Life as a Landscape

 Reading further into A Field Guide, I enjoyed Solnit's parallels between our lives and a physical landscape. I was able to appreciate this parallel even more after our class activity on the connection between geologic maps and our lives. Solnit works this theme into the book in a few ways. She talks about country songs references to specific places, and she talks about properties of geologic maps.

I was especially struck by the quote, “The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil...” I thought that this did a good job of summing up the point brought up in class on Tuesday that our physical geographic location and how we perceive it are very different.

I also liked her point about the variability of maps. There are, of course, hundreds of ways that you could map an area (population size, education, principle crops, etc. but there are also numerous possible ways to map each of these. Solnit uses the example of how the Great Salt Lake can’t be mapped accurately because, due to the basin it’s in, any change in water level leads to an extensive change in the shoreline. This seemed to fit well with the class point that maps are only a crude representation of what we really wish to portray.