by Lucy S.
I wrote this in May 2010 at a time when I was grieving losses. Recently, I found myself talking about some of the ideas in it with a couple of different people, so I decided to put it up here on the blog. It is another essay that means a lot to me and speaks again for the many connections I make between care, labor, and writing.
Both history
and nature are extremely complex, complicated, and nonlinear. What would a chaotic, nonlinear, nongendered
history with a different plot look like?
Would it be as compelling as the linear version, even if that linear
version were extremely nuanced and complicated?
A post-modern history might posit characteristics other than those
identified with modernism, such as a multiplicity of real actors; acausal,
nonsequential events; … many authorial voices, rather than one; dialectical
actions and process, rather than the imposed logos of form; situated and
contextualized, rather than universal, knowledge. It
would be a story (or multiplicity of stories) that perhaps can only be acted
and lived, not written at all.
Carolyn
Merchant – “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture As a Recovery Narrative”
And
yet I must write. I have started this
essay over and over again, trying to write about place, loss, possibility,
remembrance – all things that have been dominant themes in my life. Physical locations, living beings, and events
mesh together to create a holistic environment – which is what place is,
really. Places, after all, are not just
the dirt under our feet. They're trees
and other plants, waterways, rocks, lay of the land, animals – and they're the
people and whatever those people create together, both tangible and intangible. If you cut all the trees down, or even half
of them, is it still the same place, or is that previous place gone? Are the plains the same place that indigenous
tribes and buffalo lived, or was that a different place?
For
me, the main story about so many places, with the people and everything else in
them, has been that they are going away.
I cannot understand how to make meaning when I feel that so much is
fleeting. This has been one of the
primary concerns in my life – how to value people and places enough to stay
connected to them, to abide with them long enough and often enough to get our
bearings. And then, if we get our
bearings, maybe we can actually stop everything from slipping away at a much
faster speed than is accounted for by any natural processes. We have to know
people and places deeply, to not have it drilled into us that one person or
place is about as good as another, that they're all replaceable.
But
as crucial as this issue is for me, I kept writing myself into dead-ends. So I gave up, and wrote about the tremendous
impact Walden had upon my life when I first read it and continues to
have upon it. I had almost eleven pages
written, although I worried about whether that premise – that Walden changed
my life – really constituted a valid thesis.
How can it be that these issues which are fundamental to our lives can't
be written about if we can't shape them into linear narratives with good,
strong theses? Why must the
“multiplicity of stories … only be acted and lived, not written at all”? Must there be such a chasm between our true
lives and the writing we call worthy and scholarly?
Here
is what happened in the middle of my essay about Thoreau's effect on my
life. I came home on Tuesday night, and
found out that yet another person is going away – not dying (thank God), but
moving away, which is a chronic fact of life in the U.S. And so this essay became a jumbled narrative
– with an interruption which would not normally be seen in the finished
product. In the past, I would have
plodded onward, and if the quality of my writing deteriorated as I lost focus,
the reader would have no idea why. But
lately I have become deeply interested in letting myself back into my
writing. I have been pushing back at
academic norms which generally demand a written product in which the process is
hidden and the knowledge I contribute is not “contextualized,” as Merchant
says. So I will try to create something
meaningful by writing through this sense of loss which is overshadowing me
right now. It is a way to stay intensely
focused on this essay while writing truthfully.
This
person is my friend – a friend I have only known since last September, but who
has profoundly changed my life by being
interested enough to listen to other (spoken) jumbled narratives, responding
honestly, and gradually helping me know I could do things that I didn't know I
was capable of. Thus, he transformed the
nature of the place in which I know him. It became a different place, a place
in which I feel more at home now, more part of a community. I think that because
I felt valued and liked, I in turn interacted differently with other people in
this place, connecting more fully than I had before.
And
so I grieve this loss that is coming, while questioning whether I am
overreacting. I'm not a child; I'm not
even a standard-age college student.
Adults, after all, are supposed to adapt, to not be too dependent upon
their friendships. We are supposed to remind ourselves that we can always make
new friends. I've even tried telling
myself that this is a ridiculous, immature response, that I will be fine. But I
know that this place, in the fullest sense of the word, where I know
this friend will be gone forever. There
will be a different place which looks a lot like this one, but some of these
particular inhabitants and interactions will be gone.
My
parents hoped that I would be fine every time we moved – at least fourteen
times before I moved out at age sixteen.
