the where of it

Linda Hogan and the power of place

• Posted by Summer Wood on February 9th, 2009 filed in books, flora and fauna
• 1 Comment »

At least once or twice a week during the summer I walk a path I think of as “the burn trail”.  It veers off from the county road, wanders through a stand of ponderosa pines, crosses a grassy hogback, drops down into an arroyo where the scrub oak grows thick, lifts again to skirt a pinon-juniper forest, and then descends steeply once more to meet the county road.  Thirteen years ago this was all p-j forest, with tall ponderosas rising here and there like lookouts.  Then came the Hondo Fire, and eight thousand acres burned.  We watched the ponderosas explode in the violent heat, and worried for the live things in the path of the blaze.

When I walk the burn trail now it’s open country, grassy, with gorgeous views of the mountains both east and west and charred skeletons of the pines the blaze left behind.  It’s common to find elk track, and deer, and turkey, and the pinch-ended scat of coyote.  This fall I was pretty sure I found mountain lion scat.  Bigger than coyote, full of hair, shaped like in the pictures.  It was sitting in the middle of the trail with what looked like scratch marks around it.  Not that it would be a big deal, really.  We know they’re around, up in the mountains, down in the Gorge.  My neighbor got roughed up by a lion some years ago, not far from here.  Plenty of people have spotted them.  But I got excited.

And the truth is, I got scared.

Linda Hogan knows big animals.  In POWER, her novel about the endangered Florida panther, she gets at the mythic quality of this cat.  Her work here, as in SOLAR STORMS and in PEOPLE OF THE WHALE, her 2008 novel, turns her vivid attention to a rend in the center of modern life.  By abandoning old ways (particularly traditions that address how to behave toward animals), she contends, modern people have lost the connection that places them in proper relationship with the rest of the world.  In her books, the consequence of this amnesia is dire, both for the humans and for the animals.

Hogan, who is of Chickasaw and Germanic descent, is neither the first nor the only novelist to address this cultural fracture among indigenous people.  Nor are her observations restricted to Native Americans.  What sets Hogan apart from other novelists who trace similar themes in their work is her lyrical, incantatory ability to evoke a place so fully that the reader feels entirely, almost deliriously, immersed.  From SOLAR STORMS:

There was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams.  They dreamed charts of land and currents of water.  They dreamed where food animals lived.  These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey.  It was the language animals and humans had in common.  People found their cures in the same way.

            ”No one understands this anymore.  Once they dreamed lynx and beaver,” Agnes said.  “It used to be that you could even strike a bargain with the weather.”

            For my own part in this dreaming, as soon as I left time, when Thursday and Friday slipped away, plants began to cross my restless sleep in abundance.  A tendril reached through darkness, a first sharp leaf came up from the rich ground of my sleeping, opened upward from the place in my body that knew absolute truth.  It wasn’t a seed that had been planted there, not a cultivated growing, but a wild one, one that had been there all along, waiting.  I saw vines creeping forward.  Inside the thin lid of an eye, petals opened, and there was pollen at the center of each flower.  Field, forest, swamp.  I knew how they breathed at night, and how they were linked to us in that breath.  It was the oldest bond of survival.  I was devoted to woods the wind walked through, to mosses and lichens.  Somewhere in my past, I had lost the knowing of this opening light of life, the taking up of minerals from the dark ground, the magnitude of thickets and brush.  Now I found it once again.(170)

 

Hogan relinquishes none of the other tools of vivid narrative – her plots are compelling, her characters richly modeled, the arc of the story complex and satisfying – but her capacity to anchor the human in the place is extraordinary, and her ability to evoke the physical and spiritual power of animals I find unparalleled.

Camille Colatosti interviewed Linda Hogan for  The Witness in 2002.  In speaking about a gathering of tribal elders to address endangered species concern, Hogan said, “One of the most traditional, a man in his 80s named Howard Luke, who is an Alaskan Athabaskan, said that we do not live in a human-centered world. Animals are watching us and know what we are doing.”

On the burn trail, I got the feeling that maybe there was a mountain lion watching me, knowing what I was doing.  I didn’t know how to behave, exactly.  So I said a little prayer for both of us and walked on.