Creature of the Shade

Lineville: If It's Time, It's Time

 

Last week, I agreed to sell a prime piece of downtown real estate for $200.

Downtown Lineville, Iowa, that is.

How many urban Americans have the ruins of a small town in their lives, and how might our view of the rural change if we did? My mother’s childhood happened around a prosperous Lineville, and throughout mine it was a site of piligramage, the destination of a long summer drive every year or two. Finally, it’s where we went in 1984 to move my confused grandmother from her collapsing house and into a nursing home, a delicate deed done amid thunder and lightning that left me with the searing image of grandma in the rocking chair on the porch, tornado sirens wailing, defiantly saying that she won’t take shelter because if it’s her time it’s her time. Lineville itself could say the same thing.

Lineville is on the Iowa-Missouri border, paired with the much smaller South Lineville, Missouri. It has a classic 19th century town square, the south side of which is the state line. The Civil War’s boundary was here, and if you needed to draw some line dividing the South from the Lutheran/Calvinist upper midwest, between Faulkner and Garrison Keillor, you’d probably choose this one.

Many laws differ across the line. The remaining restaurant and gas station are on the Missouri side, because the sales tax is lower.  One of Lineville’s claims to fame is that Iowans go there on the Fourth of July because they can buy fireworks in Missouri and then shoot them out over Iowa, where they are illegal. The businesses are still there, with big signs facing north.

The verandah where my grandmother rocked in the face of disaster is now my patch of grass, inherited after my mother’s recent passing.

Next to it, and also long gone, was the home of her brother Denzil, a lifelong bachelor with epilepsy who lived there most of his life, and who never showed an interest in women. I reject the briefest impulse to put a rainbow flag on his grave. I am not here for the culture war.

My grandmother once taught school – including my mother as a girl -- in a one-room red schoolhouse, lovingly maintained by the Wayne County Historical Society until it was recently damaged by arson. But it’s still there, and so is the upright piano where they sang songs 70 years ago.

Lineville looks dead at the center, but there’s life on the edges. Like anywhere, there are people in cars going to and from houses and jobs in the surrounding land. Churches are scattered along the highway. People probably don’t see much value in refurbishing those collapsing old buildings, so they tear them down when they’re about to fall down. The whole north side of the square vanished quite recently; in Street View as I write, it’s still there.

But there is still love here, love of community and place. Commerce has fled the town square but civic life remains: the post office, the city hall and library. The park in the town square is clearly loved and cared for.  Children play and couples even stroll under its fine old trees. 

Abandoned lots turn to grass that the city mows, so that the town is morphing, lot by lot, into a well-maintained park. The people, scattered on the land or in the houses strung out along the roads, care enough to do that. It is remarkable how much pride an apparently ruined town can have.

Like big cities, small towns first evolved around people walking, which created the town squares that people love and that many more prosperous towns have restored. They also revolved around a local economy. The corn a farmer grew just outside of town went onto the train right there in Lineville, not at some big complex far away.

The vacuuming of small businesses into big corporations destroyed downtown Lineville’s economic purpose, and it’s also destroying locals’ ability to enjoy their land. The elite of the same neoliberal forces that killed much of the town is lavishing its unmatchable millions in buying up the land for recreation. A popular hunting show on TV recently made a big deal of Decatur County, just to the west, so the rush is on. For some in today’s aristocracy the proper display of power requires a private hunting reserve, just as it did for kings and dukes of old. Locals can’t afford to get onto the land that defines their identity and sense of place. The small farm, like the small town, is vanishing everywhere.

None of that is news, but now I have pictures, and stories.

I have to love Lineville for its family memories, and for my ancestors in the windswept cemetery, and now for some of my mother’s ashes settling into the grass. I have to love the anger and persistence of some of the people living here. I have to love the mostly elderly people I see in the restaurant, and the efficient and friendly woman who appears to be the whole City staff, and the mayor and city council who decided, in a quick phone poll, that my patch of grass was worth $200. I know how they vote here, and what that does to the world, and I wish I could convey how much many of us in cities share their pain. But I do what I’m here to do, and drive back to the city, feeling as empty as this hollowed town.

 

always touch the water

Portland

My job is constant travel, so the question is always: "How do I know where I am?"  

GPS is not the answer, because what I really mean, I think, is:"How do I be with (or in) the fact of where I am?"  How do I escape the erasing effect of travel, the grim sensation of "no matter where you go, there you are"?  How do I arrive in each moment with some joy at new possibilities, new sensations, that couldn't have been gotten where I was? 

One answer is to fixate on people, and on certain pleasures of human contact that technology can't replicate.  Another is to fixate on landscape, which this blog shows me to be doing constantly.  For example, my obsession with botany, and especially plant identification, is simply a way to see immediately how this place is different from that one.  An awareness of evolutionary patterns, manifested in the genetic "closeness" of physically distant plants, fuses the necessary sensation of distinction and uniqueness with the equally necessary awareness of connectedness to forge a felt sense of "here."

Another is to touch the water.

