A Geography of Kind
The Preservation of Landscapes & the Beauty of the Sexes
by Anthony Esolen
When I was a boy we lived at the back end of a glacier. True, it was a glacier in retreat, and had disappeared a few thousand years before I was born, but it had done its work well, and for that I was grateful. It had backhoed up long corrugations in the land—we called them “mountains”—like furrows in a rug. Between these furrows snaked the drain-water, a “river” as it came to be called, gouging out a long narrow valley where Irishmen would come looking for farmland and would find instead a soil shiny black and gritty: a sign of coal.
Miners, first the Irish and Welsh and then the Italian, laced the rocky knobs overlooking the valley with cartroads and train beds, digging great and small stripping holes from which they took the “black diamonds,” the hard anthracite coal. Those diamonds laid out the crazy streets and built the schools and curtained the lone hotel of my town; they erected the rounded spire of my church, St. Thomas Aquinas; they paid for Italianate frescos of the apostles and the prophets therein, and of the Immaculate Conception, with the Dominican Aquinas looking on in adoration.
A Place to Love
Then the coal petered out, or better coal was found elsewhere, and the railroad ties were torn up and the cartroads were grown over with weeds. The stripping holes were left to lie. Some filled up with greenish water; some were used as dumping grounds for various oddments: a refrigerator, a bowling ball, the rusted chassis of a bus. The hotel closed; the bars stayed open.
That was the woods of my boyhood. It was marred by man’s hand, no doubt, but it was still a woods, thick with white birch and sumac, and the occasional sugar maple or hemlock. In the summer you could see blackberry brambles everywhere; in winter, the evergreen laurel, scrappy and dark against the snow. It was not a place to go for a planned, secure, scenic walk. Bike paths had not yet been invented to lull people into the illusion of seeing the woods.
If you went up there—only boys went very far—you’d walk along the rutty cartroads, maybe run into a drunk, maybe see a hawk yawing over one particularly dismal swamp (the glacier had arranged it so that we had swamps on the tops of high hills—go figure), or find a brand new old wheelless car on the edge of a stripping hole.
I loved it. One place especially: the glacier had dropped granite rocks as it trundled back to its polar home, and some of these were dumped on a broken knuckle of a hill overlooking my town several hundred feet below. Over the years windblown dust had covered most of the boulders with a thin and paltry topsoil. Some had not been covered, but just stuck out at strange angles, and sometimes the wispy filling between two rocks would subside, leaving crevices underfoot, five or six feet deep and not more than an inch or two wide. You had to watch your step. Nothing can grow in soil so stingy; nothing but moss, some short white birches, and blueberries.
And blueberries did grow there, where so little else would; the place was carpeted with them. In the summer my brother and I (and the dog, to scare off snakes) would pick for hours. Pickings always improved the year after the town’s fire chief set fire to the woods; everyone knew he did it, but no one minded, and now I think he did it because he loved the blueberries. In winter I would hike to the top of that pile of glacial debris, alone, looking fifteen miles east and west, but no more than a mile south, as the great fold of the land loomed up against my line of sight like a brown and violet wall, the town and its little gray roads far below.
I loved that place as I have loved no other. It was not pretty. It was a stone to reject. But there I would go, in those long winters of my youth, bearing my questions and fears and loneliness. Because I loved it, I found its beauty. It had beauty; but it was shy about it. I did not love it because I thought it was beautiful. I knew it wasn’t. I learned to find the beauty it possessed only because I loved it. I even made maps of it, as a lover might draw the portrait of his beloved, and lent names to rocks and holes and ways, like an Adam among some of the odder fossils of Paradise.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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