HOMEGROUND | A Guide to the American Landscape
Edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (Trinity Press, 2006)

“A masterpiece” — Contributors include Barbara Kingsolver, Emily Hiestand, Bill McKibben, Frank Burroughs, and 40 other noted writers

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-A-Glance

1. Dendritic and Trellis Drainage

From a bird's eye view, it is easy to see why dendritic pattern drainage was named after the Greek word for tree (dendrom).   Branching irregularly and at variable angles, the streams and rills in dendritic drainage systems closely resemble the limbs and twigs of a bare deciduous tree.  This most common of drainage patterns occurs in terrain where the underlying rock is uniform in composition and has only very minor jointing and faulting.  Lacking features that would direct the course of streams, such a terrain yields the somewhat random patterns of dendritic drainage.  By contrast, a trellis drainage pattern occurs over terrain where several structural features of the landscape combine to strongly influence and direct the course of streams.  For example, in a landscape where narrow valleys are separated by parallel ridges, tributaries flow down the steep ridge scarps and join the mainstream in the valley at a nearly perpendicular angle.  The resulting rectilinear configuration, remindful of a horticultural trellis, is sometimes also called grapevine pattern drainage.

2. Bolson

Bolson is the American-Spanish version of bolsa, a Spanish word for a large purse or pouch. The image of a colossal purse is helpful in envisioning a bolson in the landscape: an extensive, saucer-shaped basin, closed at the bottom, and surrounded on all sides by mountain slopes. These pouch-like depressions occur in the arid and semi-arid mountainous areas of the Southwestern United States and Mexico.  In such desert regions, the runoff from irregular rains drains down surrounding slopes and collects in the low-lying, unvegetated area of the bolson, creating a shallow lake.  The lowest area of a bolson is called the playa, and the lakes that form there are known as playa lakes. Although some playa lakes are nearly permanent, most are ephemeral: -- formed during the inundations of desert rain, they evaporate in dry periods, leaving behind deposits of salt and other sediments. Over time, layers of sediment accumulate, and when dry, the playa may appear as a salt-flat. The bolson itself--the basin that holds the intermittent playa lakes--can be very large indeed.  In the novel A Mule for the Marquesa, Western writer Frank O’Rourke describes one bolson as “ten thousand miles of the high desert, cupped within the waterless mountains.”  O’Rourke may be taking slight poetic license, but maybe not: a bolson of ten thousand square miles is not, as one scientist put it, “completely out of bounds. ”  Some notable bolsons include the Bolson de Mapimi, in the New Mexican plateau; Hueco Bolson, which extends from New Mexico through El Paso into Mexico; and the Jornada del Muerto Bolson east of Las Cruces.  Another term for bolson is playa basin. Also see playa. 

3. Cripple

Cripple is an anglicized version of the Colonial Dutch kreupelbosch, which means thicket or underbrush. From its earliest use in America, however, cripple has been associated with not only thickety areas but wetlands. Describing the vernacular speech of the residents of the New Jersey pine barrens, John McPhee writes that "a low, wet area where Atlantic white cedars grow is called a cripple. If no cedars grow there, the wet area is called a spong, which is pronounced to rhyme with 'song.' Some people define spongs and cripples a little differently, saying that water always flows in a cripple but there is water in a spong only after a rain. Others say that any lowland area where highbush blueberries grow is a spong." (Note that the American use of spong may trace to the 19th century East Anglian dialect, in which a spong was a long, narrow strip of land.)  Many Eastern place-names derive from cripple, including Big Cripple Swamp, in Delaware; Cripple Brush Creek, in Vermont; and Kripplebush, New York. There are also dozens of Cripple Creeks found across the country--from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Denali, Alaska. A few of these creek names arise from the English sense of cripple: for example, a surveyor once cut his foot with an axe at an Oregon stream, which has since been called Cripple Creek.  But the majority of Cripple Creeks are entirely free of links to either accidents or thickets.  Folklorists speculate that as the original Dutch meaning faded, people continued using cripple as a name for creeks because of the pleasingly alliterative, and faintly poignant sound that the two words create together. 


