Words for the Western Landscape

“Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape”: Hoodoo

By Jenny Shank, 12-10-10

In his introduction to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, editor Barry Lopez writes, “The land beyond our towns, for many, has become a generalized landscape of hills and valleys, of beaches, rivers and monotonous deserts…almost without our knowing it, the particulars of these landscapes have slipped away from us.” Published this year in a paperback edition by Trinity University Press, Home Ground (480 pages, $19.95) seeks to preserve terms that describe the natural landscape by compiling definitions written by accomplished writers.  Over the next several weeks, New West will feature excerpts from Home Ground.  Today’s term is “hoodoo,” as described by John Daniel.  Daniel is an award-winning, Oregon-based author of such books as Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone and Looking After: A Son’s Memoir.

hoodoo

Hoodoos are fantastically shaped stone pillars in deserts and badlands of the North American West. Classic hoodoo groupings, such as those in Bryce Canyon National Park and Goblin Valley State Park in southern Utah, form by sporadic, intensive rainfall erosion of steeply sloped but horizontally layered sedimentary rock, leaving freestanding pinnacles, each with an overhanging cap of resistant stone. They abound on the Colorado Plateau, where smaller specimens are some- times called goblins, but occur also north through the Rockies and have been reported on Baffin Island in the Arctic. The term dates back at least to the mid–nineteenth century. Walt Whitman, in Specimen Days, regrets that he never saw “the ‘hoodoo’ or goblin land” of the Yellowstone country. That these arresting features should have been tagged with a variant of voodoo seems almost inevitable. Their suggestively spirited forms, whether taken as malign, whimsical, or transcendently elusive, exert spells to which many humans are susceptible. - John Daniel

Excerpted with permission from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, Trinity University Press. Available at booksellers everywhere.

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