Out of Place in the American West

In this article I combine the languages of visual art and written word to explore a personal sense of being out of place in the ecology of the western United States. The discussion is formed around two examples of walking art projects conducted on site in Utah and New Mexico. My intent is to offer my individual experience as one example of a larger emerging cultural theme as humanity grapples with the advent of ecological change due to global warming.

Having grown up in the hardwood forests of Connecticut before moving west and eventually settling in the high desert at age 28, I started with little knowledge of the arid environment of my home in New Mexico. The walking projects are part of a forty-year commitment to use my art practice to forge a connection to place in the Southwest. They operate in the arena of art for the interstitial space it provides between mind and body, between logic and intuition. In the words of Barry Lopez, ‘Art’s underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret’ (Lopez, 2019).

The first series, For John Wesley Powell: Attempts to Walk the Grid, investigates the inherent opposition between Euro-American cultural constructs of space and place and the physical reality of the environment of the western United States. The second, Celestial/Terrestrial Navigations, adopts walking as a strategy for beginning the process of constructing an integrated understanding of place. In both cases, the systems chosen to orchestrate the walks serve to interrupt the author’s ingrained patterns of thought and action and facilitate an unfiltered, spontaneous apprehension of place.

There is an inherent hierarchy in the relationship of the two forms of language. The walks are embodied research conducted on site and then shared using the language of visual art. The written word component presents a backstory supporting my perception of a disjunction between Euro-American mental constructs and the ground truth of the environment of the American West. It is provided as evidence of the thought process that led to my decision to pursue a walking art practice.

Figure 1

I am camped with the Land Arts of the American West (LAAW), www.landarts.unm.edu at Lake Powell, site of a public infrastructure project built to control the one of the largest sources of water in the American West, the Colorado River. With a compass and the United States Geologic Survey map for the site in hand, I attempt to walk a perfect grid on the land here at Good Hope Bay. The idea is to see how closely I can conform the physical reality of a walk to the abstract design of the cartographic grid used to divide land in the American West.

Our cook tent is situated in the lee of a small dune fifty yards from the lakeshore. I launch from the tent walking out for one hour to the north, trying to maintain a straight line. According to the map, I begin well into the lake and proceed to walk on water. In fact, the prolonged drought in the American West has shrunk Lake Powell to such an extent that I am walking on the exposed lakebed. I pick my way across the barren land within sight of the current shoreline, weaving in and out of stands of the invasive tamarix plants that pioneer disturbed soils throughout the West. This close to the water there is a musty, rotting smell arising from the recently exposed soils. The ground is littered with freshwater clams shells and a few stunted plants. Sighting on a white limestone outcrop at the base of a far hill, I proceed north. Before long I have to divert from my line in order to make my way down off a sandstone ledge to an arroyo feeding the lake from the northeast. I mark the diversion point with my GPS unit and continue onward, busting through a wall of tumbleweed to climb up out of the lakebed.

After an hour of walking north I mark the point, turn, and walk east for an hour climbing up into the dry, alkali hills away from the lake, into a strong, dust-laden wind. I record points on the GPS unit when I stray off my line. My footsteps shatter bottlebrush plants creating the sound of breaking glass. After sighting with the compass on a large tilted black sandstone slab on the next ridge, I descend through a patch of crypto-biotic soil weaving this way and that to avoid destroying the crusts as much as possible and then pick up an animal trail that leads me across an arroyo, past a huge, weathered log beached in the sand at the previous high-water mark. It must have floated down the Colorado River as there are no trees to be seen around here. I hike back up across sandstone slabs, their surfaces sculpted into intricate wave patterns, detour north to find a way down to the next drainage and then rise again onto an open ridge and continue east.

