Creature of the Shade

the sensual geographer's problem

Can you conceive of the entire Earth?  If so, can you combine that with an awareness of your own place on it?  It's a spiritual task, a self-stretcher, much like meditation.  The poet Dale Favier writes:

If you want to find me an incipient scientist, find me a child of ten who, with all the force of her imagination, tries to conceive of the Earth, to really conceive of it, to feel it in her bones, as a ball flying through space. She fails, of course, but she tries again, and there's a prickle of euphoria and panic as she gets near it. And then she tries more, conceiving of it as both tiny – as we know it to be, an insignificant planet of an insignificant star – and as vast, as we know it to be, huger than anything our mammalian imaginations were ever designed to hold. Nothing, I would say, is more attractive to the mind that takes up science than this moth-like flutter at the burning light bulb of the inconceivable.

In my forties, I am still at work on this girl's task.  I want to look out the window and see the whole earth. 

The overture of Google Earth, which shows you the Earth-as-ball before it will zoom to "you," dramatizes the goal but can't do the work for me.  To even begin, I must be in the landscape, seeing the cues that my mind can extend to form the larger picture. 

Perhaps I stand on a beach in eastern Australia, and try to perceive the curvature of the earth, sense the locations of the other continents, and thus form an image in which I'm like St Exupéry's Little Prince, standing upright on top of a large ball.  In fact, I can't even sense New Zealand, let alone distant North America.  All I can do is know, from studying the geometry, where these continents are, how many degrees below the horizon and in what direction.  With enough analysis I can point toward the ground and name a place on the far side of the planet that I am literally pointing to.  This dialectic between spherical and Cartesian geometry is as close as a I get to grasping the entire earth together with a sense of "here."  But sometimes it works.

The same obsession causes me to notice features of my location that nobody else finds interesting.  Vancouver, for example, sits on dramatic natural boundaries in both directions.  Obviously there's water to the west and land to the east, but the landscapes north and south are different in a way that helps me see large distances by looking out the window.  South of Vancouver the West Coast is about mountains and large valleys, the latter defined by vast interior rivers like the Fraser, Columbia, and Sacramento.  Look north from Vancouver, though, and everything changes.  A bank of steep mountains comes right out to the coast, and marches along it from here to Alaska.  This is a glacer-and-fjord landscape -- like you'll find in Chile, New Zealand, or Norway -- with virtually no flat land and few opportunites for settlement.  The seam between these great landscapes is right at the city itself.  Vancouver's southern boundary is the northernmost interior river, the Fraser.  It's northern boundary is the southernmost fjord, Burrard Inlet.

This feature makes Vancouver a great vantage point.  I can look either north or south and seem to perceive the full range of that landscape.  I look at the great wall of mountains north of Vancouver and know what's behind them: 1000 miles of similar mountains walling off sea from land, pierced with fjords much like this one, all the way to Glacier Bay in Alaska. If I do this often enough, I can start to feel this reality, despite the limitations of what I can see.

So with this bit of knowledge it's as though I can actually perceive 1000 miles of coast.  It doesn't get me a felt image of the earth; I still get only a corner of North America.  And it's not a direct sensation, of course, like the Little Prince's view of the ball beneath him.  It's knowledge hooked up to sensation, like a trailer to a truck, but in the right light it almost works.  That, after all, is what Favier's little girl is doing: taking something she knows and trying to perceive it.

This, too, is why California will always be a nation to me, unitary and indivisible, regardless of the cultural waves that flow across it.  For years I drove all over California as a consultant, and found myself rejoicing in the simplicity of the Central Valley, the long flat expanses that stretches north-south through the center of the state.  Because the Valley is so easy to grasp as a single place, it gives California the structure of a cathedral: a great central hall with numerous lesser rooms around the edges.  The coastal valleys and mountain passes are so many cloisters, easily sited in the mind with respect to this central immensity.  To a sensual geographer, it's the Valley that makes California perceivable in its vastness from almost anywhere within it, so that the little girl's task, applied just to the state, is almost possible. 

blood for a thimble

Suppose you're walking along a path in a forested city park when you see very tall man walking toward you, seemingly covered in blood.  It's all over his shirt, face, hands.  His intense, stoic gaze is directly on the path in front of him, as though he won't see you even when you pass.

