the where of it

stories from place

 EVOCATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES:  Collecting and archiving stories from place

 

Summer Wood

 

A PRIMER

Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go

to be in Michigan.  The right hand of America

waving from maps or the left

pressing into clay a mold to take home

from kindergarten to Mother.  I lived in Michigan

forty-three years.  The state bird

is a chained factory gate.  The state flower

is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical

though it is merely cold and deep as truth.

A Midwesterner can use the word “truth”,

can sincerely use the word “sincere”.

In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.

When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life

goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,

which we’re not getting along with

on account of the Towers as I pass.

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam.  You never forget

how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.

It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.

The Upper Peninsula is a spare state

in case Michigan goes flat.  I live now

in Virginia, which has no backup plan

but is named the same as my mother,

I live in my mother again, which is creepy

but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,

suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials

are needed.  The state joy is spring.

“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”

is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,

when February hasn’t ended.  February

is thirteen months long in Michigan.

We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us.  “What did we do?”

is the state motto.  There’s a day in May

when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives.  When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.

In this way I have given you a primer.

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

EVOCATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES ˙ Collecting and archiving stories from place 

1

            Location matters.

            It is the geographer’s motto, the one great truth, and it should be mandatory for all scholars and all framers of public policy to memorize and adhere to it:  you can’t omit the where of anything without losing a vital chunk of its significance.  Geographic referencing permits analysis of spatial relationships, it dovetails with history, it is essential in considering the intricacies of scale.  If we don’t know where a thing is, it’s difficult to say definitively what it is.

             It is a step further to claim that not just location but place matters, and a broad step beyond that to claim that places matter because they have meaning.  What kind of meaning?  And to whom?  Suddenly, we land deep in the thicket of landscape studies, far from the tenable domain of location.  But the truth is that, just because we can locate a place – map it, tie it into a grid of latitude and longitude, identify its nearest neighbors – doesn’t mean we know much about it.  What does it feel like to be there?  How do the inhabitants interact with the physical landscape?  What power structures define that interaction, what role does the past play, in what terms and by what tropes do people describe it?

            One could say that the meaning of place combines location with perspective.

 

            Or that it all depends on who you talk to, and where they’re standing.

 

2

            We live in a world on the move.  It has been estimated that nearly twenty percent of the world’s population has been displaced from its home ground.  In America alone, people are expected to relocate, on average, every four to seven years.  How can places acquire meaning when we spend so little time getting to know them?

            There’s no question that they do.  For me personally, my “life list” of the various places I’ve called home numbers over a dozen, and each of those landscapes – and the diverse interaction of cultures each supports – has put its own stamp on who I’ve turned out to be.  They exist as memories, as loci for crucial events in my personal history, as current ground for everything I do, as shapes in my consciousness (visual shapes, but also, in a way that bears deep exploring, as synesthetic templates for the play of my imagination).  Each of us carries a bank of such place-memories. Sometimes we share them.  We do that by telling stories.

            A fiction writer, I’m acutely tuned to the stories people tell.  And as a writer with a special interest in the literature of place, I’ve grown increasingly aware that the stories people share about where they live and work embed huge amounts of sophisticated information about those places that is available in no other form.  Often humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, those stories offer a way to remind ourselves who we are.  Scott Momaday, the great Kiowa man of letters, has written memorably that “history plus land equals story.”  Leslie Marmon Silko stretches further, and claims that belonging to a place is an essential part of Pueblo Indian identity, and that her people acknowledge and reinforce that identity by telling themselves and each other stories that tie them to that particular terrain.  While Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have been especially effective in putting this understanding forward, I don’t think it’s unique to those groups.  I suggest that all of us – in varying degrees – are bound by loyalties to specific landscapes, that we derive aspects of our identity from them, and that we both remember and explore that relationship in the stories we tell.

            How does this square with the high degree of mobility we seem to experience?  “Wherever you go, there you are,” intoned Confucius or, alternately, Buckaroo Banzai, and for all its inanity there’s a measure of truth to it.  We are never nowhere, and the place we find ourselves – even if it is not our home ground (which some of us, mobile early and never effectively rooted, lack) – is a place with a unique history, with stories and peculiarities and power structures, a place with layers of names and an openness to new experience.  The trouble is, it isn’t always easy to see this.  When we fail to notice where we are, when our geographic awareness falters, the character of place can slip underground.  And we try to fill it with what is familiar.

            But place is not a fungible commodity, and the backhanded way in which we’ve treated it so – through look-alike shopping malls, subdivisions, and high-rises, and with one-size-fits-all public policies and land-use regulations – does us all a disservice.  The power of place lies in its unique character, a character that is not static but grows increasingly eroded as we make choices that homogenize the physical and cultural landscape and forget the specific (and effective, and meaningful) ways people have interacted with its peculiarities.  The more we move, the more we carry our familiar surroundings with us, and the more threatened unique places become by the imposition.

            The answer is not, simply, to stop moving.  Our mobility is only sometimes a by-product of privilege; for most of the world’s population, people move because they are forced, through natural disaster or war, through poverty or resource depletion, from their original place.  But life does not occur without a setting; and an urban slum in Brasilia, a community of ranches in Wyoming, a refugee camp in Somalia, and a tony district in London share in the fact that each is a definable place and ground for human experience.  Each place hosts people with stories to tell.  And for all the facts and numbers and data that can be collected about a specific place, there is no richer way to tap the true character of that place than by listening to the stories people tell.

            Back, now, to the distinction between location and place.  Location, in spite of its being so concretely definable, is the more abstract of the two concepts.  A relative mathematical value ascribed to events and conditions, location is a marker that permits spatial comparisons.  Place, however, aims to describe the qualities inherent at that location, qualities that make it unique, and uniquely experienced by those who find themselves there.  Place is the sum of everything, physically present or ephemeral, that exists and has existed (and, some would argue, has the potential to exist) there.  It is the landscape, the weather, the built environment, the cultural history, the flora and fauna, the available resources, the lived experience of its inhabitants and those who have passed through, the memories of those who have left and the dreams of those who have yet to come – in short, place is everything in the envelope of where.

            “Everything” can never be completely or accurately represented, of course.  But it’s worth taking a stab at it, creating a record of the effort to understand it.  We already do that quite a lot, yielding concrete, useful information.  We have topographic maps and well drillers’ logs and wildlife inventories and census figures.  We know who makes how much, generally speaking, and how much water they use and how frequently cars travel the roads.  The list goes on.  We are a nation in love with data.  It suggests a heady measure of control.

            And certainly there are countless ways in which non-narrative data is valuable.  It can dispel myths, present alternate perspectives, identify trends, and describe aspects of place that might be omitted from narrative accounts.  But the danger is imminent that people will forget that the data was selectively acquired and subjectively interpreted.  Science assumes a mantle of objectivity that masks the danger.  Science tells a story, too; an important story, but not the only one.

