From the Archives: Wendell Berry’s ‘The One-Inch Journey’

Editor's Note: Acclaimed essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry was a native Kentuckian and a strong proponent of living in harmony with nature. This essay, which appeared in the May 1971 issue of Audubon, was also published that spring in the book The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge by University Press of Kentucky. Berry's voice for protecting the gorge against a plan to flood it helped lead to its eventual protection.

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The mollusk-shell of civilization, in which we more and more completely enclose ourselves, is lined on the inside with a nacreous layer that is opaque, rainbow-tinted, and an inch thick. It is impossible to see through it to the world; it works, rather, as a reflecting surface upon which we cast the self-flattering outlines and the optimistic tints of our preconceptions of what the world is.

These obscuring preconceptions were once superstitious or religious. Now they are mechanical. The figure representative of the earlier era was that of the otherworldly man who thought and said much more about where he would go when he died than about where he was living. Now we have the figure of the tourist-photographer who, one gathers, will never know where he is, but only, looking at his pictures, where he was. Between his eye and the world is interposed the mechanism of the camera—and also, perhaps, the mechanism of economics; having bought the camera, he has to keep using it to get his money's worth. For him the camera will never work as an instrument of perception or discovery. Looking through it, he is not likely to see anything that will surprise or delight or frighten him or change his sense of things.
 

As he uses it, the camera is in bondage to the self-oriented assumptions that thrive within the social enclosure. It is an extension of his living room in which his pictures will finally be shown. And if you think the aspect or the atmosphere of his living room might be changed somewhat by the pictures of foreign places and wonders that he has visited, then look, won't you, at the pictures themselves. He has photographed only what he has been prepared to see by other people's photographs. He has gone religiously and taken a picture of what he saw pictured in the travel brochures before he left home. He has photographed scenes that he could have bought on postcards or prepared slides at the nearest drugstore, the major difference being the frequent appearance in his photographs of himself, or his wife and kids. He poses members of his household on the brink of a canyon that the wind and water have been carving at for sixty million years as if there were an absolute equality between them, as if there were no precipice for the body and no abyss for the mind. And before he leaves he adds to the view his empty film cartons and the ruins of his picnic. He is blinded by the device by which he has sought to preserve his vision. He has, in effect, been no place and seen nothing; the awesomest wonders rest against his walls, deprived of mystery and immensity, reduced to his comprehension and his size, affirmative of his assumptions, as tame and predictable as a shelf of whatnots.

Throughout their history here, most white men have moved across the North American continent following the fictive coordinates of their own self-affirming assumptions. They have followed maps, memories, dreams, plans, hopes, schemes, greeds. Seldom have they looked beyond the enclosure of preconception and desire to see where they were; and the few who have looked beyond have seldom been changed by what they saw. Blind to where they were, it was inevitable that they should become the destroyers of what was there.

***

One of the oldest and most persistent legends of the white man's occupation of Kentucky is that of John Swift's silver. Swift was a silver miner who is supposed to have wandered in the Kentucky mountains about 1760. He left a journal describing his adventures, paramount among which was the discovery of a marvelously rich lode of silver. The journal contained directions for finding this wealth and also a map, but because of Swift's poor knowledge of the country and its landmarks both directions and map have proved meaningless.

And that very meaninglessness has assured the survival and the dispersal of the legend, and of the indefatigable dream that the legend represents. Today, according to historian Thomas D. Clark, there are still people in the Kentucky mountains "who had rather seek fortune by searching for nebulous silver than by plowing corn." And that region is said to be littered with vaguely defined sites where maybe John Swift found and then lost his silver mine. One of those places is the Red River Gorge, and a tributary of the Red is named in commemoration of Swift's passage through that country: Swift Camp Creek.

There could be no better parable of the white man's entrance into Kentucky. For John Swift is the true forefather of our history here, and his progeny have been numerous. They have descended upon this land from the eastward passes and from their mothers' wombs with their minds set on the dream of quick riches to be had, if not from a vein of precious metal, then from coal or from logs. Or from the land itself, for those who preferred to plow rather than hunt silver have all too often followed the agricultural method known as "mining," by which the growth is taken from the land and nothing given back, until the fields are exhausted like mined-out seams of coal.

