Valuable.

Tolkien, Middle Earth, 1955

To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Difference.

During the nights I listened to the ice booming on the lake.  During the day when I used to fetch water from the hole in the lake, I began to see how subtle changes in the temperature and the wind affected the thickness of the ice.  I heard a lot of wind and came to like the difference between wind through spruce, wind through balsam, wind through bare poplar, wind through red oak, wind through marsh grass, and wind through dead cattails.  I saw what wind and sun did to old moose tracks and deer tracks and squirrel tracks and rabbit tracks and fisher tracks and marten tracks and fox tracks.  I once crossed a pond to check my traps, and when I crossed back ten minutes later, seven sets of timber wolf tracks had crossed over mine.

David Treuer, from Trapline: An Ojibwe Man’s Search for Identity on the Canadian Taiga

When ice settles and cracks on the Great Lakes, it sounds like a distant cannon going off.

Blank.

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac

Hum.

Wyeth, November Corn, 1949

The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry.  The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on. A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.

Aldo Leopold

Biases.

Wyeth, St. Georges Pine, 1967

In the course of the years, [one] imputes to each species, from his responses to their beauty or utility, and their responses to his labors for or against them, a series of attributes that constitute a character. I am amazed to learn what diverse characters different men impute to one and the same tree.  Our plant biases are indeed a sensitive index to our affections, our tastes, our loyalties, our generosities, and our manner of wasting weekends.

Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac

Valuable.

Gubarev, Last Flight, 1996

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold

Music.

The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry.  The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on. A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.

Aldo Leopold

Wild.

Man always kills the thing he loves, so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness.  Some say we had to.  Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.  Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Aldo Leopold

Lessons.

EARLY RISERS

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters. It is strange that of all the multitude of creatures who must rise in the morning at some time, only these few should have discovered the most pleasant and least useful time for doing it.

Orion must have been the original mentor of the too-early company, for it is he who signals for too-early rising. It is time when Orion has passed west of the zenith about as far as one should lead a teal.

Early risers feel at ease with each other, perhaps because, unlike those who sleep late, they are given to understatement of their own achievements. Orion, the most widely traveled, says literally nothing. The coffee pot, from its first soft gurgle, underclaims the virtues of what simmers with in. The owl, in his trisyllabic commentary, plays down the story of the night's murders. The goose on the bar, rising briefly to a point of order in some inaudible anserine debate, lets fall no hint that he speaks with the authority of all the far hills and the sea.

The freight, I admit, is hardly reticent about his own importance, yet even he has a kind of modesty: his eye is single to his own noisy business, and he never comes roaring into somebody else's camp. I feel a deep security in this single-mindedness of freight trains.

To arrive too early in the marsh is an adventure in pure listening; the ear roams at will among the noises of the night, without let or hindrance from hand or eye. When you hear a mallard being audibly enthusiastic about his soup, you are free to picture a score guzzling among the duckweeds. When one widgeon squeals, you may postulate a squadron without fear of visual contradiction. And when a flock of bluebills, pitching pondward, tears the dark silk of heaven in one long rending nose-dive, you catch your breath at the sound, but there is nothing to see except stars. This same performance, in daytime, would have to be looked at, shot at, missed,, and then hurriedly fitted with an alibi. Nor could daylight add anything to your mind's eye picture of quivering wings, ripping the firmament neatly into halves.

The hour of listening ends when the fowl depart on muted wings for wider safer waters, each flock a blur against the graying east.

Like many another treaty of restraint, the pre-dawn pact lasts only as long as darkness humbles the arrogant. It would seem as if the sun were responsible for the daily retreat of reticence from the world. At any rate, by the time the mists are white over the lowlands, every rooster is bragging ad lib, and every corn shock is pretending to be twice as tall as any corn that ever grew. By sun-up every squirrel is exaggerating some fancied indignity to his person, and every jay proclaiming with false emotion about suppositious dangers to society, at this very moment discovered by him. Distant crows are berating a hypothetical owl, just to tell the world how vigilant crows are, and a pheasant cock, musing perhaps on his philanderings of bygone days, beats the air with his wings and tells the world in raucous warning that he owns this marsh and all the hens in it.

Nor are all these illusions of grandeur confined to the birds and beasts. By breakfast time com the honks, horns, shouts, and whistles of the awakened farmyard, and finally at evening, the drone of an untended radio. Then everybody goes to bed to relearn the lessons of the night.

Aldo Leopold

Thank You, Jess.

Expanses.

Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over.  It is not boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.  Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my county, extends on every hand as far as the dew can touch.

Aldo Leopold

Thank You, Jess. It's happening.

Most.

Jansson, Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium, et Virginia, 1636

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac

Thank You, Jessica.