THE LEADER’S NEW YEAR’S DAY LETTER
JANUARY 1, 2026

“Strange to think that the question ‘Who am I?’ can be answered by a landscape.”
—Yi-Fu Tuan

Dear Rangers,

Strange, indeed, does this enigma of a statement from the Chinese-American humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1930-2022) seem. From where I am writing to you right now I look down and across Dresser Avenue and up to the rounded mass of East Mountain. This view, and all the streets, paths, rock cubbies, favorite trees, vistas, bird songs,  river sounds, welcoming friends’ homes, and scents therein, have been mine for just over three years now. How can this landscape be an answer to fundamental questions about myself, other than to say this is where I have laid down a personal map of associations because this happens to be where my address is?

To begin to answer Professor Tuan’s riddle and to open ourselves to the deep and mysterious link between where am I? and who am I? we are first required to think in a radically hyperlocal way that goes against significant present-day trends.

Our imaginations must wriggle out of the ubiquitous flat-lined culture that is transmitted to us  daily via our technology, our consumer society, and our globalized commerce. If we can get anything anywhere at anytime, why does it matter to be in this place rather than another? As the material world becomes more homogenized across the globe, and as we humans are perpetually seduced into defining our lives by our materials, it would hardly seem to matter that I am in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, rather than Clark County, Ohio, or Emery County, Utah, if all the stuff and all the information around me is the same in every place.

Economic or political arguments aside, it is no surprise to me that there has been a crudely articulated cultural backlash to globalism. The average person (myself included) cannot understand all the complexities of a global economy. But perhaps unconsciously something is not making sense to our homo sapiens brains. A global system which we have little choice but to participate in dilutes and supplants our relationship to that factor which was to our species for hundreds of thousands of years of primary importance for sustenance and meaning: the place immediately where we live.

Consider for a moment that the former human inhabitants of this place identify themselves as Muh-he-con-ne-ok (later corrupted to Mohican) which means people of the waters that are never still. This refers to the supreme natural feature of our larger region, the mighty Hudson River whose never still tidal waters flow as far upriver as Troy, New York. Today it is hard for us to imagine the paramount importance of this waterway, which lies an inconvenient forty miles to the west of Great Barrington. But to the first people it was the great connector and life-giving stream for those living in present-day western New England and Hudson Valley New York. They belonged to that natural feature so much so that they identified with it in their name

The Euro-American settlers and early industrial pioneers of our region of course did not call themselves Muh-he-con-ne-ok. But they, too, were entirely dependent on waters that are never still for their prosperity, even if they lacked the Native American worldview of being intertwined with creation. When Zenas Crane established his still extant paper mill in Dalton in 1801, he chose the Berkshires for the abundance of falling water here. Falling water meant power for industrial mills, and at various times in the 19th-century Berkshire County was the paper and wool producing capital of the United States. Even after the railroad’s expansion across America, the mountains that frame Berkshire County meant that the Hudson River (specifically the river port of Hudson, New York) continued as the most practical point of connection for Berkshire manufacturers to get their goods to market. The meteoric success of early industry in Berkshire County cannot be separated from the exact local topography of this place. As subsequent technology made the world smaller and de-coupled our existence from local circumstances, industry linked to this place faded, and perhaps with it an identity to place that had existed here for thousands of years.

Now the region prepares for the colossal task of cleaning up the Housatonic from the final decades of her industrial exploitation—more an action of reconciliation with the land than a pressing emergency. Please forgive us, we want to belong here. To the west, the dilapidated port towns of the Hudson redefine themselves with arts and restaurants. Everywhere the fiction of real estate values ascend, untied to anything.

Without the direct and dependent tie of our very subsistence mapped onto the land where we live, we fumble and seek new meanings from place. Or for many there is no seeking at all because there is no existential need to.

Bereft of these links, we must listen to the landscape with diligence if we want to hear answers. If unconvinced that we are a part of the landscape around us we must first simply imagine that we are, because the state of existing deeply with a place is a normal state for our species. Living somewhere randomly due to life circumstances and having no connection to place—that is a contemporary way of living contrary to how our species evolved.

The landscape will not answer the question who am I? if we are expecting the answer to come from somewhere else; namely from inside our individual selves. One needs only to glance at the current roll of self-help buzzwordsto see that perhaps never before in the history of humankind has has the individual so doggedly invested in the illusion that he/she is separate from the whole. These fads easily seduce us or seem to make sense to us because the way most people live (separated from family, from neighbors, from the place where we originated, from the place where we currently live, from the living world, and even ostracized from our own bodies) is already articulating in outward form the myth that we are in our own narrative, on our own individual track.

Everything that is known about Native American cosmology would suggest that this way of individualistic thinking did not exist until very recently in the long history of homo sapiens. In an interconnected worldview the individual knows that before all else she/he belongs to a larger story. This story is that of the living world, and the living world is right where you live. Your place. In this worldview answers about the self can be found abundantly outside the self.

