Books discussed in this essay:

Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey
Touchstone Books, 288 pp., $14.00 (paper)

Bad Land: An American Romance
by Jonathan Raban
Vintage Books, 364 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Coming into the Country
by John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $16.00 (paper)

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan & the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America
by Russell Shorto
Vintage Books, 416 pp., $15.95 (paper)

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.  – Leonard Bernstein

For many writers, inspiration is elusive. Some wait for it at their desks.  Others go out looking.  They scour newspapers for choice tidbits, interview strangers, create adventures for themselves to report on.  But for some writers, inspiration comes from just being in and looking at the world around them.

Nature’s beauty and human’s distinctive footprint upon it often moves writers to write. Those who have seen California’s towering redwoods, Colorado’s snow-capped mountains, the brilliant red rock wilderness of the Southwest, or a forest of heaven-yearning skyscrapers will understand this overwhelming impulse. It is an urge founded as much upon our marveling at nature and human creation as it is a desire to understand our place in the wider world.

I myself was overcome by the irrepressible urge while hiking through the wondrous anomaly that is Death Valley. I sat on a rock flush with inspiration, feverishly recording details: The mountains crouching on the horizon like enormous camels cast in stone; bighorn sheep, emaciated and drawn, their ribs visible through the snarl of matted fur; blooming, brilliant yellow wildflowers so delicate that they withered at the touch; the air so parched that it feels like you’re inhaling cotton; the land sucked free of sound.

Of course, inspiration arises from civilization as well as wilderness. This is Sinclair Lewis, in Babbitt rhapsodizing about the modern cityscape: “The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.”

These profound experiences of place are a writer’s muse. Having experienced my own place-inspired epiphany, I was interested to learn about the experiences of other writers. So I chose four books on place: Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, a vivid, visceral and at times vitriolic meditation on Utah’s canyon lands; John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, the venerated master’s exploration of the Alaskan essence; Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, an idiosyncratic look at the homesteading of the Montana prairie; and Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World, a the hidden history of Manhattan, the settlement that helped birth our nation. 

Although all books make use of place and setting, in these works, in particular, place sits squarely at the center of the plot. The roles land plays in these dramas are as varied as the motivations that led the authors to pen them. Sometimes place is the antagonist driving the drama, such as in Badlands when the land shakes off the early settlers. “The winter cold gave the settlers their first taste of the pitiless and extreme character of the climate … the cold of Montana, when it finally came, had a shocking and insulting quality, like a boot in the face,” Raban writes.

Sometimes land is the victim of civilization’s corrupting hand as in Desert Solitaire, in which Abbey recounts the wonders of a season spent living as a ranger in the remote backcountry of Arches National Monument and the ruin brought about by industrial tourism. “This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.” Abbey writes.

Sometimes the land becomes flesh, a living character, and the book is a profile. This is the case in Coming into the Country, where McPhee describes the land in such intimate detail that we see the life pulsing through its soil. Sometimes the land is a pivot point on which history shifts as in The Island at the Center of the World. Shorto writes that the island was, “the key to control of a continent and a new world.”
 
Although the setting is central to each story, the authors came to their explorations of place for different reasons. Some saw the land and were moved to wonder its past into existence, as was the case with Shorto and Raban. Shorto, who lives in the East Village, became curious while studying the tombstones of the city’s earliest families. He undoubtedly wondered about life in the unkempt colonial seaport of Manhattan and the path that led from these provincial origins to the now-iconic New York skyline. Raban, a Seattleite, was given to taking long drives eastward. During his journeys he became enthralled by the sprinkling of ruined ranches punctuating the eternal emptiness of the Montana flats and puzzled over their meaning. The search for answers led him on an odyssey back through more than eight decades.

For Abbey the experience of looking upon the geometric splendor of Utah’s natural arches and canyons led him not back in time but forward to ponder out its future. Still other writers, such as McPhee, are driven to capture the essence of place as it exists in the moment and record it, preserve it, by means of the written word.

The stories these authors have fashioned invariably tell the struggle of humans versus nature. But the subtext to these tales encompasses something much larger: ruminations on our very existence. For looking upon Manhattan’s awe-inspiring convergence of steel and brick, which emerged from a wilderness once populated by bears and wolves, invites one to accept the notion of divine providence. Likewise reading about the capricious cruelty of a land that can drown its inhabitants one year and starve them the next, one cannot help but ask “Why?” Is chance the ultimate arbiter of our fate or is there some order, some plan?

As Raban so keenly observes, “My God was as much a product of the landscape and weather in which I lived as he was of the scriptures in which I read about him – and it seems to me entirely unsurprising that the Protestant gods of the United States should be so much fiercer and more temperamental than the one in whom I once believed. A land of earthquakes, deluges, hurricanes, lightning-strikes, forest fires and grotesque extremes of heat and cold deserves a God in keeping with its wrathful climate.”

We write about land, therefore, to understand our world, our gods, our history and our future.  And in the process we come to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

MICHAEL WERNER is Etude’s assistant editor.