Terranexus
Connection and Meaning in Ordinary Places by David K. Leff
It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate.
—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1851
One: Sudden Onset Terranexus
In the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, I took my first steps up the well-worn Crawford Path. It was the beginning a solo trip across the Presidential Range with stays at the legendary high huts of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Intoxicated by spicy spruce air, eager for the steep climbs promised by the map’s clustered contours, I passed a yellow Forest Service sign warning of bad weather, danger and even death above tree line. This only fueled my teenage rite-of-passage dreams, and the white Appalachian Trail blazes stirred an urge to walk from Georgia to Maine. Here on America’s oldest recreational footpath, cut in 1819 by rugged hostler Abel Crawford, I felt my journey somehow connecting with generations past. It was my first adventure in the wild, and I was ready for a test of manhood. What I was not prepared for was to discover an entirely new way of experiencing landscapes.
Although the first day’s hike to Mizpah Spring Hut was only two-and-half miles at a relatively easy grade, the 1,900-foot elevation gain exhausted me. I nevertheless became reenergized on reaching my destination in the windswept col between 4,000-footers Mts. Jackson and Pierce. Maybe it was the bracing alpine air, the anticipation of climbing to the bare rocky tops the next day, or just a novice’s sense of accomplishment. I reveled in conversation with fellow hikers, swapping stories over the hut crew’s homemade soup and fresh-baked bread, listening to old timers telling heroic and humorous tales. I also made a brief raid on the small library of well-thumbed books, soaking up history, geology, ecology and lore.
The next day offered stiff breezes and azure sky dotted with clouds. Along the ridge, astringent light revealed a roiling sea of green slopes punctuated with ashen ledges that seemed to break like ocean whitecaps. The trail moved through small trees, krummholz thickets, and lichen-crusted rocky plains where hardy mountain plants grew in tufts and low mats. I was gripped by the powerful natural grandeur, and the path marked by crude cairns and sometimes edged with stones seemed to possess the nobility and timeworn quality of a Roman road.
While my senses feasted on the on the stark and cragged terrain, my imagination wandered in time as well as space to Indian legends, grand hotels, logging railroads, wildfires, home-crushing landslides, rare flowers, and ancient continental crashes that formed the mountains. Not limited merely by what I saw at any given moment, I encountered a richer, denser world. It was love at first sight. I felt a sudden, strong attachment, manifestation of a phenomenon I’ve since called “terranexus,” profound connection to terrain or place.
I’d fallen in love with places before, just never so suddenly. It was usually, even at such a young age, by long association—the wooded lots I wandered in the suburbs at home and my great uncle’s New Jersey chicken farm among others. But this time my infatuation was clear and precipitous.
We spend time in places like the White Mountains for recreation, physical challenge and to find respite from an ever-accelerating frenetic life. This “land of many uses,” as the U.S. Forest Service has called our national forests, has been set aside for scientific study, wildlife, timber harvests, hunting and fishing, clean water, and to protect geological marvels and historic sites. But while these practical reasons support conservation initiatives and appropriations, they tell a junior part of the story. After all, many other places boasting such values remain unprotected. Ultimately, the political, financial, and social will to create and maintain the White Mountain National Forest and areas like it results from deep affection by small cadres of activists and wide swaths of the public.
Federal legislation, layers of management plans, wilderness designations, and all the hard work that has gone into creation and maintenance of the forest are perhaps less the result of science, resource management needs, recreational desires, and tourist dollars than it is a matter of love, attachment of people to a place. And it’s not just woodsy quiet or the austere beauty of summits that stirs such passion, but a history of human interaction from Native Americans to the pioneering Crawfords, from the cog railway to the hut system to the Mount Washington Observatory.
If we are to protect wild areas as disparate as Labrador and the Amazon from invasive species, encroaching development, climate change and other threats, it will take terranexus, a revival of connection and romance between people and places. And it will require not just a fondness and devotion to distant and wild locations, but to nearby and built environments where our attitudes toward land are formed. Only by appreciating, understanding, and improving the everyday landscapes in which we live and work will we be able to ensure the future of the White Mountains and other places where nature is dominant and human beings feel like visitors. The close-to-home areas where we first learn about the outdoors “are places of initiation,” ecologist and author Robert Michael Pyle has written, “where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin. They are the secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have to look hard to find something to love.”
After that first White Mountain journey, I longed to recapture the happy endorphins of falling in love with a place, the adrenalin rush of sudden onset terranexus. But with life becoming busy as I progressed into my twenties, it was increasingly tough getting to remote, untrammeled destinations. So I began exploring close to home, finding near-at-hand places more alluring and intriguing than I had ever imagined.