The Lakota people of the Great Plains have a ceremony called Haŋbléčeyapi, which means crying for a vision. With the assistance of a holy man, an individual is isolated on a hill without food or water for one to four nights. In prayer, the individual desires to receive a vision, communicate with spirits, and attempt to gain knowledge or strength. Other Native American people have similar rituals.

Echoing the animistic idea of receiving wisdom directly from nature, I recall now an uncanny experience I had in early June of 2022 in the San Bernadino mountains of Southern California. A couple weeks earlier Ranger Louie had offered to sell his Great Barrington condominium to me. At the time I was finishing an opera gig in Long Beach, but I had added five extra days to my California trip to spend some time in my other favorite biome, the high desert. While I was trying to soak in the expansiveness of remote landscapes Louie increasingly needed an answer to his generous offer and I was dragging my feet on deciding what to do, as the decision to stay in Berlin or leave Berlin and move to the Berkshires would have many consequences to my professional and personal life.

On the last day, as I made my way back to Los Angeles so that I could catch an early flight the next morning, I decided to spend the afternoon in a secluded spot meditating on this big life question that weighed on me. I drove up into the San Bernadino National Forest, into Mill Creek Canyon, to where the road ends at a picnic grove and a trailhead for those who are going to further ascend to the 11,502 ft. summit of Mount San Gorgonio. It was a cool but sunny late spring day and families were picnicking in the grove and playing in the mostly dry riverbed. I walked up the river and disappeared into the giant conifers on the north side of the creek. I continued a bit into the forest, the ground deep and soft with decaying pine needles under my sandaled feet. There I strung my hammock between to colossal incense cedars and I lay down, gently swaying and secluded in the peace of the ancient forest.

I spent about three hours gazing upward into the spectacular canopy of the incense cedars, to the azure sky beyond, and contemplating what a move to Great Barrington (and leaving Germany behind) would mean for my life.

The funny thing is I can’t tell you when or what exactly clinched my choice to buy the condo and make the move. But it happened right there in that  California forest at 6,000 ft., and I left that spot feeling lighter and sure of my decision. Looking back on that moment in my life, it was a move that took courage, and I am grateful that I took the risk.

Now here is the extraordinary thing: When I knew my decision had been made I began to pack up the hammock with the confidence of going back into the world with my newly decided direction. As I was stuffing the hammock into its pouch I looked down on the forest floor, and just four feet from where the hammock had been hanging to my shock was a southern pacific rattlesnake, calmly and beautifully coiled there the entire time as I blissfully lay in the hammock! It had black eyes and it seemed to be watching me, almost smiling, neither of us interested in disturbing the other. We had been laying practically side by side, me in the hammock and the snake on ground a few feet below. Thank god it did not bother me!

Native American beliefs and symbology are abundant with rattlesnakes occupying a wide array of roles across the the diverse traditions of North America, reflecting the widespread distribution and perennial danger of  rattlesnake species. Rattlesnake the creature of new beginnings by way of shedding its skin. Rattlesnake the storm-bringer, as its coil resembles the vortex of a storm. Rattlesnake the powerful and fearless. The Ojibwe people of present-day southern Ontario refer to the rattlesnake as ‘grandfather,’ which is a significant word to me because my late maternal grandfather still looms large in my thoughts with his loving and generous lesson of a life.

I sought a place where the calm and beauty of nature would allow me to think and arrive at a clear and secure decision. But really I suspect that I was intuitively looking for a place where I would feel connected to the whole (which is basically always why I go to the forest, to the mountains, to the desert). While connected to the whole swaying gently there between two cedars, I am open to the possibility that the decision to move to the Berkshires was made for me, or suggested to me by the landscape. I thought it was on me and me alone to responsibly arrive at the rational choice, the the well-deliberated plan. But perhaps the landscape told me who I am as I lay there dreaming of possible futures just a few feet away from grandfather rattlesnake who was also at rest. It seems more than coincidence that I spent hours just feet away from such a powerful creature at the same time that I made one of the biggest decisions of my life.

These examples are likely more ecstatic and emphatic than what Yi-Fu Tuan had in mind with his assertion that a landscape could answer our most fundamental questions of who we are. But they are powerful examples of how cultures that have been in deep relationship with land and place for thousands of years have evolved beliefs in which place can speak to us directly and profoundly. When our own awareness is flowing in the current of a landscape, naturally our thinking will be affected and influenced.

This past November Ranger Jeremy and I were hiking the Appalachian Trail on the east side of East Mountain. As we followed the path up the slowly ascending piedmont he told me that in that moment he was recalling exactly what we spoke about on that exact same stretch of trail one year prior, in November of 2024. The same sort of experience happens to me all the time with place. A specific place invokes a memory seemingly out of the blue. Has this ever happened to you? This is one way that place holds memory. Was the familiar landscape merely cuing his recall, or is that too simple of a description of the process at work? Could a landscape hold another’s memory for me to recall, or a thought, or an answer?

