Words for the Western Landscape

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

By Jenny Shank, 12-24-10

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 “sawtooth,” as described by Pattiann Rogers.  Rogers is an award-winning, Colorado-based poet.  Her most recent book is The Grand Array.

sawtooth

Sawtooth is an adjective used to describe a range of mountains or a single ridge in a series of peaks that resemble the jagged edge of a saw. “The best place I have found to glimpse the western land as it was in the last [the nineteenth] century, without squinting too much, is in the Sawtooth-Stanley country in south central Idaho,” writes Harlan Hague in his article “The Sawtooth-Stanley Basin Country.” In addition to this classic range of sawtooth mountains, other examples include the ancient Sawtooth Mountain Range that anchors the coast of Lake Superior along the north shore, and Sawtooth Mountain, found in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area south of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. In his poem “Steel Mountain,” from Sawtooth Country, David Beisly-Guiotto writes of standing atop this mountain in Idaho: “sheer sky, blue air chipped by white peaks/far as we can see.” Those jagged sawtooth peaks. - Pattiann Rogers

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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