A Deepness of Place.
I rose early one June morning, only a bit after the sun. After a modest breakfast and having registered my presence with the few other bunkhouse-mates awake at that hour, I left for a walk. Still unfamiliar with the area, I walked slowly past the modestly extravagant homes in Aspen’s West End, past wide-coned Colorado blue spruce and narrow-leaf cottonwood trees, through to the Hunter Creek trailhead.
The flat, needle-cushioned trail was a welcome respite from the pavements of the town, and the shade from the spruce and cottonwoods cooled an already-chilled early summer morning while the warming sun dappled the forest floor. As the trail found its way along the rushing Hunter Creek, crossing it via several man-made bridges above overflowing banks, it narrowed and began to ascend. The once-wide trail became exciting with rocks and roots, and with each passing step the trees became thinner until I encountered a treeless, sun-drenched hillside, carpeted with bushes of wild rose, scrub oak, showy cinquefoil, and rocky mountain maple. The trail exchanged this hillside for a forest of spruce and fir, and eventually, after climbing quite a ways, opened up to a great wide meadow where Hunter Creek flowed swiftly past tall willows.
As it was early June in Aspen, a brand new crop of seasonal workers had just arrived, myself among them. I came to Colorado, fresh out of school, to learn to be a Naturalist. My new employer, the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), prides itself on its commitment to train young people like me to interpret the natural world for the Roaring Fork Valley’s myriad visitors, delivering a story about place that’s engineered to foster a deep respect and curiosity for it. At the time of my walk alongside Hunter Creek I was in the middle of this training, an intensive two-week process which felt more like college than college itself often did. For eight hours a day I and fourteen other Naturalists-in-Training studied Colorado’s flora and fauna, history and geology, ecology and water, agriculture and tourism, to begin to truly understand this place in which we were all newly-arrived. The classroom at ACES was so frequently abuzz with our collective curiosities that question-and-answer sessions with our teacher, head naturalist Jim Kravitz, would often last longer than the lessons themselves.
Though these classroom lessons set an unshakeable foundation for our budding skills as professional Naturalists, nothing could compare to the experience of getting out and studying the place in the field. One of the most valuable gifts we were given during our two-week training was a field guide for the valley. For a born-and-bred Easterner like me, it served as my Bible, carrying within it the information and wisdom of generations of Roaring Fork Valley naturalists before me.
Our first of many trips out to our field sites occurred at the Maroon Bells (or the “World Famous Maroon Bells,” as Jim puts it). The Bells are two of the most imposing and spectacular mountains I’ve ever seen. Each of these pyramids of loose, red sedimentary rock (hence “maroon”) stretches over fourteen thousand feet into the air, and as such they attract mountaineers from all over the world both as a training ground for larger, more techincal mountains, and as a destination in and of themselves. For most, however, the experience of merely visiting the Maroon Creek valley and looking up at these mountains, framed on the sides by the steeply sloping walls of the conifer- and aspen-clad upper valley and on the bottom by the glassy, crystal clear Maroon Lake is an experience to be wished for.
After marveling at our first glimpse of the Maroon Bells, we fourteen naturalists in training, plus Jim and two mentor naturalists Carey and Bobby, embarked upon a hike with which the fourteen of us would grow extraordinarily familiar in the coming months: the walk from Maroon Lake to Crater Lake on the Crater Lake Trail. This trail stretches just under two miles into the Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness, a federally-protected swath of land over two hundred and eighty square miles large, and is both carpeted and canopied by life. It is here that we began to learn to use our brand new field guides. I was in Jim’s group as we walked on the trail, and for every 10 new steps we progressed along the trail, Jim stopped to introduce us to a new plant that most of us had never seen before. He taught us how to identify the new specimen and would always add in a story or tale that went along with it, something to remember it by.
Continuing, the seven of us in the group quizzed each other on the plants, birds, and animals we were learning, strengthening both our understanding of it and of each other as we walked. This became a theme on subsequent co-naturalist outings all summer: we, walking through the myriad life zones in the Colorado wildernesses, instead of passing the time with talk only of the world of personal affairs, would spend considerable time on the flora and fauna of our current jaunt, trying hard to understand them, field guides in hand.
I therefore brought this field guide, Wild at Heart, with me on my mid-training adventure to the Hunter Creek valley. It is truly enjoyable to really stop and consider a plant. To successfully identify it, one must truly get to know it’s characteristics. Like a new acquaintance at the bar on a Friday evening, I would ask questions of my new friend until I began to understand it: what shape are the leaves? are they serrated at the edge, or smooth? does it have flowers or berries? what color are they, and do they grow alone or in bunches? what size does the plant grow to? do the leaves stretch out oppositely from each other on the stem, or do they alternate up its height? Without Jim, Carey, or Bobby, it was up to me to ask these questions and use the reference in my hands to seek out the plant’s identity. Once I’d identified it with my guide, reading about its invisible properties was the next treat. For example, I learned that the humble white valerian has a compound in its roots which serves as a sedative that has little effect on the mental acuity of its users, perfect for getting to sleep while still carrying on whispered conversations about the day’s experiences and interactions with a bedfellow. Learning their stories is just as important as learning the shape of their leaves or the color of their berries.
