Nature Journal 10

Nature and the West

            I must admit that when I first saw the reading list for Treks and Texts, I was worried about the idea of reading things about the great outdoors. More specifically, I was worried about reading the works of Edward Abbey and the other authors who talked about the natural beauty of the American West. I thought this because the West always seemed so alien and distant to me, being from Louisiana. Thus, I never liked hearing stories about how great that vast frontier was and how the real nature in America lies out there in the great unknown. There just always seemed, to me at least, an implicit bias towards the western United States, touting it as the best place in America for experiencing wilderness. It is the home to the great American deserts, the Rocky Mountains, the large forests of the Pacific Northwest, the Sierra Nevada mountains, miles of salt flats, beautiful beaches, and gorgeous valleys. These places seemed to have captivated the authors of many nature writings and thus exclude the rest of the U.S. and especially the South, like Louisiana. Now, I understand that there is more open land in the western United States and less densely settled, but there is some natural beauty in the rest too. I just want to read something relatable to the nature I see every day. Nature is all over the place and I just want to read some from the familiar landscape of my youth instead of this mythical west that I have never seen, therefore I liked reading Thoreau because he was writing of the East and thus was an exception to the writings of the fantasia of the west. I am not trying to downplay the western focused writings, I actually enjoyed the readings, but I just wish there was more writings from the area I am.