Do you (a) turn and run screaming in the other direction, (b) keep walking but quietly call police on your cellphone, (c) stop and ask "Heavens, are you ok?"  In Vancouver's idyllic Stanley Park, the prevailing response appears to be (c), which is a nice surprise.

In fact, the two ladies had already passed me when they finally turned and asked "are you ok?"  Perhaps they needed to get close enough to verify that the blood was flowing from my own newly-carved wounds, and thus was probably mine.  Still, it was a nice gesture.

Was the blood worthwhile?  To judge, one must know the objective: Rubus parviflorus, the thimbleberry. 

Photo: Northern Bushcraft
 
Though obviously a Rubus, like all raspberries, the thimbleberry is scarcely a food at all.  It comes off as a fragile cap, hollow inside like a raspberry, but barely a millimeter thick.  Connoisseurs place it lightly on the tongue and then press it slowly against the roof of the mouth, letting its sharp taste flow outward like a ravishment.  To me the taste is a mixture of raspberry and rhubarb, but stripped of sweet distractions and ramped up to an ecstatic pitch.  Individual berries can seem as different as sopranos, as though inviting legions of specialized fans.

All this flows from a fruit so thin that it's almost not there.  It yields almost no nutrition, no substance, no energy, nothing but a pure sensation.  It's easy to declare it ethereal, an image of perfection, like the single virgin in a tower whose beauty ennobles a lifetime of knightly gore.  So there's something noble about risking bloodshed for them, something that would be lacking if mere blackberries had been at stake.  (Blackberries, too, would muddy the tale with their own potential for violence.  They have fierce thorns, while the thimbleberry goes, as the botanists say, "unarmed.")

So yes, the gashes in my face, which would have been tough and sexy if it had been a bicycle accident, arose from a berry-picking accident.  The archetypal scene:

Having climbed into the thimbleberries and successfully found bliss there, the time came to get back down.  Most middle aged men will understand the psychology of the moment, when one confronts the need for a 1.5m jump over the ditch to the gravel path.  In short, the required jump looks like something that the man remembers doing many times, and he momentarily forgets that the last of those times was more than a decade ago.

So he crashes.  The front foot hits the far side of the ditch, and as it slides down the man slams headlong onto the path with some forward momentum.  His chin, left temple, and the brow above his left eye all touch reverently to the gravel and slide along it for a few inches, surrendering to its sharpness. 

When he comes to rest, he notices first not the blood, but that his water bottle is lying on the path right in front of him, spilling slowly into the dust.  It feels tragic, a waste, as though the water were blood.  But he can't stop it in time, and when he finally grabs it it's been reduced to a useless husk.  This moment is so poignant that the discovery of real blood, all over his shirt and pouring from his face, feels like tasteless exaggeration, too much literalness spoiling such a lovely metaphor.

But were the thimbleberries worth it?  If I were back in a British-influenced country I'd put cost-benefit analysts the question, as the British can quantify the "welfare value" of a perfect autumn breeze.  But I'm in North America, where cost-benefit analysis is cruder.  So the thimbleberries, like the virgin in a tower, are simply not in the same dimension as the blood and gore, and I can rejoice in the impossibility of comparing them.

Rubus spectabilis: salmonberry spectacles

In this rushed and shriveled Pacific Northwest summer, I race to catch up with the salmonberries.

They're almost gone now.  If you're in the Northwest and haven't stopped for one, you'd best get into the woods or thickets today.

Some botanical names both inform and sing.  I'll never enjoy saying Pseudotsuga menziesii for douglas-fir, but my mouth loves saying Rubus spectabilis almost as much as it loves tasting them.  (Rubus is the genus of raspberries and blackberries, so this is the spectacular Rubus, which it is). 

Flamboyance is rare in the deep, dark woods, but salmonberries are as individual as drag queens.  Each bush produces berries of its own distinct color.  They're all somewhere on a spectrum from yellow to purple, but in any thicket, the sameness of each bush's berries stands out against its neighbors.  It's a nice effect when the bushes are all tangled up in each other, like lovers refusing to dissolve into oneness.  Darker colors develop from a yellow base that remains in the interior, so that darker berries appear to be glowing from within.

Ripeness has nothing to do with color; hikers who don't know this tend to leave the tasty yellow ones.  Instead, ripeness is signalled only by fullness, and a tendency to begin very gradually coming loose, hanging evocatively from the mount, ready to break free.  The sense of availability is almost erotic.

