Inland

I am writing about myself standing in the garden of a large house - but by no means a manor-house - between the Hopkins River and Russells Creek. Perhaps my reader is wondering where Russells Creek and the Hopkins flow, and how far away those two streams are from the Dog Ear and Ideal. And yet, whatever atlases I refer to, my reader will still think the worst. He will think I am writing about myself standing among gentle slopes and peaceful hills in Tolna County, or even on the plains of Szolnok County.

I am not sorry for you, reader, if you think of me as deceiving you. I can hardly forget the trick that you played on me. You allowed me to believe for a long time that I was writing to a young woman I called my editor. Safe in the depths of your glass-walled Institute, you even had me addressing you as reader and friend. Now, you still read and I still write but neither of us will trust the other.

Trust me or not, reader, but whatever I write about myself having done. I will always write about places. I will name the streams on either side wherever I am; I will match landscape with landscape.

I am writing about myself standing in a garden between the Hopkins River and Russells Creek. How can I show you the way, reader, from Ideal, South Dakota, to the few steep, coastal hills between the Hopkins and Russells Creek? Perhaps, you think, the way leads downstream along the Dog Ear, downstream again along the White, and then on down the Missouri. But that way leads towards the sea, as you well know, reader. And you in the place where Hinterland will issue from and I who first wrote to you from such an utterly landlocked place as the Great Alfold - you and I are not going so readily towards the sea.

Perhaps the way ought to lead us across the Missouri before it widens. I have looked ahead, reader, and that way is promising. I have looked ahead and seen in Minnehaha County, at the eastern edge of South Dakota, the town of Baltic. From there I looked further east and into the state of Minnesota. I saw in Nobles County the town of St Kilian, and I remembered at once another town far away over my right shoulder: the county seat of Rock County, Nebraska. I remembered Bassett, and the church called St Boniface's. I had found all of these places long before today. But only today I found for the first time still another of the dream-sites of America. I found in Lincoln County, Minnesota, the town of Balaton.

Yet the way leads in another direction, reader. Look up from your Institute to the north, where Virgin Creek trickles into the Missouri in Dewey County. Or start again from Ideal, and look west along White River to the town of Interior. Or follow Cheyenne River upstream from where it joins the Missouri. Follow it past Cherry Creek and much further upstream into Fall River County, South Dakota, and all the way to the town of Oral.

Yes, reader, the way leads upstream, but along much deeper streams than Virgin Creek or Cherry Creek or even the Cheyenne as far as Oral. Two hundred kilometres south of Ideal is the valley of the Platte in the state of Nebraska. By now, reader, you must be used to my looking for signs in districts lying between two streams. You will not be surprised if I ask you to follow the Platte upstream to Lincoln County, where two streams branch - one to the north-west and the other to the south-west.

Reader, we will not follow the North Platte, as one of the branches is called. I have looked that way and seen no signs for us. Follow me, reader, south-west along the South Platte.

You have suspected, reader, for some time, that we are drifting towards the Great Divide. Myself, I prefer the word watershed. We are a long way now from the grasslands around the Institute of Prairie Studies; we have come a long way from Ideal. We are almost within reach, we feel, of the watershed of America. In fact, reader, the South Platte will lead us, by a long and tiring route, to the state of Colorado, and into Park County, and almost to Climax.

By some means or another, reader, we have passed Climax and we are no longer in Colorado. Alert as you are, you would have noticed earlier the word coastal in a passage connected with the place where I once stood in a garden. Having found yourself on the other side of Climax, and having read my word coastal, you expect to find yourself drifting towards the sea.

And so you are, reader. Along with myself, you are drifting further away from the peaks around Climax - from the watershed of our huge land. But do not trouble yourself about the sea; do not ask for names of coasts or bays or such things. The land itself is so vast and so richly patterned with streams and towns and prairies that I will never have time for sea. Be content to know, reader, that our journey upstream from Ideal and over the watershed or, if you prefer, the Great Divide, has brought us at last to a coastal district or, as I prefer to call it, a district at the edge of the land.

To reach this district from the heights of Climax we might have followed any of hundreds of streams. West of the watershed, the map of the state of Colorado is marked all over with the lines of streams: fine lines waving on the map like sensitive filaments of underwater animals.

You may assume that we followed some of these streams on our way towards the edge of the land. Suppose, if you like, that we followed Gunnison River. Or suppose that we followed the river Dolores, which flows out of Dolores County and then through San Miguel County - where its waters are mingled with Disappointment Creek - and on past the towns of Bedrock and Paradox and Gateway.

Looking, as always, for pairs or larger patterns of streams, I have come to think of us, reader, as having descended by way of the three broadest rivers in the northwest of the state of Colorado: the Green, the White, and the Colorado. The land between those rivers is mostly empty of names of towns, except for the lonely name, on the border of the state of Utah, of Dinosaur.

I am going to write for some time, reader, about myself standing in the garden of a house with walls of white stone and a roof of red iron.

The house belonged to the widowed mother of my father; she lived in the house with two unmarried daughters and one unmarried son. My grandmother's house was the place where I spent a month of my summer holiday during the years when I thought of myself as changing from a boy into a man. My own house, where I lived with my parents, was as far from the house with the red iron roof as the junction of the North Platte and the South Platte is far from Ideal, South Dakota. My own house was in a district of swamps and heaths between Scotchman's Creek and Elster Creek.

I was left mostly alone in the white stone house, and by the time when I had spent my last summer there at the age of twenty, I had walked perhaps ten thousand times around the cracked cement paths and among the flower-beds and arbors and the islands of shrubs laid out in a pattern of fifty years before. I had walked perhaps ten thousand times from the row of agapanthus near the front gate to the fence weighed down with honeysuckle far back behind the house. And at some point on my walk that lasted for nearly a year of Januarys, I learned what sort of man I would be for the rest of my life.

I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.

But I was myself one of the things in the world, and I was not only the boy-man walking on the winding paths of a garden under a clear blue sky in summer; I was also a man who preferred to keep to his room. At one part of one path that I followed, on the shaded south side of the house, between tall fences covered with ivy and dark-green rainwater tanks with orange-red nasturtiums growing out of cracks in the stone underneath, I saw the window of a room where a man who so preferred could sit reading and writing about men who were out in the heat of the sun.

No thing was one thing. Beside every path that I followed, some plant had the look or the feel of human skin. Parts of the flowers of plants had the shapes of parts of men and women. Each thing was more than one thing. The long green leaves bunched around the agapanthus were the grass skirts of women who were naked above their waists. But any one of those leaves, if I put my hand in among them, was the strap of leather that my teachers at school brought down with all the strength of their arms on the palms of boys for punishment.

Some things were things I could not know about. I have never met anyone or even read about anyone who has my peculiar lack in his nose. After I had first learned, as a small child, that I could never know the scents of things, I took to biting off flowers and slitting them with my teeth and pushing my tongue inside them. Sometimes I tasted a drop of nectar but other people, I was sure, enjoyed something much more satisfying. For most of my childhood I went on stripping away layers of petals and grinding with my teeth into the one sour paste the dusty male parts and the sticky female and the hard white beginnings of fruits. But as a boy-man in the...