Just days after I submitted my spring students’ grades, we hit the trail for a few days—my wife Rocks, our dog Quoia, and I—climbing steeply up the Bishop Pass Trail to Long Lake.  As someone who has worked an academic calendar for around 20 years, I have learned to mark the start of summer with adventure in the mountains, only a camera in my pocket connecting me to the screentime of my work life.  Traveling from our home at sea level in Santa Cruz through Yosemite to the Eastern Sierra, neither my wife nor I were physically prepared for a trek at altitude, even if it was a relatively short hike from the trailhead to our basecamp high in the John Muir Wilderness.  Called by a primal instinct and in her physical prime, Quoia was more than up to the task of drifting from lead to trail, putting in three or four times more work than her human kin.

Camped on a rocky outcropping at over 10,000 feet in elevation, we spent a couple of days getting to know and care for this place, learning a language it spoke in birdsong, buzz, and breeze.  We spoke back to it with the steady crunch of our boots on the earth, tired groans at the top of challenging ascents, whispered wheezes as we slept, and words we spoke to alert each other of some beauty that held our awareness.  The elementary, place-based language I co-created with my kin felt wild and intimate, a project kindled by shared creativity and wonder.  Reflecting on our experience now, I find myself imagining times (past, present, and future) when family, kin, relationships, and connections are fostered by intentional efforts to grow familiarity with places among those we care about dearly.  I wonder about creative collaborations that connect us to the feeling and practice of being at home in all the places, old and new, that we discover together.   

Quoia, our four-legged kin, was familiar with wild places and a great help in our learning.  She pointed her nose in directions that stirred in her a wild awareness that I loved to witness, perhaps longing also to grow such attention in myself.  Freed of a leash in the backcountry, she always kept us in view, but she did not hesitate to chase the chipmunks chirping at her, playfully and also with the intense focus on environmental cues that helps us to understand in ways we do not.  Between sessions of play and work (often happening at the same time), Quoia spoke to us in a wordless language of wonder, exploration, play, and rest—all of it reflected in her sequoia-brown eyes.  

Our eyes, mine blue like alpine waters and Rocks’ brown like the redwoods, reflected to each other knowledge similar to what Quoia shared—quiet, attentive, and curious.  The sap of the pines, the hatching of mosquitos, and the dust of High Sierra trails left their marks on our bodies and our spirits, reminders that we were not conditioned like our wilder kin to live in this place.  And yet, in just a couple of days, we began to know the canyon we climbed, from the sharp ridgelines above to the soils, plants, rocks, snow, and water where sky met earth.  The mountain streams where I gathered our water, I knew them as cold and clear where they sped down-canyon.  Long Lake and the reflections of jagged and beautiful mountain peaks on gently lapping water as the sun set to the west, I knew them as invitations to gratitude while we digested our dinners.  Yellow-bellied marmots barking in response to our presence—I didn’t quite learn in my time with them whether they were welcoming us with their banter or sending out warning to their kin.  There’s always much left to be learned after a brief trip to the High Sierra wilderness.  The snowfields of early summer, still melting in June and July in recent years, offered uncertain but generous promises of water to the arid places where most people live in California.  

When we returned home from our brief adventure in the Sierra Nevada, I read Paul Hawken’s recent book Carbon: The Book of Life, published this year, and I was particularly struck by his thinking about the pitfalls of English as a language attuned to place:

Though English has an extraordinary number of words, that does not mean words from other languages can be translated into English.  It may be a universal language, but despite its breadth, it forsakes being a language that teaches where one lives.  In that sense, it will always be homeless. (126)

Hawken’s assessment of English invites the kinds of conversations that scholars across the disciplines (and especially in the Humanities) should be having as we teach students about using English to think, read, write, and create.  It is an imperfect but malleable tool that I still believe can offer gifts to humanity.  Hawken goes on to suggest that knowledge of indigenous language systems that show deep awareness of place offer understandings that we should consider building into English, or whatever language we regularly use.  This place-centric hybrid English is a reimagining of language for the future that exists, I believe, in tension with other trends in academic research and practice, so many of which are naturally concerned with the latest technologies offered as tools in learning.  I feel that tension in my blood and bones as surely as I feel that knot in my lower back after sleeping on the ground for a couple of nights.  

My early summer sojourn into the mountains has me wondering while I’m wandering.  I’m wondering about collaborations in academic work that help us to grow a place-based language for the future that brings us into kinship, helping us to feel at home together in the places we are always coming to know.  With colleagues of mine in the Department of English, I am currently imagining a research project, perhaps aligned with the Re(imagining) Futures theme, that thinks about the Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Lorenzo Valley five years after the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire.  This project would seek to invite diverse voices, offering a range of perspectives on the fire and experience related to it, that inform efforts to co-create language (through English and through art) that strengthens our knowledge of place—helping us to remember, providing guidance in the present, and carefully creating for the future.