At the end of the hour, I mark the point and turn south facing across dark red-earth slopes draining from the maroon cliff face to the east. Lake Powell stretches out to the southwest, a mass of bright blue surrounded by red, yellow, orange, and brown. Old mining equipment litters the hillside. Orienting with the compass towards a grey knob, I cross over an active road leading to the lake, enter a slick-rock drainage and hike up to the next ridge using the lee on an enormous boulder for protection from the wind. As I cross over the roadbed two crows soar overhead while a black hawk works the arroyo below.

I mark the point on my GPS unit and turn 90 degrees once again, now heading directly towards the expanse of Lake Powell. A finger of orange rock juts out to the north ahead of me. I walk past a rusted-out Admiral fridge and a pile of ¾” cable, skirt the LAAW camp and end up slightly west and south of my starting point. I’ve come reasonably close to walking a grid on the land, making twenty-three diversions off my line in response to changes in the topography. I will share this experience in the form of a map of the walk (above) and a journal with the GPS points included as an invitation to anyone interested in replicating the walk.

The walk at Lake Powell is part of a larger series of projects initiated at LAAW program sites in the riparian, alpine, mesa, and desert environments of the American Southwest as part of a decades long commitment to address my sense as an immigrant to the West of being out of place in my new home. In each case the shape of the walk, the deviations off the grid, reflect the specifics of the terrain. For example, in the broken country of the San Rafael Swell (Fig. 2), it is nearly impossible to maintain any sort of grid while attempting to scale the sandstone cliffs that line the riparian corridor. On Cedar Mesa my attempt to trace a grid on the land is interrupted by a 1,000-foot cliff (Fig. 3). At The Lightning Field (Fig. 4) in New Mexico I come close to being able to walk a grid in the flat open country Walter Di Maria chose for his grid-based earthwork. In Wendover Utah (Fig. 5), my effort to walk a grid mimics the grid of the city streets, the deviations to my walk are, to a great extent, dictated by the constraints of private property.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

These walks begin with the acknowledgement that I know next to nothing about the chosen site. In this I am not that different from most people living in the urban apartments, or suburban homes of the West. What do most of us really know about the mixed conifer forests where the majority of our annual moisture falls, or the piñon/juniper plant community that dominates the southwestern ecology, or the remaining intact grasslands in this severely eroded region, or the riparian corridors through which water and life flow? How can we possibly find a path to sustainability when we don’t understand the environment that we hope will sustain us?

I engage with each new place step by step to build body knowledge of that specific environment out of the realization that, ‘Only when we come close to our senses, and begin to trust, once again, the nuanced intelligence of our sensing bodies, do we begin to notice and respond to the subtle logos of the land’ (Abrams, 1996, p. 268). My intent is to facilitate unfiltered perceptions by subverting human tendencies to follow trails, avoid obstacles, conserve energy, etc. I employ a transect of the landscape that encourages chance encounters with the land and its occupants consciously designing against my preconceptions. In the words of Merlin Sheldrake, ‘Our perceptions work in large part by expectation...It is our preconceptions that create blind spots…What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look’ (Sheldrake, 2020, pp. 14–15). My walks become a form of walking meditation in which I endeavor to shut off my internal mental dialog and open my awareness to my surroundings. In the course of the walks my body absorbs sounds, smells, textures, temperatures, winds, and occasionally moisture slowly learning the particular characteristics of each place. I begin to unpack some of the misconceptions that have led to the current ecological crisis by building a direct relationship with the earth.

On one level, the choice of the grid to organize a chance encounter with place is arbitrary. It is certainly true that other systems could have been employed to short-circuit habituated patterns of walking and open myself to place. However, the decision to conduct a grid walk at Lake Powell is not capricious. The absurdity in naming this giant reservoir for a man who would have objected to the project mimics the greater disconnect in the Euro-American conception of the West. “The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent…according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the life of the land (Abrams, 1996, p. 267).