Everywhere I went, I made some new friends. But after they moved me away from Lancaster,
I argued until they gave up and let me move out. They had moved to a San Diego suburb.
My
dad was a postal carrier, and after he transferred from an L.A. suburb to the
Lancaster post office, he realized that Lancaster was a terrible place to
deliver mail. There were long routes through
which carriers were literally running.
One broke his leg leaping over a bush as he cut through someone's yard,
not knowing there was a drop on the other side.
Another ripped his fingers off on a driving route when he put the mail
in the mailbox out on the street, and then pushed on the gas pedal while his
hand was still in the mailbox. Lancaster
people were more apt to let their dogs out, so carriers got bitten a lot
more. The town was more rural back
then. Since it's in the Mojave Desert,
my dad found it unbearably hot delivering mail there in the summer, something
he hadn't considered enough before transferring. The union was weak, so
supervisors were always pressuring carriers to move faster, and then
lengthening the routes when they did. No
wonder my father had to get out of there.
A friend helped him transfer to Del Mar post office.
That's
the way these things are – people and places going away; they're no one's
fault. Or, rather, they're the fault of
some amorphous entity which we can't begin to figure out how to resist. Back then, when I railed against it, I was
railing against 'life.' That's what most
grown-ups said. That still seems to be
the story most grown-ups are telling.
The
thesis I wanted for this essay is that capitalism makes things go away. There is the amorphous entity, and at
least it's more specific than 'life.'
It's not as simple as that, however.
Maybe it's whatever drives capitalism in people. What is that thing that becomes production
for the sake of production – the logic of the machine? Why is our society organized in ways that are
considered 'practical' when that practicality seems to hurt so many people and
other living beings? What is this 'practicality' even for? It is supposedly driven by the urge to live
and be comfortable – some kind of survival and pleasure instincts, which
manifest themselves in more complicated ways in people as society becomes more
complex.
And
yet I wonder if there's also some bizarre rush to death, as if people sometimes
just want everything to hurry and get where it's going. I think of this when I hear people
complaining that old people are living too long now and using up too much
Social Security. I imagine a society
that has become one long conveyor belt (not a very original metaphor, I know),
with people pushing the buttons to make it move faster so that everyone can
hurry up and pile up in their coffins and get out of the way. Is it whatever makes a herd of animals follow
the leader off of a cliff to their deaths?
Or is it an urge to dominate, manifested as cutting down, or organizing
into neat categories, or bending living beings to one's will, or killing?
When
we began reading the works of nineteenth century 'nature' writers this
semester, I thought all environmental degradation was economically driven. I still believe that's the dominant force,
but I now realize that when we interrogate the issue further, it's not easy to
understand what then drives the economic motive, and which other motives become
entangled. By studying these authors'
literature, so interwoven with their
specific places, we've been able to delve into what was lost and how, which
modes of resistance they used to protect their environments, and which of those
approaches offer us the best potential for changing the destructive course
we're on. I've had to face the fact that
whatever drives the unhealthy, unsustainable aspects of U.S. society (or its
earlier incarnations) is not just capitalism, or the need to survive, or the
desire for pleasure, or an urge to dominate or die or kill. Instead, all of
these systems, instincts, and impulses come together in messy mixes which no
one can fully understand.
Massacre Motivations?
The
pigeon massacre in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers is one of those
messy mixes. In the end of April, a
“flock that the eye cannot see the end of”
arrives. The villagers' motives seem straightforward as they gather
whatever weapons they can find. One
character says, “There is food enough in
it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month, and feathers enough to make beds for
the whole country” (245). The men and boys go out to shoot, and then bring out
an old “miniature canon” for “an assault
of more than ordinary fatal character” (246,247). How can it be “of more than ordinary fatal
character”? What kind of hunting is more
than “ordinary” hunting?
“None
pretended to collect the game,” Cooper writes, “which lay scattered over the
fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with the fluttering
victims” (247). If they have only “pretended” to be there for
meat and feathers, but do not now care to gather the birds they've killed, what
are they really after?
Is
“more than ordinary fatal character” complete extermination? Certainly, they aren't consciously trying to
wipe out all of the pigeons. Yet Natty
Bumppo (the 'wild' pioneer), who has lived there and watched the pigeons
migrate for forty years – long before the settling of this fictionalized
version of Cooperstown, New York – implies that this may, in fact, be what
drives the killing. “I don't relish to
see these wasty ways that you are all practysing, as if the least thing wasn't
made for use, and not to destroy” (249).