Maybe it was my youthful delight in doing something contrary and unexpected, but I itched to canoe western Connecticut’s once famously and hopelessly polluted Naugatuck River. Though it was nearby, it was a kind of terra incognita for paddlers. No one I questioned had attempted it. “Had hepatitis shots?” I was asked half jokingly by friends who knew the river’s reputation. Then, sensing I was in earnest, they stared with a chilling mix of concern for my safety and wonder at my sanity. Naugatuck River water carried disease, I was warned, hid submerged metal objects that could slit the toughest canoe hull, and was laden with unmarked dams that remained invisible until too late. With a bit of trepidation, I pondered the warnings and the opportunity for years before finally dipping my paddle in the forbidden waters.
Until little more than a generation before my journey in the early 1990s, the Naugatuck had been the nation’s center of brass manufacture for over a century. Along the river’s banks, the metal was forged from copper and zinc and fabricated into clock parts, kettles, buttons, buckles, tubing, hinges, artillery shells, wire, gears and automobile parts. Over time, the swift waters became an open sewer for industrial acids, dyes, heavy metals and human waste. As early as 1899, a government report found that the river had reached the limits of permissible pollution. A 1966 survey found not a single fish alive in its 39-mile length.
Once actually on the water, I found a world of startling contrasts. The river flowing past wild-seeming banks lined with silver maple, sycamore and cottonwood where black ducks, mallards, mergansers, and geese floated, also rushed through small, gritty cities with fortress-like factories sprouting stacks, vents, exhausts and intakes. At one point I passed a maze of pipes and tanks at a chemical plant and then suddenly found myself in a constricted valley of tumultuous rapids where ospreys and turkey vultures soared above steep forested ledges. Near where drowned shopping carts and piles of bald tires collected like suicides, I spied muskrats and freshly peeled beaver chewed sticks turning slowly in eddies. Sewage treatment, control of industrial discharges, and the closure antiquated factories were resulting in rebirth of a river once shunned and given up for dead. Water quality has gotten even better in the ensuing years. Over thirty species of fish are now at home in the Naugatuck.
Despite some trash along its banks, and passage through densely developed urban and suburban areas, I found the river beautiful, not only for where it went, but for where it had been and where it was going. A place that was once a joke had become a source of inspiration and fun eliciting joyful, not derisive laughter. I was struck by terranexus in this debased and degraded place, not just because of unexpected natural beauty, but because its long and tangled encounters with humanity added layers of intrigue.
My Naugatuck voyage spawned a new interest, affection almost, for the hard used places where civilization and nature are entangled. About a mile from home via a walk wholly on pavement, such a location became my “listening point,” a place where I can be wholly within myself and both contemplate the grand mysteries of the universe and mundane conundrums of daily existence.
The term “listening point” was coined in the title of naturalist Sigurd Olson’s 1958 book, a paean to his special place, a bare glaciated spit of rock at the water’s edge in northern Minnesota. Each time he went there it “opened great realms of thought and interest” where he saw “the immensity of space and glimpsed at times the grandeur of creation.” He christened his spot “listening point” because “only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard.”
My listening point is neither remote nor secluded. It’s a mere fifteen-minute walk from where I live, a place where sometimes hundreds of people pass daily on foot, bicycles, or rollerblades. But, I can be there easily, at the slightest whim whenever the day gets hectic or the spirit moves me. Until little more than half a century ago, most of my walk to this spot was a corridor for locomotives hauling freight. The site itself was a hydroelectric station. But as Olson observed, a listening point does not have to be “close to the wilderness, but some place of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe.”
From this perch on the west bank of Connecticut’s Farmington River at the lower Collinsville Dam, I often sit on one of the rusted I-beams embedded in the concrete abutment that once served as a gate structure to bypass water. It’s surrounded by trees, offering a commanding view of riffles downstream and the dark, glossy impoundment above. Across the water are a moldering brick gatehouse and the long concrete façade of the old power canal, both brightly tattooed with graffiti. Half hidden in the woods, they appear like remnants of a long lost civilization.
While not isolated, the spot provides ample solitude. The falls’ roar is an insulating sound blocking all outside noise. The smooth water continuously rolling over the concrete spillway and plunging to a milky froth below is alluringly hypnotic and helps focus the mind. It takes but a moment to feel remote despite people nearby.
I’m energized at this oasis of tranquility. Long out of business, the axe and machete manufacturing Collins Company recognized the river’s power early in the last century when it built the dam to funnel water 650 feet downstream to a powerhouse that spun twin turbines generating a combined 700 horsepower. Now, with the water unbridled by any dynamo, I can contemplate that unfettered power and let it flow through me. At the same time I share the river’s force, it has a calming influence. Any restiveness or agitation easily flows downstream.
