve. Our ownership of the land is a myth. We die. We dig a hole. And in the end, the landscape owns us.