Clearly, he's saying that they aren't just interested in the pigeons for
practical reasons – for “use.” Does the
abundance of the pigeons explain their “wasty ways”? Bumppo seems to imply more here, with his use
of the word “destroy,” but perhaps he is warning they will inadvertently
“destroy” all of the pigeons with these ways.
Is an abundance of pigeons, however, (or trees or fish, as mentioned
elsewhere in the novel) really an inducement to heedlessly destroy them? The killing continues. Finally, after multitudes more are slain, one
of the characters shouts, “Victory! Victory! We have driven the enemy from the
field” (251). Ultimately, we're left
with bloodlust as the motive, a joy in killing “the enemy.”
Cooper,
writing this novel in the early 1820s, must have struggled with similar
real-life scenes of pigeon massacres he'd seen.
He addressed the destruction he witnessed by embedding it in a story to
dramatize what was going away. He seems
remarkably prescient to have included this scene.
Chipper
Woods Bird Observatory says passenger pigeons were “once probably the most
numerous bird on the planet …. Population estimates from the 19th
century ranged from 1 billion to close to 4 billion individuals. [They] may have reached up to 5 billion
individuals and comprised up to 40% of the total number of birds in North
America … Over hunting and the clearing of forests to make way for agriculture”
were the main factors in their extinction.
The last known pigeons in the wild were shot in 1900, and the very last
pigeon died September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. ( http://www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/passpigeon.htm) What does it mean for us and these
eco-systems that this many birds that were here on this continent have
disappeared? Somehow, despite Cooper's
efforts to change his fellow Americans' “wasty ways,” the pigeons were lost,
along with a multitude of other living things.
What
I am struck by is that there were other possibilities when Cooper wrote about
passenger pigeons. It is strange to read
these accounts, knowing that they were written at a time when this outcome was
not inevitable. Do we read this
literature just to mourn what is lost or is rapidly going? Is there anything we can do to stop this
pervading sense that so much is hurriedly going away and we don't know how to
stop it?
It
seems that neither the narratives of abundance nor the warnings of impending
loss work to stop either utter squandering or a defeatist surrender to what is
seen as unstoppable. Perhaps we can
understand to some extent the squandering that comes from a perception of
plenty (although the mass pigeon slaughter is too much for most of us to accept
now). What is harder to understand is why a conception of things vanishing
would not impel people to struggle harder to save what is in danger of being
lost. I think, however, that by the time
people note what is happening and perceive something as going away, they are
already traumatized by that perception.
We then tend to veer between paralyzing sadness at events that seem
beyond our control and an attempt to accept the inescapable. We try to adapt, because that is what healthy
people are supposed to do.
Bearing the Marks of Our Places
It
seems that adaptability has been more highly prized in most Americans than that
tenacious, deep loyalty to particular places with all of their flora and fauna
(including the human variety). In his
essay, “Place and Pedagogy,” David Orr argues for a curriculum centered around
place and “the study of relationships between places.” He contrasts what it is to be a “resident”
and an “inhabitant” of a place, focusing on “our relationships to our own
places.” This is the difference between
happening to live somewhere and being truly of a place, developing a
deep enough connection to have that place become a fundamental part of one's
identity, so that it is us and we are part of it. “Inhabitants” Orr writes, “bear the marks of
their places …. Uprooted, they get homesick” (92).
I
am keenly interested in how we who have already been uprooted and traumatized
can learn to sink our roots into a place. Although it is an important effort,
we need more than a curriculum for children in school to address this
issue. A good portion of our society has
already been profoundly damaged by having a tenuous connection to place in the
fullest communal sense of the word.
Furthermore, there are relentless economic forces at work, ripping out
the roots people do manage to grow. With
these combined forces working on people, what happens when we are homesick
wherever we are? Will we keep wandering
in search of our 'real' home, proud of ourselves for our high level of
adaptability?