It's been my ritual for many years that when visiting a coastal city, I must touch the water.  I'm not much of a swimmer or beach-lazer, so this contact requres an intentional ritual.  The situation doesn't much matter, though obviously a relatively pristine beach is preferable.

You would think, from all I've said, that the real purpose must be to contact something unique to this location.  But salt water is everywhere, and feels and tastes pretty much the same everywhere.  Indeed, nothing is more homogenizing, more crushing of distinctions that matter to us, than the sea.  It helps that cold saltwater is a clammy, unpleasant sensation; like all metaphorical voids, the sea is not there to please us.

I touch plants, too.  I'm not literally a treehugger but while walking I often reach out to touch leaves, and occasionally pause if that sensation is interesting.  

So why water?  Things present themselves most intensely right at the edge of their absence.   This is the intrinsic drama of the urban waterfront -- so much complexity right up against what reads to us as vast emptiness.  Touching a large body of water is a contact-with-the-infinite that intensifies the richness of the finite.  So, after touching the water, I turn back -- to the city or landscape that was behind me -- and can how feel (not just know) that I'm seeing something that is vulnerable, contingent, even doomed sooner or later, and therefore real.  

It's not just that I'm seeing past what the power of architecture wants me to see.  Touching the vastness of the city's physical edge -- cold saltwater -- is as close as I can come to seeing the city's jagged temporal edges of creation and doom.  I'm seeing the waterfront city superimposed on its ruined (or underwater) condition centuries from now, and on the landscape that was there before it was born.  I can see the city's power and beauty as inseparable from its vulnerability and transiece, as though it were a flower.  

In other words, I can see it.

blood for a thimble

Vancouver

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.

blown from the south

Berrima

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.

 

 

 

 

christchurch: what i remember

Sydney

It was technically an aftershock of the quake last September, but now Christchurch, New Zealand is truly in ruins.  Because the quake hit at lunchtime, many lives have been lost, many may still be alive or dying in the rubble of the 19th century urban core.  Even the cathedral spire has collapsed.

All I can do, sitting here in Australia, is remember some of what Christchurch is, or maybe was, from my visits in 2005 and 2009.

Christchurch starts at the cathedral square, where you're encouraged to stand with your back the tourist office and take this photo:   

  

And yet the place is so mellow and gentle that you don't feel like a tourist doing it.  Even here, it's easy to feel the ordinariness of Christchurch, the sense that there's just no point putting on airs when you're way down here at the end of the world.

Still, Christchurch is happy to greet tourists as a pleasant English town ...  The cathedral square, the tourist trolleys, the gentle park-lined river ideally suited to small boats ...

... it all seems content to call up the vistor's memories of Oxford, or Cambridge, or whatever your fantasy of an English town might be.  But there's also that Kiwi humility about it, a refusal to take itself too seriously. 

That inscription is cryptic to the point of being humorous when excised that way.  ("Lo these are parts of His ways but how little a portion is heard of Him.")  Christian readers who don't recognize it may wish to Google the phrase.

Christchurch takes the arts very seriously, especially for such a small and isolated city.  The Christchurch Art Centre, a repurposed 19th century college now full of galleries and studios, is one of the centerpieces of arts tourism on the South Island, an ecosystem that supports hundreds of individual artists.

But there's always a gentle whimsy to it.  That phantom house in the air is an installation, on cables stayed to the courtyard walls.

 

When I last visited in 2009, one gallery was showing "My Place," an exhibit of photographs of ordinary Christchurch people in their workplaces, with beautifully unedited, repetitive texts that are how these people really talk.  The texts are meant to be browsed much as the eye browses a photo, with no need to read from start to finish ... here's a sample ...

I’m a loner really, so it’s company for me to go in and have a bit of a yarn for half an hour. They‘ll have a laugh with me, have a joke with me. I feel at home with them, they’re good people. Turn their hand to making anything those guys. Oh yeah, clever, couldn’t wish for better people. 
It’s important, I suppose, to have people. I never married – never really interested in it. I’ve had a couple of friends and that, but, you know, we only live from day to day. Live life to the fullest would be the way I’d put it. I just say gidday to anyone in the street. I certainly do. I used to have a dog once too. Labrador Kelpie cross she was but not any more, she’s gone now. I used to walk her all through town and even today people still come up and say where’s your dog. She went on the 25th of November – gone 27 months now. I still count the months. We used to go round the river, chase after possums and that. If she found one, boy, that was hers. She’d bowl you over to get it. She was put down in the end. I didn’t want that, but there you are, that’s life, something you’ve got to take. Sad day. I miss her all right.  I’m still a pretty active sort of a guy. I work in a bike shop six mornings a week and on Sundays I walk out to the Riccarton Markets, keeps me trim. After working at the bike shop I usually come into town and visit people – all different sorts of places. Give’m a hand if I can. Generally though I’ll always go into Longhorn first, you couldn’t wish for better company than those guys. Oh yeah, A1. They’re good friends them guys – always will be.

I browse the book again, and wonder where these people are tonight.

