According to common cliché, you always remember what you happened to do at the moment you first learn terrible news. Maybe you remember what you did when you first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, or when someone shot JFK. You might remember what you did when you learned that a family member had died. I remember what I did when I first got a phone call from my mother, and she told me that they’d given away the family cabin.

That sounds horribly overwrought, doesn’t it? Comparing a national tragedy like a terrorist attack or an assassination, or even a personal tragedy like the death of a family member, to something as small as losing some property. I know how it sounds. Once upon a time, I could not have made that comparison. Even when I first began to think about animism and bioregionalism, I would never have carried it that far. But if you carry around with you the idea of an other-than-human person long enough, it will start to seep into your bones, until it lives in you and feels in you like any other. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram talks about the role that the land plays in the native mind.

It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indigenous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their traditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind. (Abram, 1997)

I would not have boasted before this that I had achieved such a level of connection, but there you have it. When I found myself suddenly uprooted, that passage came immediately to mind. Apparently, I had put down roots deep enough to understand exactly what Abram meant. For a moment, I felt proud of myself. Pride quickly gave way to horror, as what had happened to me began to sink in.

I sat in my chair, in our old apartment in Squirrel Hill, typing. I had just found out that the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy had purchased 1,600 acres of land and 1,700 acres of timber rights along the Clarion River south of Cooksburg. I had such good news to share for my home! I wrapped it into a broader historical perspective, and began writing the heroic story of Anthony Cook. His family had made a fortune in timber, but he swore an oath, sealed in a midnight pact over one of the stumps his family had left behind, to use that family fortune to save the last vestiges of old-growth forest still remaining. Cook Forest, one of the last remaining old-growth forests in the eastern half of North America, bears his name today because of all he did to save that forest. I related the story told by his grandson, of how he and his chauffeur would stage car break-downs to afford walks in the woods with wealthy friends, so that Cook could slyly persuade them of…

The phone rang.

My family could not really understand why I would feel such a terrible loss from this. My grandmother has long felt a special connection to that property, but she always understood it in terms of that property’s history between herself and her late husband. She never understood it as a relationship with the land itself. I most certainly did. That land had taught me everything I know about everything I now cherish. It had introduced me to my wife. It had begun to teach me its stories. I had once cast about, looking for a good land to become native to. I came to understand that you cannot make such a choice; the land chooses you.

As my friend, Willem Larsen, wrote so eloquently, rewilding means, above all, healing the rift between Family and Land. The Great Family Reunion, I’ve sometimes called it. I had the barest beginnings of it: a piece of land that wove together three generations of my family, a land where we had formed so many of our most meaningful memories, and so much of our relationships. A land shot through with stories; I could tell you a story about every tree there, about every rock and log. I had the beginnings of it. I had little else; in almost every other way, rewilding cut against my natural talents and inclinations, but in this, at least, I had an advantage. I had this place, and the beginnings of roots set in its soil. Despite my disagreements with my Family, I felt, in the end, this Land would bring us together.

I knew my parents did not feel the same way about the place. As John Smith puts it in Terrence Malick’s 2005 film, The New World: “The country is to them a misery, a death, a hell.” To them, the land meant nothing but the constant labor and yard work. They could not understand why I would profess such love for this place, when I never had an interest in mowing the grass there, or painting the trees, or doing any of the work to “keep it up”? Actually, I loved the place all the more for that. I helped my family wage war on the land, but it always beat us. I loved how it beat us. It taught me the resiliency and strength of the land, first-hand. Try as I might, I could not break its spirit.

So, my mother asked me if I would look at implementing some permaculture design there. I can remember few times in my life when I’ve felt such a surge of joy. I had long ago given up on the idea that my family might see the world as I do, but I still hoped that the land could bring us together. An invitation to practice permaculture right there, to take away the toil and drudgery and replace it with abundance, it seemed like all my dreams had started to come true!

I don’t know why my family decided to give the land away rather than give me a chance to make good on those plans. They gave the land away, to a relative who owns an adjacent piece of land. I remember when that land grew wild and vibrant, full of life; he made his first order of business ripping out all the trees. When the grass below baked into dead dust, he learned first-hand why ecologies don’t grow like that. When we packed up the last time, I went to each of those trees, trees I’d known all my life, trees that had stood in my life as teachers and friends, and begged forgiveness from each of them. I told them it lay beyond my power (even as I wondered, furious at myself, what else I could have done), that I could not change the decision. I swore I’d make it up to them; I swore I’d return one day, and rewild here. I swore my family would make their home here, and protect it as our own.

I have not yet fulfilled that oath.

I do not wish to paint my family as unsympathetic. They have tried to console me. They tell me that I can buy a piece of land of my own, and I can do with it whatever I want without any strings attached. When I try to explain that those “strings” made the land valuable—the connections and relationships—they do not seem to understand what I mean. I realized in those discussions that I’d let bioregional animism seep into my bones to a degree that gave us two very different ways of seeing the world. They simply could not, try as they might, understand the tragedy I felt. That land had us in its soil, three generations deep. Even if I find a piece of land today, I will have aged into an old man before I have even begun to replace what I’ve lost.

The blow sent me reeling. I did not fully appreciate, even then, just how deeply it had cut. I retreated from online discourse, retreated from many of my rewilding efforts, retreated even, if I could, from the world itself.

Over a year has passed since then, and grief has turned to anger. Anger can make for excellent motivation. I remember the oath I swore to my friends—friends probably long since murdered, not out of hate or malice, but by someone who would probably never think of the word “murder” in the act, by someone who would likely balk at my obscene exaggerations to hear such a simple task described like that. But even so, “other-than-human person” has come to mean more than a slogan to me. It has seeped into me, and I can feel it. I loved my dear friends and teachers, and I made them a promise.

I will return.