Despite having only moved to Great Barrington in the autumn of 2022, I am actually building on a lifelong personal history with the Berkshires and the special and beautiful natural places here. As I walk up the trail to East Rock I think about the first time I made that hike in September of 2022 when I came here to close on the condo. I think of making that inaugural hike with Ranger Jeremy and Ranger Louie, walking for the first time under those towering white pines and eastern hemlocks, and seeing the titanic rock face matted with moss and ferns. I had the solemn realization that this would be my new life now and old and new friendships would grow deeper here in the years to come. I think of this often when walking up that trail.

From East Rock I can look southwest at Mount Everett and the other rounded summits of the Taconics that overlook Egremont, Sheffield, and Salisbury. I think of my dad who took our family hiking in those mountains in my youth, and how he flew his hang-glider off of Mount Everett. I think of my longest friendships with Ranger Louie and our friend Nick, and how we camped at Guilder Pond just beneath the summit of Everett during a deep freeze, and founded there a winter ritual that we still practice some twenty-five years later.

From the top of Everett I can see Twin Lakes in northwest Connecticut where my maternal grandparents met and fell in love. I can look far to the north and see the balsam-topped specter of Mount Greylock, where I first visited as an infant. Between  Everett and Greylock are many inspiring summers at Tanglewood, swimming in lakes, starlit summer nights, romances, secret swimming holes on the slopes of October Mountain, zany nights at the Dream Away Lodge, a frigid January spent at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox that precipitated a huge creative and emotional opening in my life, artistic failures and triumphs, and so many other experiences that occurred in this landscape. I haven't just overlaid these experiences onto place, they are experiences that were born in rain, snow, summer heat, clear night skies, or under puffy cumulous clouds, with certain vistas, on certain roads or paths, in groves, on lawns, or under trees, in grand structures built decades ago, or on top of mountains, or in the shade of a mountain… I  relish my memories but as I look out at the landscape I cannot clutch these experiences to me as if they were precious jewels only in my possession—I share these experiences with the places that made them. At the very least they are experiences co-created with the landscape.

You each have your own geography of place, of Great Barrington, of southern Berkshire County. It could be an interesting project for one of our Regular Quarterly Meetings to create and share our personal geographies of the Berkshires, using actual maps. Our geographies might be one way that landscape answers the question who am I?

The East Rock Rangers, today commencing its first year as an incorporated organization, is by design a group trying to look for answers to the question who are we? by way of the landscapes where we live. It is an organization uniquely interested in the hyperlocal. It is not strictly a conservation group, nor strictly an outing club. The Rangers believe that there is an intrinsic reward for knowing a place intimately, and it isn’t about how many trail miles you’ve logged, or what game you've bagged (although those are both legitimate pursuits). The reward is in renewing our primal belonging to place.

On election night in 2012 I was in a bar in Birmingham, Alabama, watching the results come in. I got talking with a friendly couple who explained to me that the crowd gathered there was a complete mix of democrats and republicans, and this momentarily perplexed me as I had figured that people would be gathered in their respective political camps to watch the polls tally up. The assembled crowd was politically diverse, they explained, because they were all there to support a ballot measure that was to fund the Forever Wild Land Trust, Alabama’s land conservation fund, for the next twenty years. Hunters, tree-huggers, mountain bikers,  anglers, paddlers, weekend RV campers, birders, and anyone across the political spectrum who loves wilderness came together to support this initiative. It passed that night with over seventy-five percent of the vote.

I had a similar revelation while visiting a friend in Livingston, Montana, a mountain town north of Yellowstone National Park where green hippies and conservative cowboys mingle on the dance floor at the Murray Bar. Where people are tuned in to the beauty, preciousness, and sacredness of the place where they live, it overrides our superficial and reactionary political tribalism. I truly believe that the joy of knowing and loving a place is universal, because it is a human instinct, a human longing, and a human right.

Rangers: I invite you this year to enter into Tuan’s assertion with me, that the landscape—our shared local landscape—can indeed answer the questions who am I? and who are we? You are already engaged in this questioning because you have joined this group that shares a passion for our local wilderness. If you go into the woods and you feel a certain way—any way—then you are already receiving answers from the landscape in the way that Tuan is hinting at. Tune your senses further. Memorize a birdsong. Think in geological and glacial timescales. Learn why a plant prefers one corner of the landscape over another. Read about the native people and colorful 19th-century characters whose memory the mountain still holds. Your deeper awareness will bring you into a more intimate relation with our locality, and ultimately with yourself.

I look forward to hearing in what ways our Berkshire landscape speaks to you and to us this year, and I wish you and our organization all the very best. 

Faithfully yours,

Ranger Doug
The Leader