Because this town, which looks so much like it could be in a gentle British landscape, is actually here ...

... right next to a violent explosion of rock.  Call it the Banks Peninsula if you want to draw the tourists, but to me, especially viewed from above, it looks like the land is still exploding.   

And just south of the city, beyond the first bank of hills, right on that first bay, is Lyttleton, a small historic town that is also the deep-water port.  (Exploding landscapes are good at creating deep-water ports.)

The pizza in that little green building was superb, but one gets used to superb food on the South Island.

The epicenter was right here.  The quake was very close to the surface.  I've seen no photos of Lyttleton yet.  I've heard only a phone interview with a man sobbing here in the main street, saying that everything, everything is gone.

earth, clouds, movie

Taipei

Quick hello from Taipei airport, where I'm en route from Sydney to Vienna for five weeks of semi-deductible flaneurie, mostly in Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, and a bit of France.

Flying north over the Philippines.  Not in a window seat; instead I have in front of me a screen showing an image from a camera looking straight down from the plane.  The effect is pretty much like Google Earth, but with clouds.  You could say it’s just like looking out of the window, but without the plane in the way.  But of course, that would be looking at the real earth, while this is an artificial image, a real-time television show.  I sometimes think I’ll be the last human to whom that distinction matters.  

At this height, shapes of the land are only vague hints.  Was that long thin curving white band a river, or just a trick of the cloud?  And what was that hard round thing, a white dot, edged in black, with three smaller black dots around it, just touching it?  I leaned forward, watched intently as it slid past, but with no context at all, nothing but clouds on all sides, I finally had to accept the first impression, that it must be an apparition of Mickey Mouse.   I could take it as a miracle, a sign that I should quit my job and devote myself to founding a new Disney World here in the Philippines.  If only I knew which Philippine this is.

(We are not in the Philippines of course, because it's an international flight.  Yet a domestic flight, at exactly these coordinates and altitude, would be.  Where are we, exactly?)

To my left and right, the same movie is playing on two screens, but at different points in the film.  On my left is development, on the right climax.  The same characters doing different things to each other, at the same time.

There was something among the clouds, just now:  A thin line across the screen, curving but very solid.  A coastline, surely, but I couldn’t say which side was land and which sea.  It looked more like a membrane, a boundary between two fluids.

I like the contrast between the view of the earth in front of me and the two parts of the same movie blasting away on both sides.  On my screen the clouds, vague landforms, and miraculous apparitions all flow past an even pace, just as they do on Google Earth when you give the mouse a little nudge.  Compared to this, the emotional and visual turbulence of the movies looks like its own kind of tedium.  To my left the lead couple in the film are having a quiet romantic moment over dinner, while to my right they're about to kill each other.  And straight ahead, just the earth rolling past.  Or maybe I have to say, a picture of it.

like a cheetah

Sydney

Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai's airport with its city center.  Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like:  "But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt."

And I thought:  "Like a cheetah."

That explained the déja vu I was feeling.  At some point long ago I'd heard those words -- "its future is very much in doubt" -- in that same firm and resonant baritone, as I watched a cheetah -- the world's fastest land mammal -- running into the distance from exactly this camera angle.  

And finally I saw what the show was about.  We are meant to care for the maglev exactly as we'd care for a charismatic endangered species.  We're to feel a specific motivating awe for the maglev because it's sleek, fast, muscular, intense and yet, for all that, endangered, just like the cheetah.  We're to believe that because this fast-moving yet inanimate object is the product of human engineers, the sentience of those engineers is there in the endangered thing itself, vulnerable to our judgment, just like the cheetah.

And I don't believe that.  I don't care about powerful-but-vulerable transit technologies in the way I care about cheetahs.  What's wrong with me?

Cross posted from Human Transit.  Photo: Primrose Girl

space

Sydney

When I first imagined moving to Australia, it was about space.  Everything felt spacious here.  The bracing void of the continent seemed to promise more room in all dimensions, not just between cities but between moments, between thoughts, even between walls. 

But metaphors have half-lives, and as they decay the raw becomes rawer.  On my first flight across the continent, I set myself a task.  I would fix my eye on the patch of red land below me, framed like a picture in the airplane window.  I'd take this picture as an object of meditation, follow my breath, and commit to remaining with it until something about it changed.

I could never do it.  Perhaps the picture in the window would be scalloped pink dunes, stretching across the picture frame, rolling slowly to the left with always a new identical dune rolling in from the right.  I'd watch as hundreds passed, waiting for the variation.  Something.  I didn't need a road, a town.  A tree would have done, or even just a shift in the pattern of dunes, a spare beat in the rhythm.  Nothing.  The land did change, but at a pace below human perception. 

And I thought:  Yes, I needed space.  But nobody needs this much space.  

 

leaves, clouds, platforms, tiers, thoughts

Sydney

One of the most distinctive traits of Eucalyptus, to me, is its tendency to throw out puffy clouds of foliage, with space in between them.

 

vanishing in the mist

Friends back in Australia seem to have the impression that I'm reveling in summer during this sojourn in Oregon.