Finding and Preserving People and Place in the Text

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 19^th 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 19^th 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.