As water tumbles over the precipice and I feel its mild thunder in my chest, I often concentrate on breathing, feel my abdomen rise and fall, the chest expand and contract. The mind gains free reign and wanders like a dog out for a walk.
At this one time site of industrial power I now enjoy a place rich in natural beauty and deep ecological function where I feel the kinetic energy of moving water while gazing at the slowly deteriorating imprint of humanity. I’ve spent many hours here wondering about our need for a deeper mutual relationship with the natural world. Thought fragments and fleeting ideas have come to me while almost in a listening-point-dream-state. Over the years, I’ve pieced together a framework that helps explain, to me at least, where that relationship with nature has been and where it might be going.
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Henry D. Thoreau uttered in one of his lightning-bolt aphorisms. The earth’s wild places have clearly shrunk since his time, making the remaining ones even more precious for the homeostatic regulation of the planet. But beyond ecological value, their worth as wellsprings of human imagination have grown exponentially as their acreage has contracted. Counter intuitively, perhaps, protection of such places requires we appreciate nearby landscapes. To turn the Concord naturalist’s dictum somewhat around, I’m convinced that in built spaces where we live is the preservation of the wild. Terranexus is necessary for human survival. I’ve heard this mantra whispered in the wind and falling water at my listening point.
Two: Conservation’s Fourth Wave
America has experienced three waves of conservation consciousness pointing the way to terranexus. While scientists, politicians, and artists, sportsmen and travelers have contributed to each wave, writers have probably been the most influential. No wonder Bill McKibben, one of today’s finest environmental authors, has observed that “an argument can be made that environmental writing is America’s single most distinctive contribution to the world’s literature.”
The first wave established an awareness of the beauty and diversity of nature, creating a realization that the natural world was not just something for exploitation. While there are antecedents, in America this approach was pioneered by Thoreau whose masterpiece, Walden, was published in 1854. The book is full of keen nature observations and acerbic critiques of society, but most significantly makes a compelling connection between human consciousness and natural objects and phenomena, the first stirrings of terranexus. To some extent, all environmental writing is a footnote to Thoreau, but there are many clear-eyed and compelling authors in this first-wave tradition of awareness. These include Catskill naturalist John Burroughs in the later nineteenth century, and Edwin Way Teale who won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his epic four volumes about seasonal change in the twentieth. Among contemporary writers are John Hanson Mitchell who interweaves human culture with nature, and time with place. Another is Robert Finch, whose Cape Cod essays tie personal experience with history and nature’s cycles.
The second wave launched from the first. It called not just for awareness and appreciation, but activism to protect beauty, ecological functions and other values. Mountain wanderer and Sierra Club founder John Muir is the progenitor, advocating for creation of national parks and in defense of forests. His poetic pleas to save Hetch Hetchy Valley and the redwoods remain moving, an expression of terranexus through efforts to protect places. This approach has included late twentieth and early twenty-first century authors as diverse as eco-anarchist Edward Abbey and climate change activist McKibben. Perhaps this second wave of conservation consciousness reached its zenith with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 blockbuster about the toxic dangers of pesticides that launched modern environmentalism and enabled us to clearly see the connection between human activity and the health of our landscape.
A third wave that introduced ethical conservation consciousness began with forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold, most well known for A Sand County Almanac. His land ethic “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it,” advancing terranexus via both a practical and moral connection of people to places. Integral to that view is an ecological way of thinking. “Land, then,” he wrote, “is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” Though once termed a “subversive science,” an ecological worldview is today widely accepted though, unfortunately, less well practiced. Its best contemporary expression is in the writings of Kentuckian Wendell Berry who knows “Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” The same sense of ecological connection flashes through the works of essayists Scott Russell Sanders and Annie Dillard. In fact, there is some element of Leopold’s enviro-ethics in all the best writers that have come after him.
Leopold’s land ethic imbued with terranexus could herald a fourth wave of conservation consciousness, encouraging us to prize not just pristine and magnificent places—the Yellowstones of the world—but more mundane precincts. A sense of terranexus encourages us to consciously explore rather than sleepwalk through areas where we live, work and visit. Exploration entices us to learn more, and as we come to know such places better we increasingly learn to appreciate them, hopefully even come to love them. And to the extent we appreciate and love them, we’ll recognize our connection and want to invest our time, energy, and money to protect and make them better. As we come to value familiar places, distant wonders will only grow in our esteem.
