Adopted by Orphaned Land

We walked the fence line – my first time ever. Throughout the years of my paying attention, the brush has been too thick for all but the intrepid, and I have seldom fit that description. But I’ve always been curious, and inheritance has concretized my interest. Not that legal stewardship has all that much, finally, to do with “ownership.” As David James Duncan observes in his beautiful memoir My Story As Told By Water, we tend to confuse “purchasing” with “owning.” “Isn’t it possible to purchase a thousand products and still own nothing – and to own a thousand wonderful things yet purchase nothing? The quarter-million or so acres in Montana, three-quarters of a million in New Mexico, and the gazillion or so acres in Patagonia owned by Ted Turner are acres that have never been and never will be touched, comprehended, or inhabited, in any physical sense, by a fellow named Ted Turner. In what sense does Turner own any of it? (p. 74)

In that sense – and perhaps that sense only – Mr. Turner and I are alike; him with his gazillions of acres scattered around the world, and me with these 25 in Berclair. Indeed, there hasn’t been compelling incentive. This now isolated parcel rather functionally known as “Across the Creek” (“’cross the crick”), is the product of successive generational divisions of inheritance and is only accessible, as the moniker suggests, by crossing a deep and narrow creek on foot (or by heavy equipment unfazed by the underlying water). A driving approach from the other side would require the purchase of land that isn’t for sale, or access permission that so far we have failed to negotiate. And so these 25 acres of land that are difficult to reach, ill-suited to plant even if accessible, and until now too overgrown to hike. One might, then – in the epidemically utilitarian spirit so common in our culture – ask “what use is it?” Value, to this way of thinking, is inherently and inseparably tied to function, and this little plot by familiar measures seems to have neither. It is, apparently, good hunting land, but (with apologies to my relatives) that hardly affects my ledger. No oil has been drilled there, no crops have been grown there, no bridge has been built there so no house has been erected there. It is, one is almost forced to admit, useless. It simply “is”, and when has that ever been enough? You can’t even walk it.

Until, that is, now. Through the wise initiative of my brother along with his countless hours tractoring a brush hog, and the subsequent brute force of a bulldozer selectively applied here and there, this little orphaned piece of land now opens itself for exploration. And we did – leaping the creek, climbing the bank, and poking around; noting the landmarks about which we’d been told, discovering some of our own; surfacing fresh questions about “who” and “when” and “why” and “what”. We stooped to admire a tiny wildflower, and stretched to avoid a nascent cactus. We felt the earth beneath our feet – and occasionally one of its briars through our socks. We walked. We stopped and simply gazed. We listened. We noted the steel rods that are all that remain of the broken-down fence dividing cousin from cousin, and noted how artificial and ephemeral are the boundaries we willfully impose – and how little the earth could care. “Something there is,” Robert Frost wisely observed, “that doesn’t love a wall.” And we inhaled, deeply, walking lovingly and curiously the lines.

Did all of our walking make us “owners” in any stronger sense of the word? Hardly. But it did make us a little bit more “owned” by that land, and that, somehow, seems infinitely more important.