The Long Shore: A Psychological Experience of the Wilderness

This mother-and-daughter account of their experience of the Hollister Ranch upon which they both grew up moves the reader into a good feel for how land and psyche interact. There is a minimum of speculation and a maximum of sense and event. The life of the ranch, its voice, surfaces now and again through human conflicts and encounters against the backdrop of its imminent sale. As Jane Wheelright says: "The coastline of the ranch is like the floor plan of my life...."Both writers are Jungian analysts, and most of the Jungian commentary is provided by Lynda Schmidt, who on occasions describes the ranch as a "manifestation of the Self" (for Jung, the Self with a capital S meant the archetype of totality; he also called it the God-image). I think we must be very careful--and Lynda Schmidt generally is--when we bring in archetypal concepts, because how we do so can either illuminate or devalue their manifestations. It's like describing one's wife as a Goddess figure or an anima container: what happened to the actual woman? If we see wilderness as a manifestation of the Self, or even of God, is this helpful, or does it shift our attention away from the wilderness as an entity in its own right? This is one of the few books that take the land seriously. Here is a characteristic passage:I had a strong sense of being buried deep in the soil, lost under the vast, rocky ledges, melted into the landscape, submerged as an integral part of that place. None of the others in my generation had the remotest sense of being so influenced. I was starting at scratch and I felt like a child about to be orphaned.

Jane Wheelwright and Linda Schmidt -- a mother-daughter team -- authored this book, which is really a conversation about the intricate relationship between one's psyche and one's place. Both are trained in psychology -- Jane in Zurich at the Jung Center -- and both bring a refreshingly honest self-critical flair to this book. The Long Shore is the story of the Hollister family ranch -- a vast oak-studded arroyo-dipping range of coastal grassland near Santa Barbara, California -- and how each author experienced the place psychologically. Their experiences are extremely different, much of which seems related to the gradual conversion of this vast cattle ranch to a series of late-20th century subdivisions. Sound familiar?By treating this as a personal exploration, and by calling each other down from any soapboxes, the authors go new places in literature. The Long Shore remains the BEST examination I have read of how one's psychological state is derived -- at least in part -- from the state of the land surrounding. How a wild environment parents us. How it challenges us. How it forces a kind of a reflective relationship that few nature-writers have the first-person confidence to detail on the page, and few psychologists have the wherewithal to examine directly in themselves, much less in others.If you incline toward this kind of exploration of inner nature and outer nature, The Long Shore is a book to own, to savor and return to. If you don't incline toward this, what else are you doing that's more important?