My Problem with Landscapes

“Get your stick ready, Francina, I’m about to shift into second gear!” my father would say.

Our car during the years in Ecuador, a venerable 1948 Dodge, had a number of quirks, one of which was that the second gear would pop out unless the gearshift lever was manually held in place. Driving up and down the Andean escarpments, second gear was an almost constant necessity, but it was dangerous for my father to hold the lever with one hand while negotiating the hairpin turns of stone-paved roads dating from the Inca empire.

My mother, concerned that we would plunge nine thousand feet to our deaths in the jungle below, insisted on holding the gearshift lever for him, but leaning sideways for hours on end used to give her a backache. One day, while we waited by the side of the road as my father watered the radiator, she rummaged in the underbrush and pulled out a sturdy forked stick, about the length of a conductor’s baton. And with that, from then on, she held the gear in place, avoided backache, and saved our lives.

The purpose of those trips was simple: to view landscapes. In Ecuador, in the 1950s, apart from some gilded baroque churches in Quito, landscapes were about all there was. My parents were great landscape aficionados. We’d be driving along some deserted highway in the oxygen-deprived páramos and my mother, waving her stick, would yell “Stop! Stop! We must look at this view!”

“Magnificent! Extraordinary!” my parents would exclaim. And yes, there in the distance would be a snow-covered volcano whose Quechua name (Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Tungurahua, Pichincha) I’d had to memorize in school, or the river Napo snaking its way through millions of hectares of greenly undifferentiated jungle towards the Amazon, where yet another volcano, the Sangay, was spewing smoke and flames as it had done non-stop since the seventeenth century.

As the sun plummeted (in the tropics it plummets rather than descends) towards the horizon, I would brace myself for another explosion of awe. My parents were connoisseurs of sunsets, and never tired of pointing them out to each other. The colors! The clouds! The sky! And look—there is the first star!

While this was going on, I would stand around, listening to the ticks of the Dodge’s cooling engine and scuffing the Andean dirt with my orthotic boots. Periodically my mother would turn to me, and with a majestic sweep of her arm towards the view in question urge, “Isn’t it simply marvelous?” I had no answer to this. If there were ten-year-olds in the world capable of feeling awe at a sunset/volcano/jungle/body of water, I was not one. All I could manage was a polite nod, and the suggestion that it was time to go home.

However, when in the next year or so the hormonal tides started their inexorable rise, I began to resist my parents’ landscape fixation. Maybe there was something wrong with me—those landscapes were spectacular, after all. But I didn’t know how to respond to things that just sat there, mute and motionless and unchanged for eons. The more my parents exclaimed and admired, the more I withdrew, drawing my gaze inwards like a snail tucking in its horns. Standing before a grand bit of scenery and being expected to feel aesthetic pleasure was a lot like sitting through an endless Brahms symphony and being expected to enjoy it. Instead, I reserved my interest for the local fauna. Show me a llama in a pasture, its head like a periscope atop its long neck, batting movie-star eyelashes as it prepared to fling a gob of spit in my direction, and I was all attention.

It took many years for me to add landscapes to the list of things I enjoyed, but eventually I did. One fall day I was at the window of our house in Maryland, gazing raptly at the undulating meadows and golden hills fading into the distance.

“Look at this!” I said to my preteen daughter, gesturing towards the view. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Sure,” she answered. “What’s for dinner?”