Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Chapter 15. Teaching About Place in an Era of Geographical Detachment

c h a p t e r 1 5 Teaching About Place in an Era of Geographical Detachment h a l c r i m m e l A powerful spring storm that downed trees along Utah’s Wasatch Front is now rolling toward us across the Uinta Basin. Above the rim of Split Mountain Canyon, lightning flickers in the dry air. The students are a little nervous about settling in for the night, so I remind them we’re in a rain shadow, where average annual precipitation is only about eight inches, with most falling as snow. But if thunder follows lightning by less than a count of five, I say, leave the tents and get in the van. Neither comment seems particularly reassuring. But so far not a sprinkle has reached us. Dinosaur National Monument, some 150 miles east of Salt Lake City, is an ecological hub where the Northern Plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin Desert converge. As such, it would seem to be an ideal choice for studying place. Plants and fish have adapted—often uniquely—to the 211,000-acre monument, which ranges from 4,730 to 9,006 feet in elevation. Rogue ponderosa inhabit canyons thousands of feet below their usual range. The rare Ute ladies’ tresses orchid, a federally listed threatened species, survives in Dinosaur. Adaptation 2 2 0 m e e t i n g t h e c h a l l e n g e s continues as more than seventy-five species of invasive plants challenge the distinctive ecology that defines a sense of place here. Tamarisk, for example, a thirsty plague of a shrub, has spread throughout the river corridor, infesting once-open beaches and side canyons and displacing Fremont cottonwoods. I first became acquainted with Dinosaur National Monument in the early 1990s on a four-day river trip. During the last three years I have frequently returned to research a book about the monument ’s river canyons. This spring I am teaching creative non-fiction that emphasizes desert place; eleven students are with me for the course’s weeklong field component. While we are on location, our goal is to learn about Dinosaur’s climate, hydrology, geography, natural history, anthropology, and so forth, and then incorporate this knowledge into place-based creative nonfiction essays. Once we get away from campus and in the field, the reading—no longer a chore for students—spins itself into gold. I notice a headlamp burning in one tent all night; next morning the student tells me he stayed up until dawn, finishing The Secret Knowledge of Water, by Craig Childs. Along with these essays on desert lands, we also read works by Edward Abbey, Ellen Meloy,TerryTempest Williams, and Ann Zwinger. Though Zwinger’s Run, River, Run is the only one of the readings actually to discuss Dinosaur National Monument, all teach us about arid and semi-arid lands, and all provide the students with helpful models of place-based creative nonfiction. Free from cell phones, iPods, the Internet, families, and jobs, the students can focus solely on the high desert surroundings, and even the unfamiliar concepts of natural and cultural history become part of informal discussion. Given the unlikely mix of backgrounds, I’m h a l c r i m m e l 2 2 1 surprised how quickly the group seems to settle into the routine of camping and how well they get along with each other. Of the eleven, seven are married. Nine are women—four of them are nontraditional students in their thirties and forties. One is pregnant. One has a seconddegree black belt. Another, a police record. One a Ph.D. Religious differences, ever a theme in Mormon-dominated Utah, don’t seem to be playing a role either. The group shares a rare and genuine camaraderie despite the mix: an atheist, an evangelical Christian, a Catholic, a Unitarian, six Mormons, and a hard-partying Jack Mormon who regales us with Raymond Carver-esque stories about his social life as a tire-store employee. As for myself (in the interest of full disclosure), place is an obsession, though one I’ve learned to repress. In graduate school I’d once taught a class on “Sense of Place” perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “If I ever hear the expression ‘sense of place’ again I will be sick,” wrote one woman on her course...