4. Hook

Features named hook are found on both land and water. On water, hook is the term for an acute, hooklike bend in a river or stream; the Hallowell Hook in the Kennebec River of Maine is an example. As a landform, hook is another name for a recurved spit — the low, tongue-like shoal of land that extends from shore into a body of water, then curves back landward. The hooked shape of a recurved spit is sculpted by a complex interplay of natural forces, including winds, wave refraction, and opposing ocean currents.  The dynamic nature of a recurved spit can be seen at Sandy Hook, a compound recurved spit which extends into the major channel leading into New York Harbor:  due to the ongoing northward expansion of the shoal, the lighthouse built on Sandy Hook in 1764, which originally stood 500 feet from the tip of the hook, now stands 1 1/2 miles inland.  As a word for a landform, hook seems related to the Dutch hoek, which means corner or nook;  in 19th century usage, a corner-like scrap of land might also be called a hook.


5. Isthmus

Bordered on two sides by water, an isthmus is a relatively narrow strip of land that links two larger land masses, such as two islands, a mainland coast with an offshore island, or even two continents. An example of the last is the Isthmus of Panama, which extends from the southern border of Mexico to Colombia — linking the North and South American continents. An isthmus that acts as a corridor along which animals and plants migrate from one continent to another is sometimes called a “land-bridge.” In From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne observes that an isthmus can also transport a mountain range: "On the west,” Verne writes, “…rise the Rocky Mountains, that immense range which, commencing at the Straits of Magellan, follows the western coast of Southern America under the name of the Andes or the Cordilleras, until it crosses the Isthmus of Panama, and runs up the whole of North America to the very borders of the Polar Sea." The term appears in various coastal place-names, including:  Isthmus Bay in Alaska; Isthmus Brook in Penobscot, Maine; and Isthmus Slough, in Coos, Oregon. While many landscape terms derive from analogy to our own anatomy--neck, mouth, finger, etc.--isthmus seems to be the rarer case in which a geographic term is applied to an analogous feature of the body: anatomically, an isthmus is a narrow band of tissue connecting two larger parts of some corporeal structure. 


6. Landing

At its most rudimentary, a landing is simply any convenient, safe place to come ashore alongside a river, lake, or ocean. As such useful places were developed, the word landing also came to incorporate the proximate docking and staging areas for cargo or passengers. From the town of Landing, New Jersey, near the southern end of Lake Hopatcong, to Jim Cullum's Landing, a jazz club on the San Antonio River, landings are associated with good facilities and transfer areas alongside bodies of water. Because they were naturally strategic sites, landings established for commercial water traffic sometimes grew into full-fledged communities. An example is Moss Landing in California, a town that boomed during the Gold Rush, and survives as a small fishing village on Monterey Bay. Today, new landings are being proposed for sites along the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers as one tool to help reclaim the rivers and the riverfronts of the old steel communities of southwestern Pennsylvania. In the lexicon of marine fisheries a landing is the word for catches of fish brought ashore, in aggregate. Finally, landing is also a logging term, referring to the flattened-out place on a mountain where loggers pile recently cut trees until they are ready for transport to a sawmill. See cold deck. 

7. Lek

A word of Scandinavian origin identifying a particular, traditional area of land or water to which various species congregate, year after year, to enact their mating rituals.  Among the creatures that mate at leks are pipefish and marine iguanas, and, above all, certain species of birds--notably prairie grouse, sage grouse, and woodcocks. At the avian leks, male birds display in an array of ingenious ways, variously leaping, jousting, strutting, drumming, spiraling into the air then plummeting to earth in zigzags--all behaviors evolved to attract females of the species. After observing the displays, female birds choose mates based on signs of prowess, including, in some species, the male's ability to maintain a position in the center of the lekking ground. The spectacular events at the leks on the American prairies also impressed the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Shoshone peoples, who incorporated stylized elements of lek displays into some of their dances.  Today, many traditional lek grounds have been fragmented, or erased altogether by such activities as grazing and agriculture, mining, subdivision and highway construction, and chemical treatments.  As suitable lek territories have diminished, the population of American lekking birds has also declined very steeply. Happily, in some areas, including the eastern Texas Panhandle, sustainable ranching techniques are restoring both native grasses and good lek territories.


