If left rootless and disconnected, most people — like most plants — wither and wane, spiritually sick from lack of psychological sustenance. This malaise, I’ve come to believe, is more common than we might think, as most of us no longer maintain any kind of connection to the land, the places we occupy, our locations.

Once we all were bound to the places we lived — the earth outside our door gave life to the crops that kept our families alive, the meat on our dish once fed in the meadows downriver. Such is no longer the case.

Our food comes from the market, which resembles every other market in every other place. The meat from some anonymous cow, or a sow fattened by antibiotics and injections. The greens to keep us healthy are hauled in the back of a massive big rig for thousands of miles, born from copyrighted seeds and grown in lots the size of some counties.

The wilds of a place were once its soul. To connect with the land was to take a long walk, bite into the brisk winter breeze, listen to the low hiss of the river dashing through a bottleneck. Now these sacred places, where they exist at all, often stand one step removed from us. Like sad-eyed creatures in the confines of a run-down zoo, the land is riven with manicured trails, roads, shapely hedges, and interpretive brochures.

In an effort to preserve, we’ve actually divorced nature. We stand apart with binoculars and glossy foldouts, smart phones and selfies, and rarely get dirty.

Several facts seem to exacerbate the issue: First, one is hard put most of the time to tell one part of the country from the next, one town from its twin two thousand miles apart. All the same companies, the same employee uniforms, recipes, products, and services are offered from the same bland buildings in the same giant parking lots. Sprawl, like a disease, spreads in the wake of greed, denuding character and leaving towns spavined, generic, listless.

Second, we’re all desperately tied up in a system that requires constant work to survive. People’s lives become a blind march from the bed to the car to work back to home then to bed again, the passing scenery a colorful collage of passing billboards and towering signs offering this or that contraption for cheap. Meaning and purpose are supplanted by naked want.

Third, we’re a mobile society, on the move day and night along broad highways that shrink once impossible distances into a day’s drive, at most. People live for a few years in one town, then move to the next. Small towns remain so starved for industry that its youth is set to wander the wide world in search of a livable wage, whatever that means. Fewer and fewer people spend their lives entwined in the seasons, intimate with their surroundings, alive to its subtleties.

I’m no different. Yet recently, my appreciation for this particular place has blossomed. While not always by choice, I’ve spent the last 30 years in Humboldt County. And in that time I’ve become intimate with its jagged landscapes — the broken stone cliffs that sheer off into the blue eddies of the Pacific; the famed towering trees, pillars of the world; wetlands alive with waterfowl, delicate grasses, the rhythms of the tide.

For years, it bored me. I’d seen it all before, and I ached for a fresh view, a new postcard to send along in the mail, another experience to notch my leather belt.

But now, for some reason, that’s all changed. I take great comfort in the familiar features of this rugged place, and share — as best I can — that familiarity with my kids. Only through a prolonged courtship can we see beyond the obvious, penetrate a place’s mystery and feel its rhythms as our own. Who knows? Maybe I’m just growing up.

We live in a farmhouse that has been in my wife’s family for generations. Her mother was raised in this house, as was she, and our children now, as well. On the ten-acre property, we’ve spotted the red-shouldered hawk, barn swallows, song sparrows, countless hummingbirds, a black bear, a family of playful foxes, and raccoons, among endless other species.

The family’s matriarch recently passed, setting off the long and unsettling discussion about future ownership, possible sale, inheritance and land legalities. Watching that hawk watching us, just as its ancestor very likely watched our predecessors, I wonder how we came to believe we own any of this.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.