In other cultural traditions our fixation on linear abstractions would be seen as pathology. In the words of Aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta, ‘We don’t have a word for linear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place…One man tried going in a straight line many thousand years ago and was called wamba (crazy) and punished by being thrown up into the sky”’ (Yunkaporta, 2020, p. 18). What better place to demonstrate this disjunction between the abstract construct of the grid and the physical reality of the land than at Lake Powell?

This interrogation of the grid is part of a larger investigation of the mental constructs impeding human response to the global climate crisis. As the effects of global warming accelerate, we have entered a period of rapid change in the planetary ecology. The debate concerning the actuality of global warming is over. We are now faced with simultaneously limiting further global warming and adapting to the new ecological reality. Populations in ‘developed’ nations have reached a moment of reckoning with the responsibility we have to acknowledge the error in our behaviors, reverse the deleterious effects of our actions (Evans, 2021), and take on the task of bringing our species back into a sustainable web of life on this planet. To succeed, humanity will have to make significant systemic changes in our production and consumption of carbon to avoid the worst effects of global warming. On a deeper level, the future of our species is dependent on our ability to make fundamental changes in our relationship with the planet. Can we reimagine ourselves as one part of a complex web rather than as the species having ‘dominion’ (Genesis, 1:28) over all others? What steps can we take to build real knowledge of the ecology of which we are merely one part?

While scientists will necessarily take the lead in addressing the technological issues, it falls to humanists to foment a change in the human mindset. For artists, the question becomes: what is our role in this endeavor? In envisioning how art could possibly play a role in this recalibration of human engagement with the environment, a place to begin is with the paradigms that have driven our abuse of the environment that sustain us. If we have placed ourselves above and outside of the rest of creation for so long that there is no obvious road back into the web of the ecology of the planet, can art be helpful by serving as a mirror presenting back to culture the assumptions that underscore our behaviors? Can art, as a human practice, provide examples of actionable pathways to reconnection? Can art help us maintain hope that all is not lost? Can it serve to remind us of the beauty and wonder in the world?

The question becomes how to proceed. The walks I present here are my attempt to engage these possibilities in the context of my home environment in New Mexico. While climate change is unarguably a global issue, the humanities can often be most effective when directed to specific places and communities. According to most scientific projections, the effects of global warming will vary by region. ‘… an increased rise in temperatures will affect different locations on earth in unique ways. Scientists have identified the Southwest as a climate change hotspot—an area whose climate is particularly vulnerable to an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere’ (Diffenbaugh et al, 2008). This possibility has yet to penetrate the consciousness of western communities that cling to a fantasy of sustainability when what is required is an immediate adjustment to the environmental realities of this arid region.

Making the necessary changes quickly enough will not be easy. In the United States, movement is part of our cultural DNA. As northern Europeans immigrated to this hemisphere, we brought thousands of years of cultural baggage with us. The fact that the eastern seaboard had some of the same plant and animal species as Europe masked the degree to which northern Europeans had evolved in the context of a different environment. The subsequent move west laid bare the extent to which early northern European immigrants were out of place in this hemisphere.

The West occupies a specific place in the American psyche. For an immigrant nation formed by the mobilization of people alienated from the closed economic, social and spiritual constructs of northern European cultures, the ‘New World’ provided the opportunity for reinvention. The subsequent expansion west represented an extension and refinement of the original impulse towards migration that inspired the first wave of European populations to cross the ocean to a new land.

For most Euro-Americans, the American West was, and in many ways still is, the land of freedom, lawlessness, self determination: the California gold rush, the Sagebrush Rebellion, Las Vegas Strip, nuclear tests, illegal immigration. As the communities along the east coast settled into forms of economic and social practice that retained much of their European antecedents, the population grew by leaps and bounds. The West then became the release valve, the place of the truly individual, entrepreneurial, independent Americans. ‘the east was a fallen world, “debased and mongrel with its hordes of encroaching vermin”; whereas survival “in the clean cattle country”… required a “spirit of adventure, courage and self sufficiency”’ (Wister in Stephanson, 1995, p. 86).