8. Milk gap

A term once common in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Arkansas, a milk gap is, variously: any outdoor place where cows are milked; the structure that encloses such a place; or, in mountainous areas, an actual gap or notch in the hills through which ranchers bring their cows for milking. In keeping with the variations in meaning, milk gaps can be located at some distance from the main farmhouse (in Smoky Mountain Mysteries, Juanitta Baldwin writes: "Lucius and Almarine lit lanterns, picked up zinc buckets, and set off over a path up the hill to the milk gap."), or fairly close by (in an oral story collected by Silas Turnbo, a resident of Wiley's Cove, Arkansas reported that "Near 10 o'clock in the night while the calves were at the milk gap I heard a great racket out there…I knew a savage beast had attacked the calf but having no dog and as the night was very dark I was afraid to run out to the milk gap to try to scare the beast away.") The sense of milk gap as a physical structure is given in Robert Morgan's Brave Enemies, a novel set in the 18th century Carolinas: "'We must all do our share to help your darling mother,' Mr. Griffin said. He said it while…he leaned on the milk gap and I carried leaves to spread in the cow stall."

 9. Mouth

Applied to land features, mouth is a term for all manner of surface openings, including the crater of a volcano, as well as the entrances and exits to canyons, valleys, and caves. A mouth is also the place where one waterway empties into a larger body of water, for example, where a river flows into the sea. (The mouth is considered the last, identifiable portion of the smaller tributary before it merges with the larger entity.) Place names derived from mouth include the Mouth of River Styx Landing, in the town of Mississippi, Arkansas; and Mouth of the Maravillas, at Bourland Canyon, Texas. Other American place names arise from two Algonquian words for mouth: the Algonquian word "Sawacotuck," which means "mouth of the tidal stream," is the basis for the name of Saugatuck, Michigan, a town located at the mouth of Kalamazoo River. The word "Saco," the Algonquian word for "flowing out" or "river-mouth," is the source for several town names, including Saco, Missouri;  Sac City, Iowa, and Saco, Maine. Still other, kindred American place names arise from boca, the Spanish word for mouth, including the historic town of Boca, California, located at the mouth of the Little Truckee River.  Based on these typical examples, it would seem likely that Boca Raton, Florida would also be located near the mouth of a river. But the history of that city's name illustrates instead the mutability of landscape language. Boca Raton and nearby Lake Boca Raton take their common name from an historic inlet called Boca Ratones, which is shown on an 18th Century Spanish map. As it turns out, however, Boca Ratones was merely an inlet of the bay, and not a mouth. Moreover, its location was nowhere near the present-day city of Boca Raton, but far to the south in Biscayne Bay near Miami. For reasons now unknown, the name migrated northward up the Florida coast and was applied first to the lake (although the lake did not then have a connection to the sea), and some years later to the emerging coastal city of Boca Raton. During this process, citizens of the new Florida city shortened the original adjective “Ratones” — which means thieves — to the apparently more suitable “Raton,” Spanish for rat. 

10. Nook

Once a precise term of English land measurement for a small field ("Two Fardells of Land make a Nooke…and two Nookes make halfe a Yard of Land"), nook is now a more elastic term applied lyrically and affectionately to a small, secluded place somewhat closed in by trees or rocks, offering peace and retreat. The connection between a sylvan nook and the interior corner space also called nook (the inglenook by a fireplace, for example) seems to be that the original scrap of farm field called a nook was often triangular in shape. The triangular shape may also explain a now almost obsolete meaning of nook — as a promontory of land jutting into the sea and terminating in a point. (Note that such a promontory is now sometimes called a hook.) While the sheltered nook in a given landscape is a small, even tiny, spot, the word nook can also be used to refer to any place on the planet that is deemed remote, even if it is a very large area; thus Cotton Mather could once say of some visitors that they were "As genteel persons as most that ever visited these nooks of America."

