Entry 4: De-romanticizing Place (also, the Catskills)
Last week, my family took a long-awaited vacation to New York’s Catskill Mountains. We reveled in the cool air, splashed in streams, marveled at wild mushrooms, hiked to waterfalls and rocky outcroppings, and sipped craft beer in mountain hollows. It was lovely—the place, the weather, the time together.
On the path to Kaaterskill Falls. July 20, 2021 (Lucy Bryan).
Still, on our way home, I shared an observation with my husband, a mystery I’m still unraveling. For much of my life, landscapes (especially new ones) evoked powerful emotions in me. I remember, at the age of 13 or 14, riding through the Smoky Mountains on the way to my first backpacking trip. Peering into the shadowy forest beneath the dense canopy, the soundtrack of Last of the Mohicans blaring from the car speakers, I felt a visceral desire akin to lust. If I could have swallowed those mountains and made them part of me, I would have.
At age 20, I arrived in Yosemite National Park for the first time. My boyfriend and I stumbled out of our station wagon onto the sun-warmed slabs at Olmstead Point. Peering down Tenaya Canyon, I struggled to comprehend the scale of the overlapping granite domes and plunging cliffs ahead of me. I felt small and light and free—like a bird riding an updraft, like a dandelion seed lifted from its humble stalk to incomprehensible heights.
Chanterelles, ghost plant, and unknown mushrooms at Mountain Top Arboretum. July 21, 2021 (Lucy Bryan).
The landscapes of the Catskill Mountains—their steep, forested slopes veiled in mist and strewn with burbling creeks—would have undoubtedly aroused similarly romantic sentiments in my younger self. But on this trip, I admired and enjoyed their beauty without feeling particularly stirred.
What’s changed? So much that it’s hard to know what to attribute it to. Maybe this change, like so much else, is just a part of growing up. Maybe the old feelings were products of the hormones swirling around my teenage and young adult body. Or maybe all the work I’ve put into becoming more even-keeled comes with some unintended side effects. And obviously, I’ve been exposed to more landscapes in the intervening years—desert basins, ancient aspen groves, stands of enormous redwoods that took root when Jesus walked the earth. But I’m not convinced that I’ve reached some kind of critical saturation point for picturesque places.
I think it more likely that what I know about people has changed the way I experience place. In particular, I no longer see places as pure, unspoiled, untouched by our species. The idea of “wild nature,” as John Muir once put it, is (in most cases) a myth. It’s impossible for me, these days, to disentangle a place from its human history. Having recently read An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and having driven through the Seneca Nation en route to the Catskills, I felt acutely aware, over the course of my trip, that I was vacationing on stolen land—land that’s part of the traditional territory of the Mohican and Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga peoples. (An aside: if you don’t know whose land you’re occupying, check out this interactive map.)
The view from Artist’s Rock. July 23, 2021 (Lucy Bryan).
The problems of climate change, consumption-driven waste, and pollution—to which White colonizers have disproportionately contributed—also remained present in my mind as we passed flooded roads on our drive into the Catskills, as my inbox filled with news of western wildfires and catastrophic floods in Germany, as we packed the dumpster outside our rental house with beer cans and water bottles and leftovers and trash, trash, trash, trash. There’s not a square inch of earth or ocean on this planet that is untouched by our species. I guess I have a pretty grim view of humanity these days, White Americans in particular—which I mostly kept to myself on this vacation, because who wants to be known as the family fun-killer?
I’m not quite sure what to make of this change in the way I experience places. Part of me misses the sense of connection with a place that those surges in emotion gave me. Another part of me thinks that those feelings of connection were superficial at best, and deluded at worst. Real connection with a place takes time and patience and learning and a whole lot of walking.
Nowadays, I’m more likely to feel something for a place I know well. There’s that burst of excitement that comes with finding the first morel of the season. There’s that sense of awe I feel when beloved trees whirl and bend in a thunderstorm. Yesterday, while I was driving to a doctor’s appointment, I listened to the host of a local radio show converse with a gardener who’d created his own special breed of tomato. The gardener spoke with joy and enthusiasm about his horticultural experiments and then gave the host a home-grown jalapeño to try on air (it was pretty dang hot, the host reported). And something about this moved me, filled me with pride and affection for this place that feeds me and my neighbors, this place that has become my home. It also made me want a BLT.
So, I can still feel deeply for a place—which is reassuring. Maybe it just takes more work than it used to. And an authentic connection. And maybe that’s a good thing for me and for the places I love.