In examining the history of this expansion and the brutal realities experienced by both Euro-American immigrants and Native American inhabitants of this region, it seems evident that many of the problems can be traced to a set of ideas, a set of abstract projections formed in the cultures of northern Europe and carried forward by the immigrants. In short, it can be argued that the degree to which Euro-Americans have been out of place in the American West can be tied directly to a set of governing ideas embedded in the identity of an immigrant people in a newly formed nation adjusting to a to an unfamiliar environment.

The first of these Euro-American cultural projections may well be the idea that the West was one great ‘wilderness’ unsullied by human intervention. As Roderick Nash explains in Wilderness and the American Mind, ‘the concept of wilderness is one European immigrants brought with them from the old world. It has deep positive as well as negative roots that run back through Romanticism, the Enlightenment and Medieval cultural views to both early Christian-Jewish and Greco-Roman thought’ (Nash, 1967, pp. 13 and 44). On the one hand it has represented darkness and evil and on the other the opportunity for contact with the sublime. In either case it reinforced a separation between nature and culture, between our species and the rest of creation. That divide is deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of Euro-Americans. While this concept of wilderness has persisted into modern times in dominant culture, for example in the passage by Congress of the Wilderness Act of 1964, it is not a cultural construct Indigenous peoples typically share. Rather, ‘As Luther Standing Bear observed in the early 1930s, “Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness”, and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame”’ (Pence, 1999, p. 133).

It is understandable that people launching into the unknown from the shores of Europe would project this label on their destination. By extension, the move across the geographic and topographic boundaries of the Appalachian Mountains and then the Mississippi River could be seen as leaving an acculturated territory for terra nullius To Euro-Americans it may have been ‘no man’s land’, but to the Indigenous populations who lived there it was home. ‘…the area was not a “wilderness.” Indeed, to all the people of the region it was “clearly defined,” and all “knew the boundaries of tribal lands; … every stream, the contour of every hill, and each peculiar feature of the landscape had its tradition. It was our home, the scene of our history, and we loved it as our country’ (La Fresche in Pence, 1999, p. 17).

These two world views were fundamentally at odds and destined to clash. This idea that the West had no existing political state reinforced Euro-American’s judgment of the inferiority of Indigenous cultures and provided a rational for the effort to exterminate their race and appropriate their lands, ‘Among many settlers, the Apache had come to be perceived as little more than, in the words of one, “a brute biped who is as easily killed as a wolf”’ (Jacoby, 2008, p. 123).

Euro-Americans, as they set off west, were destined to be out of place precisely because their intent was to impose an imported worldview rather than adapt to the reality of a new land. ‘Ironically, the nation’s exploitation of the very wilderness that distinguished it from the Old World would convert America into a sad replica of Europe’ (Pence, 1999, p. 36). By defining Indigenous peoples as savages, immigrants walled themselves off from the cultural knowledge that could have integrated them into place. This inability or unwillingness to understand the territories they entered as acculturated space, to instead conceive of them as a cultural void allowed the perpetration of the next mental construct. In the crystallization of a vision for the new country that stretched across the continent, the concept of Manifest Destiny, ‘the nation’s divine covenant with Providence to bring liberty and democracy to the shores of the Pacific and beyond’ (O’Sullivan in Pratt, 1927, p. 795), was articulated as justification for the nation claiming the right to expand to across the entire continent ‘from sea to shining sea’ (Bates, 1910). This concept was then articulated by President John Quincy Adams in terms of national policy. ‘The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one system of religious and political principles’ (Adams in Stephanson, 1995, p. 59).

As the nation expanded westward, what was being exported was the agrarian model from the original states, whether or not it could be successful in the new territories. This agrarian idea of the individual, independent landowner was fundamental to the United States democratic model. If the West was going to be successfully incorporated into the expanding nation, it was important to the governing powers in Washington that it conform to this central model.