11. Quicksand

Quicksand is an ordinary bed of sand so saturated with water that it has become soupy and unstable. Most commonly found along beaches, riverbanks, lake shores, and marshes, or near underground springs, quicksand can also be triggered by earthquakes, which intensify the pressure of existing groundwater. As water flows in and fills the voids between sand particles, the friction between the particles diminishes, the bonds of the silicon molecules loosen, and a formerly solid bed of sand can suddenly become a viscous, incoherent mixture. The "quick" in quicksand suggests the speed with which sand in this condition moves, and also "quick" in the sense of something that seems endowed with life. A cliché of B-movie adventures, quicksand has also been invoked by literary masters to vivify other engulfing forces, such as deceit and greed. Being caught in actual quicksand need not be fatal, however; the beds are usually only several feet deep, and although quicksands vary in buoyancy, it is usually easier to float in quicksand than in water. Struggling too much can indeed cause a person in quicksand to sink, but by relaxing, lying on the back, and slowly moving the arms, it is possible to float gradually to the shore and safety. 

12. Sandhills

Landlocked and located far from existing coastlines, some sandhills are the remains of dune fields and beaches once amassed along the shores of ancient oceans; others are the wind-blown products of erosion. Like present-day coastal dunes, sandhills are aeolian landforms, shaped by winds acting on plentiful supplies of sand. Their various locations — near the Texas Panhandle; miles inland from the Carolina and Georgia coasts; in the heartland of Nebraska — are a geological timepiece, marking these notably dry regions as former marine and riverine habitats. The Carolina sandhills, for instance, indicate that the Atlantic Ocean was once much higher than today, its waves anciently crashing near the present-day Piedmont fall line, some xx miles inland. The extensive 24,000 square mile sandhill region of Nebraska has a more complex history:  blown sand from ancient river deposits, which were eroded from the sandstones of the Rocky Mountains, which were, in turn, the former seabed of an ancient inland sea, which vanished as the North American continent and mountains were uplifted. In time the sandstone of the newly formed mountains began to erode; the resulting sand (along with silt and gravel) was transported across the plains by braided rivers, blanketing the plains east of the mountains. Then, over the last several million years, new rivers dissected the mass of sand, carrying some of the it away, and exposing some of it to wind. Through differential wind-generated erosion, the finest particles were blown eastward to form loess deposits in Iowa; the heavier sand-sized particles remained behind, and were moved only a short distance forming the Nebraska sandhills. Vast and undulating, ranging up to 600 feet high, sandhills are majestic, serene, and elemental places. For many of the Plains Indians, they were sacred, the final home for departed spirits. The term has been applied to towns (Sandhill, Texas); entertainment facilities (Sandhills Drive-In Theater, Box Butte, Nebraska); a magnificent bird (the Sandhill Crane); and historically, to inhabitants of the pinelands of South Carolina and Georgia, who were known as sand-hillers. 

13. Sinter mound

Sinter mounds are the impressive accumulations of an amorphous, porous stone that emerges around geysers and hot springs. Composed of minerals that precipitate out from the superheated waters, sinter deposits amass only about an inch per century, but can grow very large — the vast sinter mound around the White Dome geyser at Yellowstone Park, Wyoming is an example — and may eventually close off a geyser vent entirely. In addition to mounds, sinter deposits also form as scalloped edges on hot pools, and around geysers, as ornate cones, and sheets or terraces that encrust the surrounding area. Sheets of sinter, like the broad sinter plain around the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone, occur when mineral deposits are carried across a geyser basin by flowing water. Siliceous sinter, the kind that occurs around geysers, is also the most common type. It originates underground as the hot alkaline waters that feed a geyser dissolve silica from the surrounding volcanic rock. When the silica-rich water gushes to the surface and begins to cool, silica precipitates out as siliceous sinter--the porous, material commonly called geyserite. Technically, siliceous sinter is hydrous silicon dioxide, chemically similar to opal. A second kind of sinter deposit is calceous sinter (calcium carbonate), which precipitates from water in caves as the spikes that rise from cave floors (stalagmites) or hang down from ceilings (stalactites). Calceous sinter also forms the beautiful sedimentary limestone called travertine (used to build much of Rome, including Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona.)  Sinter is the umbrella word that encompasses both materials (travertine, geyserite), and the various forms (mounds, terraces, cones, spikes, scallops). The word comes from Old German, and is an etymological cousin to the English "cinder."

