Borrowed Landscapes

Late on a January afternoon with a low grey ceiling of clouds, we walked along what the local people called “the white road” on a ridge above the Tuscan hills. It didn’t seem to be much of a road. It was made of big flakes of white shale and would have torn up a vehicle in no time. In fact it was only used by walkers. The highway was below us.

Shots rang out all around the wooded hills. It was hunting season, though the trees in their autumnal colors hid any people from us. Gunshots made Don jumpy. Could they see us? Would they look? We walked from the beautiful reclaimed villa where we were staying (near Greve, set between Siena and Florence), to an abandoned villa, once a vintner's house. Below us, on every side, stretched fields in varying colors of dry gold and green bounded by straight cedars. Beyond the fields were the woods under the lowering evening skies. A tame landscape cut into patchwork.

I was feeling a little sick from too rich a restaurant meal the day before. Our unseasonal visit was resented by local people. The library, after a rainy afternoon on which we spent too much time on the internet, placed a new sign forbidding its use. When Don went to buy bread, the vendor insisted he was out, though Don could see the loaves on the shelf. “We put up with these Americans in August. Why now?” But we also had an extraordinary meal at the only restaurant in Greve which was open. The owner touted exquisite food made by a Chinese chef and played Frank Sinatra on the loudspeaker.

I could not get over the beauty of the mild land we walked through, known to have been cultivated by the Etruscans three thousand years ago, and probably much before that as well. Burnished by the low winter light on a short day, it was mesmerizing. And yet we also felt at home. Florence is roughly on the same latitude as Oregon, which was, roughly, also ours in California. But what about those gunshots? As we walked back to our villa, the rocks on the white road gleamed and I clutched Don’s arm.

We were borrowing this Tuscan landscape, traveling in winter because it was the best time for Don to get away. It is important to know something of the world and share in its life. We visited Florence and Siena, and also West Yorkshire, where we have family. I took in the beautiful villa, the rolling landscape and made it my own.

Early Chinese and Japanese gardeners “borrowed landscapes” by incorporating the scenery of the distant background into their garden designs. English gardens did the same. It seems to me that we all borrow scenery wherever we live and travel. As the English philosopher Rupert Spira says, “To begin with, we seem to be in the world; then the world seems to be in us; and finally the distinction between our self and the world dissolves.”

With the coming of more mobility in life, we increasingly choose our surroundings. This includes not only the house we live in, but the community, the weather, the pattern of vegetation, the entire ecology of our lives. With luck, we find our roots and stability. As my niece Tara said, before she moved back to England and began a family, “I feel like a potted plant here in California. I want to be planted, to let my roots go deep into the ground.”

Luckily there are all kinds of humans and they make their homes all over the world. I moved to California more than 50 years ago for a variety of reasons. It took a while, but when I was able to get out in the country and see the golden hillsides which looked to me like bear fur growing mangier as the year progressed, the deep blue skies and the sage green trees and chaparral, I grew attached to this new home. The hills and fields were always borrowed landscapes, however. I lived in the city, bounded by water, islands, bridges. A feature I loved about the state was the ease with which a young, impecunious person could wander freely, sharing the open spaces and living in beauty.

All that wandering is in me now, part of me. Not needing ownership, I do need the sense that I can experience the world, share the commons with others. Most great cities and countries provide for this. Parks and open spaces, as well as plazas and public gardens in cities allow us to experience places with other people. We also need public transportation to get us from place to place. Life on the west coast has afforded me many borrowed landscapes to make my own.

I have also done a moderate amount of traveling, often alone. By this time, when I listen to an audiobook or watch a documentary, I can place it in the context of what I know of the world, of the things I have touched with my fingertips, heard with my own ears and seen with my eyes. Coming from the Midwest for the first time, I remember my surprise at the fact that the grass and trees in New York were just like ours. The most foreign atmosphere for me was deep in China, in a train station where even the air was strangely full of particles and the light fell on surfaces I could barely recognize. 

Given time we get used to things. We are humans, after all. Traveling back in time is harder. How do we really know what it was like to live without electric light or plumbing? To have horses around us instead of engines? To live without antibiotics or anesthesia?

We recently moved from northern to southern California. The landscape is completely different: more sky, more desert scrub and palm trees. “Where is the line between Giantlandia and Dodgerville,” asks the paper this morning, when the two teams are fighting it out for the National League pennant. We don’t know, but we have certainly crossed it.

“LA is for everyone,” proclaims a current ad campaign on the sides of bus shelters. When we first arrived, almost a year before COVID lockdowns began, I certainly found this to be true. I knew public plazas, hidden gardens and many safe places to sit outdoors. People also talked to each other more freely, on train platforms, in coffee shops and in the laundromat. Masks have put a damper on this, but it will come back. And many of the public places are once again pleasant places to be.

At present, there are hardly any tourists in Tuscany. Those villas are empty and no one disturbs the peace in Greve, though I am sure they miss our euros. Our borrowed landscapes are closer to home, our involvement with them deeper.