In my case, I did not adapt well to my
parents' moves, and they were still reeling from their own traumas. They kept moving to find a decent job for my
dad and a 'real' home. My dad grew up in
the heart of Los Angeles, never going anywhere because his dad worked six days
a week and was in a bad mood on the seventh. He detested L.A. and its palm
trees with the many rats that lived in them, so he wanted only to escape
it. His family lived in a two bedroom
home. There would ultimately be nine of
them, including his five siblings, and my grandmother's mother who, as an old
woman, had to leave her home in New Jersey to live with them. My dad and my uncle slept in the attic,
boosting themselves up from the kitchen counter through a big hole my
grandfather had cut over the refrigerator so they could get to their
'bedroom.' They walked a plank to keep
from stepping through the living room ceiling, until they got to their twin
beds, on bigger boards. “It was hot as
hell in the summer up there,” my dad always says about it.
In
contrast, he idealizes the New Jersey he left at age six and never saw again.
He and his twin brother picked berries near their home. Every summer, they and their mother stayed
with her aunt and uncle in Mayo, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay. Their great-uncle took them out crabbing. My
grandmother said she was different there.
She had 'people' there. But my
grandfather, who had already left England at age sixteen, decided they all had
to move to California. My dad remembers
his grandmother crying on the day they piled in the car for their cross-country
move in 1946. His grandfather hugged
them goodbye and made their mother promise to bring them back to visit. When my father and uncle were 14, she finally
visited by train, but couldn't afford to bring them along. Her father asked, “Why didn't you bring the
boys?” Then he died the following year.
That's the story in our family – a sort of Garden of Eden narrative that
keeps playing out generation after generation (on my mother's side as well, in
its own way). For one reason or another,
we lose people and places that we cannot quite get over, our own forms of
paradise.
Perhaps
this was why my father was primed to be intensely loyal to another paradise, if
he could just find it again.
Formal Preservations: Yosemite
The coniferous
forests of the Sierra are the grandest and most beautiful in the world, and
grow in a delightful climate on the most interesting and accessible of mountain
ranges … however dense and somber they may appear in general views, neither on
the rocky heights nor down on the leafiest hollows will you find anything to
remind you of the dank, malarial selvas of the Amazon and Orinoco ... John Muir – Mountains of California
(139).
Like
Muir, my father was utterly enthralled with and fiercely loyal to Yosemite from
the first time we went there. I love the
boastful superlatives of Muir's language here: “grandest” and “most beautiful
in the world” and “most interesting.”
Although he observed and studied as a scientist, he clearly also fell in
love with Yosemite. He is even putting
down other forests in comparison here, places he had never even been – which
certainly has its problematic aspects, but again, demonstrates his intense
emotional attachment to that particular place.
It was not his original home; like my father, Muir went there for the
first time in his very early 30s. And,
like Muir, my father, uses an abundance of superlatives when telling people
about Yosemite (“the best place in the world”).
Furthermore,
although neither of my parents had high school diplomas, this place has taught
them things, as it did Muir. They were
inspired to read a great deal about Yosemite and John Muir's role there. They also learned the value of conservation
by being in a place which would have looked very different if left to the
forces of the free-market. We knew we
could go back there, because it was a National Park. We would never be denied access because it
had been sold. It was more of a home
than the places we lived, which were always changing. It was a place where we forged roots, even
though we could only live there two weeks a year.
This,
then, is the answer which comes to us from John Muir – to formally preserve
some places so that they do not go away.
Certainly, there is tremendous value in the concept of common areas
owned by all. My family and I were all
healed to some extent by our two weeks every year in Yosemite when I was
growing up.
And
yet it has not been a perfect solution.
William Cronon, in his essay, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” points out
that the people who already lived in these areas which would be made into
national parks – the Indian tribes – lost their homes. They were forced onto reservations. Their deep ties to those particular places
were forcibly cut because of “the myth of the wilderness as 'virgin,'
uninhabited land. (79) Furthermore,
Cronon notes: “To the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization
but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the
wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade
responsibility for the lives we actually lead” (81).
Obviously,
the national parks are important common spaces at this point, but at best, they
can only preserve what is within their borders, and even that will be affected
by mass environmental degradation in the rest of the world (through climate
change, for example). We must find a way
to take care of the flora and fauna (again, including humans) in the places we
call home most of the year.
