Eye of the beholder: The writer's view of the Teton Range from the sandstone rim on “Magic Ridge.” Photo by Susan Marsh
by Susan Marsh
After writing about a nameless ridge in the foothills of the
Gros Ventre Range, which I christened “Magic Ridge,” I realized I had been
there only once, nearly a year ago. So I decided to pay it another visit, approaching
from the opposite direction than the way I went before.
More magic awaited. A gnarled limber pine snag marked the
former “end” of the ridge, but now I saw that it was more like a midpoint, a
monument standing between the ridge and an elevated plateau that gently dipped northward
into a forest of Douglas-fir. On the south side ran a broken and tilting tablet
of sandstone, rather like the crust of a deflated pie.
More terrain to explore: not only snags clinging to bare
bedrock, but south-facing slopes sporting balsamroot, larkspur and intensely
red paintbrush—the three primary colors in their most saturated hues. I fell in
love with the place all over again.
When I moved from the northwest coast to attend graduate
school in Utah, the landscape of the Intermountain West seemed impoverished.
The trees were short and widely spaced, scraping by on too little water. The mountains,
without glaciers or permanent snowfields, looked not only dry but bare. Summer
nights didn’t cool below 80 degrees.
Eventually I found plenty to love about the Bear River Range:
blue skies and actual powder snow in winter, rather than rain on “Cascade
concrete”; bigtooth maple and aspen adorning the hillsides with fall color.
Still, tall coniferous forests at the feet of snow-capped peaks remained
imprinted in my mind as an ideal vision of
natural beauty. Friends who grew up
in Utah and returned after living near the coast for a time considered my ideal
to be a dark, dreary, dripping place; claustrophobia-inducing, even depressing.
Like pronghorns, they were used to being able to see.
Whether a coastal forest with the song of a varied thrush
echoing through the old growth, or an arid steppe with the smell of sage after
a rain, each place has its own brand of beauty. All such places share this in
common: we love and identify with them. To each of us, a special place is beautiful
in a very personal way.
According to one definition, beauty is a combination of
qualities that "pleases the
aesthetic senses, especially
the sight.” But beauty carries far more weight than what we can see. More than simple
scenery, beauty is a spiritual concept, a gateway through which people may encounter
the numinous. It includes natural sounds and silences, winds and stillness, scents
and a sense of the eternal. Ask a blind person who loves the outdoors; you
don’t need eyesight to experience beauty.
I’ve been questioning why many of us are kind of snobbish
about the place we came from, to which we unfavorably compare other places. And
I want to explore what Americans in general mean by beauty in a landscape. Who
decides? Can beauty be quantified? And how do the words we use to describe the
natural world reveal our relationship to it?
In the mid-19th century, most Americans (that is, the non-indigenous
and non-enslaved) had their roots in Europe. The educated and influential among
them set the standards for cultural norms, including those relating to art and
aesthetics. Their expectations of what a lovely landscape ought to look like
included a pleasing mix of forest, openings and farms, maybe a few sheep
scattered in a pasture. They fondly recalled—or imagined—how landscapes of
northern Europe translated well to the climate of upstate New York, where the Hudson
River school of painting took hold.
Through the influence of the school’s well-known artists, an
ideal American landscape formed in the minds of citizens: the pastoral. Pastoral scenes were characterized
by their realistic, detailed and romantic depictions of nature, into which people
and their settlements harmoniously nestled. The Hudson River school—a style,
not an institution—remained dominant in American landscape painting for most of the 19th century.
The Oxbow: This 1826 painting by Hudson River school luminary Thomas Cole in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City depicts the view from Mount Holyoke in Northampton, Massachusetts, after a thunderstorm. Public Domain
Some of the Hudson River school painters began to venture
westward in the 1850s, and their paintbrushes left the gentle rolling hills of Mount
Holyoke and the Catskills behind. Among those artists were Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt.
They painted grand—often grandiose—scenes, many of them set
in the Rocky Mountains. While these renderings were not always representational, they
expressed the awe stirred in the artists by the magnificence of a new and
untamed land. They painted with purpose, surely out of their personal reactions
to the scenes, but also to impress others. Thomas Moran’s monumental painting, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” had a significant
influence on Congress as it deliberated over creating our first national park:
Yellowstone.