            There’s no escaping the subjective aspect of the personal narrative.  That is its potential strength:  many distinct voices relating experiences, opinions, and information of individual relevance, in their own words, combine to paint a powerful picture as rich and varied as the place itself.   Something happens when people gather and start to tell stories.  There’s a creative spark, a deepened connection; and when the stories they tell are grounded in the land they walk on, that shared narrative strengthens the fabric of the community and affirms its relation with the place they call their own.

            How can the continually changing relationship between people and a particular landscape be creatively represented?  Although I’ve used place-stories told to me in my own novels and articles (with their tellers’ permission), I began to wonder what it would look like to collect these stories in their original forms and make them accessible to the community itself.  Oral history projects are commonplace, but what if we used the latest advances in geographic information technology to specifically georeference these stories, in an accessible multimedia “deep map,” alongside a wealth of other data on that place?  Formulating this question launched this project, and help has come from many corners.  From the Geography Department at the University of New Mexico came advice and information regarding geographic information systems flexible enough to incorporate the various forms of data and still remain accessible to community members with little or no computer experience.  Combing the work of cultural anthropologists and critical theorists provided reading lists anchored in the deep literature of place, landscape, memory.  From colleagues at the Taos Land Trust, from local teachers, from scientists, fellow writers, and artists, came a volley of enthusiastic support and interest.

            And, most importantly, from my neighbors in San Cristóbal come the stories.  Not just from the elders like Jenny Vincent, 95, a musician and Living Treasure who moved to the valley in 1937, or Ricardo Medina, 83, born here – but from the young ones too, and the recent arrivals, and those who may just be passing through.  The beauty of this project for me is that it includes all of us.  San Cristóbal, New Mexico, a tiny village in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, is not my original home.  I was born in Manhattan, a world away,  but my heart found its home here, and I’m eager to know this place as deeply as I can.  San Cristóbal is my inspiration, and my aim in developing this project is to create a scalable, replicable model that rural communities and urban neighborhoods alike can use to explore and archive their experience of their specific place.  Radically inclusive, deeply intimate, and historically relevant, the Stories From Place project is an attempt to elicit and organize the most vital stories so that we can reflect upon where we are, how we engage with our home place, and how that engagement shapes and defines us as individuals and as a community.

            This paper explores two essential elements of the project.  The first part looks at the ways that have been historically available to archive relevant place-based information (with an emphasis on the insights provided by personal narrative), and explores some of the new technologies that are becoming rapidly available.  The second, and longer, part, considers story collection, dipping into landscape theory and necessarily focusing on the issue of perspective.  In this part I consider five separate but intertwined lenses:  those of history, power, work, language, and feel.  This list is not remotely comprehensive, and all of these are concepts that have been explored in greater depth by other writers and scholars.  My aim has been to select the themes that generate the most provocative questions.  These questions, carefully chosen and appropriately posed, can elicit the stories that reveal the meaning of place. 

 

3

            With all the moving we do, we aren’t accustomed to hearing people talk about place and its myriad meanings.  We don’t know how to actively listen; don’t ask the right questions that spur deep and meaningful responses about the relationship we bear to place.  And yet, viewed from a longer perspective, we must have place – and our collective experience of it – hardwired in our brains.  Why else the persistence of nationalism and regionalism?  Why do so many of us support our local sports teams so actively?

            We know place because our survival depends on it.  Today we might be hampered by a bad sense of direction, even endangered if it deposits us in a rough neighborhood in an unfamiliar city – but in premodern times, and for many people today whose living depends on the land, knowing the terrain was a matter of life or death.  Our earliest codifications of that knowledge were oral narratives, communally held and repeated stories that reminded group members that who they were was tied to where they were.  Leslie Marmon Silko describes the relationship Pueblo Indian stories have to the land.  Some of these stories recount events from long ago, such as the stories of Creation and Emergence; others concern current events; but in matters of cultural importance, Silko writes, “the crucial element in a narrative is the terrain.”  She describes this further:

            The places where the stories occur are precisely located, and prominent geographical details recalled, even if the landscape is well known to listeners, often because the turning point in the narrative involved a peculiarity of the special quality of a rock or tree or plant found only at that place.  Thus, in the case of many of the Pueblo narratives, it is impossible to determine which came first, the incident or the geographical feature that begs to be brought alive in a story that features some unusual aspect of this location.

 

            Collectively, Silko writes, these stories “taught us how we were the people we believed we were…. This sense of identity was intimately linked with the surrounding terrain, to the landscape that has often played a significant role in a story or in the outcome of a conflict.”

            Taken in sum, these stories create a communal map of tribal territory.  They are packed with relevant information about key landmarks, the location of fresh water, the behavior and migration patterns of animals, the proximity of one place to another, the whereabouts of shelter, and other vital issues.  But they pertain to the collective soul of the tribe as well.  Keith Basso, in decades of work with the Cibecue band of Western Apache, relates how that tribe ascribes stories of moral import to specific locations.  The names of places are important and specifically descriptive, evoking accurate images; examples include (trans. Basso) Water Flows Inward Under A Cottonwood Tree, and Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above In A Compact Cluster.  The names are place-markers, oral devices for locating narrative events in specific settings, “and Apache listeners,” Basso writes, “whether they have visited the sites or not, are able to imagine in some detail how they might appear.”  But they are also self-contained story-capsules themselves – an awareness every astute Apache storyteller makes use of.

            Associated with each place – hence, with each place-name – is a story that recounts something important that happened there.  “Without exception,” Basso writes, “and usually in very graphic terms, [these] tales focus on persons who suffer misfortune as the consequence of actions that violate Apache standards for acceptable social behavior…. [They] are morality tales pure and simple, and when viewed as such by the Apaches – as compact commentaries on what should be avoided so as to deal successfully and effectively with other people – they are highly informative.”

            In itself, this is an astonishingly deep and effective way of connecting tribal values with the land.  But it becomes breathtaking when Basso reveals the way in which these stories are transmitted. 

            In addition to everything else – places, events, moral standards, conceptions of cultural identity – every tale is also ‘about’ the person at whom it is directed.  This is because the telling of a historical tale is almost always prompted by an individual’s having committed one or more social offenses to which the act of narration, together with the tale itself, is intended as a critical and remedial response. … Thus, on occasions when these stories are actually told – by real Apache storytellers, in real interpersonal contexts, to real social offenders – these narratives are understood to be accompanied by an unstated message from the storyteller that may be phrased something like this:  ‘I know that you have acted in a way similar or analogous to the way in which someone acted in the story I am telling you.  If you continue to act in this way, something similar or analogous to what has happened to the character in the story might also happen to you.’  This metacommunicative message is just as important as any conveyed by the text of the storyteller’s tale.  For Apaches contend that if the message is taken to heart by the person at whom the tale is aimed – and if, in conjunction with lessons drawn from the tale itself, he or she resolves to improve his or her behavior – a lasting bond will have been created between that individual and the site or sites at which events in the tale took place.

