23 June 03
Blood and Water
Coming back East is a major exercise in juggling for me… I have family in Maine, now, and all my friends in Boston where I used to live. I’m also taking advantage of this trip to do some genealogical research, which means travelling to New Hampshire and Philadelphia—and spreading myself thinner over a two-week period than I usually do.
Yesterday, however, felt a bit like I was back in my former life. I took a trip to Plum Island in northern Massachusetts with two birding friends, and we sloshed our way through the muck into Plumbush marsh looking for seaside sparrows (no luck, though plenty of sharp-tails), edged quietly down a boat-ramp trying to find the clapper rail that was clacking incessantly (saw it several times as it collapsed itself vertically through reeds and grasses), pottered about the New Pines to the overlook where we saw a tricolored heron, and generally ate salty and sweet snacks in between forays. The weather wasn’t good (showers all day, which to me were heavenly) so few other birders were around, but I still ran into old friends all along the way.
It’s a dislocating experience to catch glimpses of a time that is past. I have left people behind me each time I’ve moved somewhere, which has been often, and these friends get connected in my mind with the place I left. Sometimes they move too, and the past gets fragmented, almost ruptured. We are a culture that is just manic to move. When I read Fred’s posts on Fragments From Floyd about how he’s stayed pretty much in the same region all his life, I’m astonished and a little envious. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m pursuing the naming of dead ancestors: if I can’t be rooted in a place, there’s no way of escaping the fact that their blood flows in my veins…
22 June 03
Last Bastion
This afternoon I went on a cycling ramble around Davis, a bit of a cultural field survey in preparation perhaps for a later Ecotone joint blogging exercise on suburbs and place. I was riding north on Mace Blvd. at the eastern limits of Davis, north of I-80, when I saw the above bird perched on top of a sign reading “Rick Price – Custom Homes”.
This is a burrowing owl, a species which is in the process of being extirpated from the Davis area, owing to its proclivity for living in sparsely vegetated plots inhabited by ground squirrels, the same sort of land that’s ideal for building things like housing developments and college football stadiums. This bird was part of a pair inhabiting a thin plot of ground, which looked like it was recently scraped, between the road and a tomato field. This is just east of the upper-middle class McMansion tract houses comprising Mace Ranch, which was the scene in the year 2000 of the developer deep-disking burrowing owl habitat without any notification. The city is suing the developer, but such actions are most likely far too late for the population of the birds.
21 June 03
Kindred
On Thursday I met up with Beth from Cassandra Pages on my way to a family visit. We both looked at each other as though we couldn’t quite believe it. I was in her place-the place she writes about, thinks about, grows, breathes, inhabits. It was an honor. New England this year is lush and outrageous-the pine trees explode in yellow clouds of pollen and the next rainshower coagulates it on the windshields of cars in a sulphur-like glop. I saw a common loon on a nest on the way over.
Above is a photo of the two of us looking at the Ecotone Wiki and posting a joint thing, which I never even do with Numenius—felt like stirring up the dynamic of a 60s commune, in a way.
20 June 03
Red Planet in the Morning
In two months time, on August 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than in any time in the past 59,619 years. Every two years, Mars is favorably placed for observing, being on the same side of the Sun as we are, and this time around we are approaching a record-setting opposition of Mars. Now is the time to start watching in a telescope the lead-up to this event, as the planet, rising in the early morning, is already 60% of its maximum apparent size in the sky.
Getting up at 4 in the morning is not something I am wont to do, but for some reason I woke up at that time, so I got up, poked my nose outside to check the sky and wind conditions, and thought why not? I hauled the 7” reflector outside to get it cooling to ambient temperature, went back for a little bit of a doze, threw some clothes on, and started observing.
Telescopic observing is good exercise in the discipline of learning to see. Anybody expecting magazine-quality images in the eyepiece will be disappointed; visual details are instead subtle and take much patience to tease out. In the case of viewing planets, one is constantly battling atmospheric flickering (known as “poor seeing”), and one’s impression of surface detail gets built up over many tens of minutes of observing.
The conditions were good this morning—it was cool and the air was pretty still. I think such conditions are typical in the summer here, which bodes well for Mars-watching in the next couple of months. It’s getting up at that hour that’s the challenge. Above is a rendering based on a sketch I did at the eyepiece. The South Polar Cap was quite evident, as was a darkish area in the Southern Hemisphere.
Some critters were up too and kept me company. A coyote howled once at the passage of a freight train, and a western kingbird sung for a bit while it was still quite dark.