***

The wealth of a place is not to be reckoned by its market value at some given moment. Its real wealth is not just its present value, but its potential value as it continues through time; and therefore its wealth is not finally reckonable at all, for we do not know how long the world, or our species, will last. 

I have heard strip miners justify the destruction of large tracts of the earth by figures showing that the value of the mineral lying under the ground was greater than the value of the crops or the forest then standing on the surface. They would be right only if the world, or if people's dependence on it, should come to an abrupt end the day after the seam was mined out.

It is certainly possible that the world or the human race may come to an end pretty soon. But another possibility—and a much more demanding possibility, too—is that the human race may continue for thousands of years. We can't possibly say how many thousands it may be. But in Asia there are agricultural lands that, by wise farming methods, have continuously produced food crops for six thousand years. If the people of China and Korea and Japan have depended on their farmlands for six thousand years, we in America might reasonably prepare to be dependent for at least that long on ours. And so before we accept the arguments of the strip miners, we should ask other experts to compute for us the value of the produce of the soil overlying the coal seams for a period of six thousand years, and we should weigh that value against the value of the mineral.

***

When a mineral deposit is mined out, the miners are done with that place forever. When a logging crew has cut the marketable trees from a boundary of timber, it may be that a generation or more will pass before another logging crew will return. But the farmer's relation to a place, and his dependence on it, are continuous, and because of that he is the figure who most accurately represents to us what our relation to the earth is. And Americans who contemplate the history and the behavior of the American farmer are not apt to find him the source of much comfort. There have been, and continue to be, noble exceptions; nevertheless, the historical tendencies that I am talking about seem to me clearly established.

Characteristically, the American farmer, moving into new lands to the west, did not subject himself to the disciplines and restraints implicit in the nature and the topography of the new land. Instead, he pretty much ignored where he was and went about his business on the assumption that the place he had come to was the same as the place he had come from. Thus the Englishman, starting as a farmer in Virginia, was obeying not so much a vision of what a farm in Virginia might or ought to be as a memory of what farming in England was. And the son of a Virginia farmer, opening a farm in the Kentucky wilderness, imitated the Virginian's imitation of an Englishman. Because of differences in soil and climate and rainfall this imitativeness has been, in general, a failure. On relatively flat lands the performance of the American farmer has often enough been poor. On steep lands his performance has been almost invariably disastrous. Kentucky farmers have often destroyed whole hillsides in only a few crop years. In some of the levelest lands they have done more damage in a generation than the thoroughly indigenous Japanese farmers did to their land in six millennia. And the Kentucky farmer, going west, overgrazed the plains—largely, I believe, on the assumption that the grass grew there the same way he had seen it growing in Kentucky.

But the American farmer has not been so destructive just because of an illusion as to his whereabouts. For years, almost from the beginning, there has been in this country a social fashion that has led people to believe that life in the city is better than life in the country, that there is something degrading in any work that dirties the hands, that work of any kind has its highest meaning and reward in leisure. Many of our farmers, because of these attitudes, have come to look upon farming not as an honorable calling or as a meaningful way of life, but as a form of bondage. Consequently, the aim and the ideal of their labor has not been a wise and preserving use of the land, but escape, both from the land and from the work it requires. And so the farmers have often farmed their land not in accordance with a vision of what it is or what it ought to be, but in accordance with a dream of where they would like to go as soon as they can get the money. It is these who have "mined" the land, for to build the fertility of a field, putting back as well as taking away, is to cut the margin of immediate profit; that would be to make a long-term investment in the future of the land, and their only thought of the future is the wish that as much of it as possible will be spent somewhere else. Their hopes and dreams lying elsewhere, they can have no clear and disciplining sense of where they are, and so the old destructive ways persist. They are institutionalized in fact, in the efficiencies and chemical shortcuts of "agri-business."

Several months ago I watched a farmer prepare the ground and plant and grow a crop of corn on a ridge draining into the North Fork of the Red River. The ridge was narrow, falling off steeply on both sides like a barn roof. It was not suited to row-cropping at all. My guess was that, like a great deal of steep Kentucky land, it had been logged off years ago, and then cropped and pastured until the land would no longer sustain a profitable growth, and then abandoned. A growth of trees and bushes had covered it again. And then, having learned nothing from experience, and perhaps driven by the adverse markets that have nearly always afflicted farmers—and farmlands—in America, this man had returned to it, to practice on it yet again the "new ground" methods of his grandfathers, cutting and burning all the bushes and trees, plowing between the stumps, and planting corn. The crop was puny, hardly worth the man's trouble and labor, much less the damage to the ridge. The erosion, beginning as soon as he uncovered the ground, will continue and he will thus continue to invest in his crop—long after his earnings from it have been spent and forgotten.