14. Swag

A shallow subsidence in the ground that collects water, a swag can be a natural formation, or one generated by a mining excavation. Swags occur in flat or slightly rolling terrain, and may also be called sag ponds. Many older references, alas, involve accidents, such as two 19th century brothers who drowned while "bathing in the old colliery swag." In mountainous regions of North Carolina, the term is applied to landforms more generally: for example, an inn located atop the Catalooche Divide takes its name from a ridge that locals call The Swag because it overlooks a dip in the ridge. From the inn's brochure: "Think of swag draperies, swag lamps, or a sway-back horse, and you will see in your mind's eye the gentle curve of our landscape." These meanings all derive from swag in the sense of something heavy and loose that sways or sags under its own weight. In addition, swag is an Australian term for a tramp's bundle (thus, swagman), and widespread slang for thief's loot, a meaning revived, playfully, for the copious give-aways at modern day conventions and conferences. Place names derived from swag include Swag Gulch, a valley in Colorado, and Swag Fork, a stream in Wyoming.

15. Drain

Depending on the region of the country, a drain may be variously: a ditch dug for draining off water, a tributary more diminutive than a creek, a little spring in a small hollow, a gully or ravine; an ebb tide; or a channel in a saltwater marsh. In many places, including South Carolina and Maine, the word is pronounced, and often spelled "dreen."  During the Prohibition era in America, Appalachian moonshiners liked to situate their whisky stills on what they called dreens — springs located very far up on particularly steep slopes, thus obscured from all but the most ardent revenuer. Even today, in Maine, lobstermen and clam diggers may refer to especially low tides as "dreen tides," and a Maine tide may be said to "dreen out." In Beautiful Swimmers, author William Warner indicates how drain is used in the vernacular of the Chesapeake Bay watermen: "Down every tidal gut and through every big 'thoroughfare' and little 'swash' or 'drain' as the breaks in the marsh are called, there comes an enormous and nourishing flow of silage."

16. Tableland

A tableland is a broad, relatively flat, and steep-sided plateau that rises high and abruptly above the surrounding region. One of the basic topographical landforms, tablelands are essentially youthful plains, and are most commonly found on the American continents. Tablelands can be localized — a relatively small, isolated, cliff-edged version is called a mesa — but the term is most commonly applied to an extensive region, such as the area Willa Cather describes in her novel, One of Ours: "The table-land, from horizon to horizon, was brilliant for the mass of purple vapours rolling in the west, with bright edges, like new-cut lead." Two prominent North American tablelands are the Colorado Plateau, and the Llano Estacado of the southern Great Plains. Place names derived from this landform include Tableland, California, Tableland Reservoir in Oregon, and Table Mountain in Butte County, California. 

17. Trail

A trail is a simple path worn by animals or people passing repeatedly through a remote or rugged territory. The many kinds of trails include cattle, deer, and mountain trails; the historic trails of Native American origin; trails for skiing and hiking, and for walking through parks and nature sanctuaries. As a word for such routes, trail comes into use around 1800; the earlier word, still used in Southern states, is trace — for example the Natchez Trace, which runs from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. In American English, trail has taken on iconic status, suggesting a journey into wilderness or unknown territory. But not into the entirely unknown, of course, for the trail is itself a guide, embodying collective intelligence about the best way through a region. Indeed, many full-fledged roads now follow the route of former trails; the Yadkin Road, in Moore County, North Carolina, for example, grew from a Siouan trail, which in turn likely grew from a path first made by buffalo migrating between the Piedmont and coastal marshes. Named American trails include the Iditarod Trail (Anchorage to Nome); the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails (used by settlers going west); the Appalachian Trail (Katahdin, Maine, to Springer Mountain, Georgia); and The Trail of Tears, the route of the forced Cherokee trek. Of that route, Edna Ferber writes, in Cimmaron: "Tears came to his own eyes when he spoke of…the Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokees, a peaceful and home-loving Indian tribe, were torn from the land which a government had given them by sworn treaty, to be sent far away on a march which, from cold, hunger, exposure, and heartbreak, was marked by bleaching bones from Georgia to Oklahoma." In recent decades the new occupation of trailbuilder, has arisen, reflecting a contemporary American desire to spend more time in remote and wild places. Each summer now in the West thousands of young people make their living "digging trail" deep in the wilderness. 