 

            In most cases, the storyteller can rely on a shared knowledge of the associated stories, and need not do more than simply say the name of the relevant place to evoke the story in the mind and heart of the intended listener.  It bears hearing the process described by an Apache storyteller, Nick Thompson, quoted in Basso:

            This is what we know about our stories.  They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life…. It’s like an arrow, they say.  Sometimes it just bounces off – it’s too soft and you don’t think about anything.  But when it’s strong it goes in deep and starts working on your mind right away.  No one says anything to you, only that story is all, but now you know that people have been watching you and talking about you.  They don’t like how you’ve been acting.  So you have to think about your life.

            Then you feel weak, real weak, like you are sick.  You don’t want to eat or talk to anyone.  That story is working on you now.  You keep thinking about it.  That story is changing you now, making you want to live right…. You think only of what you did that was wrong and you don’t like it.  So you want to live better.  After a while, you don’t like to think of what you did wrong.  So you try to forget that story.  You try to pull that arrow out….

            But you won’t forget that story.  You’re going to see the place where it happened, maybe every day if it’s nearby… If you don’t see it, you’re going to hear its name and see it in your mind.  It doesn’t matter if you get old – that place will keep on stalking you like the one who shot you with the story….

            Even if we go far away from here to some big city, places around here keep stalking us.  If you live wrong, you will hear the names and see the places in your mind.  They keep on stalking you, even if you go across oceans.  The names of all these places are good.  They make you remember how to live right.

 

            I can’t describe how moving it was to me to read this the first time, and how continually amazed I am by the worldview Thompson presents.  And yet – steeped though I am in a very different, Eurocentric tradition – I find similarities, in quality if not in degree, between the way I and other non-Native Americans think about landscape and its anchored stories, and the perspective Thompson describes.  In its grossest form, there are built structures (the Lincoln Monument, say, or Ellis Island, or the quarry down the road where the skinnydipping kids dove in and drowned) keyed to culturally shared stories that provide a kind of moral compass to our actions.  But there is nothing like the kind of orally transmitted cultural map of a given area’s physical terrain that most transplanted Americans can consult.  Instead, we have drawn maps.

            There is a profound difference between an independent artifact like a drawn map and the integrated worldview afforded by a detailed mental picture of the terrain.  Most obviously but also most significantly, the former is located outside of the person while the latter is internalized (and owned).  For land-based people who use them to augment their functional mental imagery, like the Gitskan and Wet’suwet’en of British Columbia or Pacific Islanders’ navigation charts made of sticks and shells, maps are translations of knowledge that is more real in their lived experience.  For many modern Americans, though, divorced as we tend to be from actual, daily interaction with the land, maps provide more detail than we carry in our heads.  And more authority.

            The question of authority is central to the movement from the oral tradition to the written and graphic world of maps.  Both meanings of the word pertain here.  Where, before, the creation of a mental map of a specific terrain and its endowment with value was a communal affair, written maps are authored by a cartographer and funded by those concerns who, frankly, stand to gain from its existence.  An oral-story-map doesn’t separate use and gain from creation, but a cartographic representation absolutely does.  I’ll discuss this issue in greater depth in the section on power, but for now, the issue of authorship of a map is a trade-off (one that can be overcome to some degree by communal participation in its creation) for the benefit it provides:  a map is easily shared by people who need not share a communal worldview and story bank that links their daily life and livelihood to the land.  The risk it introduces is that an independent document can come to be granted more validity – more authority – than the human knowledge banks it supposedly taps.  When this authority is granted to a person or agency with something to gain, the results can be devastating for the inhabitants of that place.

            Drawn maps are one way that individual authorship comes to bear on the relationship between people and the land.  For literate societies, the exploration of that relationship and the depiction of terrain is a time-honored form in fiction, memoir, travelogues, and works of natural history.  While a map’s authorship may be masked, most works in this tradition are not anonymous.  A single narrative voice composes a picture of a place and describes her/his relationship to it.  Leaving aside fiction, where nearly every brilliant work must be set brilliantly in place but where considerable license is provided to depart from what the author knows of a “real”, existing place, there are many examples that superbly convey both the particulars of place and the details of how its inhabitants relate to it.  Many of the best veer away from solipcism and bring in the views of others.  In any case, they remain the work of an individual consciousness.

            There is a small but noticeable trend in literature toward “deep-mapping”, described by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks as an “attempt to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place…”.  The phrase was coined by William Least Heat-Moon in his giant, informative, and deeply satisfying work PrairyErth: A Deep Map.  The tome (at 624 pages, what else to call it?) is an amalgam of sources and styles integrated by the voice and figure of the author himself as he walks and explores the 744 square miles and 3,000 human inhabitants of Chase County, the geographic center of the contiguous United States and “the last remaining grand expanse of tallgrass prairie in America.”  It is a superb work, a grand scrapbook, enormous and entertaining and comprehensive at the same time that it acknowledges the wealth of information and perspective it fails to include.

            Places and the stories they engender have a kind of fractal quality, in that the closer you look, the more – and more – and more reveals itself, with no end in sight.  William de Buys, a New Mexico author, acknowledges this with his slender book The Walk, a deep map of the terrain he’s walked daily around his home in El Valle.  It’s a book that celebrates the kind of close observation that yields hidden gems:  signs of trees peeled for the food content of their bark by former Apache inhabitants, circa 1842; early redirections of the river to serve the needs of settlers milling grain.  It is one man’s exploration of the terrain most beloved to him, and an examination of the way his neighbors, throughout time, have come to know and alter that landscape.

            As a writer myself, I’m drawn, of course, to written narratives and the treasures they contain.  But only a privileged few have the skills or wherewithal to compose an elegant treatise on the particular details of the land they know well.  Fortunately, nearly everyone has a story to tell and the air to tell it.  Least-Heat Moon walked his way around Chase County and collected those stories, sometimes summarizing for readers, sometimes letting the tellers speak in their own words.  His work is a gift to the literary world and to the people of Chase County, and I’m grateful to have it.  But how different would it look if a “deep map” were drawn by those people themselves?  Again, the question:  how to archive the bits and scraps of information, the stories and history and data, collabora-tively and accessibly?

            The development of Geographic Information Systems opens new territory for the attempt, and across the world people are trying, little by little, to make use of that new technology for this purpose.  Here in New Mexico I spoke at length with Denise Bleakly, a GIS specialist at Sandia Labs who spends a good deal of her spare time working with the New Mexico Acequia Association, faculty and students at the University of New Mexico, and community members, to map the Acequia Junta y Cienaga in Rio Arriba County.  The acequia – a network of ditches that follows the flow of terrain and carries water from a river or stream to distribute it to agricultural fields and orchards – is a centuries-old, historically relevant, cultural institution and landscape feature in the small communities of northern New Mexico.  These communities have a long tradition of subsistence farming and ranching and rely on the acequia to water the fields with snow runoff during the usually arid spring and early summer.  But the system is not without glitches, and water fights (sometimes armed, always heated) are common when there is less water available than need requires.  Much of the paperwork is archaic or missing, but the ditch itself, as depicted in early aerial photographs, provides clues to historical precedence. 