A practice of the same vintage and wisdom is that of overgrazing such slopes. The assumption is that the only function of grass is to serve as feed for livestock, and the stock is permitted to graze it to the root. The result, again, is the erosion of the slopes and the steady depletion not only of the watershed but of the pasture. The result is the siltation and flooding of the streams. The result is the impoverishment and degradation and displacement of the people. For the reasons I have mentioned, and doubtless for other reasons that I don't know, the obvious lesson has never been learned: You cannot uncover steep land without destroying it.

And the causes of these ruinous attitudes and practices are by no means coextensive with the ridges and hollows of the Red River country. They have their origin in our life and history as a people here in America. They have their origin in our failure to this day to be able to assign any value other than economic to the land, and to the life of and on the land, and to men's labor—and in our complacent assumption that our economy will somehow turn out to be the same as nature's, that it somehow has something to do with the truth about our life in this world.

Of all illusory enclosures, that of the American economy is the narrowest and the worst. To be blind to everything outside the competence of a bank clerk is, as we have been told over and over, to be spiritually dead; it is also, as we are slowly learning, to be an accomplice in the death of the world. It is a form of insanity. But even in economic terms it has failed to make sense. In the intelligence of a man governed exclusively or mainly by economic concerns there appears to be an inclination, compelling as the law of gravity, toward the quickest profit. Cutting a stand of timber, he is apt to diminish the possibility that more timber will ever grow. Opening a strip mine, he takes out the coal, and assures in the process that there will be no more produce from that land for generations, or perhaps forever. Overpasturing a hillside this year, he reduces the number of cattle he will be able to pasture next year. And so he is not only spiritually dead and criminally destructive; on his own terms of economics he is stupid; his "practicality" is only folly. And this man—whom our grandchildren will look upon as the incarnation of evil, if they survive the results of his folly—is the man we have most honored and entrusted with power.

***

When a man operates in the landscape either as a dreamer of "better" places or as a simple digit of the "economy," he is operating without moral or ecological controls. And without controls himself, he destroys controls of nature: The layers of vegetation and topsoil that, if let alone, would cover the land and preserve it. With nothing to break the fall of the rains or to absorb and hold the water, the slopes begin to function as little more than roofs, shedding the runoff into the river. And then the river begins to be known and feared as a destroyer, and the people downstream begin to cry out "flood control"—as if control would not exist if human did not invent it, and as if it were something people could cry out for and surely get.

And for this very complex problem, with its sources in the abused watershed and in the minds of the people, the city fathers downstream and the U.S. Army of Engineers offer a stunningly simple solution: Build a dam! The downstream citizens, sealed up in their clamshell, are aware of only one phenomenon: High water. It appears to them that Nature, man's enemy, is warring against them, threatening to fill the clamshell with a muddy flood. And so the ancient battle cry is raised: Conquer Nature! Nature has already been conquered on the slopes upstream, and so now it has to be conquered downstream.

The Corps of Engineers is a famous nature-conquerer, and it is always alert for that familiar battle cry. But the Corps of Engineers has its clamshell, too, and when the cry is heard it feels no need to go outside, but looks instead around its rainbow-tinted walls at its charts and maps and tables and graphs and gauges showing the direction and velocity of the political wind. From the Engineers’ commanding vantage point it is clear to them that what is needed is a dam. And the processes of dam-making are set in motion. All this is done by the manipulation of abstractions: Between two points on a topographical map a dam is to be built, requiring a certain predicted expenditure of dollars, backing the water to the level of a certain contour, able to control a certain amount of runoff from the slopes upstream and to deliver a specified number of gallons daily to the city water companies downstream. The place of the resulting lake does not matter, because it is not known. For the inexhaustible details and aspects and facts and mysteries of the life of the river valley there is to be substituted the abstraction of a waterlevel tabulated upon pieces of paper. And that abstraction of mechanics attracts the most abstract of human desires—avarice. For a lake means Tourists, Recreation Developments, Deals, Money. Thus, by what some will call human genius and others the munificence of God, an ecological disaster will be turned into an economic bonanza. Now the walls of the shell are alight with wonderful dreams; civilization is like being surrounded by a technicolor movie, and it looks like everybody's going to have plenty of ticket money.