With the goal of integrating this vast territory into the United States, Congress then took up the question of how best to develop the West. The idea that it was terra nullius, that it was our inherent destiny to explore and occupy this territory bringing a unifying vision to its incorporation into the expanding nation was further supported by one more Euro-American concept embedded in the agrarian model, namely that land was a commodity to be bought and sold in our economic system. The decimation of Indigenous cultures by the agency of imported diseases followed by armed aggression to a great extent erased the counter examples of hunting and gathering based land distribution systems leaving the models to be generated from within Euro-American culture. As a result, whatever the argument over which system of land definition should be imposed, the shared goal was the division of the West into identifiable units and subsequent transfer into private ownership. The intent was to make this new territory in the arid West conform to the existing model in the humid East. The conceit of Manifest Destiny in this regard was reinforced by absurdities such as ‘rain follows the plow’ (Wilber, 1881). This widely accepted magical thinking that the efforts of Euro-Americans to bring agriculture to the arid West would, in fact, increase the amount of rainfall in that region over the long term doomed countless homesteaders to suffering and loss.

The dominant voice in the debate at that time was that of developers and their agents in Congress, not the poor migrant homesteaders. They advocated for following the eastern model of land development by dividing the West along the cartographic grid into equal plots regardless of the terrain. In this system the unit of the land was determined by size, not resource. A section of forest was the same as a section of rangeland. A section of watered, arable land was the same as a section of arid desert. The strongest voice against this model of dividing land was John Wesley Powell. Unlike most of the representatives in Congress charged with making this decision, Powell had actual, lived experience in the territory under discussion. He had studied the patterns of precipitation, ascertained that twenty inches per year was the minimum for farming without irrigation, and delineated the 100th meridian as the western most line to which the agrarian model from the East could extend (Powell, 1878, p. 50; Schott in Worster, 2001, p. 349). To John Wesley Powell, the West was not an abstract idea to be argued out on philosophical or political terms but a real, living ecology with a distinct character that Americans would ignore at their peril. While he oversaw surveying the land using the grid system, he objected to the division and transfer of the land on that basis. He understood what was at stake for the individuals and families that risked all to start anew in the unknown arid regions of the West (DeBuys, 2001).

The model of land development he proposed contained at least two radical elements. The first was to divide the land based on resources, not the grid. From his survey work he was aware that vast regions in the West were quite simply not habitable. For the homesteaders to be successful, their settlements would have to be concentrated in areas that had sufficient water, grass and or timber. In his words, ‘I think it would be an almost criminal act to…allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they can not maintain themselves’ (Powell in Worster, 2001, p. 504).

The second idea was perhaps more radical even than the first. His map prepared in 1889–1890 for the US Geologic Survey divided the West (Powell, 1890) into watersheds or ‘drainage districts’ (Worster, 2001, p. 477). He proposed that the process of inhabitation of the West abandon the eastern concept of the individual, independent landowner and adopt the cooperative model of a shared commons. He suggested that successful agriculture in the West would require irrigation, that the capital and labor required were beyond that available to the individual farmer, and therefore, that land should be organized around water cooperatives of nine or more individuals (Powell, 1878, p. 33). His thoughts on this were surely informed by his investigations of collaborative Mormon farming practices in Utah and the Hispanic acequía system in New Mexico (Worster, 2001, p. 477). His model stood in direct opposition to the American ideal of the western individualist and to the moneyed interests pursuing control of the land and water.

He lost. The West was divided by the grid. Homesteaders committed their families to move west to plots of land, sight unseen, and the results were often a disaster for both the Indigenous societies, and for the homesteaders. These immigrants were unprepared for an environment that, except in a minority of favorable situations, could not sustain their agrarian dreams. They were out of place in the West. The harsh, arid conditions wore them down and drove them out and the effects of the environmental disaster they left behind linger to this day.

