Landscape and children

 Barry Lopez’s fine essay “Replacing Memory” has a note about landscape and children.

Lopez was visiting Southern California, one of the places he called home as a boy. One day, the atmosphere cleared. There was no haze. You could smell the Pacific. His wife said she could understand what he was talking about when he spoke of the clear air of his childhood.

 

I told her something Wallace Stegner wrote: whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see the world afterward. I said I thought it was emotional sight, not strictly a physical thing.

I’ve seen versions of the idea in other places. This is first version I’ve seen featuring gauze.

My version: If you pitch the puppy into the backseat of the truck and take him wherever you go, he will think that’s normal. If you do that with an old dog that’s never been in a car, you are asking for trouble.

We humans are less exceptional than we imagine. I grew up in West Texas. Though I’m an old man who’s lived in many places, that landscape is comforting in a way I couldn’t possibly explain. The Georgia Piedmont is nothing like that dry, spare landscape, which is light on land, heavy on sky.

If the sky here is clear and blue, I find myself looking at it for a long time.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 206. “Replacing Memory” is on pp. 191-210.