Seeing the Country, Whole
It took repeated visits to the West for this pecan farmer and nature writer from South Georgia to feel in his bones the wonders of his home landscape in the coastal plain.
On my first trip to the Yellowstone country, I flew into Billings with my wife and two daughters. We visited relatives for a day or two and then drove across the Beartooth Highway into Yellowstone National Park. I had spent time in the Rocky Mountains intermittently since college but never this section, nor along this route.
It was almost too much to take in—the views, the wildflowers, the jagged, snowy peaks, the deep blue of the sky. I could literally feel the endorphins coursing through my brain. Part of that came from seeing the same joy and wonder in my kids’ eyes. We are people of the humid fields and pines and hardwood bottoms of South Georgia, and such sights are as foreign to us as the dark side of the moon.
It has always been this way when I go West. Whether the Rockies or the Pacific Coast, the Sierras, the Cascades, or even New Mexico’s Organ Mountains, I am entranced by the scenery. For the longest time, I spent most of my trips out West simply goggle-eyed, ogling the landscape. Only recently has my time in the West become more regular, allowing me to slow down when I am there, and settle into the landscape. What I have realized over the last few years of returning there to the same place over and over, is that it takes time to really see the country.
There’s not much that interests me more than the relationships between people and the land. In all their complexities, the mess we make of the land, the harm we cause it, our attempts to correct the mistakes, to do things better, the restorative peace it offers us, the beauty, mysteries, and wonder we find in it. In all the many ways we interact with and are a part of it, there is something about those relationships that dwells so deeply inside of us that they often throb like an ingrown toenail. Yet, both our superficial and tacit understandings of the land have a way of blinding us to place.
I always wondered if people who live surrounded by mountains lose some of that initial awe at the landscape because they are surrounded by it constantly. I have asked myself, how long would that take? Over the last eight years I returned to the same place in southwestern Montana with friends and family. On the first few trips, it was always the same: I was so hopped up on the landscape my brain couldn’t do much more than just try to take it in. But after a while, I learned the names of places—roads, mountain peaks, streams, plants, animals, and trees. I became familiar enough with them that my senses kicked in and I experienced them. My lungs and body started to feel the contours and elevation of the peaks and the high air. I felt the current of the river pushing against my legs and learned where and how the water flowed. I watched where the birds gather their seed, listened to their songs, slicked my hands with the slime of a cutthroat trout, felt that constant wind clear my head of clutter, and learned what times of year the balsamroot and fireweed bloom. I still have a hard time distinguishing the Western pines, but I’m working on them.
My lungs and body started to feel the contours and elevation of the peaks and the high air. I felt the current of the river pushing against my legs and learned where and how the water flowed.
After a time, I felt the landscape. This is when you know you are experiencing a place. This is when you really begin to see it. But no matter how often I visit southwestern Montana, no matter how well I learn the life and landscape of that place, I will always be a visitor there. Each time I return, I expect I will see it more clearly.
But our home ground, that place we know best, can be hardest to see. Especially if it is as plain as my home. Through high school and college, like most, I wanted nothing more than to move away and live a more adventurous life somewhere with more splendorous views than the Georgia Coastal Plain, some place like those Rocky Mountains. I had been living within and around pine forests, endless rows of cotton, peanut fields, and watermelon fields, slow-moving, muddy, tree-shrouded creeks and rivers, all my life. I grew tired of gnats swarming around my ears, nose, mouth, and eyes. Tired of suffocating summer days, so humid that outside, it felt like stepping into a hot bath. There are mosquitos, rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, rank vegetation full of redbugs (chiggers). I thought I knew this place. I thought I knew all it offered me. But there was more to it than I saw.
The ecologist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.” This coastal plain—so inhospitable to early settlers they considered it a barren wasteland—housed wonders of its own. Gopher tortoises, painted buntings, summer tanagers, enormous fountains of clean water flowing from the earth, bobwhite quail.
Yes, there are nearly sterile, dry coniferous forests of loblolly and slash pine. There are Dollar Generals around every corner. But there are also hardwood bottoms, fields of grasses and wildflowers, beach dunes, estuaries, island ridges surrounded by swamps, wetlands, and savannas. There are even a few magical places left where the longleaf pine still stands within a world of its own.
Farmhouses surrounded by fields, woods, and orchards. Edges where people and animals parcel out the hours of the day. This is one of the few places left, like the mountain West, where most people are still tied to the land.
You can still live simply here. Farmhouses surrounded by fields, woods, and orchards. Edges where people and animals parcel out the hours of the day. This is one of the few places left, like the mountain West, where most people are still tied to the land. Life, for many of the people I know, revolves around their gardens, their fields, and orchards. They take their leisure on the rivers and lakes, they eat from the land, hunting, fishing, gathering, and they grow things from the earth. What people do each day still depends largely on the weather and its cycles. That way of seeing the world, here, as everywhere, is still under threat from modern society and technology, which has its own advantages, but not at the risk of losing all this.
I have come to realize that the sweat soaking through my clothes as I stand in the shade of my own muscadine vine, the smell of peanuts dug from the earth, the sound of the bobwhite quail, the feel of the mud along the creek bank, the dry coating of sandy loam on my hands after working on irrigation lines, the tug of a crappie or bream, the lit stadium of a high school football field on a Friday night, the sweetly bitter, ripe odor of a pecan fresh out of its shuck, the thunder and cooling wind that arrive just ahead of a summer afternoon thunderstorm, all have helped me to better see this place over the years, to know it. This is how I have experienced my home.
“My wound is geography,” Pat Conroy wrote in The Prince of Tides. “It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” When we take the time to thread ourselves into a landscape, it opens itself to us. It comes in through our eyes and ears, our noses, our skin. It seeps into our pores, and here in the South especially, it binds itself to the cadence of our very words. This is how we come to know and feel a landscape. In doing so, we learn something about our past and present. We become tangled in the webs of history, eternity, and consequence played out upon the land long before we were born. It is all there when we see the country, whole.
About the author
Lenny Wells is a professor of Horticulture at the University of Georgia’s campus in Tifton, Georgia. He also grows pecans on his family’s farm and writes when he can. Lenny is the author of a book on the history of the pecan, entitled Pecan: America’s Native Nut Tree.
I lived in the Tampa Bay region for 30 years and loved the natural beauty and wildlife of the area. However, after recently retiring, I returned to my childhood home in southwest Georgia and immediately felt such a deep connection to the place. This entire essay spoke to my experience but the beauty of your last paragraph managed to powerfully capture and explain what has been a mystery to me. Thank you.