Thoreau, Walden, and Wilderness Where We Live
Our village
life would stagnate if not for the unexplored forests and meadows which
surround it. We need the tonic of wildness – to wade sometimes in marshes where
the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk … At the same time that we are earnest to
explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild … We need to witness our own
limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David
Thoreau – Walden (213)
At
first glance, this may sound like the same kind of problematic conception of
wilderness which Cronon is critiquing, but there are some crucial
differences. One obvious difference is
that this “wildness” is right there where he lives, surrounding the
village. And when he says “all things
must be mysterious and unexplorable,” he does not say a certain percentage
should be set aside to retain these characteristics but rather that somehow
“all things” would retain them. When
“land and sea” are “infinitely wild,” it means they are not sanitized and
dominated, that we accept natural processes.
Indeed, further down in the passage, he exemplifies this wildness in
“the vulture feeding on the carrion,” and even the stench of “a dead horse in
the hollow” (213). This is, as Cronon
calls it, a “wildness [that] can be found anywhere” (89).
Because
he is looking for it, and has defined it in these terms, Thoreau sees it all
around him. Furthermore, he is intensely
loyal to his particular place, not because it is “the grandest” and “most beautiful”
as Muir later says about Yosemite but because it is his home and he knows it
well. About the pond, he writes, “The
scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though very beautiful, does not
approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented
or lived by its shore” (121). He is not
trying to promote Walden Pond as a tourist spot; rather, he is modeling a kind
of relationship for people to have with their own places.
As
much as I was capable of it at the time, I had this kind of loyalty to
Lancaster. It would seem
incomprehensible to most people to reject San Diego for Lancaster, but I loved
Lancaster. Yes, it was the people (my
grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my friends and their families), but it was
also the Joshua trees, the intensely blue skies, the snow we still got in the
winter (back then, but no more), the mountains in the distance, the dry air
which felt clean to me. It was my home,
in its totality, embedded in me.
But
I had no physical space to live in where I belonged. My fast-food job didn't pay enough for me to
be a roommate, so instead I was just 'staying' with people temporarily,
sleeping on their couches.
At
seventeen, I lived with my boyfriend and his family. Even back then, I was drawn to environmental
improvement, albeit in rather simplistic, non-ecological terms. Their backyard was hard-pack dirt, like
concrete, with huge piles of debris from some other time, but I imagined
something else back there. I convinced
Isaac and Angie, his twelve-year-old siblings, of my vision, so every morning
before they left for school, the three of us would go out in back and move some
junk into the regular trash container.
It was an absurd plan that would have taken years at that rate, but we
were oblivious to that reality and worked on it for months, laughing together
in the cold morning desert air. I had to
move out long before we made any serious progress back there, though.
Ultimately,
I left Lancaster itself to get away from their brother. Did capitalism make him abusive? Again, it's not as simple as saying,
capitalism made me lose Lancaster as my home. Certainly, economic issues played
a part in which options were available to his mother years before when his
father was beating her. When she finally
did throw him out, economic necessity forced her to work full-time, leaving her
kids to fend for themselves to a large extent.
And my own precarious economic situation exacerbated the fear I felt
there at that time, so that it seemed the only reasonable thing to do was
leave.
This
may seem far afield from Thoreau's relationship with Walden Pond and the land
around it, but what I am saying is that being loyal to a place isn't enough to
keep our roots there safe. I loved
Lancaster; my father, uncle, grandmother, and her mother loved New Jersey. Like Thoreau, we have loved particular
places, but unlike him, we were unable to stay in them. Our 'Waldens' got left behind, where we could
not get back to them. Even if, after
enough years, we were able to move back to places with the same names and
geographical locations, they were not the same places we had left. Roots had been severed, and we had missed the
natural process of living there in the intervening years.
Furthermore,
since I’ve shared a small piece of the experience I had living with my
boyfriend's family, in a sense, their “authorial voices,” as Merchant would
say, are part of the “many” in here now, and it is obvious that being attached
to Lancaster did not solve all of their problems.
Years
later, after I had read Walden, living out in the sage
brush foothills of Southern California in Aguanga with my five kids, part of a
struggling marriage, working on a house that was an enormous amount of work, I would
think sometimes that Thoreau never had to contend with the emotional and
economic challenges we were all facing.
I loved Walden – but where was Thoreau when I brought my niece,
Rose, and her boyfriend, William, to live with us because they had nowhere to
live? What answers did he have for
someone like Rose, who did love a place (Lancaster, like me) but who had been
through so much hell in that place that it wasn't doing her any good to stay
there?