19 June 03
Food, Glorious Food
Staying in a house where two of the other occupants experienced, as I did, English boarding school food (three different schools, identical kitchen) has led to some interesting musings on what the effect of that has been on us: we all agree that we spend more than the average bear on groceries. In my case, I also go to the local co-op several times a week in order to have fresh food all the time, as green as possible, organic mostly, and not inexpensive. Nor do I eat meat.
I can’t help it. When you’re still recovering, decades later, from battered spam and spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants in a long tube shape, served with custard), which you had to gobble quickly, where the kitchen’s response to the oceans of stodge they crammed down the gullets of ravenous teenagers was rhubarb stewed to oblivion, and where the only fresh fruit was orange quarters at half-time in field hockey matches (too bad if you weren’t on the team), you develop a certain aversion to institutional food. The odor of overboiled cabbage that lingered through the wooden hallways until the next installation of overboiled cabbage made going to smell the corpse plant last week an almost nostalgic experience for me.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out on Saturday. Apart from the magic, the only thing that distinguishes the experience of these children from our own boarding school experiences is that the food’s good. So we eagerly await the publication of the book (I’m getting it delivered here and left copious room in my bags for it) in an effort to rework the memories.
18 June 03
The Magician of Walker Hall
I stopped in today to see Dolph Gotelli’s installation at the Design Museum on campus, entitled “34 Years of Fantasy and Play”. Gotelli is a design professor here who is noted for teaching his students the role of fantasy and imagination. The midterm assignment in a course he taught this spring involved aliens invading the quad north of the administration building; each student’s alien was to be at least three feet tall, resemble nothing at all seen in Star Wars or Star Trek, and had to leave Earth by 5 PM the day of the installation. Gotelli is also a collector who would be the envy of any woodrat. He has what is likely the world’s largest collection of Christmas memorabilia, including a suitably ancient fruitcake, and he saves almost all his correspondence, a sampling of which, entitled “Forest of Bureaucracy”, was pinned onto the center columns of his installation.
His motto is “To know is nothing; to imagine is everything.” His students design toys, pop-up books, edible tablescapes, read fairy tales, and profoundly engage their sense of whimsy. And judging from his students’ correspondence, sandwiched between notes from deans and recalcitrant department chairs, some carry this sense with them long after they leave college.
The question I have is why is this sense of whimsy and imagination so rare in the material designs expressed in our culture? Why don’t the sides of automobiles sport gargoyles, or at least something other than a monochromatic paint scheme? Why is there a trend towards ever more restrictive deeds and CC&Rs in housing developments—heaven help if you paint your house in burnt sienna and goldenrod, let alone hang your skirts on the laundry line? Occasionally exceptions break through, such as the 1999 cow sculptures in Chicago, but the exceptions prove the rule.
After all, if you met a large visiting papier-mch dragon or perhaps even a giant squid on your path to work, wouldn’t your heart be lightened a bit?
17 June 03
A Maine Interlude
There’s a Baltimore oriole singing outside… which means I’m not in Davis anymore. The blue jays, the chickadees, the chimney swifts nesting in the abandoned smokestack of the old shoe factory, and the ruby-throated hummingbird that’s hanging around my sister’s rock garden are all constant reminders of how different this place is from the one I live in. The people dress differently, say little. Yup.
The house prices are different, too. The house across the street is for sale. It’s a three-bedroom that in Davis would be termed a “cosy fixer-upper,” but it also has this barn round back that’s been converted to include a granny flat. In Davis something like this would go for over $400,000; here, it’s $79,000. And it’s been on the market for a year.
Some day, I suppose the urge to own property will overtake me, the way they say the urge to have children overcomes women at some point. Since the latter has yet to occur in my case, and I’m fast running out of time for such things, I’m skeptical about the former. But every so often I get a twinge. This little house, with its unpretentious faade and its proximity to my family, whose younger members are growing up faster than I can keep up with in yearly visits, is definitely the occasion of one such twinge. It would be completely impractical to move here: there’s no work for either of us. And midsummer masks the feeling of resignation occasioned by the fifth large snowstorm, let alone the fifteenth…
16 June 03
Summer Arrives
...and the temperatures are well in the 90s. The students timed their departure well to avoid the heat. At least the campus, with nobody around, is placid for a week or so, until summer session starts.
Yesterday I returned to my sketching spot from the other day on Putah Creek and did a little digiscoping. The white-tailed kite didn’t stay at his perch long enough for me to get the scope set up, but I spotted this black-crowned night heron with a nest overhanging the creek. Not a bad location—- it’s definitely afternoon dip weather.
15 June 03
Of Space and Place
Here is another entry for today’s collective set of weblog posts for our Ecotone wiki. Excerpts from these posts can be found here.
A year ago last November, it was late in the afternoon in a meeting in Houston on Internet map services, and drifting off, I wrote the following tanka:
World a geodatabase.