            Bleakly and her team have been working to map the acequia into a GIS that incorporates a wealth of information.  Using low- or no-cost software and hardware, they are creating a multi-media map that incorporates scanned images, contemporary digital photography, digital sound files and electronic written documents.  These various media are organized by GPS location and displayed via “pushpins” on an electronic map.            Not only can they document and display in this way the location of the acequia, its diversion dam, and related gates, but they are able to georeference plant and animal species found along the acequia (including pinpointing the location of invasive species that interfere with groundwater recharge), include cultural characteristics such as geographic place names and the locations of homes, shrines, fields, and orchards, and even present digital sound files of acequia parciantes (members) telling stories related to the landscape.

            Part of Bleakly’s impetus for launching this project stemmed from a desire to make the technology of digital mapping available to communities who sought to “preserve landscapes, and communicate what is unique about the community.”  She was frustrated by the increasing complexity and cost of cartographic software.  “This project is attempting to use software and equipment that is readily available, easy to use, and relatively low cost – and whenever possible, free,” Bleakly said.  The team relies on an inexpensive laptop computer, a digital camera, a simple GPS unit, and a cartographic software suite that includes Media Mapper and ESRI’s ArcView 3.X cartographic.  The software cost alone exceeds $1000, but Bleakly contends that ArcView trumps other, lower cost options because of its widespread use in environmental and planning applications.  The results can be displayed on the computer loaded with ArcView, or the maps (minus the sound files) printed on a large-format printer.

            This is an exciting project, not least because of the high degree of community involvement it invites.  A similar project on a much grander scale (and with a budget of more than $500,000), was completed in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park in 2006.  I spoke with Dr. Lewis Sharman, staff ecologist, the visionary behind the venture.  The project is a joint mapping protocol and resource inventory that explored – via volunteer “coastwalkers” trained to collect precise data – and archived the natural history of over 1500 kilometers of protected coastline in the park.  The database is intended to provide a snapshot in time, as thorough as feasible a picture of the flora and fauna along the coast, gathering data to record natural changes and providing a baseline against which potential damage from human-caused disasters (the devastating example of the Exxon Valdez oil spill fresh in their minds) can be assessed.  Each of the more than 21,000 ground photographs is georeferenced to what Sharman calls “a mother of a base map,” created by mosaicking high-resolution aerial photos into a digitized, interactive map using ArcView with the Image Analysis Extension and powered by MapObjectsLt2.  The team made an effort as well to engage the Tlingit tribe, traditional inhabitants of the area, in compiling a list of names and traditional uses for the plants and animals in an “ethnoecological encyclopedia” component to the project.

            While park personnel and the general public can access the database at computer kiosks throughout the park, the development team also succeeded in their effort to load full sets of data (maps and files, using coarser resolution of the photographs) onto a single DVD that can be read by any computer with Microsoft Access.  The problem this presents, of course, is that any updates or changes to the database result in newer versions of the DVD that must be printed and distributed to interested parties, and Sharman and his team continue to work toward ways to make the information available to researchers and members of the public via the Internet.

            The Acequia Junta y Cienaga Mapping Project began in 2003; the Glacier Bay project gathered data on the last of its transects in 2003.  Since then, web technology has exploded, and the use of ArcView or similar programs for these kinds of projects may become obsolete.  With the advent and accessibility of Google Earth – a program that brings satellite imagery to the masses, along with the potential for storing georeferenced data in layers – a new tool was introduced for archiving geographic data at the level of the community.  By combining the customizable features of Google Earth with click-through websites that contain other types of information (video and sound files, for example), the possibilities for online atlases and the like have greatly expanded.

            The idea of a complex, fully-functioning, interactive and collaborative web map is still in its infancy, but work is under way to bring it to fruition.  A number of free, web-based personal mapping programs have existed for some time (Platial and Frappr among them), but the introduction of GoogleMyMaps in spring of 2007 raised the ante.  MyMaps and its competition, offerings by Microsoft and Yahoo, permit KML files and foster collaboration among users – advantages that have downsides, as well.  Some of the difficulties are technological but others, such as privacy issues and differences in skill level among collaborators, may not be so easily overcome.

            Nevertheless, web maps offer profound advantages over conventional digital maps or paper versions.  They can deliver timely, changing information and avoid the distribution problems updates present with the other formats.  The software infrastructure is inexpensive, and they work across browsers and operating systems.  Using mash up tools, they can utilize different data sources.  They support hyperlinking, they can be personalized, and they can be accessed and edited by a variety of collaborators.  In seeking a format, or platform, for the Stories from Place project, these advantages mesh well with the desired qualities but leave some unfulfilled.  What are these desired qualities?

            First, the format should be permanent but not static.  It should be open to ongoing additions from community members (mediated by a designated and trained person chosen from the community itself, if possible); there should be an easy protocol for contributing, and some periodic prompt (annual StoryBlitz? A scheduled walk?) that would encourage people both to revisit the existing material and to contribute more, while affirming their relationship with their place.  Standards for permanence would likely include some manner of archiving the data physically as well as electronically.

            It should be accessible and affordable:  accessible to all members of the community, and, at their discretion, with those who don’t live there; affordable both in its creation and in storage costs and access fees.

            A variety of information sources and types should be encouraged.  Video- and audio-taped interviews (possibly following the same format as StoryCorps, which engages a family member or friend to conduct the informal questioning), data from government agencies, bibliographies of related reading, historical photographs, diverse maps, scanned documents, informal natural histories – the list of possibilities is endless.  Before beginning the project, a deep list of those possibilities should be compiled, and community members encouraged to be creative in drafting more.  Multi-media lends a freshness and immediacy to the project and should definitely be supported.

            It must be collaborative; the community should be engaged every step of the way, in as deep a way as feasible.  Children and adults should be given the opportunity to master the technological tools used.  The technology should be chosen for ease of use by non-experts.  Just as important, it must be beautiful, both in design and in intention.  It should be accurate, evocative, and pleasurable to peruse, as much scrapbook as map, and it should enrich the lives of the community members while at the same time storing information for later generations.

            Can any one format accommodate all of these requirements?  Probably not.  For that reason, it may require a hybrid form (wall posters plus interactive electronic map plus web pages of photographs plus events that celebrate specific landscape elements plus plus plus…).  Creativity is at a premium in designing a wide menu of options for communities to choose from.

 

 

4

            The previous two sections discussed, first, the pertinence of narrative to a full understanding of the relationship people bear to place, and second, the various technologies available for recording that understanding in a durable and ongoing fashion.  The sections that follow will consider a few of the lenses through which people develop that understanding.  What factors color our perception of place?