She
was my cousin's daughter, but we called each other aunt and niece, since my
cousin was an only child. And my cousin
was a horrible mother. She beat her four
kids until they were too big to let her anymore. She began leaving them alone from morning
until late at night once she thought they were old enough – no food, sometimes
no heat, if she hadn't paid her utility bill and it had come to the point where
they'd turned off the gas. I learned the
worst of these things after Rose got closer to me, when she'd call me up, drunk
and sobbing, wanting to know what was wrong with her and her siblings to have a
mother who had treated them like that.
Her brother, Ricky, stuttered severely and dragged his right arm and leg
because he hadn't breathed right when he was first born. She told me that her mother used to rage at
Ricky, screaming “retard boy” at him over and over while she beat him. Rose felt that they were defective somehow,
that there was something ugly in them to even have lives like that. And so I would sit through those phone calls
for hours at a time, making no excuses for her mother, offering no platitudes,
but telling her that it had nothing to do with her and her siblings – that my
cousin was just a terrible mother, and it wasn't their fault.
Rose
was an incredibly honest person – not in the way our society means it (she had
done plenty of shoplifting), but in that she spoke the truth as best as she
knew how, and she craved the same from others.
And in that respect, she had something in common with Thoreau, though
she never read him and probably could not have slogged through Walden. In Walden, Thoreau emphasizes the
importance of telling the truth. “No
face which we can give a matter will stead us at last so well as the truth ….
Say what you have to say, not what you ought.
Any truth is better than make-believe” (220).
I
know that this chaotic essay cannot become the Rose and William story, but I am
not ready to leave them behind yet. They
came to live with us in Aguanga, which isn't much of a town in the sense of
having public places where people interact. People live out there on small
acreages, mostly in mobile homes or other modest structures, often with strange
collections of what look like junk to anyone else but them. Some people just call it desert, but it's
different than Lancaster, almost 2,000 feet above sea level, with clusters of Cottonwood
trees around the occasional creek, and Canyon live oaks growing only in spots
where the micro-climate apparently suits them best. The temperatures are much
milder than Lancaster, too.
Our
four acres had some Cottonwoods and a few large pines up by the house, plus
several Eucalyptus trees out by the dirt road.
Visitors would say appreciatively, “It's so quiet,” but there were lots
of sounds there, too. Some were different than city sounds – Jack’s and Bob's
rooster every morning 'next door', the donkeys across the road braying – and
some were not so different, like the birds or wind or dogs barking or a car in
the distance. In the late mornings,
Jack's or Bob's anguished cries to their dog (“Skippy! Skippyyyyyy!”) would
float through our open windows. Skippy
couldn't know that coyotes can snatch up little dogs who run off out there, and
Jack and Bob apparently couldn't figure out how to prevent that daily
drama. We would shake our heads, roll
our eyes, and laugh, echoing their desperate yells.
The
house needed an overwhelming amount of work.
We had bought it on a contract-for-deed at an unheard of price in
Southern California, because it was a single-wide mobile home with a framed,
stucco home enclosing it and doubling its square footage, and because it had no
permit. Well, there were also the small gaps to the outside the previous owner
had thought it was pointless to cover, because “if mice wanta get in, they're
gonna get in anyway.” This is not
actually true. We painstakingly found
and filled every hole, ripped out dusty old carpet that reeked of mouse urine,
and gutted the kitchen with mouse droppings under the broken cabinets and
nonworking stove.
By
the time Rose and William got there, we had already ripped out the remnants of
the mobile home from the inside, gotten rid of the mice, and rebuilt the
kitchen. There was no one else to do the
work but us. I should have loved Aguanga for its own sake, but in the
beginning, it had mainly been a way for us to get back home to California. It was through their eyes that I began to
love it.
Aguanga
was a resting place for William and Rose, a time to heal at least some of the
tremendous trauma they carried inside them.
William had lived in El Salvador with his grandmother until his mother
paid the coyotes to bring him up
through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. when he was eleven. She’d left him there as an infant. William
finished growing up in L.A., even went to school there, but never got legal
residency in the U.S. William had no
place where he felt at home, other than in the memories of his childhood with
his grandmother. When he and Rose got
together, she became his ‘place.’
But
their relationship was troubled, even at our house. Sometimes when they argued, he would lock
himself in the bathroom and cry. Rose
would pound on the door and tell him he was acting like a “fucking baby.”
I
believed I was showing my kids that you don’t throw people away, that you do
what you can to help them. And most of
the time, Rose and William did well there.
