When I was twenty-seven, I left the Northwest and moved to northern California, it was a good move, since I made it for both love and work, but for many years I missed the land I had been born into with a startling ferocity. I recognized that the Californian landscape was beautiful, with its redwood groves, oak-studded hills, and lush and tidy vineyards, but for me its loveliness lacked significance. I felt no real connection to that picture postcard prettiness, and I longed for the subtler, deeper meanings of the land I had known first.

The land was eastern Washington, and I knew it as a kid knows her hometown—not as a place with a population count, principal industries, and named streets, but as a web of backyards, shortcuts, and smells. If I didn't fully understand the history of the country, I knew its feel beneath my bare feet in every season. If I didn't know the names of the grasses that grew by the roadsides, I knew the taste of the tender white pith at the base of their stems.

Even if I lacked names for many of the birds and most of the wild plants that inhabited my birthplace, still, all my words came from there. Tree meant an occasional pine, hill was a curved wave of earth, field an endless stretch of wind-tossed grain. Spring meant mud and rain and cloud-mottled skies, fall white mornings and blue and golden afternoons. For the first five years I lived in California, it seemed I had no language to describe the new land I was marooned in. I felt as though I were in mourning, as though a dear relative or beloved friend had died.

Then my husband and I found fifty-five acres of second-growth forest, steep and isolated enough that we could (barely) afford to make a down payment, and we moved there with our two small daughters. Sometime that first fall I read Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, in which Snyder quotes a Crow elder as saying "You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough—even white people—the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren't lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them."

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