            It is almost impossible to look at a place without having the past intrude upon our vision.  History – both personal history, and the accrued cultural and physical history of the place – is always present.  Even those places we call wilderness are not exempt.  “Objectively, of course,” the historian Simon Shama writes in Landscape and Memory, “the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens.  But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture…. This irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, is all the nature we have.”  Wilderness is a myth, Shama says, and because we need to believe in it – need to believe that a part of the green world exists untrammeled by human interference – we can fail to see the traces of prior inhabitants.

            Sometimes that failure can have dire consequences.  Rebecca Solnit, in her book Savage Dreams, draws attention to the careful stewardship the Ahwahneechee band of Miwok Indians exercised over the land we call Yosemite now, lighting fires to clear brush for game to thrive and to release nutrients into the soil.  The open meadows full of wildflowers that John Muir remarked on in glowing prose were a direct result not just of God’s hand but of the hand of humans as well.  Similarly, land cover throughout the American west has been drastically altered by human customs and government policies regarding livestock grazing, hunting, logging, fire suppression, and water diversion.  If we don’t consult the past, we have no way of knowing how the landscape has changed over the years, and no way to predict the changes that might be in store for the future.

            When “settlers” land on a place, we often (through ignorance, mostly, but also sometimes by willfully donning shutters) do not see the evidence of others who have come before us.  In that way, we devalue the complex history of the place and discredit the claims any prior inhabitants may have to the land.  Decades or centuries later, when the claims no longer pertain because the descendants of those people no longer have the power to make them, the evidence of that history may be exalted to the status of monument or “traditional cultural property” and protected against change.  Occasionally those designations are assigned to places that are still contested.  The battle for those places and that designation – such as that for Taos Pueblo’s Blue Lake – can be fierce.

            Any honest examination of place isn’t complete without asking, who came before?  And what traces might they have left that remain imprinted on the landscape?  Sometimes these traces are as subtle as the tree scars William deBuys found in the bark of pine trees he walked past for decades without noticing.  Some places might have abandoned mines, or neglected irrigation ditches, or decrepit moradas or other structures that point to religious ceremonies that once took place there.  Asking what is not there any longer is a potent way to open the past.  Rebecca Solnit quotes Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Belief in defining the Tibetan word shul, or “track”, calling it

a mark that remains after that which has made it has passed by – a footprint, for example.  In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night.  All of these are shul:  the impression that something used to be there.  A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others.

 

             Sometimes the people best able to reveal the history of a place are those who have lived there the longest, and it is natural to privilege their stories over those of newcomers.  It’s a mistake.  One common flaw in oral history projects is their tendency to credit only elders with valuable knowledge.  While it is appropriately respectful (and practical) to consult older people first, it’s important not to stop there.  Any living, breathing place is accessible to people of any age and any length of residence, and some of the most telling stories come from people who have arrived from someplace else and carry that different perspective with them.  (I write this with the force and vigor of philosophical conviction, but I’m as subject as anyone – maybe more than most – to the charms of the old stories and the authentic value of their tellers.)  But young people remember how to trespass; people in their middle years offer the perspective of making a living in the current day; and immigrants – particularly those who have come not just from a different region, but from a different country or radically different lifestyle – may experience an entirely different place than the one that lives in the minds of those older, lifelong residents.  All of the stories have value.  All of them, together, will reflect more accurately on the place than any subset ever could.      

            There is a conflict between the impulse to pave over the past and the will to preserve it, and sometimes, in trying to do the latter, we succeed at the former – if not paving over, at least arresting it in a particular moment in time and encasing it in the resin of reverence.  Often those most subject to nostalgia are those younger people who did not actually live the reality of the thing they wish to see preserved.  David Harvey describes the dangers of nostalgia in an article on efforts to preserve the hedgerow, a traditional and iconic feature of the English countryside.  “Hedges,” Harvey writes, “have been reinterpreted in terms of their aesthetic and ecological value [as opposed to their actual agricultural use, revealed through oral histories taken from farmers], with little reference to any functional value and how this may impact on their development, location and form.  This enthusiasm to ‘museumify’ the landscape should be recognized as a present-centered concern, the latest construction of the countryside’s meaning and purpose.”  Harvey is no fan of the wholesale degradation of the land through modern agricultural practices; rather, though he recognizes the laudable intention of policy makers, he decries the attempt to create a sham replica of what was once a functioning, integrated element of a way of farming – and he bases his conclusions on narratives offered by the people who had used the hedgerows in the past.

            Harvey raises interesting questions about the English countryside that have consequence for policy makers and landscape interpreters worldwide.

Do we want to be remembered as a society for whom nostalgia and regret formed the central framework for our attempt to turn the countryside into a museum that conveys an agreed and singular story?  Or do we want to be remembered as a society that attempted to reconcile a myriad competing views, experiences, stories and meanings within a complex and multi-faceted countryside?  Rather than smugly congratulating ourselves for seeing the error in our (previously destructive) ways, and switching our policies from hedgerow removal to uniform hedgerow conservation, we should take a step back and explore the full variety and diversity of hedgerow meaning.  To this end, an oral history approach is invaluable in highlighting the personal, the ambiguous, the complex and seemingly implausible.

 

            He goes on to more general conclusions about the value of narrative in understanding place. Although his work concerns rural places, his points are equally relevant for urban neighborhoods.

We should endeavor to make oral history into more than mere ornamentation or interesting anecdote, striving to complicate our understandings of the countryside as a social construct.  In terms of policy relevance, an oral history project … can inform policymakers … on issues that will help them manage and deal with items, artifacts and entire landscapes that we have inherited from the past….  However, it can also foster debate at a more general level, asking questions about who we are and why and how we value particular things…. Oral histories may be able to animate and democratize policy, informing and helping to build policies for the future.  Although oral histories are ostensibly about the past, their contexts are found in the present, while it is the future that their agendas are always aimed towards.

 

 

5

            Harvey works out of a critical tradition that examines the role of materialist power structures in constructing landscapes – landscape, that is, visually representing cultural meaning and relations.  I’ll consider this in further depth in the next section when I consider landscape through the lens of work.  Here, my concerns are the power relations revealed by ownership; visible and invisible boundaries, and the concept of trespass; the power derived from brokering a vision of the landscape; spiritual power and access; and gender relations, particularly as they relate to the concept of the frontier and issues of scale.

            “We come and go but the land is always here.  And the people who love and understand it are the people who really own it – for a little while,” wrote Willa Cather.  Truly, there is a kind of ownership conferred by loving and understanding a place; but ownership as most of us know the word means, brutally, being in possession of the material right to be on a piece of “property”.  We attain that right by purchasing or inheriting deed to the land, or renting a place, or engaging in some business which invites our presence, or possessing the right as citizen to share communally owned land or roadways.  All of these power relations leave their visible mark on the landscape.  They register less visibly but resonate no less powerfully in the relations people bear to their place, creating terms of passage and trespass, fostering resentments and ambiguous conditions of fealty, physically altering our state – our breathing, our level of anxiety, our mental awareness – as we cross certain boundaries into areas owned by others.  In the city, where all, ostensibly, have the right to use the public roads and sidewalks, there are turf distinctions that supercede customary rules of ownership but prove no less valid for it.  Boundaries are the kind of thing everyone acknowledges but few discuss.  Asking the right questions to probe this loaded area would be essential to developing a clear and comprehensive sense of a place.