Opinions on taste differ, but I seem to have enough inter-sensory links that I can taste visual beauty up to a point.  The sight of a salmonberry going into my mouth must affect my taste of it.  To me, those little green hairs on each drupe are just a nice bit of fiber, and the taste seems to glow from within, as the berry does.

permanent weather and the civic image

Rain in Seattle.  Sun in Los Angeles.  Fog in San Francisco.  Wind in Chicago.  The endless summer nights of Helsinki or Edinburgh.  How could we navigate without our stereotypes of the urban air and sky?

In his odd novel Voyage to Pagany, the great modernist poet (but not novelist) William Carlos Williams tells of a self-absorbed man riding through Europe by train.  In Chapter XIV (adequate fragments here) he's delayed in the middle of the night in Genoa.

Genoa.  The name sounded hollow, depressing as the coldly sulphurous gallery through which he was passing, baggage in hand ...

The placename is a sponge for first impressions, and never quite shakes them off.  For Williams's hero, "Genoa" means "night, don't know anybody, don't speak the language, poor me."  Or to reduce this (literally) benighted city to one sentence:

I will never see the sun in Genoa.

But here's what's odd.  When I read this chapter in graduate school, the only experience I'd ever had of Genoa was of passing through it at night on the train.  In fact, that remains my only experience of Genoa, so that even now, when someone says "Genoa" I imagine a city at night.  Northwest Italy isn't high on my list of travel destinations, so it's quite likely that I too will never see the sun in Genoa, and hence never dissociate the city from this absurdly accidental recollection.

Professional thinkers-about-cities would never reduce their impression of a city to a story of something that happened to them there.  But everyone else does this quite naturally; when I ask a person on the street what she thinks of a city, she'll often mention some joyous or traumatic recollection, presenting that as her permanent definition of the place.  We urbanists are supposed to take pride in having a larger, grander view.  But I bet most of us carry these silly but useful attitudes, at least when we get fairly far down our personal list of Cities We Want to Think About.

Right now, you see, I don't feel a need to expand my awareness of Genoa, except to the extent that I want to expand my awareness generally.  I wouldn't pass up an expense-paid visit to Genoa in the daytime, and would surrender my prejudice happily if I did.  But failing that, the prejudice is working for me.  It's painting a relatively unfamiliar part of Europe with a few touchstones of mood.  Thanks to these quick associations, my near-total ignorance of northwest Italy, while still near-total, is packaged and marked with a couple of personal baggage tags, so I can haul it around as a familiar without having to look inside.

The baggage tags are personal, but they're also authorized by the Greater Truth of Literature.  Anyone can pass through a city at night, but I passed through Genoa at night just as William Carlos Williams's hero did decades ago.  I have a similar tag stuck on Bologna, where I once had a scare of thinking I had missed a late night train connection and would be spending the night on a station bench.  I'd have forgotten the episode by now had Robert Dessaix's hero not had exactly the same experience, in his fine novel Night Letters.  Nonfiction lies all the time, but fiction makes no truth claims and therefore can never be disproven, so it can sell itself as "Access to Deeper Truth" even when it's just the whining of a man stuck in a train station.  Williams and Dessaix tell me that I wasn't alone in my nocturnal and unwanted visits to Genoa and Bologna, that these experiences actually Resonate with the Human Experience.  So I remember them.

Thus authorized, it feels good, at least to me, to permanently associate cities with atmospheric conditions and their related moods.  Even dealing with cities I know well (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) I find a pleasure in wrapping each in the stereotypical weather condition (rain, fog, sun, respectively) and experiencing all variations from that as an engaging nuance.  For cities I don't know it's even easier: for me it's always night in Genoa.   These simplifications are silly but useful in maintaining a firm structure on which more interesting thoughts can sometimes sprout.

Now and then I notice myself consciously choosing a new atmospheric prejudice.  I was in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend 2011, and would like to declare that hereafter, I shall consider Chicago a city where towers loom in ominous chilly fog and thunderstorms. 

On my stay there I had two days of that, followed by two days of hot sun.  The fog and storms, I decided, are the Chicago I want, because they allowed me to experience the downtown skyscrapers as overpowering, exactly as they were intended. Structures vanishing into the clouds are not just tall, but unknowably, maybe infinitely tall.

Chicago was built to turn a vast frontier into commodities and profit.  The dramatic starburst of rail lines emanating from it look like force-lines of a blast, so to be at the center of the blast is, well, like the end of a science fiction film when we finally get inside the Center of Ominous Power.  I wanted it to be grand but in mysterious, overpowering, intimidating way.

