jaclynwrites's blog

My parents’ house has been situated on their three-acre lot on the side of a mountain of Sterling Forest for the past twenty years. One of my first memories is visiting the lot as I sat atop my father’s shoulders while he trekked up the steady rise that would one day become our driveway.  The house fits in with the lay of the land, as if nature dictated where my father had placed that house he built at night for a year after his daytime job as a carpenter in New York City.  The architectural design which my Dad customized back in 1989 has since been altered as my parents have added to it, but the major features, the original character of the place, remains intact. The house with its cedar siding adds to the effect of its rightful placement up on the hill, flanked by trees of a similar hue.  The local wildlife seems to agree with the natural setting of my parents home, as trails of turkeys, deer, bears, and an occasional coyote, to mention a few, frequently visit, peering in our windows as if the man made structure was a natural phenomenon.

The house I call home stands in relative isolation. My parents don’t have any neighbors in the traditional sense, but we did make a trail through the woods to my father’s childhood best friend’s home about 100 yards to the south on Old Tuxedo Road. Structurally the house is bookended by two fireplaces and follows a circular pattern within so that there is always more than one way to exit any room on the ground floor. The bedrooms upstairs all provide great views of the surrounding forest, especially the master bedroom that overlooks Warwick Mountain. The front porch also faces this mountain to the west, providing sunsets over the horizon, and a great place for summer naps, reading, or just thinking. A host of wildlife passes through on the front lawn making them available for easy viewing. The porch is made entirely of cedar and stone, a woodsy retreat attached to the house by sliding glass doors. The interior of the house also contains these natural elements—hardwood floors and stone tiles and countertops throughout. There are large windows in every room, including a skylight in the main living room. Each season in our pocket of upstate New York is accompanied by drastic changes in temperature and sense of place. During the winter, the house feels even more isolated than the other seasons, even though this is when the trees are most barren and one can catch glimpses of the road, or the home recently built to the north. The snow accumulation up on the side of the mountain far surpasses that of the town below. In spring the wildlife returns with the onset of the budding trees and plants and the world is suddenly green. This continues throughout the summer when temperatures linger in the 80s and 90s at the peak of day. This is the height of action around the property when the bees are buzzing, and our two dachshunds chase the squirrels, chipmunks, and Garder snakes that find their way in and out of the stone retaining wall around the pool. At night the cicadas are nearly deafening, but deliciously so, and the only thing between us and the constellations above is the occasional bat flying overhead. As the summer gives way to autumn, the turkeys and deer are most abundant. The dying leaves are a vision of bitter sweetness as the enchanting rich colors that envelop the house is only a premonition of the long, treacherous winter that will soon come bearing the cold. These changes are a part of home.

But to really understand the place I grew up, it must be placed within the context of place on a larger scale. It stands outside the village limits—Greenwood Lake, NY being a village within the town of Warwick, a larger, richer area slightly to the northwest. Greenwood Lake is a one-traffic light town full of New York City commuters and blue-collar types most of which frequent the three major bars in town. Greenwood Lake was once a popular destination for vacationing, many of the houses were once bungalows never intended to be permanent residences. These houses surround the main feature of the town, the nine-mile lake that initially attracted vacationers, along with New York’s 18-year-old drinking law when New Jersey, which owns about a third of the lake, was already at 21. Greenwood Lake once held the record for most bars per square mile in the state. The drinking legacy still persists despite the closure of many of the establishments of Greenwood Lake’s heyday back in the 60s and 70s. Greenwood Lake’s association with Warwick has a paradoxical effect. Homes are generally cheaper in the village and its reputation for drug and alcohol use has caused those in Warwick to look down upon the Lake which lacks the yuppie quality of Warwick’s more trendy main street restaurants and shops, their farmer’s market, and much larger school system. Greenwood Lake still does not have its own high school—a factor that village residents have been fighting over since forever. But then again, it is still part of Warwick whether they like it or not, and so Greenwood Lake residents may lay claim on Warwick’s amenities. My parents’ house is both within and without the context of Greenwood Lake. Its isolation up in the woods and location beyond the village limits makes it feel detached from Greenwood Lake, yet our rural location necessitates drives to the village use of the post office and convenience store. The town no longer has a supermarket, while Warwick now has two.

 My childhood home is in a word, idyllic, but while it does have some sustainable features, like its own water well, its isolation and location on a road unsuitable for pedestrians or even bikers makes it less ideal. Old Tuxedo Road is steep and windy. On our section, which is especially treacherous for walking, there is a deep ravine—about a 30-foot drop from the elevation of the road, which as time wears on has lost its yellow lines. Since Greenwood Lake only has one small and poorly stocked “grocery store,” most residents drive to neighboring towns for food. Although there are over a dozen family owned farms including dairy, black dirt onion fields, and apple and berry orchards within a fifteen mile radius of Greenwood Lake, to get local produce necessitates a drive in the car about ten miles to one of two locations that provide local products all at one place—Pennings Farm Market or the outdoor vendors (weather permitting) that transform a parking lot into a Farmer’s Market on Sundays during the summer and fall. Unfortunately, most people choose to shop at Shoprite or the sparkling new Pricechopper across the street. Warwick boasts a few small clothing stores, but there are generally overpriced and sparsely stocked. The nearest stores or shopping malls are a twenty to forty minute drive, depending on the direction one chooses to drive and quality of goods required. Additionally, the lack of business in Greenwood Lake and the surrounding area makes commuting necessary. Many people commute daily to New York City, about 50 miles away, or an hour to two hour drive each direction depending on traffic. There are no highways close by to town. The ride over the Tuxedo Mountain on Route 17, or the route through New Jersey and over the infamous Skyline Drive are the only ways to get to the highways that lead to the city. Mass transportation is limited, although there is a bus from Greenwood Lake to the Port Authority, or a train about fifteen to twenty minutes away that goes to Hoboken, NJ or Penn Station if you switch over at Seacaucus. My own father has been commuting via car to downtown New York City since before I was born. His general contracting business would not generate nearly as much money upstate, if it were to survive at all. His company specializes in the renovation of office spaces in Manhattan, the equivalent of which simply does not exist beyond the city limits. My father generally spends about three to four hours a day in the car driving to and from his office. While my parents are able to enjoy some of the virtues of true country living that is certainly more desirable than what James Howard Kunstler would call the horrors of “suburban sprawl,” the commute and lack of local economy makes living in Greenwood Lake less than ideal for my parents or the rest of the village residents. While there is a definite sense of place, and one worth caring about, good town planning is lacking in Greenwood Lake and the surrounding area. While my parents have certainly created a home in the true sense of the word, the community by Kunstler’s definition remains absent.