Garnering inspiration from mundane places to protect singular ones may sound far-fetched, but it is exactly in the Leopold mode. Though Leopold worked and lived in some of the American West’s most fabulous country, it was a patch of worn-out land in an ordinary Wisconsin sand county on which he most lavished his love and found inspiration for world changing ideas. Leopold explained that “the [human] individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” Likewise, terranexus erases, or at least blurs the lines between human and wild communities, between the built and natural environments, recognizing their linked ecology because “man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team.”
If ecological science teaches one basic lesson everyone readily understands, it’s that all things are connected. But the connections we perceive at the scale of a wolf’s territory or the habitat of bog turtles, a skunk cabbage filled wetland, and even at a watershed level, tend to be forgotten with regard to humanity, whether in rural areas, suburbs or large cities. Even among those who have elevated Leopold to near-sainthood, there seems some amnesia over the fact that he first explained natural communities by reference to their human analog, places where man’s “instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate.”
Despite notable exceptions, the world seems to be divided into those who enjoy the pulse of urbanity and those who seek the flow of nature, those who often find the built environment too frenetic and ugly, and those for whom the natural world is dull and frightening. It is a chasm at least as wide as that perceived between science and the humanities in C.P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures.” Perhaps we need a deeper, more ecological way of looking at the world requiring slower, more deliberate movement through the landscape than we commonly experience. Sometimes we need simply to walk.
Many great conservationists have been inveterate walkers. After all, afoot is often the best means of traveling in wilder places. Inasmuch as what we perceive is often inversely proportional to how fast we move, going slowly enables us to see and understand more, essential conditions for terranexus. Furthermore, walking is a great stimulant to thought. “The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust.
It comes as no surprise that Thoreau, Muir, and Teale are among many famous walkers who have shaped our understanding and love of nature. But the same is true of many great thinkers and lovers of urban areas such as twentieth century social critic Lewis Mumford who won the 1962 National Book Award for The City in History, or Alfred Kazin, a literary critic of the same era whose A Walker in the City fuses personal experience with acute observation of architecture and the human ecology of neighborhoods. Among contemporary writers, Harvard’s John Stilgoe continues to explore city and suburb by foot and bicycle.
Terranexus teaches that built places can be just as beautiful, intriguing and curious as natural marvels. And a mix of the two often provides the most fascinating environments. Perhaps this is why my sense of terranexus first emerged in the White Mountains where both nature and human works stun the senses. Nature is awe inspiring, but the huts, well engineered trails, and features like the Mount Washington Cog Railway are critical to the experience.
City walkers are in the grand European tradition of the flaneur, the somewhat aimless wanderers who know urban areas with their raw senses, by footstep. Careful observers like naturalists, they distill stories from the architectural features of buildings whether it be a brick bond pattern, plate glass, or neon sign. They know how sunlight and shadow play on a plaza at various times of day and changes with the seasons. When a street is dug up they notice remnants of barrel stave water mains and cobblestone pavement. To a flaneur the past is always present. They know the stories of former inhabitants and watch the habits and moods of people in shops, on the street, and in cafes.
Nature and the world of human structures are inextricably linked. It’s not civilization that is artificial or unnatural, but the distinction we have drawn between them. We need to extend hiking trails through cities, connecting them to wilder precincts. I’d like to see the blazes that take us up mountains and along bucolic waterbodies also mark paths through urban areas as does Boston’s Freedom Trail. The New England Trail, newest of the eleven national scenic trails established by Congress does just that on its way from Long Island Sound toward New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock. Starting in Guilford, Connecticut, the first few miles take hikers past a veritable timeline of buildings representing almost 400 years of European settlement, including New England’s oldest stone house.
The synergies of nature and culture first struck me while walking Boston’s Emerald Necklace, a ten mile long series of connected green spaces that snake along the city’s backbone from the historic Common to Franklin Park. A few years before paddling the Naugatuck, I discovered the route by accident when opening a crease-worn map to direct a friend to a Red Sox game. For the first time, I noticed swatches of deep green in the grid of city streets.
Much of the Necklace and the concept of making connections among city greenspaces was the brainchild of Frederick Law Olmsted, father of American landscape architecture, who is most famous for designing New York’s Central Park. The route became my portal to discovering a rich mixture of history, art, architecture, birdlife, open waters and forest. But it wasn’t all bucolic beauty. I also found pollution, invasive species, graffiti, a man urinating in the bushes, and broken walkways and bridges.