That day I spent hours on the trail with the book and the plants and, like my experience at the Bells, I identified many that I had never seen before. As I walked, this wealth of new information enveloped me. It was as if I began the walk as a stranger in a crowd full of mutual acquaintances, and with the help of some careful observation (and my trusty field guide) transformed my experience into one of walking among old friends. This, I realize now, is the feeling of place, of belonging. It is the sensation that comes when being in a place transitions from existing there to living there. It is fueled by curiosity and a desire to truly understand and know a place, and this curiosity is rewarded by an overwhelming feeling of true belonging.
I fear that a consequence of our current age, where the highways leading into each major American metropolitan area are becoming more and more identical, with the usual suspects (McDonalds, Wendy’s, Jiffy Lubes, Starbucks) dotting their shoulders, is that this kind of deep belonging is becoming harder and harder to come by. Because of this growing homogeneity of place, very little work must be done to identify with a newly-arrived-at one. Instead of a hike with a field guide or an hour in the neighborhood coffee shop, a Big Mac, Venti Chai Latte, and some Netflix does the trick — it feels like home, because home is everywhere. The problem with this universalized concept of “home,” in the words of cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, is that “the place doesn’t really make any difference for us, at least not as long as we consider the land to be merely a backdrop against which human history unfolds, or merely as a stockpile of resources for the global spread of our human monoculture.”
In other words, the problem with relying on the familiar cultural obelisks — the Golden Arches or Green Mermaids — is that we are entirely disconnected from the place that all of this convenience and familiarity is built upon.
Experiencing a place isn’t hard, but not experiencing it is extraordinarily easy. Consider the ease with which we neglect to go for a run, take a walk, or work on a project that we’ve been thinking about after a long day of work, choosing instead to stay in and watch TV or incessantly refresh our social media of choice. There’s of course beauty and value in experiencing our place through all means, including Facebook and Game of Thrones, but it is important to be aware of how these new forms of connection might slowly lead to a feeling of loneliness which stems almost entirely from our lack of cultivation of a feeling of belonging.
As we feel more connected to a place, we can more and more begin to rely upon that connection. Further, the connection is worth more and more across facets of our daily lives. Finding that a relationship with a co-worker is being strained, or that goals you’ve set for yourself aren’t being met, the chance to re-settle into a comfortable groove can be easily found by re-connecting to place: getting a cup of coffee with a friend in the local shop, walking down the main street of town and stopping to pet friendly dogs, or strolling up to the nearest peak to take in the view.
This process is, I believe, critical to any chance of a feeling of satisfaction in a given situation. Imagine! Mental refreshment right outside your door. A solution to the challenges of our modern world lurking right through the trees, field guide in hand. Yet I of course realize that for many the accessibility of the natural world is limited. Though I personally believe that a deep commitment to developing an understanding of the place in which we live by exploring and recreating outside is the best way to feel independence, belonging, and connectedness, this feeling can come via many other means.
The point is this: if we arise each morning with no guess of the day’s weather, we’re disconnected to place. If we are surprised by the changing of the leaves or the closing of a shop, we are disconnected to place. If we look past trash beside the road as a necessary evil of progress, we are disconnected to place. If a newcomer to town asks about the most beautiful part of the area and you cannot find an answer, you are disconnected to place. Because with a deep understanding of place comes curiosity, and curiosity only deepens this feeling. A deeper still understanding sparks a passionate defense of the place that fostered it. Just as we defend ourselves against insult and offense, we grow passionately supportive of our chosen place as we grow still closer to it.
It is this realization of the importance of place that inspired my love for my job as a Naturalist. Every day, I was given the opportunity to lead people into the sense that they somehow belonged here, in Aspen. Simply by telling the story of how a grove of aspen trees is not a group of individual organisms but in fact a huge mass of trees connected by their roots, or how mountain springs flow with water that has been stored in underground aquifers for thousands of years, or by even just telling someone the name of a wildflower, I can bring them closer to feeling connected to the place that they’re visiting. It is my hope that even twenty percent of the individuals on my guided walks this summer took home a desire to explore, learn, and connect to their homes, wherever that is.
As I descended down the Hunter Creek trail, I leapt from rock to rock, challenging myself not to fall. Enlivened by my nearness to cracking my head open, each step was precise. The feeling of control as the rubber of my boots stuck solidly to each stone only emboldened the next movement. As my heel slipped on an improperly-angled slope I adapted, finding flatter rocks. Reaching the end of the trail and walking upon flat ground again, I felt new. Mounting my bicycle to return home, to awakened housemates and more adventures awaiting, I couldn’t help but smile.
