For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Daniela Garvue—whose story “Mongo Two” appears in our Winter 2025 issue—pulls from Barry Lopez’s Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape.
Back in Nebraska, our neighbor Pete used to drive up and down our dirt road, calling for his dog, Rex. “The old S-O-B likes to hide in the barrow ditch,” Pete told us. A decade later and six hundred miles from home, I opened Barry Lopez’s Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape and read this entry by Conger Beasley Jr.:
Borrow Pit
In the glaciated Midwest, for example, borrow pits are found next to just about every freeway, the terrain there so flat that earth has to be borrowed to build overpasses. In an era of hand tools, dirt to build up a roadbed was borrowed from a pit and conveyed to the worksite with a wheelbarrow; thus sometimes the feature is called a barrow pit or ditch.
Home Ground is a dictionary of American landscape features, defined by such giants of American literature as Joy Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, and William Kittredge. Like any good dictionary, it is an exploration of the public psyche, for its definitions are also terms of pride, distaste, and hope. For every lofty cirque there is a hogback; scablands humble the everglades. What are the badlands, but a judgement call? Consider the fluid political lines between creeks, cricks, kills, quebradas, runs, washes, arroyos, streams, and any other path of water which people have named according to their ancestral language or their source of income.
The entries range from dry descriptions, complete with technical diagrams, to anecdotes that must be personal: “Anyone who has ridden a long distance bus in Mexico, moreover, will never forget passing a narrow curve at midnight,” writes Luis Alberto Urrea for “angostura.” Most definitions are clear eyed, but sometimes the authors can’t help but inject awe: “Arches are Earth clean to the bone,” writes Linda Hogan. “A person walking through one walks through Time.”
The term “borrow pit” made itself comfortable in my mind, slipping into place the way you finally hear certain truths from the other side of half-told family gossip. Aha. That’s where Rex was hiding. That’s where I crashed my first car. In a book full of such rich American vocabulary as “hoodoo” and “chaparral,” it was “borrow pit” that made me love Nebraska the most.
I am once again far from home, writing this from a mountainside in Costa Rica, where the landforms and politics are strangers to me. I had wanted to escape my own fraught country for a while, to inhabit some kinder, greener land, but as often happens in travel, I am thinking about America more than ever. As I was packing for my trip, a friend asked if I ever thought of leaving the country for good, and I surprised myself with real anger. I love this great and troubled nation. I want to look closely and keep on loving. Anyone can see that our party flags fly threadbare over a common home. Our task is to share our neighbor’s fence line with grace and to help them search the borrow pit for their dog. I echo Barry Lopez’s hope in the introduction:
If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better.