But enter the place itself. Leave behind the theories and the propaganda, the presumptions, the charts and statistics, and go into the watershed of the Red River. Drive along the ridges where the tributaries head up, and look at the overcropped, overpastured, denuded slopes. Look at the despoiled carcass of a land that was once bountifully forested, ecologically healthy and whole, and of incalculable economic potential. Consider the results of methods that grew out of ignorance and misunderstanding and economic constraint.

And then consider the river itself. Even now there are stretches of it that look as wild and unspoiled, you imagine, as they did a hundred years ago. That, to be sure, is something to be thankful for—but so far you are only looking at the surface. Step into the stream and wade down it for a few hundred steps. And notice that wherever the current slows you are walking, not over the clean rocky or weedy bottom of a healthy stream, but in mud. In places the mud is more than knee deep. It is the soil of the ridges and slopes upstream, the wasted flesh of a living creature that has been stricken by a lethal disease.

To a man standing in that mud, aware of what it means, the idea of the proposed "flood-control dam" is a giddy fiction, a fairy tale that reduces science to the level of the crudest superstition. It is not as obviously stupid, but it is just as stupid nevertheless, as the idea of putting a stopper in the mouth of a volcano. For what the dam will be, if the misuse of the watershed continues, is the first step in the creation of a swamp. It will have nothing to do with the control of anything, but will be only another manifestation of the lack of moral and social and economic control that made the need for "flood control" in the first place. It will finally be seen to have a good deal more to do with the illusions of a short-term investment and the quick profit and the easy remedy than with any reality of the environment.

***

The proponents of the dam in the Red River Gorge are the most recent heirs of John Swift in that part of the country. They have been entranced, as Swift was, by the dream of ease—of easy wealth, of easy answers, of easy fulfillments. And the dream is accompanied, necessarily, by the assumption that such ease is not destructive.

It almost always is destructive. For the labor of preserving the life of the world, of which our lives are a part and on which they depend, is difficult and complex and endless. In nature all that grows finally is made to augment the possibility of growth, and so nothing is wasted. This year's leaves decay and enter the intricate life and process of the soil, which assures that there will be more leaves another year. It is this pattern and only this—not any that he may conceivably invent—that man must imitate and enter into if he is to live in the world without destroying it.

The task of preserving the life of the world is one that has little to do with the present values of American society. It has almost nothing to do with our concepts of wealth and profit and success and luxury and ease. It has nothing at all to do with short-term investments, or short- term anything else. It is not recognizable to a short-term intelligence. It involves a man in work that he can neither live to finish nor imagine the end of. It is humble work, often involving the use of the hands. It requires a tolerance and respect for mystery. Its model figures are not to be found among the great figures of our history: Our artists, inventors, soldiers, statesmen—but among humble people whose lives were devoted laboriously and ceremoniously and lovingly to the life of their land: Tribal people and peasants.

***

John Swift has other heirs in the country of his legend who will no doubt be surprised and outraged to be so considered. And yet I believe that they and the dam-builders, whose activities they are apt to deplore, have this ancestor in common. They are the lovers of "scenery." Now that the Red River Gorge has become famous because of the efforts to keep it from being made into a lake, the scenery-lovers cause traffic jams there on the weekends. They come by carloads and busloads, following one another, bumper-to-bumper, along the narrow blacktop, stopping only at "scenic overlooks”, or perhaps not stopping at all. For them the automobile has become a censoring device. They want to see only what can be seen sitting down, and at highway speeds. They supposedly are charmed by the notion of a wilder place, but they want it neatly packaged in "views"—as if the world were a commodity, to be served up to consumers like hamburgers at a drive-in.

Like the tourist-photographer's camera, their eyes seek out only what resembles what they have already seen, or what resembles pictures they have seen, or what they have been told is "beautiful." They will exclaim over a long view of a monumental rock or cliff, but will never see the phoebe's nest clinging to its face. Still less will they be aware of the cycles of living and dying, exuberance and pain, plenty and want, eating and being eaten, growth and decay, that course through the scene they are looking at.