Fast forward to the present. The lands allocated to immigrants in the Homestead Act experiment have largely been returned to the federal government and reconstituted into the Bureau of Land Management, arable land has been concentrated in the hands of corporations and along with it access to available water and the overwhelming percentage of western people live not on the land but in mega cities such as Los Angles, Phoenix, and Denver. If climate change is likely to make the environment increasingly hotter and drier, to what degree are westerners prepared for the changes ahead? To what degree is the necessary resiliency built into western communities? Given our lack of knowledge of the environment, how can western communities possibly make the necessary changes quickly enough to survive? (Reisner, 1987)

Americans have historically been good at reacting to crisis. We can, perhaps, make the top down, systemic technological changes required to avoid extinction in the near term. Achieving long term sustainability by returning to a position as one species in the complex ecological web of the planet is another matter. It will require a fundamental change in human consciousness. Maybe that’s where art can be of help. Art can work to reveal the underlying patterns in human thinking that have brought us to this point. It can also bring the discussion down from the level of systems and policies to that of individual human response. At a time when the problems are so large as to make any individual action seem valueless, art can affirm that what we care for, the choices we make as individuals, as groups and as communities still matter.

For art to be an effective focus in adapting to global warming, changes are necessary in both practice and content. To merely point in a new direction is not enough. Going forward art will have to ‘walk its talk’. In that sense, art making that centers around steel, bronze, concrete or any other carbon dependent materials is contributing to the problem. Art that functions merely as material commodity in the system of capitalist exchange only exacerbates the problem.

This understanding is not new. Since the 1960s, pioneering artists such as Agnes Denes, Helen and Newton Harrison, Buster Simpson. Ana Mendieta, and Hans Haacke forged a path to aligning art practices with this new consciousness (Brown, 2014). In the ensuing decades, many artists changed the nature of their art practice to focus on process over product and moved the location of art from the gallery out onto the land and into community (Kastner and Wallis, 1998). As art has moved from Earthworks to Land Art to Environmental Art to Eco Art to Systems Theory and Social Practice, environment and community (nature and culture) have increasingly become equal partners in art making.

As one example, art based in walking has evolved in a ‘no trace’, practice of ‘discovering’ as described by Gary Nabhan in which knowledge of environmental and/or social place is what is actually constructed:

Most of us need to be humbled more often, to be reminded that nature is not only more complex than we think, it’s more complex than we can think…And so I wish to champion the fine art of discovering, a process far different from the heroic act of discovery. Through the process of discovering, we seldom achieve any hard-and-fast truth about the world…Instead we are inevitably assured of how little we know about that on which our lives depend (Nabhan, 1997, p. 98).

British artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton offered walking as a European version of Land Art starting in the late 1960s. Their work has been followed by artists such as Francis Alys, Janet Cardiff and Marina Abramović who have added social and political aspects to the earlier environmental focus of walking projects (O’Rourke, 2013). Walking was not part of my early efforts to define an art practice in New Mexico. I began with a commitment, in my sculptural installations, to work with only the materials available in my environmental backyard in the Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Spending days traveling the dirt roads through the piñon and juniper covered hills, crossing the arroyos feeding the Galisteo River and climbing the Ortiz Mountains above my home, I gleaned juniper, aspen, tamarisk, willow, and adobe to use in my installations. In the process I became acquainted with the shape of the land, the territorial boundaries between plant communities and the activities of non-human inhabitants.

