Where Is Here Anymore?: A Personal Reflection on "Representing the Environment," Chapter 3 of The Environmental Imagination by Lawrence Buell

One bright October day eight-and-a-half years ago, according to the printout on the photograph, I went out into the woods behind my home with my wife's camera to find an alphabet. Reading The Environmental Imagination (1995), I found myself recalling that sojourn, and went in search of the day's bounty through boxes and boxes of photographs—the enormous clutter of one's pre-digital life. I couldn't recall whether I snapped all twenty-six characters. I could only find nine. Some of which, dressed in camouflage, tried to evade capture. Some of them needed my help. Within the nine photographs I was able to recover there were just barely enough letters to spell out an interesting question with regards to my own interface with the environment and this particular discussion (fig. 1, fig. 2, fig. 3). Why search for an alphabet in the woods? What purpose is served by imposing this Apollonian principle on Dionysian nature?

Perhaps my question is a corollary to Buell's question: "Must literature always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?" Admittedly, an alphabet is not literature, but in truth, I often go to the woods to find stories, if only in the sense that I find a kind of peace there that is conducive to wondering as I wander. On one occasion I found a beaver dam where there wasn't one before and in figuring out how to empty the impromptu lake which now separated half of my property from the other half, I ended up finding the opening to a story I was having trouble starting. This is how The Boy in the Burning House (2000) began.

I live on seventy-six acres of land in eastern Ontario. Tellingly, I spoke of the "woods" behind my house, in my opening remarks, when in fact it is "bush." No local would speak of this hardscrabble land as woods. I

Figure 1.

"W"

Figure 2.

"H"

Figure 3.

"Y"

use the word in an entirely literary way. One doesn't go to the bush to find a story, at least I don't. Trees in sufficient abundance to hide any man-made artifice are always woods for me unless they stretch on forever in which case they become forest, like the boreal forest that surrounds the northern Ontario lake where we have a camp and spend some part of every summer. The same lake, more or less, to which Burl Crow tracked down the elusive and solitary composer Nathaniel Gow in my novel The Maestro (1995). And there again is this theme of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian. Cosmos brought to chaos.

Our camp at Lake Pogomasing—an Ojibwa word meaning "lake of many narrows"—cannot be reached by road but only by floatplane or by a train called the Budd Car, which will drop you off wherever you wish. The two-kilometer walk from the train track through this primordial forest is along a rough but man-made trail that has been there for 10,000 years. I'll take you back to this place later in our talk. But for now, I want to wander about a little aimlessly in the much gentler woods.

Woods, for me, are the Hundred-Acre preserve of Winnie the Pooh (1926); woods are the semi-mystical landscape with a river running through it of Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908); woods are something only wild-ish—something contained within a literary sensibility. I own bush-land, which I choose to call woods, unless, of course, I'm hiring a local man to cut some of it down. Woods, for me, are, I suppose, a translation of nature into story.

This image might be mistaken for a mask, but it is in fact the ideogram for the word "Ma," meaning "place" (fig. 4). So...