The conservation movement has so far concentrated too much on scenic places. This is changing, and it can’t change too soon. There will have to be a concern with agricultural methods, with city environments, with the watersheds of unspectacular streams, with the widespread preservation of farm woodlands and wetlands. To preserve only the scenic places is to invite their destruction either in the process of the destruction of their surroundings or by the overcrowding of people who have no other places to go.

The scenery-oriented conservationists are the ones who have introduced esthetics into the vocabulary of conservation and then made nonsense of it by failing to see its relation to practicality or, for that matter, to reality—so that the term is now bandied about by publicists as if it referred to a quantity of something to be purchased at the buyer's convenience, and by strip miners and other ruiners as if it referred to a handy camouflage for disgrace. The concern with esthetics has been mostly a dealing with appearances, as if anything that "looks good" is all right. An example of the esthetic approach to conservation is the Kentucky law requiring junkyards to be surrounded by a high fence—which only conceals the problem and, in practice, often looks worse. Another is a proposal, once advanced by West Kentucky strip miners, that areas destroyed by strip mining should be landscaped along the main highways.

The truth, as always, is more difficult. Natural beauty is no more than a by-product of natural health. Decently and frugally used, the earth will be beautiful; disdained, exploited, and abused, it will be ugly, as well as unhealthy, and there will be no way to "beautify" it. When one relates to the world in terms of its "scenery," then one is apt to go around talking about "beautifying" such things as strip mines and slums. But what is being destroyed cannot be made beautiful. The notion that a process of ruin can be accompanied and offset by a process of beautification, that all is well if the country looks pretty from the roadside, is only another illusion of ease, like John Swift's silver. It is another technicolor pipe dream to keep us ignorant and endangered and dangerous, shut up in our shell.

***

There is something suicidal, and more sinister than that, in this quest for easy wealth and easy answers, for it proposes goals that are dead ends, that imagination and desire do not go beyond. Once the precious vein of silver has been found, once the speculation in land or mineral or timber has paid off, then a man's work will be over; he will have escaped forever the drudgery of the plow or the office. But if a man has destroyed in himself the capacity to enjoy work—and he does this inevitably by working toward the goal of escape from work—then how can he possibly enjoy leisure? He can't, of course. And our country is full of men who have worked and sacrificed and deferred pleasure, and as a result achieved all that they dreamed of—and who, having now neither work nor goal, are miserable. Such a life is shallow and destructive; despising the work it has undertaken out of hatred for work, it has unwittingly learned to despise itself; destroying peace and innocent pleasure in seeking for ease, it has unwittingly destroyed itself; despising and destroying itself, it helplessly despises and destroys the world.

That is the predominant form of our life now. But there is another form that life can take. We can learn about it from exceptional people of our own culture, and from other cultures less destructive than ours. I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement" but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of his place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains him, and which he knows he can never encompass with his understanding or desire.

***

Comparatively few white men have ever lived this way in America. And for the ones who have, or who have attempted to, it has been difficult, for the prevailing social current has always flowed away from the land, toward the city and the abstractions of wealth and specialization and power. The pressures against a modest and preserving life on the land have been manifested most immediately in adverse agricultural markets and in an overwhelming prejudice against all things identifiable as "country." These pressures have already destroyed the small farmers of most sections of the country, and are well advanced in the destruction of the rest.

Broken from the land, contemporary Americans do not now settle down in some city, as to some extent they used to, but remain migratory from job to job and from neighborhood to neighborhood and from city to city. But these wanderings have no real function. They do not spread knowledge and skills and songs as the wanderings of artists and poets once did, and they are not linked to natural cycles as were the wanderings of Arctic peoples and desert nomads. They are artificial wanderings, unappeasable searches for John Swift's silver in all its modern manifestations: More money, shorter hours, easier work, higher status.

Not only does all this moving around destroy the integrity and continuity of marriages and families, as has been often enough said, but it destroys any possibility of a disciplined relation to the earth. For it seems a fact that most minds require, as a condition of insight and discipline, some measure of continuity, and some measure of the devotion that can only associate itself with continuity. Unchecked by any feeling that they may return soon, or at all, weekenders strew the public woodlands and streamsides with trash. Lacking any association with the disciplines of maintaining the farmlands the year round, urban hunters have become notorious as destroyers of fences and gates—and as most indiscriminate shooters.