Several large pieces by Moran and
Bierstadt still hang in the U.S. Capitol and the Smithsonian Institution,
symbols of this nation’s heritage of wild beauty and one that we still hold in
our hearts and minds, even as the national parks and monuments themselves are
strained by the sheer numbers of us.
While painters of the Hudson River school
influenced public perceptions of land-based beauty, another form of creative
work dovetailed with their two-dimensional art. In 1850, Frederick Law Olmsted took
a walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous
parks and private estates, as well as the scenic countryside.
Moved by his experience, Olmsted and
collaborator Calvert Vaux won the design competition for a new public park in New
York City. After Central Park was completed, the two landscape architects
turned their attention to what would become Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
English-American artist Thomas Moran painted this famous piece, "The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone," in 1872. It is largely credited with expanding conservation efforts in America and hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of George D. Pratt. Public Domain
These urban parks, and many others—these
two being prolific—were designed to improve the quality of life in America by
providing open green space where citizens could relax away from the noise and
stress of the growing city. The foreground scenery in those parks could have
been, and might have been, featured in Hudson River school paintings.
The painters passed down to us images
of bucolic beauty that we can see in museums or as screen savers, while the
landscape architects gave us ways to physically enter those scenes a few blocks
from our apartment buildings. As more Americans followed the survey parties
westward to settle the plains and arid spaces farther afield, they installed public
and private outdoor spaces that resembled the parks of the east.
Our generation of westerners has
inherited a well-developed system of parks and squares, golf courses and
greenways. Some feature wide expanses of Kentucky bluegrass, large shade trees and
often a pool or fountain, all of which require plenty of water. Xeriscaping is
becoming more popular, and increasingly required through ordinances, but aridity
still challenges our culturally ingrained ideas of beauty.
New York City's Central Park from the air.. Landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed the park, and it first opened to the public in 1858. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith
While urban parks filled one need, larger regional and
national parks would fill another. And in the Greater Yellowstone region we are
especially fortunate, for Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks aren’t the
only places that draw people for scenery, rest and recreation. BLM lands and the
national forests comprise millions of acres of public land, some of it
protected, some of it not so much. A few places like Hyalite Canyon near
Bozeman and Cache Creek near Jackson are nearly as crowded as the parks, but
much of this public land is not.
The scattered settlements and farmlands depicted in Hudson
River school paintings have long been replaced by growing cities, suburbs,
exurbs and highways that connect them. But Central Park and the Greater Yellowstone
region still offer spiritual respite and balm for all of the senses, thanks to
those who had the vision to create and save such places for us all.
Yet nearly every effort to preserve a place for its wild
beauty has been opposed, often vehemently, by those who consider saving undeveloped
land as a waste, a missed opportunity, and entirely unnecessary. I am aware
that “Magic Ridge” remains as it is because there is no merchantable timber on
its slopes, no gold under its
Cushion Draba and Hood’s phlox along the sandstone rim of "Magic Ridge." Photo by Susan Marsh
feet, no roads or trails that lead directly to
it. So far, its lack of notoriety protects it. When I go again, I will do my
best to leave my footprints light, so the next adventurer to stumble upon it
may find a personal place of magic.
In the meanwhile, Magic Ridge joins many images of beauty tattooed
in my brain, images of places offering mental rest, emotional peace and respite
from a growing daily angst over what this region—and every region—is becoming.
Yesterday afternoon, well before the dreaded “rush hour,” I
tried to run an errand in Jackson, Wyoming. The traffic on the main drag was
backed up from the north end of town to Wilson, at the base of Teton Pass
(about eight miles). I put my errand list on hold and retreated to the
backyard, where, with earplugs against the noise of construction and lawn-care
equipment nearby, I sat back and watched a breeze lifting the leaves of an
aspen. I watched a pair of mountain chickadees bring caterpillars to their nest
in a box my husband made several years ago.
I thought about Magic Ridge. Whether or not I go there
again, as long as memory survives, it will bring me a sense of peace and
knowledge that some places are still as they should be. Kind of like a painting
of Yellowstone’s Lower Falls brings back the memory of cool moist air rising
from the river far below, rainbow prisms in the sunlight, and the rush of azure
water carving through the multicolored grand canyon at the heart of our first
national park, as it has done for millennia before my time.
About Susan Marsh
Susan Marsh spent three decades with the U.S. Forest Service and is today an award-winning writer living in Jackson Hole.
