America [antikvár]

FOREWORD On Captiva Island off the soudiern shore of Florida, tiny ovals of limestone intermix with myriads of seasheils, whole because of the gradual beach and waves quieted in the Gulf of Mexico. When the waves wash them, they tinkle like an old player piano in the next room. When the highest tides of the year sweep the Olympic Peninsula coastline at the Quileute Indian reservation, the retreating waves rattle and roll the beach Above: Familiar to most people as America's national emblem, the bald eagle has a wing span exceeding seven feet. The huge nests of these fish-eating birds can weigh over a ton. Above right: Polished beach cobbles pave Lake Superior's shores in Michigan's U.P. Left: The Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park demonstrates the riot of autumn colors in the deciduous forests of Michigan and other areas east of the Mississippi River. cobbles, making them chatter and warble. Shells have been ground to nothing and only the stones remain, smoothed to ovals, hurried down from the straight-up walls that back the beach, bits and pieces of the far northwestern mountains. The oceans that formed these beaches shaped the varied outlines of this country, scalloped and bayed, rough and rocky, flat and gentle. Scuffling along another kind of beach in the middle of the United States, I watch for the small, dark green stone, inlaid with cream-colored rectangular crystals, that says "Colorado River," a rock born in the San Juan Mountains to the northeast in Colorado and, before Glen Canyon Dam, carried down into the Grand Canyon, occurring only here, a uniqueness that marks many places in this country. In the small things you can hold in your hand lies the magnificent diversity of this country, pebbles black and ochre, cream and red, green and white, and every shade of gray. Along North Carolina's Outer Banks, Wyoming's Green River, Indiana's White River, Massachusetts' Assabet River, are pebbles, bits and pieces of mountains and hills, Adirondacks and Rockies and Cascades, carried down rivulet to creek to stream to Mississippi or Connecticut or Columbia, to some shore or backwater somewhere. The river brings the pebbles down; the ocean rocks them back and forth. The travels of pebbles speak to the journeys of this countryside, a landscape on the move, sometimes imperceptibly, at other times with rude awakenings: two continental plates jockey together and the San Andreas jerks; Mount St. Helens' truncated cone smokes with hidden agendas. In the East, the Atlantic Ocean wedges pebbles into a craggy granite crack on the Maine shore, locking a white quartz hummingbird's egg into a gray matrix. These pebbly symbols, these small talismans, in all their variety, speak of a vast multitude of journeys and terrains in this country, born of heat and underground fire, cooled and farmed, eroded into places for towns and cities. A huge variety of colors and types and shapes reflects the multiplicity of those of us who call this country home, come from different places, gathered from different shores. Take a pebble, river-molded or ocean-smoothed, in your hand and turn to the four points of the compass. Envision mountains and canyons, broad meadows and narrow defiles, flat fields and rolling hillocks laid with tall grass prairies and old growth forests and savannahs, wetlands and deserts, places wild and places peopled. Let that nubbin of somebody's mountain evoke this country of magnificent breadth and beauty. By closing a hand over its shape and size and color, we can evoke the movement and change, the yesterdays and tomorrows of this country. By opening this book to Fred Hirschmann's magnificent photographs, we can absorb this country's todays and enjoy the complexities of a country so vast we can never know it all. Be thankful both for the pebbles and for photographers and what they tell us. They've been there. They tell it all. ANN ZWINGER