Rose couldn’t drink alcohol because she couldn’t get to any stores to
get it without us. They were cut off
from the world in some ways. She made
salsa from the tomatoes and jalapenos we grew.
Rose often boasted to her siblings, when she talked to them by phone,
that we “all ate together at the table, like a family.” They loved sitting outside by themselves in
the evening, smoking and talking.
Sometimes we came home late at night to find them curled up in the sofa
sleeper bed watching Disney movies, like The
Little Mermaid. It was exhausting to
have them there at times. But they were safe for a little while.
Finally,
they left us and returned to Lancaster. They wanted to get jobs. Rose wanted
William to just use a fake social security number so he could work, but he was
terrified. William was afraid of so many things. One night, the police caught him stealing a
broken Game Boy from a parked car. He
and Rose had argued; he’d gone out, walking and crying. Later, he wrote that he’d taken it to have
something to bring back to her, since he couldn’t work or give her
anything.
William
was a model prisoner during his few months in County Jail, but when he was due
to get out, Immigration took him and held him.
Before they deported him, William sent a card to Rose. He said to tell us that the months they’d
lived with us were the happiest in his life.
Then we heard very little, until one day, his younger sister saw Rose at
the Lancaster Mall and said William had been shot in the head and killed in El
Salvador. Someone had tried to rob him. About two years later, Rose, too, was
dead. She’d been drinking and taken a
turn in the foothills too hard, rolling the truck she was driving. With no seatbelt on, she was thrown, slamming
down on her back. They said she’d
probably died on impact. That was almost
three years ago.
What
do people like Rose and William have to do with Thoreau? And what good can his philosophy and example
do them? It took me a long time to
realize that I was asking this question in the way that people ask, “Where was
God then?” This is unfair and
unreasonable, of course.
Because
Thoreau attempted to act out his philosophy and then engaged in the act of
writing about it, we as readers often hold him to a higher standard than we
would hold another ordinary human.
Somehow, it seems that when an imperfect person chooses to write a
public text, particularly one which attempts to interrogate and answer how to
live and make meaning, we expect perfect, all-encompassing answers.
Do
we subconsciously relate to the author as God in his text? Perhaps it is the act of reading which sets
the stage for this – the hearing of someone else's voice in our head. When that voice vigorously proposes answers
to some of life's most essential questions, it is understandable that it takes
on a God-like authority – one we may accept too readily as 'gospel' or reject
too indignantly because of the author's imperfection.
In
fact, Thoreau’s willingness to act as a flawed human may ultimately be what
makes Walden most relevant. If only people who have answers for
everything have the right to look for and propose answers to some of the most
crucial questions for humanity, then none of us can ever take on these
questions. Conversely, when we accept
that a flesh and blood person like us wrote Walden, that an imperfect
person chose to act, we become more able to act ourselves rather than only
critique. We grow a little in that
realization, as we recognize that we cannot all sit on the sidelines, only
reading about heroes (idealized or failed) grappling with our biggest problems.
Thus,
I write this now as a flawed, even traumatized person. Rose, William, my old boyfriend’s family, my
father’s family, and my friend are part of the “many authorial voices” because
we all embody the dilemma we face as a society.
Damaged places produce traumatized people, who in turn do not know how
to prevent more damage to or heal the places they inhabit. We become caught in this vicious cycle. ‘Nature’ and ‘the environment’ are not apart
from us. In order to break the cycle, I
begin by telling the truth about this interconnection.
But
I want to be more specific about Thoreau’s value. I have shared some of my own “chaotic,
nonlinear history” – some material facts of my life. Back in Aguanga, I read what I later
discovered to be the most often-quoted passage in the book: “I went to the
woods, because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I
came to die, discover that I had not lived” (65). I wanted to fully inhabit those days, which I
think is closely akin to fully inhabiting a place. I did not live in the woods, or alone. In fact, so little in my life description
would seem to have anything in common with Thoreau. But my closest relationships have never been
based upon superficial similarities.
What is it, I wanted to know, to “front only the essential facts of life”? Is it to be pushed right up against what you
think you cannot do, and then live your way right through the middle of it,
without “practis[ing] resignation”?