The conservation movement has become almost exclusively a matter of power struggles between agencies and corporations and organizations of conservationists. The agencies and corporations are motivated by visions of power and profit. The conservation organizations are motivated by principles which very largely remain abstract since the number of people who can know a place is necessarily too small to protect it, and must therefore enlist the aid of people who do not know it but are willing to protect it on principle.

I should make it clear that I recognize the need for the conservation organizations, and that I am emphatically on their side. But the organizations, by themselves, are not enough. If they are to succeed in any way that is meaningful or perhaps if they are to succeed at all, their work must be augmented by an effort to rebuild the life of our society in terms of a decent spiritual and economic connection to the land. That cannot be done by organizations but only by individuals and by families and by small informal groups. It will have to be done by leaving the cities and the suburbs and making a bond with some place, and by living there—doing the work the place requires, repairing the damage other men have done to it, preserving its woods, building back its fertility and its ecological health—undertaking, that is, the labor, the necessary difficulty and clumsiness of discovering, at this late date and in the most taxing of circumstances, a form of human life that is not destructive.

***

In the Red River Gorge there is such a family as I am talking about: People drawn out of the city to an ancestral tract of farmland enclosed in that wilderness—drawn back by loyalty and love, and by a sense, having learned the alternatives, of what such a place and such a life means and what they might be made to mean. The house can be reached only by footpath in wet weather, and in the best of weather only by tractor. The house sits at the edge of the woods, at the foot of a great sheer cliff, overlooking the open fields of the bottomlands. The quiet of the wilderness rises over it, enormous, a silence millions of years old concentrated in the looming gray cliff-face. It is a quietness that has been accepted; the house, one senses, has over the years been cleansed of all unnecessary sounds. It seems somehow to have assumed the deeply musing inwardness of the stone that towers over it. It is the dwelling place of a sorrowing intelligence that understands the crisis of the Gorge as a part of the crisis of the world. If the Gorge is flooded and this family loses its home and its history and the disciplining and reassuring sense of its place in the world, that will be no isolated incident, not one of those sacrifices that are sometimes required of individuals for the sake of the common good. It will be another small step in the spread of an epidemic, a chronic and cancerous devaluation of the life of the world and the lives of people. When this family is forced out of its home, which has been for them not just a place to sleep and eat but a loving task and a hopeful promise and a joy, they will join the thousands of the American dispossessed who have been driven out to make room for roads and airports and lakes and suchlike. When people can't be secure in their homes because of the demands of the public interest, then the public interest is serving us as a foul god.

What that household promises to the world is not the possibility of better organizations, but the possibility of better life. It has taken its life knowingly and lovingly from its place. And in return it offers to the place the promise of life—a longer and more abundant and better cherished life than can be offered it by any government or organization. For if the good principles of governments and organizations can't be made to live in the lives of people and places then they are dead—or, at best, five percent alive in the bungling dutifulness of functionaries.

And that household, meaningful and promising as it is, is certainly doomed, for it can survive only in its particularity and it is caught between two abstractions: The organizations that would destroy the Gorge, and the organizations that would preserve it. The forces of destruction, of course, consider nothing except their dreams of profit, and the consequent methods. And the forces of preservation cannot consider or represent private claims because the Gorge cannot be saved, or damage to it limited, except as a public place. There is, so far as I know, no force that represents the frail possibility that security in one's home implies the right to stay in it. The Public Interest, in some of its manifestations, is another colored lantern slide on the wall of our snug clamshell—howbeit most remunerative to some of its servants. If the public is destroyed piecemeal "in its own interest"—well, that is regrettable, for the liars in public office will have to contend with a further diminishment of confidence in the government, but The Public Interest must be served. Meanwhile, who worries about a few more dispossessed families—they're getting paid, aren't they?

