Shared and Shifting Land(scapes)

Making Memoir and Personal Ecology in the Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church

Places, too, pretend to be blank, though beneath any place is everything that has ever happened there.... To write such a place is not, as it first might seem, simply to inscribe the place onto a page.... In practice, to write a place is to lay across it a skin, a membrane of text and experience. The skin is there to hold the stories of the place in place, transforming the illegible (because shapeless) land into a storied landscape. Land becomes landscape once humans have touched it-once it contains and embodies our stories.

Norma Tilden, "Stratigraphies: Writing a Suspect Terrain"1

I'm an instinctive trail-follower. There's nothing I've loved better to do since I was "going-on-eleven" and went to live on the Pajanto Plateau. It was full of Indian trails and game trails and horseback trails and the kind of trails your imagination gets you into when you pick up pottery shards and arrowheads, to find your way around by blazes on trees, or if there aren't any, just by the lay of the land. If you got lost, you depended more on a feeling in your bones, a sort of inner compass, than on anything in your mind to get you out again.... I write to keep from getting lost.

Peggy Church, in Bones Incandescent, ed. Shelley Armitage2

The natural world of the American West variously has been given a voice in a range of narratives throughout historically recorded and literary texts. In the case of what we now call memoir-personal works that may treat one's own life experiences reflectively as well as memorializing others'-the natural world as well as the idea of nature may speak through the intermediary of memoir, works that translate land into landscape. Yet a place said both to "contain" and to "embody" our stories, as Nor ma Tilden posits, may be in its own stratigraphies-geologic, atmospheric, botanic, for example-site of physical, figurative, symbolic topography becoming text. Kinds of texts-oral stories of land and places cycled within Amerindian cultures, for instance, as well as material culture (such as pottery shards)-provide a means for inscribing the self within the cultures and communities of nature. These texts, whether originally passed down or pieced together, may find a place in written memoir, even as memoir itself begins to function as the remembered place. Moreover, the process of these texts, how they are made and function, suggest that they demand of memoir-writing a quest for form. And when one's primal place is physically lost, the act of recreating it makes memoir a complex storytelling, indeed: the interplay of observation, memory, dream, imagination, metaphor-making. As Peggy Church says, "I write to keep from getting lost."

Loss and longing, shared places yet environmental and human shirts, prompt a search for relational and ecological balance in the land-based life writing of poet, memoirist, and nonfiction writer Peggy Pond Church. A native New Mexican, Church lived from childhood to midlife on the Pajarito Plateau, specifically the 32,000-acre Ramon Vigil land grant in the area of what is now Los Alamos, New Mexico. Accomplished poet and nonfiction writer during her life (1904-1986), Church mostly is remembered today as the youngest native New Mexican member of the so-called Santa Fe-Taos Writers' Colony of the 19205 and '30s. She published in Poetry and the Saturday Review of Literature and won several publishing awards for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She retains a small following across the country. Indeed, the playwright Lansford Wilson, when asked in 1982 by the New York Times Book Review to name the most outstanding book he'd read that year, cited Church's memoir of Edith Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge (1959).3

For Peggy Church, the meaning of the Pajarito Plateau took many creative forms during her life. Fundamental to them all are the almost daily journals she kept from childhood on (but extant only from the 1930s until her death). In these, the Pajarito was a place of physical and spiritual exhilaration, calling forth a record of tensions between private testimony and public perceptions and "use" of the area.4 Kept initially on a regular basis in two Pajarito journals eventually named "Pajarito-Subjective" and "Littlebird," the journals describe Anasazi culture as tied to the cycles of geology, flora, and fauna, the impact of sacred places experientially discussed.5 The public poet is a graceful private mediator making the initial Pajarito entries evocatively descriptive, transformative, organic, and celebratory. The loss of this primal childhood place in 1942, when the U.S. government commandeered the area for the Manhattan Project and forcibly removed the Churches, surfaces throughout Church's life in the pervasive theme of advocacy of the Pajarito's possible meanings. These take form in formal memoir as Church initially invests residual meaning of loss and dispossession in the story of her friend Edith Warner, who in her own private journals and letters recorded the profound effect of this place. Church's memoir of Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge, became doubly essential when Warner herself was "lost" to cancer.6 Next, Church's journals consider her own childhood and coming of age as a woman, geography acting as metaphorical site for questions about human relationships to natural and human-altered landscapes. Continuing as private and interior interpolations and subtexts of her public writing projects, the journals reflect on nature and women's nature(s) simultaneously with Church's biographical project on Mary Austin, whom she briefly knew in Santa Fe during Austin's latter years. Shared but shifting land(scapes) take their final form in Church's later journals where, after having worked through the "biographies" of two women writing nature, she strips away this skein, working toward a memoir of the plateau.