Thoreau
writes that he “wanted to drive life into a corner, and if it proved to be
mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its
meanness to the world.” Those words
enabled me to make meaning of what I might instead, with a different definition
of that experience, have interpreted only as drudgery. We regain our power when we decide we are “driv[ing]
life into a corner” instead of feeling that it has driven us into a
corner. My life there was “mean”
sometimes, but Thoreau was saying I could find significance in the “meanness”
by taking it on and telling the truth about it, by not avoiding or fearing
it. “Or if it were sublime,” he writes,
“to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it...” It makes sense that he places these two
qualities of life together, the “mean” and the “sublime” because feeling the
one allows us to feel the other. When we
do not numb the “meanness” we are able to see and feel the “sublime” in our
days, and explain what it is that makes it “sublime.” This choice to make
meaning of our experiences, to be fully present for them, enables us to “learn”
whatever it is that the present has “to teach.” (65)
Words as Place and Resistance
In
this sense, words themselves can become a kind of place when we are homesick.
The right literature profoundly affects us. That is its power in the
world. Thoreau writes in Walden,
“A written word … is something at once more intimate with us and more universal
than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life
itself. It may be translated into every
language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips”
(73).
I
am moved by this concept of intimacy and universality – the way in which I read
Thoreau, and his words speak inside of my head, while I am synchronously aware
that he, the individual once as alive as I am now, wrote these words to
communicate with us across time – a person with other words spoken in his head
as he read authors from times before his.
With written words, the author connects with the multitudes, but
connects with them one by one, as individuals.
The
residual life and breath in those words as they are read make real for us the
fact that people came before us and will come after us, and that we make
meaning through our mutual connection and commitment to one another, even
across time. If we can grow to love what
we know of someone through his or her literary communication across time,
perhaps we can imagine someone else like us experiencing this life and breath
in the future, connecting through written words across space and time. This suggests a way to increase our
relationship with and commitment to present and future human beings.
The
truth is, then, that all three of the 19th century authors I’ve
discussed in here have contributed partial answers. Cooper told stories of what
was being lost, as I have attempted to tell my own stories of loss. Muir focused on protecting wilderness, partly
as a place for people to go and experience some kind of restoration. In the same sense, though it was no national
park, Aguanga was a sort of wilderness where Rose and William could retreat and
heal for a time. Thoreau tried to put
his philosophy into action and then write about it truthfully. I am trying to do that now, in my own way.
These
are imperfect solutions. We cannot stop
people and places from going away much more quickly than they need to with only
our words. Yet we have to start with our
words, and they have to in some way resist the status quo. We must connect our words to our lived
experiences or they become only an abstraction.
By capturing
only a fragment of reality, unrelieved abstraction inevitably distorts
perception. By denying genuine emotion,
it distorts and diminishes human potentials. For the fully abstracted mind, all
places become ‘real estate’ or mere natural resources, their larger economic,ecological,
social, political, and spiritual possibilities lost to the purely and narrowly
utilitarian.
David Orr –
“Place and Pedagogy”
In
the same way that places become “real estate” or “natural resources,” my friend
is going away because those who have power over the material realities of his
life view him first and foremost as only a “human resource.” They do not care
who he is in the fullest sense and what kind of place he creates by being one
of the inhabitants here. In our society, the people who have the most power
over other people tend to view living beings and our places in these abstract
terms. They believe that they are the
‘practical’ ones.
And
so it is capitalism and whatever impulses exist in people that bring such a
system into being and sustain it, that makes people and places go away. I am not going to apply the narrative of
abundance to this particular loss (telling myself that there are always more
friends to be made), nor am I going to be paralyzed by the sadness of this loss
and so many others that have come before it.
Like so many other people, I am traumatized and fragmented, but I am
making this text that I am writing right now a place where I can put some of
myself and the people and places which are part of me back together.
Perhaps
if we all keep speaking and writing our truths about what is happening, we will
hold onto our people and places. Carolyn Merchant is wrong; these
“multiplicities of stories” can be written and must be written. In so doing, we expand the ways in which they
are “acted and lived.”
Works
Cited
Cooper,
James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New
York: Signet Classics, 2007.
Cronon,
William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature.
New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1995.
Merchant,
Carolyn. “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature.
New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1995.
Muir,
John. The Mountains of California.
Berkeley, CA: The Speed Press, 1977.
Orr,
David W. “Place and Pedagogy.” Ecological
Literacy: Educating Our Children for a sustainable World. San Francisco,
CA: Sierra Club Books, 2005.
Thoreau,
Henry D. Walden. New York, NY: W.W. Norton
& Company Inc, 2008.
