All memory is a circling back to moments of earlier experience. Memoir, by definition, looks back to what has come before. My own memoir, A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography, begins with a memory of feeding the half-wild cats during summer vacations spent on my grandparents’ farm, where I learned that everything has measure: “In this rural ritual, nothing—not the scraps left over from the table, not the steps to the barnyard and back—is wasted.”
When I write of this return to a place–a landscape, an ecosystem–it evokes not only an important time of my childhood but also the emotion associated with it. Here recursivity is present in the steps to the barn and back, as well as in the ritual performed each day, bringing back the happiness of those childhood trips: I felt happy to be back with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins; happy to be outside where I could explore the farm with its barns, creeks, and pastures; and happy to step back in time—from my childhood in the city to a simpler, rural way of life. Yet the tone of the passage is bittersweet: happiness is evoked by an experience that has sadly passed.
A friend of mine often uses the prompt, “Write about the second time you did something.” I love this idea because saying “the second time” doesn’t just mean “twice.” It means “again.” It means “repeat.” It’s another way of saying “return.” When students use this prompt, they often go home or go back to a place they loved—or hated. These returns inspire stories of reconsidering or re-facing (as in facing again) a location that holds meaning from the past. Memories about return are doubly compelling because they inherently contain a narrative of transformation as we introduce themes of discovery and loss in “then and now” or “before and after” modes of storytelling. When we circle back to a remembered place, we reconnect to the past by completing a journey moving forward and in reverse. While we were gone, something has surely changed.
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I called my memoir an “ecobiography” because it places the story of my life alongside the story of the ecosystems in which I have lived. In ecology-based memoir, circling back is a useful way to write about change and transformation in the natural world. Nature, after all, does not stand still. Unless subjected to catastrophic forces or human intrusion, however, landscapes change so slowly they seem not to change at all in our human scale of time. Because transformation in the natural world can occur more slowly than our observations or experiences allow, circling back can also invoke how things have not changed or how they have remained the same, despite our expectations. The vast contours and iconic vistas of mountain, desert, and ocean may appear as backdrops to our lives. Up close, though, changes become more apparent, reminding us of the ways nature goes on while we are not looking. Most stories, in fact, include both change and stasis, an equation particularly characteristic of writing about the natural world. Circling back to a location or situation from the past creates narrative interest by revealing transformation through the writer’s eyes.
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From the title on, Andrea Jones’ essay “Return” offers a wonderful example of circling back—for the writer, the reader, and the natural world. “Return” tells the story of Jones’ visit to Lake Powell, a place of childhood memory to which she has not returned for decades. Written in present tense, the essay begins with contrast between the remembered past and the immediate present: “Years have passed since I’ve traveled these roads, but the route is ingrained like an instinct and the topography matches my recollections with comforting precision.” As Jones continues to describe the landscape through nostalgic eyes, she uses words like “seek out,” “starved,” “and “crave” to signal some kind of desire, one we assume she will reveal later in the essay.
In the second paragraph, Jones relates topographical details of the desert landscape viewed from her driver’s seat. This paragraph subtly creates a tension between change and stasis as the familiar landscape is suddenly altered emotionally by the realization that this trip is the first she has made on her own: “Until today, I’ve always been a passenger.” This revelation is followed by the memory of family trips to Lake Powell, where Jones enjoyed spending time together with siblings and, in particular, with her father. Jones indicates the difference in time spent at Lake Powell with that of their daily lives. At the lake, her dad leaves his watch in the cabin of their boat for the entire vacation, a memory of ritual that symbolizes the sense of natural time learned from the Lake Powell of her childhood.
As the narrative progresses, Jones moves fluidly between past and present in what she calls “alignment with my memory.” The structure follows the staccato rhythm of Jones’ observations: this is the same, this is the same, and this is the same, but that is different. For example, from the landmark where Jones remembers first spotting the lake as a child, she is now startled to find no blue appears. The lake as she knew it is gone. This pattern continues as Jones discovers more scenes where “familiarity and novelty collide.” For example, Jones juxtaposes evidence of the reservoir’s decline with sensory details remembered and re-experienced like dry air, rough sandstone, smells of gasoline and water, and sounds of waves and motorboats. Nor is she the same person she was as a child–she knows more about the environmental impact of humans on this fragile ecosystem.
As Jones confronts these changes, she must also face the desire behind her return. I will not reveal her discovery except to say it encompasses not only her family but the ecosystem of the lake seen through the thrust of geological time, too. What Jones recovers from Lake Powell’s passing brings her back full circle to her ecological roots, what Jones calls “the foundations of my relationship to the natural world,” evoked in lake-view memory as “a circle drawn in sand by wind-spun grass, a lizard doing push-ups, a petroglyph.”
