The remembered earth

 N. Scott Momaday wrote a little book with a vast sense of place, The Way to Rainy Mountain.

It’s about the journey of the Kiowa people. They were a people who hunted on foot in the woodlands of what is now Montana and Wyoming. They became a people who hunted on horseback on the plains.

The journey of the people is about their stories, and Momaday retells them. It’s also about their place — the vast plains and its edges — and the many landmarks within. The place that was most important to Momaday was Rainy Mountain, in Oklahoma. His grandmother, a storyteller, lived there. 

 

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

 

• Sources: N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

The quotation is from Momaday’s essay “An American Land Ethic,” which was collected in The Man Made of Words; New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. It’s here: 

https://www.mountainrecord.org/earth-initiative/an-american-land-ethic/