18. Varve

Deriving from the Swedish word for layer, a varve is a pair of two thin, alternating bands of sedimentary clay and silt. The word was originally used to refer exclusively to the layered, annual sediments that were deposited (as long as 18,000 years ago) in ancient glacial lakes and other still water pools formed from glacial meltwater. However, varves continue to form today, and have been found to form in lakes (even tropical lakes) as well as artificial reservoirs. They can be expected in any part of the country where seasonal sedimentation in lake basins occurs. The thicker and coarser band of sediment deposited in summer (by rapid streams fed by melting ice) is lighter in color and often includes iron oxides. The thinner band of fine clay and other organic material that settles out in winter (from grains suspended in still pools), is darker in color. Because successive layers of glacial varves were deposited annually, they can be counted and compared in thickness and used to calculate the age of the deposits, to track the retreats and advances of glaciers, and to establish data about climate change--much the way tree rings can be use to identify age and varying growth conditions.  Such use of varves, developed in 1878 by the Swedish geologist Gerard de Geer, is called varve chronology (or geochronology), and is one of the main techniques that confirmed the Ice Age as not merely a hypothesis, but a fact of prehistory. Contemplating the abundance of varved clays around the Baltic Sea, de Geer wrote that "Nature must have conserved all the years that have passed in these sediments." Recently, as scientists have learned that varves occur in marine habitats as well as in lakes, an alternative term, rhythmite (from the seasonal nature of the deposits) has come into favor.

19. Woodland

An apparently rather straightforward word, woodland is in fact a richly ambiguous landscape term that is used both as an overarching term for all wooded lands (forests, timberlands, plantations, even orchards), and to indicate a sub-category of forest — a sub-category itself quite ambiguous, but perhaps most simply described as: sparsely wooded land with an open canopy in which the crowns of trees do not touch. [The full extent of the variations of the term "woodland" may be enjoyed in the numerous pages devoted to the term in the report generated by a United Nations conference convened to "harmonize forest-related terms."] Attempting to distinguish woodlands from forests, forest professionals use several gauges, including crown cover, projective foliage, and the richness of life on the floor. Again, figures and descriptions vary widely, but very generally, a woodland is not less than ten acres, with a vibrant carpet of herbs, grasses, mosses, ferns and shrubs, and a canopy of between 10-30 percent projective foliage cover. (An open forest has 30-70 percent; a closed forest more than 70 percent.) Woodlands can be broadleaf or coniferous, and are further identified by the dominant tree species. Taken together, the spacing of trees and the principal type of tree determine the amount of sunlight that penetrates the canopy; which in turn influences the richness of plant, animal, and insect life within a particular woodland. Thousands of American places are named after woodland. Some, like The Woodlands in Houston and Woodland Pond Park in Oregon refer to actual wooded surrounds. Many more places — including schools, churches, subdivisions, cemeteries, shopping malls and whole towns — are given the name Woodland for a sylvan quality more longed-for than real. 

20. Yazoo

Named after the Yazoo River, which flows along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River for miles before joining it above Vicksburg, a yazoo is a tributary that, deferred from joining the mainstream by a natural levee formation, parallels the larger channel for some significant distance, until at last an opening in the bank or levee allows it to empty into the trunk stream. Alternative terms are yazoo stream and deferred tributary. The word yazoo itself was originally the name of a small, now vanished Native American tribe that once inhabited central Mississippi. Historians still debate the meaning of the tribe's name; their educated guesses include widely varying possibilities, including grass; river of death, hunting ground, and, to blow on an instrument. Contemporary place names derived from yazoo include the Yazoo Cutoff, in Madison, Louisiana; the Yazoo Backwater Levee, in Sharkey, Mississippi; and Yazoo County, the storied region where the Mississippi hills descend into the Delta. 

•••

Purchase Homeground

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-A-Glance