Return immerses us in nostalgia for a by-gone world, while cautioning against the notion that everything “natural” will—or must—remain the same. In A Bushel’s Worth, I wrote of dismantling my grandparents’ farmhouse for resources we could use at our own farm. We couldn’t save the land, so instead we bring home Depression-era light fixtures, paneled doors, glass doorknobs, yellow pine moldings, and a milk-painted jelly cabinet left in the cellar, “rescuing what we could of our rural roots before the remains were sacrificed to the changing times.” Even though this act feels like desecration, I’m practicing the lesson Waste not, want not that I learned from my grandparents. In writing of salvage as a return to their farms, I retrace their steps across the land and extend them in renewal to my own.
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In a nature-based concept of circling back, landscape and ecosystems are not necessarily altered but may instead serve as the impetus for transformation within the one who returns. Here recursivity may bring restitution or even renewal. In Burntwater, writer and naturalist Scott Thybony brings his archeological background to travels throughout the Four Corners area of the U.S. Southwest: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Thybony makes his home in the southwest and many of these areas are familiar to him, yet he brings a traveler’s curiosity, a naturalist’s eye, and an archeologist’s sense of deep history to his writing about the region.
Thybony returns to the Grand Canyon, a place he has backpacked, traversed, and guided others through for many years. This time, however, he returns on a mission different from recreation, one much closer to his heart: finding the wreckage of his brother’s helicopter, presumably to clear his brother’s name of any wrongdoing in the accident that caused his death and the death of twenty-four others.
This somber reason brings with it a different sense of return, one that causes Thybony to overlook his own safety. Still weak from a recent illness, he sets off from Point Sublime with little water and no hat in the mid-afternoon of an August day, intending, he thinks, to return before dark. Walking below the rim with no trail to follow, he becomes too tired to hike back and beds down among boulders for the night as if he were part of the landscape: “The canyon’s immense scale absorbed the human presence, leaving a place where people disappear altogether.”
Waking early the next morning, he feels stronger and decides to finish what he came there to do: “A long day, a hard push, and it would be done.” He passes up water in a pocket of bedrock, intending to refill his supply on his return. Stumbling along the desert gorge in intense heat, severe dehydration sets in before he can make it back. Somehow, through miracle, spiritual assistance, or just plain luck, Thybony discovers a narrow overhang that allows—or, in his telling, guides—his recovery until darkness brings cooler air for starting out again. Assured now of survival, he walks into the night, finding water and then another overhang where he and his brother had sheltered 14 years earlier, the firewood his brother gathered still stashed against the back of the rock wall, another happenstance of this ill-formed quest in which “the trajectory had curved back on itself.” This chapter is full of returns: return to the Canyon and the natural world, return to the memories of brotherhood, return to life without his brother, and, for his brother, the return of his good name.
In ecobiography, writing about the second time you encounter an aspect of the natural world may mean taking weather or climate events into account. In the third section of my essay “Front Range Triptych,” I write of confronting a wildfire that threatens our farm by returning to 2013 when “the floodwaters from unprecedented rainfall were already sweeping down the canyon through the river across the highway from our farm before we knew what was happening.” In both disasters, we prepared for evacuation by packing our cars with computers, photo albums, instruments, keepsakes, and necessities for a week, and then we waited outside in the dark meadow with the deer who had found refuge on our farm to see what would happen next. And in both, the impending disaster only touched our land; evacuation was avoided. Writing about the fire through remembering the flood revealed how tenuous our lives have become in our dependency on nature’s increasingly extreme cycles of drought and deluge.
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Retracing another’s journey provides a parallel recursivity as the mirroring of footsteps reveals both stasis and change. Robert Root’s Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now begins with a jolt: the unexpected panorama of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains rising from the prairie “like an upright row of uneven sawteeth.” Root, a “midwestern flatland boy” recently transplanted to Colorado at the time of this vision, was driving east from Denver International Airport when the Front Range of the Rockies came into view.
Imagining the early European-American pioneers trailblazing across the prairie in covered wagons to homestead the U.S. West, Root suddenly realizes how the Front Range must have appeared to English adventurer Isabella Bird, who traveled solo from Scotland in 1873 in search of adventure in the wild Rockies and the nascent settlement of Estes Park. Following Bird’s letters to her sister in Scotland and A Ladies’ Life in the Rocky Mountains, the book Bird later based on them, Root retraces the Englishwoman’s steps (on her little horse Birdie, and others horses she hired) to find what remained of Bird’s mountains 130 years later at the dawn of the 21st century.
