Pondering on Place

Discussion has been growing between Fred of Fragments From Floyd, Lisa from Field Notes, and ourselves about what blogging about place might mean in a larger context than simply one’s own interaction with a geographical location in which one finds oneself (by choice or need). I say “ourselves” but I have been quite silent so far in the discussion. This is an attempt to explore what place means for myself, Pica, as opposed to Numenius.

Both Lisa and Fred live in places that are ordinarily described as “picturesque” by the majority of us. We don’t. We live in Davis, which is a college town (more like a city, now) of about 65,000 people in the Central Valley of California. I used to joke to friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Barbara-the previous two places I had lived-that Davis was like a cross between Berkeley and North Dakota.

Agricultural land surrounds the house we rent, the guest house of a ranch house. Our landlord owns 40 acres of prime agricultural land which he leases to Campbell’s Soup. The wind blows all March and April; once the fields get plowed, that translates into a lot of dirt blowing around. The field immediately to our south is owned, somehow, by the Shriners, who have no compunction about getting it sprayed. Spraying, in this context, means application of pesticides by small plane, usually very early in the morning.

Yet Davis also has its progressive side, with one of the best food Co-ops in the country, a City Council that passed a dark-sky ordinance in addition to building a tunnel for migrating toads, and a well-educated, vocal, politically active (if predominantly white) population.

I do love living here, though, despite the dust and the pesticides. I love being able to ride my bicycle to work; my two-mile route takes me over Putah Creek, along some horse pens, through the Arboretum (always good for birds) and fetching up at the core of UC Davis, with its huge aged oaks. I love being able to live car-free (we do own a car for heavy shopping and short trips, but it’s still my first, and I’m 43 years old). Over 100 miles of bikeways in a town this size make it a haven for bike nuts—we qualify, owning six bikes between the two of us; the tandem cost three times as much as the car.

The Putah-Cache Creek Bioregion Project is exploring in greater depth the appeal of this “less picturesque” landscape. Spring migration in the Central Valley is muted compared to the outrageous excesses of Cambridge or even Santa Barbara, yet we have come to feel much more bonded to the birds around us here—our resident barn owls, the Swainson’s hawks, the meadowlarks and Zonotrichia sparrows in winter, the blue grosbeaks and loggerhead shrikes in summer, the ever-present, ever-raucous yellow-billed mapgies. These birds ground me, organize my understanding of the seasons. They reinforce my sense of place.