My ideal Chicago, in short, is a meteorological projection of a conventional story about what makes Chicago unique.  So I feel briefly wise, though actually just prejudiced, when I look at my images of Chicago in such conditions, as though the city is telling me a story I want to hear ...

In such a perfectly symbolic city, a photo that might otherwise be a joke, "Christ the Steakhouse," isn't funny at all.

Nor can "Time" be just the name of a media corporation.

Then the sun came out, and it was all flatter, more like a city anywhere in the midwest.  On a long hike north from the loop, Michigan Avenue looked like Singapore's Orchard Road, Lincoln Park looked like a number of great midwestern city parks, the Clark Road business districts looked nice or not-nice in familiar ways, and the only glorious uniqueness was that my hike ended at a well-known religous site for green urbanists: Wrigley Field, a Major League Baseball Stadium with Practically No Parking.

By then, it was too dark to photograph, so as I sorted photographs in an about-to-close Starbucks in what would have been the shadow of the stadium walls, I thought "this is nice, Wrigley Field at night," which is perilously close to "Wrigley Field is night."   And indeed, not being much of a baseball fan, I'll be fine if I never see the sun there.
 

minority rocks

Last week, on a rainy beach near Sambro, Nova Scotia, I finally had a chance to photograph a sensation I've noted in several places.

Minority black rocks, usually about 1-5% of all rocks on the beach ...

... but inevitably standing out. 

They're scattered, not hanging together, not a tribe or clique.  I immediately think of prophets and melancholy commentators in literature.  Lone, ignored voices, advising of doom.  Never the prince or hero, but sometimes ... what?

... the sidekick?  Muse?  Fool?  Priest?  Or just the usual character in black, sharp tool politely stowed, keen to not scare the rainbathers?

 

 

 

summer roadside barbecue

June 25, 2011

Sambro Head, Nova Scotia

around 5:30 pm local time

9 degrees Celsius



(48 degrees F)



Light rain ...

bus signage as poetry

Having some fun with the poetics of bus signage this weekend, over at Human Transit.  Do visit!

grocery orchids of spring

selling
full-blooming
plants
at full price

is like

selling
full-price
concert tickets
at intermission

the view from my window: vancouver

More soon.

blown from the south

For the last ten days, I've been happily settled at a friend's house in the country on the edge of Berrima, New South Wales, a tiny historic town a few hours drive southwest of Sydney.  I've been working on a book project, mostly at a picnic table outside the small house where I'm staying.

It's been serene, except that, well, late February and early March are supposed to be summer.  Aussies, oddly, reckon seasons as starting on the first of the month, so March 1 is the beginning of fall, but we're all on the same rolling ball, and the astronomical fact is that we're not at the equinox yet. So it bloody well ought to be summer, even if tendrils of red are starting to creep down certain exotic leaves.  I didn't expect the blasting heat of an El Niño summer; this is a wet, grassy La Niña year.  But still ...

Still, on clear days and cloudy ones, there's been a chilly breeze from the south.  South means Antarctic here, of course, so the concepts "south" and "cold" are intertwined and feed off one another, making a south wind feel a bit colder than it technically is.  For all I know, this persistent breeze may originate in the paddock across the road, but because that paddock is south of me, it comes wrapped in the pale blue aura of the Antarctic.  Brr.

So, needing a sign, I'll take it.  For better or worse, I'm leaving Australia in a few weeks, to take a six-month assignment back in Vancouver, Canada, where I lived in 2005-6.  So I'll take the cold south wind as a little push in that direction.

Leaving Australia for Canada will feel, I expect, much like leaving Canada for Australia.  For months it felt like the right thing to do, leading to an crescendo of certainty as things fell into place.  Then, for the last weeks, it felt profoundly wrong.  In the final days before I left Vancouver in 2006, every douglas fir and salal bush seemed to be questioning my judgment, and perhaps muttering vaguely of betrayal.

Now, after years of poking about in Australian landscapes, I expect the same critique.  Can I live without the twelve-tone contemplations of the Australian magpie, the confounding abundance of eucalypt species, the radioactive cuteness of the koala, or the consoling serenity of the kangaroo's patient gaze?  Yes, I can, but this sadness has accompanied all of my life's departures, and it's like an old friend now.