Introduction

Chapter 1 - Destined for Here

Chapter 2 - A Start in the Wrong Direction

Chapter 3 - The Keys to Getting Lost

Chapter 4 - Skimmed Off the Top

Chapter 5 - A Value Forgotten

Chapter 6 - New Ways on Old Ground

Chapter 7 - Questions in Place

Chapter 8 - Next on the Chopping Block

Chapter 9 - No Longer Yours

Chapter 10 - Value of Place

Chapter 11 - Old Ground Under New Values

Chapter 12 - A Right to Roam

Chapter 13 - Imparted Changes

Chapter 14 - Stewardship & Ethic

Chapter 15 - Investment in Place

Chapter 16 - Wayfinding

Bibliography

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION

The hardest things to see are those that are truly there. A westerly wind blowing in from the Pacific whistles through the warped boards of a dilapidated ranching cabin. The small gray structure is surrounded by potreros of wild buckwheat that have become an ebbing golden tide, out of which rise smooth boulders of sandstone like whales breaching between waves of grass. The wind pushes at sediment eroded off the tops of these stones and then circulates the granules back within the nooks and crannies from which they came, a gentle grinding that’s been at work for millions of years. On the inner walls of the caves, time scours away the images that were drawn in crushed iron minerals and seed oil thousands of years ago by the people whose descendants still call this region home.

As the wind carries northward, it sweeps down over chaparral ecosystems into the oil-derrick-dotted valley below. A cow saunters past a gas pipeline stickered with chemical warnings; chewing its cud of desert sage, it is oblivious to the change occurring all around. Chains creak as an old signboard sways in the passing gust, the diner it is advertising long since closed. A tumbleweed weaves down the crumbling road in what was once a downtown. Through a notch in the chain of mountains in the distance, the same breeze travels in search of lower pressures and warmer temperatures, which it finds in the next basin over—a flat expanse of salt beds and wildflowers.

Once an inland brackish sea harboring abundant marine ecosystems, this patch of earth has hosted Native American villages, cowboy showdowns, and thousand-head cattle ranches over the sixteen thousand years since geologic processes filled the basin with sediment. In this area now known as the Carrizo Plain National Monument, the bordering mountains offer one form of protection, and so does the federal decree of sanctuary, which safeguards the well-being of the tule elk and seasonal superblooms that can be found here. The area is preserved—for now—yet the surrounding region bristles with proposals for timber harvests, gold mines, and more oil platforms, continuing the legacy of American private interests lobbying the government for permission to extract all that the land has to offer in order to make men richer.

I take a breath, sucking in that same wind, drawing it back across the land, back across time, and into my lungs. I am standing atop one of the stone leviathans in that meadow and gazing over a Western landscape mythologized in films, books, and culture, only to be abandoned once its riches were sold. Ever so slowly, the named and known place itself began to disappear.

Ancient adobe walls, warped by sun and rain, crack along foundation corners, and old boards split from ranch homes that have been torn at by wind. The towns have been forsaken, and dirt roads from all directions show little sign of travel. Just as the weeds and grasses have propagated over these disturbed ruts along the valley, the chapparal brush begins to take back the cattle herding paths and trails that once wound upward into the mountains. Over the past two decades of drought, fire, and deluge, nature has reclaimed the places where it had been parted. I can see the remains of thetownship, but there is no clear path to it from where I now stand. Nor does the map in my hand suggest that where I am has ever been anywhere at all.

But wandering to this place was no accident. To get here, I followed the lines—both those written on the landscape and those drawn on maps—of those who had come before me. I traversed switchbacks up trails etched into the earth by cattle, sheep, and their herders. I studied the intricacies of structures and places that once had names in languages not my own. Coming here would not have been feasible with only the modern map in my hands; the history of this patch of earth exists only as negative space in our twenty-first century records. These places and their stories—our histories—have been consciously left off of maps meant for the public, erased in each subsequent revision, perhaps in an effort to reduce a backlog of debt that the US Department of Agriculture cannot pay in the wake of decades of congressional budget cuts.

Time and again I find myself considering who we are and what place is. What I know for sure is that it’s far more than what we see in front of us on any given day. A place is a web of many strands, and it includes the past, the future, and the persistent present: that which has been here and is now fading away, that which we might help this land become, and all that has remained through changes over time.

Every journey must start somewhere, this one just happened to start where I was most lost—where the human history of a place was clearly present on the land and yet erased from all official records.

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