The Scripture of Maps, The Names of Trees

By STEPHEN TRIMBLE '72
Specificity floated into my consciousness one fall midway through elementary school in the form of golden leaves drifting out of the blue Colorado sky to land on the ground surrounding the church a few doors from our house. We lived in west Denver, where suburbs began their climb to the foothills of the Front Range. Our house lay on the plains, with an old farmhouse across the street, a horse pasture behind us, and undeveloped lots scattered through the neighborhood. The Baptist church building stood alone on an otherwise empty block. This was hardly pristine short-grass prairie, but native cottonwoods still dropped clouds of cottony seeds on the spring winds and the signature birds of the Great Plains, magpies, flapped from tree to tree.

I went out to collect leaves for a school project, ironing them between two sheets of wax paper and enlisting my mother to type labels for me. I remember the thrill of appropriating the object, the first step, and then, at the next level, of harvesting the power of its name. This was a new kind of knowledge: cottonwood, catalpa, silver maple, boxelder, locust, elm. These sources of power lay around unclaimed and unowned, there for the taking.

Native peoples who still depend on the land for sustenance acquire such power earlier. Their lives depend on attending to the behavior of their prey animals and on their knowledge of medicinal and food plants. This leads to power in an elemental way - an appreciation of the power of other lives.

In developing what the philosopher and ecologist Aldo Leopold called the "land ethic," regard for the wilderness often comes last. First comes a child's involvement with vacant lots, ditch creatures, and the leaves of "weed trees" - discovering what environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan call "nearby nature." Such comparatively mundane experiences lay the foundation for what can develop into Edith Cobb's ideal, "a living ecological relationship between ... a person and a place" - topophilia, rootedness, placeness, knowing where home is.

Found objects from nature can define a home and nurture self-esteem. Think back to your feelings as a child: wandering, you find wonders, identify them (sometimes), take them home to your room, show them off to friends, and protect them. No one has a conch shell or chip of obsidian or fragile wisp of snakeskin or sack of chestnuts or nub of deer antler just like yours. Your possession is unique; thus, you are unique. This is the decade in which I was a vessel for my teachers, family, and peers to fill. I vividly remember the last travels of those years, park by national park, snapshot by snapshot. The year I turned thirteen, my ability to focus on the same experiences disappeared for a time beneath a haze of hormonal pyrotechnics.

Adolescents take whatever we have given them, and run. On this mad dash, they seem to close their eyes and run in unpredictable directions. As parents, we try to keep them from running off cliffs. We hope they will climb mountains and not be trapped in one or another disastrous morass. But our control is disappearing fast. Our children are off on their own journeys, carrying with them whatever we have given them, knowingly or unknowingly.

Adolescence for me was too early to feel a part of the naturalist and philosopher Joseph Wood Krutch's "great chain of life," to understand the land in context, with an awareness of interdependencies. I neither knew enough nor had sufficient experience. Adulthood legally begins at eighteen or twenty-one for good reason.

I turned twenty-one and entered adulthood in several of the usual ways in 1971. And I returned once more to learning the names of trees.

For a college field project in an introductory botany class at CC, I censused conifers along a thousand vertical feet of switchbacking trail on St. Charles Peak in Colorado's Wet Mountains. I learned to identify six evergreens in addition to the deciduous aspen I already knew, and analyzed their elevational distributions and limits. Never before had I noticed the specificity of trees in their environment. Now, I did. Douglas fir. Engelmann spruce. Common juniper. White fir. Subalpine fir. Limber pine. Seedling, sapling, adult.

In retrospect, knowing where an awareness of trees has led me, I see the discovery of their lives as just as pivotal as any other landmark of maturing. For the first time, I passed into what biologist E.O. Wilson calls "the naturalist's trance," when my connections to other creatures mattered as much as my humanity. I saw details with a little of the attentiveness of a writer. My ability to see and understand beyond my personal boundaries passed a crucial threshold. Ever since, I have seen these trees as my friends. When they grow along my path, I reach out to them, draw their needles through my hands, and smile. I say their names, an acknowledgment of kinship - like a formal genealogy, another chapter of Scripture. Pseudotsuga. Picea. Juniperus. Abies concolor. Pinus flexilis.

"Pseudotsuga. Douglas fir. I am here, too."
Not every child has the predilection to become a naturalist. And it may take time to develop. For instance, I did not see beyond my adolescent self until 21.
I started lucky - with a secure middle-class background, decent self-esteem, curiosity, and a privileged education. My childhood experiences with maps and geography and exposure to open country gave me an underlying understanding of environment ready to populate with animals and plants. Not until chance encounters in my last years of college, however - my best friend's passion for field biology, another friend's stories of working as a park ranger, encountering mentors - did I begin to see as a naturalist, watching the telephone poles for raptors, carrying binoculars to identify the warblers in riparian woods, learning the telltale characters of borage, mustard and sedge. Only then did I come to believe that natural history was as important as civil rights, American literature, or having a romance in one's life. And not until I began to read the literature of natural history could I articulate my belief in the Earth as grounding and faith and guide.
None of us can predict or control the career or avocational choices of our children. All we can do is introduce, try to prevent prejudice, battle gender stereotypes, teach by the example of our own attention and wonder. All we can do is recite from the Scripture of maps and field guides. Give names to the mountains and rivers, give names to the trees. Give voice to the emotions that storms and tundra flowers, young bison and soaring ravens can pull from us.
As parents, we can take our children with us to the land. We can be there with them as they climb on rocks, play in streams and waves, dig in the rich soil of woods and gardens, putter and learn. Here, on the land, we learn from each other. Here, our children's journey begins.
Trimble has published 16 books and his photographs appear in a wide range of publications. The preceding piece is excerpted from The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, by Trimble and Gary Paul Nabhan, (c)Beacon Press, 1994. Trimble received an honorary doctorate from CC in 1990. He led a seminar on "The Spirit of the Desert West" at Homecoming '97. His book by that name will appear in 1998.
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