Putah Creek saunter—
A hawk enters my haiku.
Who is the wiser?
The division, which my little poem hints at, between modern spatial technologies and the almost mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality is what is leading me to write about place. As somebody professionally involved with the former, I find I need the latter for balance.
I have always been interested in natural history, and aware of the long tradition of natural history writing. This led me to study zoology in college and for awhile in graduate school before realizing I wasn’t meant to have a career as an evolutionary biologist. My search for another discipline to enter led me to geography. Why not? I liked the holism of the field, and have loved maps since the beginning (the tale is that I taught myself to read at age three or so from studying maps). I could combine interests in conservation, maps and mapping, and computing, by working on geographic information systems.
But I also began to read more widely in geography, and learned about the humanistic side of geography in addition to the technical side in which I was specializing. Authors such as the landscape historian John Stilgoe and his teacher J.B. Jackson became favorites of mine. My old interests in natural history thus expanded to wondering about the cultural meanings of a landscape.
The danger in our modern world of geodatabases, remote sensing technologies, and GPS mapping tools with sub-meter accuracies, is that what cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in computer maps gets forgotten about. These spatial tools are eminently technologies for the managerial mindset, designed to support the archetypal ‘decision-maker’. Lost here is any notion of place as narrative, or place as history.
I was always one for a saunter anyway. As John Stilgoe puts it, cycling along at 11 miles an hour is an ideal way to explore the landscape (at such a speed one can gaze straight through picket fences), and wandering on bicycle or foot is deep in my bones. If every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to light.
15 June 03
Water and Old Stones
This entry is part of the first collective blog on place that is being organized through the Ecotone Wiki. We are all writing, today, about what led us to think and write about place. The wiki can be edited by anyone, so please join in if you’d like!
In November 1991, recovering from a marriage that began in Cambridge, England, and ended in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to Venice (Italy, not California). I had travelled quite a bit, but I had never taken myself on vacation before-I had never been alone in a new place recreationally-and I equipped myself with a notebook, some rolls of Tri-X, and contingency plans to visit friends near Milan in case I got too lonely.
Foreigners have been making the pilgrimage to Venice since at least medieval times and have written exhaustively, sometimes well, mostly not, about this unique city. Rather than oppressing me, this knowledge was quite liberating: I was absolved of the need to say anything original whatsoever. What I did not expect, though, was how great a teacher Venice would be in the art of opening my eyes.
I anticipated writing, introspectively, finding myself (whatever that means), basically wallowing in this somewhat decaying, watery city of boats and old stone. The act of walking and seeing and looking and walking some more became more joyful and exciting with each step (and there I was, hoping for some good old-fashioned melancholy!). Every street held a surprise, each canaletto reflected a minor balcony above it, every photograph was perfectly pre-framed by the city. Take nothing, nothing at face value, look harder, she whispers. It’s a mask. Look behind the wall, up the stair. In the boatsheds by the water… It’s so trite, it’s so unoriginal, but it’s so true: Venice is a magical city. She’s also by far the most prominent personality in her own history (which could never be said of, say, Florence).
My journal scribblings were hastily reworked one afternoon in my tiny hotel room as I pored over them. They can get organized differently! I need not be tyrannized by dates! There are themes! Burano is not Murano because… Torcello watches them all from afar… Venice is like an abalone shell… I dashed out that evening on the vaporetto to buy some blue hand-marbled paper and I began taking photographs differently: I was going to make my first artist’s book.
I did not neglect the oceans of Tintorettos but found myself getting impatient to head back outside, to see the light at ten, noon, three, six… to see the fishermen coming in from the lagoon. To see the women negotiating the floods on rickety planks during the aqu’alta without ever getting their expensive shoes wet. To watch how this city just HELD itself in its setting, in its history, in the tragicomic knowledge of its future demise. In its place.
I have the Venice Book, still, a large and unwieldy affair with a blue calfskin spine (inexpertly thinned with a skiving knife) and an italic calligraphy whose spikiness makes me wince, just a little. The photographs stand up twelve years later, though. Whenever I see the book I relive that tiny epiphany in that tiny room.
The question as posed—How I Started Thinking About Place, And Why I Started Writing About It—tempts me to start cataloging a list of thank-yous, academy-award style, to places I have known that have taught me, well, place—the pre-Roman ruins at Tiermes in Spain, the Cotswold rookeries, the salt marsh between Cohasset and Scituate, Massachusetts. But for me the writing came first, and Venice taught me the connection between them. By writing I learned to think about place, which in turn made me SEE it. And the cycle continues… looking makes me listen, makes me alive to the infinite transformations around me that make a place THIS place.