Each park along the necklace was a jewel commemorating a different aspect of Boston. With its walkways and tree shaded lawns the Common memorializes famous people and events with statuary and plaques. These objects commemorating the past were like tangible shadows in a place busy with tourists, concerts, and ballgames. From the Common, I entered the well planted flower beds and carefully groomed grass of the Public Garden which exuded a traditional Bostonian atmosphere of restrained formality. On the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, a wide linear swath of green dividing lanes of traffic, tree colonnades formed a leafy tunnel between low cliffs of brownstone and brick row houses lining the street.
Walking through the linear Backbay Fens and Riverway I passed bodies of water that were once tidal marshes and then fetid dumps for sewage. Today, Olmsted’s green spaces are interrupted by roads, and parts of them are given over to athletic fields, community gardens and other uses. Nevertheless, I saw painted and snapping turtles basking in the sun, green and bull frogs hunched at the water’s edge, and lots of birds from kingfishers to black crowned night herons, black ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. Children fished for carp, and held their catches high for me to see. Of course there was the inevitable half drowned shopping cart, some beer and soda bottles and other detritus in the water. Somewhere in this mixture of nature and trash the hopes and regrets of urban life seemed unwittingly expressed.
The Emerald Necklace continued to the open horizons and beautifully reflective waters of Jamaica Pond, a former reservoir, and then to the Arnold Arboretum, a place of both natural beauty and scientifically planted trees from every temperate region of the globe. I finally arrived at Franklin Park whose connection to the rest of the Necklace is tenuous because an Olmsted proposed parkway was never built. Large for a city park, its over 400 acres contained seemingly wild forests dense with maple, oak, and beech. But there were also invasive plants common in developed areas, like barberry and Japanese knotweed. There’s a meadow disguised as a golf course, and a zoo. I watched red-tailed hawks wheeling overhead and wandered through places where not a single building was visible.
The Emerald Necklace is no wilderness, but perhaps it has sufficient wildness, as Thoreau would have it, to help preserve the world. Although nature purists might emphasize limitations, I felt exhilaration in finding nature and culture so well married. In Boston, an urban dweller does not have to flee the city to walk slightly on the wild side. If a traditional urban environment had these places, I wondered about the possibilities in less thickly settled areas. It seemed that preserving and promoting such nodes of wildness close to where people live could both enrich daily existence and save truly wild areas for special visits, thus avoiding their overuse. We need to be naturalists of urbanity, flaneurs of the wild.
In an age where preserved natural places like the White Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains National Park are often shrouded in air pollution and eaten alive by invasive species that come in the wake of human commerce, treating cities and wild places as distinct, unrelated islands seems particularly puzzling. How many people realize that the location of cities, housing tracts, agricultural fields, factories, and even the contour of roads are often largely dictated by bedrock and glacial geology and other natural factors? And recent books like David Owen’s Green Metropolis and Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City make a compelling case that if you care about nature, city living is preferred because urban dwellers require less living space, use less fuel, produce less trash and spend fewer hours in cars. Spreading people thinly across the countryside, Owen writes, “may make them feel greener, but . . . increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and address.”
Perhaps the link between built and natural environments was most elegiacally captured by journalist Howard Mansfield in his book The Same Ax, Twice. “The house is more like a natural landscape,” he writes. “You are looking at time. Seven generations of life represented by a notch on a girt, a paint chip on a summer beam, the way the head of an adze met the wood one winter day in 1664. Life flowed through here and like a glacier left its marks upon wood and plaster.” Such connections are the very soul of terranexus.
Three: Wounded Places
For many of us, our appreciation of landscapes and an impulse toward terranexus is most intense where nature is dominant, from mountains to beaches, black spruce bogs to floodplain forests. They seduce us with their distinct beauty and refreshing differences from our usual haunts. But to be fully aware of and appreciate this world, our attachment must extend to working landscapes of farm and forest which provide food and fiber and offer a rich patchwork of trees, pasture, and cropland. It must embrace historic colonial towns with their broad greens, and nineteenth-century mill villages with their fortress-like factories. It needs to include city neighborhoods, commercial and industrial districts, both those that are well maintained and those suffering neglect. All these places help explain who we are as a society and as individuals. To see only those that please us is to inhabit a Disneyland of our own making.
While they need no encouragement or protection, even strip developments with their garish signs, confusing traffic lanes, fast food restaurants, filling stations and big box stores are functional parts of our landscape along with interstate highways and housing tracts. We may think some of these landscapes ugly and wasteful, but few of us do not use them. And I admit to feeling an occasional thrum of excitement in the busy commerce of a strip mall, or the cinematic movement of topography at sixty-five miles per hour. All these are areas in which we live, work and do business. They are places that deserve our interest and attention. The more we understand them, the more we will know what is needed to create better places.