When Nostalgia Is the Scent We Follow

1.

The first radio caller is Charlie, who reports that Kuba, his German shepherd, has a strange behavior, one that isn't necessarily a problem except that it's so odd. Kuba, says Charlie, "likes to merge with the vegetation." When the dog approaches a shrub, he slips into a kind of trance and enters the bush in "slow mode." The German shepherd seems to gaze distantly and deliberately at certain trees and bushes as if they have psychic power, and as I turn up the volume on my car radio, I think, yes, Charlie's dog is like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, who was called into the dark heart of the New England woods by the wicked wails of fallen Salemites. Should I worry about Kuba, Charlie wonders? Is there something wrong with him? The radio host, zoologist Patricia McConnell, explains to Charlie that Kuba's condition wasn't all that unusual and was perhaps caused by "some kind of mild electrical glitch" that scientists are unable to explain. Some dogs, apparently, are inexplicably intoxicated by certain landscapes.

And so, I thought, am I. So are we all.

2.

I have lived in the Northern Rockies now for nineteen years, off and on, and while I am in love with western landscapes, what have been haunting me lately are the tallgrass prairies of my midwestern home. Like many native ecosystems in that region, prairies exist in isolated islands—sometimes as small as a cemetery plot that was never plowed, and rarely larger than a few hundred acres. No doubt this melancholy quality is one thing that appeals to me about the prairie—lone plant survivors who are unknown to each other, quietly holding out, separated from each other by highways, farm fields, and subdivisions. At one time, eighty percent of the northern Illinois region where I grew up was covered by tallgrass prairie, vast expanses of high grass that utterly confused the settlers who could not explain the absences of trees, and left William Cullen Bryant convinced that only poetry could adequately describe the prairie's "boundless wastes and awful solitudes."

The urban sprawl I see when I fly into Chicago fills me with a sadness that even poetry can't fix. I am being sentimental, of course. But what's strange is this nostalgia for a landscape I know mostly from books. I grew up in the suburbs, and the prairie, with its legendary fourteen inches of topsoil, was long gone well before I was born. Lake Michigan is there, as it always was, and as the plane pivots in a long, slow arc to land at O'Hare, I stare at the water and remember Kuba the German shepherd. This must be what it's like to be intoxicated by a bush.

A hunger for what seems timeless is one of the things that call us back to places. Memory is proprietary, possessive, and easily betrayed; we are pleased when we see things as we remembered them and disappointed when they are not. This may be one reason that I am always drawn to Lake Michigan when I return home (or the ragged peaks in the Sawtooth range, near where I now live, and the granite shoreline of the Maine coast, near where I once lived), places that because of their immensity seem immune to change. That's why the obliteration of the Illinois prairie—falling to the plow in less than twenty years—is so stunning. It's the equivalent of draining the lake, a change so massive that I find it hard to imagine what the tallgrass prairie might have looked like, even with William Cullen Bryant's help.

Instead of poetry, these days we have Google Earth, which gives us a new way to imagine the colossal loss of place. As I write, a smoky smear, clearly visible from a satellite, stretches from Los Angeles to the Nevada line from fires that burned 250 square miles in Angeles National Forest. I sometimes study the Google Earth image of North America at night, which from space appears...