             Sometimes ownership alone gives a person or agency the right to broker a vision (create a map; define the conditions of entry; justify physical changes or the like) of a place.  Building developers do this as a matter of course; so do public land managers, and, on a smaller scale, so does every homeowner who plants daffodils or builds a garage without consulting her neighbors.  In America, private land ownership is sacrosanct and the right to do as one will, subject to some rules, with the property one owns is woven into the fabric of the culture.  This is a culturally construed right, though – and when groups or individuals outstretch the bounds of what their neighbors find acceptable interesting conflicts can arise.  This, too, is fertile ground for stories.  What happens when the cult leader buys the adjacent eighty acres (or six row houses) for a polygamist community?  What if the Forest Service decides to conduct a timber sale or controlled burn adjacent to your own acreage?  What if you want to dig a gravel pit and your neighbors object?  How about the crack house on the corner doing business at all hours in what used to be a quiet residential neighborhood?  Stories.

            Science, too – and certain kinds of assertions masquerading as science – can seize the right to define a place, as well.  Those who make maps are well aware of this opportunity.  My own bias is toward exalting ecological concerns over most others, but the way science has been used and misused to favor or oppose land use policies – interpreting raw data in subjective ways, without acknowledging the bias inherent in that interpretation – stands as a reminder that science, too, has a point of view.  Maria Lane clarifies the way in which a scientific reputation can subvert normal requirements for verification in mapmaking in her astute article, “Geographers of Mars.”  Similarly, the maps created for federal agencies like the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Environmental Protection Agency might look different than those created by scientists hired by a mining corporation or those engaged by an environmental advocacy group.  It is quite possible, as Mark Monmonier pointed out, to “lie with maps.”  It is equally possible to manipulate other types of data to reflect a particular point of view.

            A different kind of power than that conferred by ownership or scientific authority is suggested by the Willa Cather quote, though.  Not only geomancers and druids lend credence to the idea that land possesses a spiritual power, and that certain locales have a greater share of it than others.  Traditional landscape features granted a spiritual component include cemeteries and church plots, but a variety of others may exist.  I lived for a time in a house in Questa that, neighbors informed me, had been the traditional site for funereal wakes some decades before; the dead person was displayed in the central room, and the attendees circled in procession around the outside of the building.   There may be trails that are part of spiritual pilgrimage; ancient burial mounds or the like; certain trees or groves that are acknowledged to possess a kind of supernatural power, or that are simply acknowledged by the community as places of peace and rest.  Some mountains are held to be sacred, as are some bodies of water and geological features.  Some battlefields have not only historical value but spiritual importance as well, and other plots of ground are granted spiritual value for things that happened there.  And not all places of spiritual value are good; there may be frightening places as well, and places believed to be possessed by ghosts or evil spirits or an inchoate malevolence that brings bad luck to those who cross it.  Some of these may show up on maps as traditional cultural properties protected under the National Register, but most will not.  It’s hard to know what a community values, spiritually, and why, without asking for stories.

            Inevitably, any inquiry into power as expressed in landscape must address the ways social groups interact along lines of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender.  Each provides a shifting lens made more complex by the fact that no person can be adequately described by participation in a single social group.  The advantage offered by the narrative technique is that each person is ideally granted her or his own voice.  I say “ideally” because it is foolish to believe that everyone has equal access to a voice; issues around silencing, self-censorship, sensitive information, and private stories, will inevitably arise.  Part of this can be offset by the practice of allowing the interviewed person to choose his interviewer, granting them privacy during the recording session, and allowing them the right to grant permission to use only those parts of the interview they deem suitable for public exposure.  Even if stories aren’t made public, then, they’ve been collected and can remain in the possession of those community members to share as they see fit.

            There is one further concern to take into consideration in this category, and that’s the issue of scale.  Although not ostensibly subject to power issues, the question of scale – which, for these purposes, let’s talk about as how big a place qualifies as “place” – is intimately related to gender.

            How big?  Yes, but also where the place qualifies along various spectra from inside to outside, from private to public, from tame to wild, from domestic to industrial.  The domain of women has traditionally fallen on the left side of these dichotomies, and been accorded less value than the male counterparts of work and polis and frontier.  In framing questions regarding place, care must be taken not to reinforce this value judgment.  It’s important to remember that places inside houses are still places, and just as valid.  There is a corner of my kitchen where we used to store dog food when my old dogs were still alive.  It’s a cupboard we didn’t use for anything but the big sacks of chow, and every morning and every evening I opened that door and dipped a cup into the sack and fed the dogs.  This tremendously ordinary, mundane event and place is anything but banal or inconsequential in my memory.  When I stand there now I am flooded not just with memories of that small gesture but with a whole time of life, when our dogs were young and our kids were young and we were young and building the house, and the creek was dry for so many years because of drought and the floor stayed clean because there was no moisture to make mud to track in.

            J.B. Jackson, a geographer with a special affection for New Mexico, was the champion of the ordinary as it expressed itself in the landscape.  To grossly paraphrase, he said:  Don’t look for the truth of a built landscape in the grand cathedrals and public buildings, take a look at the parking lots and trailer parks and at the back yards of mechanics who work out of their homes.  How people use the land says more about how they really relate to it than all the wishful thinking wrapped up in grandeur and planning.  His insight didn’t appear to extend to the value of women’s use of land, but it is not difficult to jump from his sense of beauty and power in the more ordinary male activities to an awareness of the hidden beauty in women’s more traditional uses of landscape.

 

6

            Jackson provides a useful jumping-off point for the next lens to consider:  that of work.  By work I mean the ways in which the act of “making a living” – providing for material needs – can have an impact on the relationship between a place and the people who live or work there.

            For some landscapes, this will be the most obvious element of the landscape.  For communities situated next to a mine, for farming communities whose fields are partitioned in clearly defined ways, for communities that house the workforce of a major corporation, for factory towns or paper mills or military installments or neighborhoods adjacent to a busy port, the presence of that employer will overshadow many other concerns.  Even for those whose chief source of work is not immediately evident, the question of employment will yield stories that reveal much about the changing relationship people have to the land. 

