• picture
  • picture
  • picture
  • picture
Public Radio's Environmental News Magazine (follow us on Google News)

Home Ground: Painted Hill

Air Date: Week of

The Painted Hills of Oregon. (Photo: Mark Schindler)

Living on Earth continues its series exploring features of the American landscape. The series is based on the book “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape,” edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. In this installment, Oregon writer John Daniel describes “painted hill.”



Transcript

GELLERMAN: Picture a landscape of a place you love. The image is more than the sum of its parts. There’s an intimacy, a special relationship we have with the land and the forms that are special to us, even as they change. To know a place, to truly know a place is a way of making it our own. Writers Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney asked 45 authors to describe features of landscapes. The definitions are part of a collection called “Home Ground - Language for an American Landscape.” We’ve asked several writers to read from their entries. Today, John Daniel of Oregon has his definition of “painted hill.”

DANIEL: Painted hill. Badlands produce colorful heaps and mounds called painted hills in central Oregon. Striped horizontally in soft interbled hues of red green and pale gold with punctuations of black manganese. The Oregon painted hills embody volcanic ash worked by plants, animals and groundwater into ancient soils now compacted into clay stone layers.


The Painted Hills of Oregon.(Photo: Mark Schindler)

At present, a region of semi arid steppe this geological library of antiquated earth. In the phrase of geologist Ellen Morris Bishop records more than 30 million years of climatic and biotic regimes ranging from subtropical swamp through temperate oaks of annum.

Except for brief skullcaps of bunch grass little vegetation can root in the dense weathered clay of the painted hills. Their life is in their colors which can shift subtly before one’s eyes as the clay takes on the moisture of rain and lets it go. The painted desert of Arizona contains similar formations, called pintaras by early Spanish Americans and by the Navajo land of the sleeping rainbow.

[MUSIC: Laura Veirs “Wrecking” from ‘Saltbreakers’ (Nonesuch Records – 2007)]

GELLERMAN: John Daniel lives and writes in the hills just outside of Eugene, Oregon. His definition of “painted hill” is included in the book, “Home Ground - Language for an American Landscape,” edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. We’ll bring you more places from “Home Ground” in the weeks ahead.

 

Links

Home Ground Project

 

Living on Earth wants to hear from you!

Living on Earth
62 Calef Highway, Suite 212
Lee, NH 03861
Telephone: 617-287-4121
E-mail: comments@loe.org

Newsletter [Click here]

Donate to Living on Earth!
Living on Earth is an independent media program and relies entirely on contributions from listeners and institutions supporting public service. Please donate now to preserve an independent environmental voice.

Newsletter
Living on Earth offers a weekly delivery of the show's rundown to your mailbox. Sign up for our newsletter today!

Sailors For The Sea: Be the change you want to sea.

The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment: Committed to protecting and improving the health of the global environment.

Contribute to Living on Earth and receive, as our gift to you, an archival print of one of Mark Seth Lender's extraordinary wildlife photographs. Follow the link to see Mark's current collection of photographs.

Buy a signed copy of Mark Seth Lender's book Smeagull the Seagull & support Living on Earth