Reading the Earth

“Horizon”. An expansive, all-encompassing, promising word – and the title of the book I’m reading. The author, Barry Lopez, was recommended to me years ago by the man next to me on a flight from somewhere. I am pleased with my choice. In an autobiographical style, Lopez, a worldwide traveler and nature writer, relates how his interests developed from childhood into adulthood and then proceeds to take the reader to visit memorable places he’s traveled, searching for deeper truths to be found in those places.

I instantly relate to his habit of returning home with mementos from afar. In an earlier life I may have belonged to a hunter-gatherer tribe. When I’m out and about, I can’t resist depositing a unique rock, a seed pod or a feather into my pocket. Offerings from the Earth.

Here in my study a fossil poses on a shelf. Elongated and pointy, the gray-brown rock bears the reddish imprint of an ancient sea dollar. The design stood out in a vast windswept plain awash with marine fossils. Here it was not difficult to imagine that this Patagonian plain was once ocean floor pushed upwards over the millennium to form the Andean cordillera, the vertical column of South America. What an overwhelming thought to know that I was standing on geological history.

If I rustle through the papers in a drawer of my night table, I’ll come across the silky softness of an owl down feather, given to me years ago by the writing coach of a workshop at Los Parronales farm. I was the first to notice the owls there and whenever we return, people ask, “Have you seen the owls yet?” and we cross a field to scan the “owl trees.” The feather reminds me of the joyful companionship of those workshop days. Over the years, urban sprawl creeps closer to the farm.  Once those trees are felled to make way for factories, where will the owls find refuge?

A basket of rocks sits on my round oak table off the kitchen: a shiny black rough chunk of volcanic lava from Easter Island; a wafer-thin oval deposited on a beach by the retreating Marinelli Glacier; a pale grey pumice ball expelled from the Calbuco volcano and propelled by a river into a Patagonian lake; a sliver of shale plucked from the edge of Glen Alpine Creek in the California Sierras. As I hold each in my hand, I am reconnected with the place that prompted me to bring home a piece of that landscape.

I cannot walk a beach without “combing” it, alert to an offering from the sea, the origin of all. Shells in a variety of shapes and sizes: compact bivalves and smooth gastropods left on a sandy strand in Costa Rica or a pristine Galapagos beach, or a sand dollar found on a Monterey Bay shore. I think of shells as feminine. Plain or intricately designed, white exteriors with blushes of pale pink within. I wonder what creature once lived within. Did you tumble in with a crashing, booming wave? How far did you travel? Are you a descendent of the First Mollusk?

Being a transplant to this country, I’ve made an effort to learn to identify the native vegetation. My book of “Flora Silvestre de Chile, Zona Austral” (Native Chilean Vegetation, southern region) bulges with dried leaf specimens, each inserted into the species’ corresponding page. Not having grown up with these species, I need memory aides to take me back to treks through the lush temperate rainforests of Patagonia, inhabited by wild fuchsia, the ancient alerce and the Nothofagus families of trees, giant ferns, nalca (giant rhubarb) leaves (umbrellas for hidden frogs), the iconic araucaria (monkey puzzle tree). Like the rocks and the seashells, these trees are remnants of ancient times. My eyes follow the trunk of an alerce, up, up to its towering peak and I try to imagine what this landscape was like millennia ago when the tree first took root.

My mementos had their origins in the Earth. They tell an awe-inspiring story too huge to comprehend. I have them here in my city home so that I will never forget.