            Sometimes the landscape features associated with work are more subtle.  For the community Denise Bleakly is mapping, as for my community of San Cristóbal, the presence of the acequia, while barely noticeable visually, is an enormously important factor in both its history and its current, day-to-day practices.  The acequia permits a traditional way of life – subsistence farming and small-scale livestock ranching (cattle, sheep) – that would not be possible without the network of ditches to bring water to fields and orchards in this arid landscape.  It serves as a nexus for community self-government and land stewardship; and the historical placement of the acequia, subject as it was to the fall of terrain, traditionally defined the areas of land that were agricultural and therefore off-limits to building.  I came to understand this from a story my neighbor Jose Leon Trujillo told me while we stood on a road that follows the side of the valley and gazed over the gentle sprawl of the village.  The fact that newcomers have built in that zone is evidence of the inconsistent perceptions of appropriate land use that any diverse community is likely to display.

            Ernie Atencio, a noted scholar and writer who heads up the Taos Land Trust, has spoken and written extensively on traditional Hispano land-use practices in the area, including that of the ejido.  Like the acequia, the ejido was a shared resource, a common portion of the forest or grazing land that was owned collectively and used according to a set of rules established by community members.  With the transfer of ownership of much of the southwest from Mexico to the United States, a new set of rules superceded the traditional ones and the ejido was lost to the community, sparking changes in social structures and altering the relationship of the people to the land in ways that continue to be felt a century later.

            Other communities, urban, suburban, and rural, will have other conventions that govern the intersection of land and work.  For communities whose primary industry is in decline, there may be remnants of the old retooled for new uses – as for mining communities whose out-of-work miners are retrained to mitigate environmental damage.  The question of the effect of work (particularly, but not exclusively, extractive industry) on the physical health of the landscape, on the water and air quality and the like, is another avenue to explore.  So is the community’s proximity to urban centers.  Some newer communities may have sprung up as bedroom communities whose residents commute to work in adjacent cities; others, initially focused around agriculture or other endeavors, may have become suburban as the city outgrew its boundaries and encroached on the surrounding towns.  Previously vibrant urban downtowns may have lost residents and businesses (and suffered a decline in their tax base) when commerce shifted to the city’s edges.  All of these conditions and the countless other possible scenarios are difficult to gauge by traditional research methods, but clearly apparent when personal narrative is used as a tool.

   

7

            A particularly useful lens to consider is the way language reflects a community’s relationship with place.  I’ll address this through three angles:  the use of place names and other descriptives; the history of occupation revealed through the language of origin; and the level and style of language employed by scholars, by policy makers, and by residents when talking about place.

            Keith Basso, in Wisdom Sits in Places, recounts the story of a Western Apache cowboy with whom he worked stringing barbed-wire fence.

I noticed that [he] was talking quietly to himself.  When I listened carefully, I discovered that he was reciting a list of place-names – a long list, punctuated only by spurts of tobacco juice, that went on for nearly ten minutes.  Later, when I ventured to ask him about it, he said he “talked names” all the time.  Why?  “I like to,” he said.  “I ride that way in my mind.”  And on dozens of other occasions when I have been working or traveling with Apaches, they have taken satisfaction in pointing out particular locations and pronouncing their names – once, twice, three times or more.  Why? … “That place looks like its name,” someone will explain.  Or, “That name makes me see that place like it really is.”(46)

 

            All of us are subject to this, sometimes – letting a name fly for the sheer pleasure of it.  “I’m going to Paris,” we say, or “He’s from the Yukon.”  Closer to home, using place names can have the same pleasure without the exoticism.  There’s a canyon I walk nearly every day called Timber Springs, and I say that name aloud whenever I can and silently, to myself, more often than that.  It’s a place I love to go, a place where a small stream threads among tall ponderosas, and its name evokes the look of the place as well as the warm feeling I associate with it.  When I use the name with people who share my love for the canyon, it confirms our bond.  Something similar happens in every city when people stake their claim by using a place name that refers to something that no longer exists.  “Turn right at the Old Blinking Light,” we say in Taos, though the light that’s been hanging at that intersection hasn’t blinked for ten years.  Sometimes place names honor the departed; I live on Carlitos Road, named for the father of the man who explained to me about building on irrigated land.  Other names call down blessings or protection, as in the frequent use of saints’ names for communities founded by Catholics.  Place names are dear to us (which is why it’s so heinous when a park or other public place is renamed for a corporate sponsor), and asking community members to add place names to a map is sure to spark a positive response and a lively exchange of stories – some true, maybe; others apocryphal, but no less worthy for that.

            The language or languages a community uses to describe its places is an enormously sensitive issue, and must be dealt with competently and respectfully.  In the matter of place names, an examination of their language of derivation can reflect the changing history of the region.  Denise Bleakly relates the work of Roberto Valdez, who mapped place names along a semi-abandoned acequia in the Espanola Valley, home to his family for multiple generations, and discovered names of Native American, Spanish, and English origin.  Often maps will print offensively Anglicized versions of the traditional names community members use; more often, place names of small features are omitted entirely.  Similarly, it’s important that the people gathering and recording these stories understand the language the community members speak most comfortably, so that nuances, jokes, asides and the like aren’t lost.  This may require a translator when the interview is finished, but the conversation itself should ideally be conducted in the language of the community member’s choice.

            There is a disturbing trend toward the loss of precision in terms that describe landscape features.  Once a rich lexicon that revealed an acute interest in the distinct regional landscapes in this country, this generation of speakers and writers has lost the words to describe – and even, it could be said, to see – the distinctions.  Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney have edited a book called Home Ground:  Language for an American Landscape in an attempt to revitalize some of the language.  Inviting distinguished authors to define and elaborate on terms like wrack line, nubble, muskeg, and vly, they have created a gorgeous resource for those whose love of language equals their love of place.  In a similar vein, the Stories from Place project could encourage community members to reach for rich descriptive language to tie their memories to the ground.

            Often it’s no trouble to get people to speak richly; regional vernaculars are loaded with humor and imagery and insight and a delight in the sound and flow of words.  The tone and level of their language, however, will be greatly affected by the tone and level of the language used by the person who introduces the project.  If the launch uses stilted or scholarly language, people could shy away from speaking in their own voices.  The example of J.B. Jackson, who spoke and wrote a nimble and muscular prose, is again useful.  Gwendolyn Wright, in “On Modern Vernaculars and J.B. Jackson,” remarks on Jackson’s “iconoclastic determination to look closely at words, places, and ideas that are too easily dismissed or taken for granted.”  Jackson, who is known for his celebration of the vernacular in landscape, was also a fan of vernacular speech.  “Vernaculars words and cadence are by no means dull,” Wright reminds us.

            What is said often resounds with an imaginative, playful, or surprisingly poetic ring; in antagonistic circumstances it can be provocative, even threatening.  Nor are vernaculars inevitably parochial, for they encourage the indigenous pride that leads to trade and cultural creativity as well as warfare.  Ordinary speech is a subtle art whose poesis and theory of practice generally operate below the surface.  The practice is social; the goal, at once instrumentality and pleasure.

