The other day I was walking one of those old, overgrown, and nearly invisible dirt roads on Bound Brook Island – the site of Wellfleet’s first settlement in the late 17th century, and now largely abandoned. I love wandering in such places of unrecorded and unidentified history, history that resides purely in things and not ideas, not even my own.
I might, for instance, in these second- or third-growth woods, come upon a so-called “wolf tree,’ that is, a tree whose canopy spreads out in a wide pattern so different from that of most forest trees. A wolf tree usually indicates one that has matured in an open field or pasture, perhaps spared by some long-vanished farmer to provide shade for his cattle, or for himself when scything the meadow that these woods used to be, decades or centuries ago.
Or I might come upon an old, round “Cape Cod” cellar hole, its bricks long-removed and repurposed in some other setting. Yet it calls to mind a whole vanished family that once lived here, whose lives must have seemed to them as peculiar and permanent as mine does to me. Or I might come upon some fragments of an old structure too slight or already too reabsorbed back into the earth so that it tells me almost nothing about itself, so that I have to supply its entire identity from my own imagination and what I know of this place.
In other words, it is the very inarticulateness of these mute objects that allows me to wonder about and invent their history based on what I know or have learned. And this, I realize, is what I love to do: to wander in an unrecorded and unlabeled landscape and tease out meaning and stories from the non-human and vanished-human remnants of a place.
This, I fully realize, is an old-fashioned and subjective way of reading a landscape, and one that is probably dying out. More and more we approach a landscape with technology. More and more we ceded our urge for supposition and inference – for story-telling, if you will – to scientific facts and digital analysis.
I am no Luddite, with a knee-jerk rejection of all technological innovation. Computers inhabit my house. You are hearing these words through a complex network of electronic communication. Moreover, I have for decades raided scientific research as fodder for my essays. But when I go for walks in places like this, I try to shed as many technological filters that mediate between me and what I see.
I fully suspect the day will come – if it has not already – when I will be able to saunter through woods like these and, if I find an interesting feature or artifact, simply point my iPhone at it and, using my “archeological app,” have the Internet instantly supply me, not only with its putative identity, but with its history, its cultural significance, even its stories, so that, in the end, I need not wonder about it at all.
But I am not sure that I want to live in a world like that, for it would represent the death of the individual imagination, without which there is no art, no true civic life, no possibility of moral growth. If, in the end, we know only what we are told by some vast digital grid – accurate or not – then we may literally have no soul of our own.
