Lindsey Nette
We came to the park with our own survey in mind, with a compass for finding our own sense of place — it was a homemade kite camera, an old technology new to us. A compass refers to a device used both to draw geometry and to find direction. Ours did neither; more importantly, it gave us a sense of purpose in our explorations. We went out looking for something, even if it was something as elusive as wind, to which we developed a heightened awareness, learning to distinguish wind from a breeze and gusts from steady gales. Here, against the empty space, wind has a presence that is tangible. When we arrived, the ranger was retrieving a shredded flag from a puddle some thirty feet from the mast. We parked and started loading up our packs. He wandered over to welcome us. “Ontario eh?” he smiled, looking at our license plate. He told us about a family, also from Ontario, that had set up camp here a few nights back, then packed it in with the sound of coyotes. “They followed me back to town,” he laughed and shook his head, “Couldn’t take the open space.” We talked about the park, about quicksand and fossils and crested wheatgrass. He kicked at the stuff, “We can’t control it. It crowds out the native species.” Crested wheatgrass is an invader from Siberia, a trace of the cattle ranches that had been here before. It is the antagonist to his native prairie,
which that morning seemed to disappoint him. Everything was out of place. The grassland wasn’t familiar enough for the young family, and it was looking far too familiar to him. It is a landscape in flux, like the noise between radio frequencies. It isn’t exactly domestic, but not yet all that wild; it isn’t native grassland, but isn’t still a farm. This transformation too, has happened here before. It didn’t take long for the grassland to infiltrate the grid – to prove how ill-suited it is to an ecology built on motion and change. The lines of the survey are wearing away, trees dying and fences leaning in the wind. And the squares are dissolving, its owners abandoning them to large-scale farm enterprises or near-worthless hay. The park itself is an archipelago of abandoned farms and ranches interspersed with those still in operation. And everywhere the two uses overstep their boundaries. The thing is, grasslands are indivisible. 3 It’s like trying to carve an ocean. Grass is a relentless current that floods every isolated vision of place. It grows in every crack, dominates every void. It thrives in the margins between the places we force, and those that evolve. The park, just like every ranch or farm, is fighting the current – nobly trying to throw a net around its vision of prairie.
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M H: On page ___, Desiree Valadares chronicles the formation of National Parks in Canada, a “far from innocent” conservation practice that preserves an ideal of the wilderness within boundaries drawn to exclude most human activity. Here, Lindsey tells us what it’s like to visit the preserved wilderness and the “empty” of a national park. Gridded fences mark the prairie and make islands of the wilderness known as parks, hard boundaries that have little to do with the way wild grass actually grows, that are incompatible with prairie ecology. Meanwhile, most
visitors to the park have never cultivated their instinct to learn about emptiness: the paths we can take in the park, the things we can do here, the ways to understand its ecology and its significance, are increasingly predefined for humans at a park. Lindsey’s camera kite, which defies land boundaries and signed paths, gives us a whole other glimpse of the wilderness besides the one put forth by Parks Canada. A O’C: How do we move through, experience, and reference scale within landscape? These
questions are brought to mind with Lindsey’s writing and mapping of the Grasslands National Park, and are amplified against the expansive ‘emptiness’ of the site. This act of viewing is really an individual experience, which I think is critical to the more singular quality of scenic landscapes. Lindsey references the Dominion Land Survey, the overlaid grid, as a way of examining, understanding, and ‘seeing’ the site. This incompatible grid, and relentless geometry, provides a reference or marking in an otherwise unmarked landscape. As
she describes, to survey, as an act, is to see. The article illustrates the author’s way of surveying and seeing the site. Fundamentally, the act of surveying is the act of measuring, and in this case, marking the landscape. The use of markers and measurements as a tool for seeing the landscape has been a popular study amongst certain artists, whose explorations I think are relevant to the discussion, although they explore this experiential response through more formal intervention. The article brings to mind Walter di Maria’s
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