Sadness--joy--sadness--love that cannot be lost

The Hour of Land:
A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

by Terry Tempest Williams

If you have a wanderlust and liking for natural places, don't read this. It will scratch the itch and make you cry. Effigy Mounds National Monument--previously unknown to me--has now been added to my 'places to go' list. But I don't think I'll be lucky enough to get from the experience what she describes,

Suddenly, with a white oak as my witness, the energy of the woods shifts.  In the clearing--is the bird. I stopped to see the winged effigy in its entirety. Falcon enters my mind--swift and stealth. What if the wind I have been hearing is the memory of flight? This bird, made of earth, glimmers as light dances on the leaves, and I want to touch her body, a garden. But I don't. Restraint is its own prayer. 

The fact that a red-headed woodpecker, now iridescent in sunshine, flies down  from an oak branch to where the raptor's heart would be, only makes the moment more miraculous. 

For the rest of the afternoon, I walk the effigy's wings into motion.  They say her wingspan is more than two hundred feet. For me, her wings span time, where the whispering of holy wisdom can be heard. 

Great Bird, above the great river, what would you have us know?

If I were writing the shortlist for greatest author of all time, she'd be on it without question. But so much of this book is very hard to read, so hard, so painfully gut-wretchingly hard, I cringe every time I have to turn it on (audiobook, read by the author). She writes of America's National Parks and such, and she writes from the hearts. From the soul, even--but not her soul, the soul of the great places themselves.

And it's a soul that has been badly stressed. I read a book about sustainable agriculture one, and it implied that long-term sustainable agriculture was never going to happen. People get old, people retire and die, and the farm goes to another one with a slightly different vision from the original. Sooner or later--he argues--it will end up in the direction of a person who decides to make it produce "just a little more." Greed is inevitable; all efforts to preserve a way of life are inevitably doomed.

I refuse to believe that is true and continually search out examples to the contrary, Amazon.com's purchase of Whole Foods nonwithstanding. I know there are farmers in Europe who hold onto a way of life so zealously that they would boycott anyone selling cheese with the preferred brand but an altered method. Probably stone him. For farming, the picture may not be as bleak as it seems.

But for the National Parks, I'm not so sure. Once a scenic vista is interrupted by oil rigs, eroded strip mines, or wind farms, how long will it be before mankind gets tired of looking at his own ugly shit and tears them down?  The government changes every eight years, or even sooner, and eventually one will be elected who allows federal land--our land--to be used for development even though it's immediately adjacent to a national treasure.  All it takes is a well-placed campaign contribution from Big Oil, and our national heritage, our beauty, our soul, is tarnished. When traveling those parks we must learn to look inward, not outward. We must deny  our eyes from looking over the edges, for fear we might see what our National Greed has done.

None of this is directly taken from her book, but the feeling is there. If your heart is tender, read the book anyway and skip the painful parts. Read it for the walks through Teddy Roosevelt Grasslands with her father, for her venture to Big Bend in winter, for her travels to Gettysburg and Effigy Mounds and Alcatraz Island, and for her family's adventure in Yosemite during a massive wildfire.