            Sometimes, language is all we have left of a place we have left behind – the language of names and of memory – and the only means we have to pass on the sense of worth and of loss that surrounds those memories.  Even for people who may never have visited an ancestral or imagined place, the language can be enough to evoke the landscape.  For Jews displaced to the diaspora, the descriptions of the Holy Land are in Hebrew, not the everyday Yiddish, Rebecca Solnit relates, and through practice of that language “an indelible image of a then imaginary homeland kept those speakers from melting into their surroundings.”  She muses further,

 

I wonder sometimes about the merit of that miraculous tenacity, that adherence to a lost landscape and a senescent language.  A case could be made that they would be better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so they could wholly embrace the country they were in.  Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it. 

 

            I don’t know a more moving description of the plight of the immigrant than this double existing, this sense of being shadowed by a self and a place that can never be returned to but that does not cease to matter.

 

8

            The way it feels to leave a place, the way it feels to be in a place – this is the final lens, the one that could be called, broadly, the phenomenology of place.  This lens considers what it feels like to be a being-in-the-world, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously formulated it – what it feels like, smells like, tastes like; what it is like to see and be seen.  For landscape theorists and cultural geographers, the primary source for this school of thought is the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who stressed that embodiment is the basis of perception, and that self and landscape are inseparably intertwined.

            The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan works in this tradition.  In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience he discusses the difference between the feeling of connectedness people experience with their home place and the feeling of spiritual endowment or historical value some places seem to possess.

            A strong attachment to the homeland can emerge quite apart from any explicit concept of sacredness; it can form without the memory of heroic battles won and lost, and without the bond of fear or of superiority vis-à-vis other people.  Attachment of a deep though subconscious sort may come simply with familiarity and ease, with the assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time.

 

            These are the simple joys of childhood, the joys that come with having a body – nurture, familiarity, sound and smell – “homely pleasures” that may account for the deep impact the place where we lived as a child is likely to have on our adult memories.  Being a body in a place is one of the most deeply felt and difficult to explain elements of a sense of place.  Tuan talks about the way our earliest perceptions of moving through space colors our future experience irrevocably.  For the Wintu of north-central California, their language suggests an experience of place so deep that their bodies do not seem to exist independent of it; they use the cardinal directions to speak of their own body parts, such that

When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm.  When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm.

 

            This is subjective experience, but such that the subject is an inseparable self-and- place.  Tony Hiss describes the experience as “simultaneous perception… a more general awareness of a great many different things at once:  sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of touch and balance, as well as thoughts and feelings.”  The brain-body system responds to subtle differences in the amount and quality of light, to air quality, orientation, proximity to others, and a host of other cues, all of which combine to form a gestalt of place.  Some of us crave the experience more than others, and put ourselves in the path of it almost as an addict seeks a drug.  For a few, the need to feel their body collide with the physical world runs to extreme measures.  Daniel Villasenor, author and Shao-Lin trained monk and martial artist, described to me the art of running down mountains – a yogic practice intended to dissolve the separation between watching mind and doing body.  The monk sets off full-tilt down a steep hillside, heedless of danger, throwing himself at the mercy of the place.  Nurture.  Familiarity, turned on its head.

             Tuan talks about the sense some cultures have of being at the center of the world.  I know that feeling.  There is a spot, a derelict cemetery adjacent to a ruin of a house on the fringe of a near-forgotten town in southern Colorado, where I feel myself at the center of the world.  Oddly enough, it is a purely physical sensation.  I have no meaningful memories associated with the place, no cultural contingencies, nothing that draws me there but this inexpressible feeling of being centered, of putting myself at the center.  It doesn’t make me want to stay there but it keeps me returning.

            There exist a whole range of cultural taboos against speaking of the desire place can spark in us.  We can say we are homesick; that we love a place; that we feel at home there.  It is difficult to talk about the feeling that arises – as close to sex as to anything else – when we stand in a place that makes our bodies feel ready to explode with combined emotion-sensation.  There’s a James Wright poem that describes it.  It seems fitting to close this section with that.

 

A BLESSING     James Wright

 

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

9

            I write this sitting in an armchair in my home in San Cristóbal, New Mexico, and I’m reminded of the childhood practice of stating one’s address:  Main Street, my town, this state, the United States of America, North America, the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way… silly, and yet we need that somehow, a familiar way to locate ourselves, tether us to the patch of dirt that’s willing to have us reside there.  Call it here.  Call it now.  Outside a snowstorm rages.  A field stands in front of me to the south, and then a ridge, and then the land tilts up to become a mountain.  I belong here, and I am trying to understand – through these lenses, this effort – what that means.  What this place means, and what it means to me.

            Not everyone will be interested in creating an evocative cartography of their home place.  But for those who do, I hope this will offer a way to begin to think about it.  A year ago I sat in Paul Zandbergen’s office and he asked me, “What would you like this to look like?”  I’m closer to answering that now than I had been, but the final answer – the final product – will have to be a collaboration of all those willing to engage in the project.

            I’m grateful to them in advance, and deeply grateful to all of you who have taken the time to discuss this with me and point me in the direction of others whose thought has enriched my own.

 

Summer Wood

Notes

 

Page 2 – See Why Geography Matters, Harm de Blij, for a readable argument in favor of knowing where things are.

 

Page 4 – See “Interior and Exterior Landscapes:  The Pueblo Migration Stories”, first published in Antaeus, no. 57 (Autumn 1986), collected in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit:  Essays on Native American Life Today.

 

Page 10 – Silko, p. __; Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, p. 51.

 

Page 11 – Basso, p. 59.

 

Page 13 – Use of maps by land-based people, Lippard, p. 76.

 

Page 14 – Pearson and Shanks, quoted in “Deep Map”, Wikipedia entry.

 

Page 19 – Information on Google Earth, personal communication with Paul Zandbergen; information on web mapping, Wikipedia entry of the same name.

 

Page 20 – For more information on this not-for-profit organization that has recorded and archived more than 17,000 conversations, visit http://www.storycorps.net/listen/.

 

Page 21 – Design suggestions and guidelines available in Tufte, Envisioning Information.

 

Page 22 – Schama, p. 7.

 

Page 23 – Solnit, quoting Stephen Batchelor, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p. 51.

 

Page 24 – Harvey, p. 29.

 

Page 25 – Harvey, p. 30.

 

Page 28 – See Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps.

 

Page 29 – For a thorough exploration of traditional cultural properties and the protection afforded them by federal regulation, see King, Places That Count.

 

Page 33 – Basso, p. 46.

 

Pages 35-36 – Wright, in Wilson and Groth, p. 170.

 

Page 36 – Solnit, p. 47.

 

Page 37 – My understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s work is through mediation by John Wylie, Landscape; see p. 151 of that work.  Yi-Fu Tuan, p. 158.

 

Page 38 – Solnit, quoting Dorothy Lee, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p. 17.  Hiss, p. 3.

 

Page 39:  You can find more poems by James Wright at http://www.poemhunter.com/james-wright/.  An amazing collection of correspondence between Wright and Leslie Marmon Silko is available in The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, published in 1985 by Graywolf Press (currently out of print).

 

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