***

What will cure us? At this point it seems useless to outline yet another idea of a better community, or to invoke yet another anthropological model. These already abound, and we fail to make use of them for the same reason that we continue to destroy the earth: We remain for the most part blind to our surroundings. What the world was, or what we have agreed that it was, obtrudes between our sight and what the world is. If we do not see clearly what the nature of our place is, we destroy our place. If we don't see where we are, we are more dead than alive. If we cannot see how our own lives are drawn from the life of the world, and how they are involved and joined with that greater life, then we live in a deathly sleep, and such efforts as we may make to preserve the greater life will be inept and even destructive. If like John Swift we do not know the country and its landmarks, if we are unable to see where we are in relation to it, then we lose it and lose its promised abundance. We lose our lives.

The effort to clarify our sight cannot begin in the society, but only in the eye and in the mind. It is a spiritual quest, not a political function. Each man must confront the world alone, and learn to see it for himself: "First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye."

And so from the figure of the silver-hunter John Swift, I turn to the figure of the photographic artist—not the tourist-photographer who goes to a place, bound by his intentions and preconceptions, to record what has already been recorded and what he therefore expects to find, but the photographer who goes into a place in search of the real news of it.

His search is a pilgrimage, for he goes along ways he does not fully understand, in search of what he does not expect and cannot anticipate. His undertaking involves a profound humility, for he has effaced himself; he has done away with his expectations; he has ceased to make demands upon the place. He keeps only the discipline of his art that informs and sharpens his vision—he keeps, that is, the practice of observation—for before a man can be a seer he must be a looker. His camera is a dark room, and he has made a dark place in his mind, exultant and fearful, by which he accepts that he does not know what he is going to see, he does not know the next picture. He has entered into the darkness—in order to see! But for the moment the dark lens holds only a vague potency, like a lentil seed, still one with the mystery of what will come next, which is one with the mystery of the wilderness and of the creation.

And then there comes a breaking of the light—and there is another shore to step out of the dark upon, lighted by a blooming flower like a candelabra. We are invited on! We are led on as by the promise of a feast spread for us that we do not yet know. In the shadows a little stream steps down over a ledge of rock into the light. Beyond are the trees, and the darkness again.

Knowing the heaviness of the dead-end search for wealth and ease, what a relief and a joy it is to consider the photographer's pilgrimage to the earth. He is seeking, not the ultimate form of the creation, for he cannot hope to find that, but rather the inexhaustible manifestations of form within the creation. Walking through the woods, he finds within the apparent clutter of trunks and branches a row of trees, leading the eye on. He sees the entrance of the sun upon a rock face. Among the dark trees, time and again, there appears suddenly a tree of light. In the early morning the mist is white and thick in the valley so that the ridgetops seem to float in the sky; looking, one's eyes receive a kinship with the eyes of a sage in the mountains of China a thousand years ago. The light withholds itself from the darkness inside the earth, and the darkness in the earth opens out to the light. The paths and streams clamber through notches in the cliffs. In the narrow ravines the water flashes over the rock lip, enters the great calm and ease of falling, descending into shadow; and the trees strain up out of the tumbled rocks into the light. In the midst of its ageless turmoil in the Roughs of the Upper Gorge, the river breaks out of the rocks, collects in an open pool, and stands still. A small stream is flowing out of the dark tunnel it has followed down through the woods, entering the greater opening of the river—and a man is standing there, not the uproarious creature of machines but just a man standing quietly, almost hidden by the leaves. The photographer is nowhere to be seen. These images are the record of his pilgrimage, and he has moved on. Once, these served him as landmarks, each one defining his whereabouts and leading him on to the next, and thence on again. It is an endless quest, for it is going nowhere in terms of space and time, but only drawing deeper into the presence, and into the mystery, of what is underfoot and overhead and all around. Its grace is the grace of knowing that our consciousness and the light are always arriving in the world together.

The camera is a point of reference, a bit like a compass though not nearly so predictable. It is the discipline and the opportunity of vision. In relation to the enclosure we call civilization, these pictures are not ornaments or relics, but windows and doors, enlargements of our living space, entrances into the mysterious world outside the walls, lessons in what to look for and how to see. They limit our comfort; they drain away the subtle corruption of being smug; they make us a little afraid, for they suggest always the presence of the unknown, what lies outside the picture and beyond eyesight; they suggest the possibility of the sudden accesses of delight, insight, beauty, joy that entice us to keep alive and reward us for living; they can serve as spiritual landmarks in the pilgrimage to the earth that each one of us must undertake alone.

***

Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home. It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification—by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.