With the implementation of the Land Arts of the American West program, I found myself spending the fall each year living out in the field. The issue for me was how to adjust my practice to the nomadic studio LAAW provided. My previous approach based in a sculptural adaptation of native materials was problematic. In LAAW, we committed to a ‘no trace’ policy of engagement. This ruled against removing materials for use in my sculptures. I searched for a new approach that fostered engagement with the sites along our journeys and could translate back to the urban center without transporting large quantities of material. The solutions I have come up with to date are all based in the relationship between walking and perception of place. My explorations of this form of art making started with a focus on the grid to call out its central role in the development of the West. More recently I have moved away from exposing the errors in Euro-American thinking about the environment to projects that directly build knowledge of the western ecology. In the Celestial/Terrestrial Navigations series of walks I choose amongst the images that European and Arabian peoples projected onto the uncounted stars in the night sky to bring order to unfathomable space. The constellations I select relate to the ecologies of the particular place; Orion in the mountains, Scorpio in deserts, Eridanus in river valleys, etc.. The series started in response to time spent out at night with the LAAW program under the dark skies of the American Southwest. The projects serve to address the degree to which experience of the night sky, as an aspect of place, has been removed from contemporary American culture as human populations have increasingly concentrated in the constant light of urban settings.

The inspiration came at Muley Point on Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah with a walk on a moonless night in which I became disoriented and unsure of the way back to my tent. Cedar Mesa is one of the darkest places at night in the forty-eight states. I found it impossible to see anything beyond the next piñon tree as I searched about. Locating Scorpio low over the horizon provided orientation in an otherwise boundless, isotropic space. With the constellation to guide me, I found my way back to the mesa edge and eventually my tent.

That experience led me to consider the deep relationship to the sky that desert peoples (and sailors) around the globe sustain. These walks become a symbolic attempt to mend the current rift between the earth and sky, to make a whole ecology out of disconnected parts, to implement a move towards a position of being in place.

Celestial/terrestrial navigations

Figure 6

Figure 7

For a walk at El Vado Lake, I position the constellation Eridanus on the site map using Google Earth, load the coordinates of the various star points onto a GPS unit and then walk the path they create on the land. It appears from the map that I am, once again, capable of walking on water, when, in reality, drought has exposed vast sections of the lake bottom. I set out to weave together Eridanus and the Chama River, beginning at the first star point, Achermar, near the high-water mark at the north end of the lake and the river inlet. The lakebed here is dusty and dry. As I follow Eridanus, one star point to the next, I make my way first through a layer of coyote willow and tamarisk and then a thick band of cocklebur as the soil gets darker and wetter. To reach Acamar, I have to wade across the Chama River, my boots sinking deep, getting stuck in the muddy bottom. I clamber up the far bank and walk along the east bank to Theemin and then cross the Chama River again, rise up and over a spit of land and into the dry lakebed on the far side. As I continue on past Asha and Ran, I climb up out of the lakebed and into the juniper, piñon and ponderosa plant community. The change back to the native landscape is abrupt. Further on I re enter the lakebed, pass back through willow, tamarisk, and cocklebur before finishing up at star point Cursa.

Figure 8

Along the way I have photographed each new plant species I encountered to assemble a portrait of place. In this period of climate disruption, as extinction accelerates, species that can migrate do while those that cannot must adapt or die out. The reality is that the ecology of El Vado Lake today may be quite different in only a decade or two. For example, my photographs largely document the pioneer and invasive species that have taken advantage of newly exposed land in the El Vado lakebed. If and when the water returns, the invasives’ presence will be erased rendering my walk a record of a particular moment in time in the rapidly changing El Vado Lake ecology.

Figure 2

In this article I combine the languages of visual art and written word to connect a personal sense of being out of place in the ecology of the American West to larger cultural paradigms embedded in the Euro-American expansion from the nation’s original footprint on the east coast. The article is structured around two examples of walking art projects; one designed to unpack cultural mindsets that have affected Euro-American immigrants’ experience of the West and the other to begin to build connections to the region’s ecology. Through the act of walking, I have experienced a topography that is not governed by an abstract geometry. Step by step I have learned specifics about the ecologies of the west; the fungi that sprout after heavy rains in Alpine forests, the invasive and pioneer species that take advantage of disturbed soils at western reservoirs, the plant communities holding fast to the nurturing environments of riparian corridors, etc. In the process, I have begun to replace inherited cultural misconceptions of the west with lived, embodied knowledge and to develop a true intimacy with the place I call home.