What Root finds is familiar to me, for my own home is located at the gateway to the canyon Bird traveled to reach Estes. My partner John and I live just 20 minutes downhill by car from Estes Park; we drive the north St. Vrain canyon a dozen times a year for quick get-aways to the mountains. Many of our friends drive that road every day. The Front Range is undergoing rapid development as legalized marijuana, liberal social attitudes, and a vibrant housing market draw new residents here, not to mention the tourists who come to ski each winter and hike every summer.
It took Isabella Bird many weeks of frustration and a long day’s ride to reach Estes Park by horse. From the ridge near the cabin of Rocky Mountain Jim, the ruffian “child of the mountains” who would become her companion and guide cabin, Bird could finally look into the vast valley surrounded by magnificent mountains she had come so far to see: “Never, nowhere, have I ever seen the view to rival Estes Park.”
The Estes Park Isabella Bird finds has grown into a valley full of homes, a downtown shopping strip of taffy and t-shirts, and an encirclement of motels, townhomes, and dude ranches. One hundred and thirty-some years later, Root can drive Bird’s route in an hour.
But outside this tourist economy, the mountains still reign. Rocky Mountain National Park turned 100 in 2015. Despite the traffic from millions of travelers each year, despite the browning of the hillsides from pine beetle kill, and despite the national park system’s struggles for funding and against privatization, wildlife still roams the land and the canyon walls still rise along the river until they open to a mountain plain at the foot of towering peaks. The scenery still inspires awe. Driving the St. Vrain to Estes, Root mainly thinks about the geological forces that created this mountain canyon. But when he comes upon his first view down into the valley (now a scenic overlook with an obliging redstone sign for tourist photo opportunities), he agrees with Bird: “It’s a splendid view. . . . I gasp the moment I first glimpse it and pull off at the first overlook I come to.”
Root points out that the least accessible places Bird traveled–“the fringes of the wild”—retain their wildness today due to difficult weather, altitude, or terrain that limit urban development. The other parts—the parts that no longer resemble Bird’s wilderness—are the parts in which Root now lives, made endurable by returning to Bird’s wilder places whenever he can.
In Root’s retracing we find Bird, we find Root, and we find ourselves. Returning to their journeys, we question our own. What of our own wild places? And what of their preservation? What lengths will we go to ensure they remain—if it is not already too late? The preservation of Rocky Mountain National Park was accomplished through the foresight of people who valued its natural beauty and inherent wildness. The trade-off was tourism within contained areas and with regulations that help protect wildlife and natural ecosystems. That trade-off translates to millions of visitors yearly. Sometimes, I am one of those visitors.
In my essay “Ride,” I write of the trips I took with my dad to medical appointments and then radiation treatments for jaw cancer. As I drove through recently developed areas of our Front Range town with dad in the passenger seat, he talked about the land he knew as a surveyor before the human-built landscape appeared, “his reminiscences a palimpsest of the city overtaking the plains.” From him, I’d learned to love the lesser and unbuilt ecosystems like farmland and mountain wilderness, and much of my writing is about those places. Returning to them through my father’s fading eyes brings recursivity to my essay; the cycle of life continues. When I write of the final ride I take with my dad’s ashes, I don’t disclose whether we’re driving to the prairie or mountains because my memory of him lives on in both.
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When return is possible, we revisit the wild and natural places we love. In writing about return, we track not only what has come before, but also act as witness to transformation in the natural world, ourselves, and the kinship between us. Through circling back in our writing, we retrace our steps through memory like a mirror with two sides, one for what came before and another for what came after, with the emotions evoked through our memories as varied as our experiences. This circular motion of return provides a theme for our writing, but can do so much more. As we face real concerns of the earth’s rapidly changing environments, circling back as a writing strategy can help us recognize what we have lost, preserve what we still can, and, as return brings renewal, prepare for what lies ahead.
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Writer, farmer, and teacher Kayann Short, Ph.D., is the author of A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography (Torrey House Press), a Nautilus Green Living & Sustainability winner. This essay is from a book project on writing ecobiography. Her work appears in Mud Season Review, Hawk & Handsaw, The Hopper, Panorama, and Burningword, among others, and the anthologies, Dirt: A Love Story and Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Downing Excellence in Journalism award, Short runs a CSA and organizes community writing events at Stonebridge Farm on Colorado’s Front Range.
