"Of course, no one person has the time, knowledge, or skill to learn everything about a landscape, so in my walks I have relied upon the labors of generations of botanists, ornithologists, zoologists, geologists, ecologists, meteorologists, astronomers, cultural historians, and a host of other specialists who have studied with particular care some feature of the natural world. Whenever possible, I queried people I met along the way: the old people who grew up in the landscape, who knew it in its former incarnations, who watched it change; and the children, who still have the capacity to see everything afresh and to see things the rest of us might miss. I have attended, too, to language. How did the wood anemone and Sheep Pasture get their names? What does the queset of Queset Brook signify in the language of Native Americans? Scratch a name in a landscape, and history bubbles up like a spring.
"In my daily rambles along the path, I have been inspired by a famous observer of the Irish landscape, the early-twentieth-century naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, who walked over all of Ireland 'with reverent feet,' he said, eschewing motor transport, 'stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully.' And although I have aspired to Praeger’s pedal reverence, I know I have fallen short. Another thirty-seven years walking my path would not do it justice. The contemporary writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, another close observer of the Irish landscape, defines something he calls the 'adequate step,' a step worthy of the landscape it traverses. The adequate step takes note of geology, biology, myths, history, and politics, says Robinson in Stones of Aran. It also includes the consciousness of the walker. And even all of that, he states, is not enough. No step, or series of steps, can ever be fully adequate. 'To forget the dimensions of the step is to forgo our honor as human beings,' he writes, 'but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under food at any given moment would be a crushing backload to carry.'
"A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake, Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many surprising ways the history of our nation and of our fickle love affair with the natural world. Step by step, year by year, the landscape I traverse became deeper, richer, more multidimensional, always overflowing the mind that sought to contain it."
