"... against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities.  It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in. There are more of those, too, than there used to be, and they know a great deal more, and are better able to resist and sometimes prevent the extractive frenzy that periodically attacks them.

" I believe that eventually, perhaps within a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water. I think they will learn to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and till arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on resources that they will know how to cherish and renew." (p.xxii)

Wallace Stegner. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: living and writing in the West. New York: Random House. 1992.

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Does a landscape shape you? Do you feel captured by the air, the wind, the snow, the lack of rain, the sting of brush, the prickle of buffalo grass on your toes? Do you change as a result of being here?

Of course, you do. And, if you stay, you cannot escape becoming part of the landscape, coming under the superior influence of the land.

"In the course of my readings I had come across the assertion that the Cypress Hills area was regarded by Natives as sacred. ... That this land was once sacred, in the light of my experiences, seemed more than plausible. ...

"In the intense summer heat, with mirages lifting fields beyond the horizon's edge into view in the sky, with grassy hill following after grassy hill, the one much like the other, and it much like the next, with the sky - immense, burning, infinite - swimming overhead and around one's shoulders, a man, a woman, felt free, or else felt she walked on God's lap, rested her head on his bosom, felt daily in the wind God's breath on her cheek, and in the burn of the sun God's fire which might comfort or destroy. How else to live here, without going mad? And in the winter the icy, shining blue hills, the brilliant, dry cold inducing imagery of knives and cutting, bones and death.

"Now when I looked out over the rolling hills and grassy plains I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence; I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension." (pp. 112/113)

Sharon Butala, the perfection of the morning: an apprenticeship in nature. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994.

image © D. Wall