Kunstler refers over and over again to the necessity of building and maintaining places that people care about. In his chapter “A Place Called Home” he points out the lack of real “homes” in America that have instead been replaced by cheap replicas and prefabricated houses that no one has thought to reconsider. What’s worse is the lack of skill in homebuilding that has come as a result of the “do it yourself” home improvement kits sold at places like Home Depot. Kunstler outlines “two contemporary myths: (1) the idea that shopping is a substitute for design, and (2) the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing, in this case skillful work without skill” (171). As if these consequences of mass production weren’t detrimental enough to our idea of “home” and the communities (or lack there of) that Americans live in, building codes in most places have stunted the growth of any potential building worth caring about, or made it impossible to carry on the tradition or character of old, well-built homes (such as in the case of Kunstler’s home town Saratoga Springs).
 
What is perhaps most poignant about this section of the book is Kunstler’s point that the joke is on us. He writes: “If the ordinary house of our time seems like a joke, remember that it expresses the spirit of our age. The question, then, is : what kind of joke represents the spirit of our age? And then answer is: a joke on ourselves” (166). He uses the example of the ridiculous lawn ornaments that people place in their yards that result in the homeowner’s surpassing of “his own humorous intentions. This is what comes of living in houses without dignity” (167). Kunstler reminds us a page later that “if nothing is sacred, then everything is profane” which is why most American houses lack charm. Charm, the essential ingredient, is missing and this is why we no longer have places worth caring about. Finally, he suggests that Americans in the postwar era preferred living in a fantasy: “They preferred lies. And the biggest lie of all was that the place they lived was home” (169).

But there are greater implications for creating places worth caring about. Kunstler shows a direct relationship between the decline in a successful community--which also means a successful economy--and the moral degradation of a place. It is not surprising that with the economic decline in his old town of Schuylerville came a rise in crime, the breakup of families, increases in teen pregnancy, and the like. Kunstler blames this on the growing national economy and the decline of a local one: "What happened to Schuylerville..typifies the fate of farm and factory towns throughout upstate New York, parts of New England, and the Midwest: as our national economy became more gigantic, local economies ceased to matter. And with that they ceased to be communities in the most meaningful sense, though people and buildings remained" (180).

I really enjoyed Kunstler’s chapter “American Space” that describes the very conflicted view of the American landscape by the early settlers. The notion of wilderness is embedded deeply in our western ideology from classical thought to Christianity and Romanticism, and Kunstler makes reference to all of these, including the myth of the masculine hero going out into the wild (even though he doesn’t specifically call it this) which is one of the most traceable themes in literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
 
Traditionally there is an association with those who live closer to nature with primitivism and classicalism. While the former makes sense, the latter seems paradoxical. We often think of classical Greece and Rome as ideal civilizations (even though they weren’t), but their focus was on the cultivation of land not on the value of nature in and of itself. This was also true of the American mindset in the late nineteenth century that still saw potential dollar signs attached to the land along with a burgeoning appreciation for the land and a growing conversationalist movement. But perhaps there is a deeper tie to the classical mythology that finds its way into our culture perhaps without our realizing it. The wilderness was looked at with disdain even in relatively advanced civilizations like those of the Greeks and Romans. Classical celebrations of nature were restricted to the cultivated or pastoral variety and therefore what was beautiful was only such because it was fruitful.
             
Christianity, too, finds its way into the early American conception of the land. In early medieval Christianity the wild held its significance as the earthly realm belonging to the powers of evil that the church had to overcome through missionary efforts, yet, paradoxically Christianity also maintained the notion that wild country could be a place of refuge or one of religious purity.
 
The pastoral condition is seemingly the closest to paradise and the life of ease and contentment, afterall, Eden was a garden. Transforming the wild into the rural or pastoral has Scriptural precedents (Genesis 1:28). God told man to increase, conquer the earth, and have dominion over all living things: “Increase and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” For years the wilderness was waste and the proper behavior toward it was exploitation. When the pioneers encountered wild country they saw it through a utilitarian lens: trees were lumber, prairies were farms, canyons were sites of hydroelectric dams. The wild country had value as potential civilization: waste to garden.

The Vernacular Landscape mentions how the American conception of landscape and wilderness is a pervasive theme in much of American literature, and as John Brinkerhoff Jackson’s essays point out, the conceptions of both the landscape and the wilderness are as vast and complex as the landscape itself. One of the most important considerations in a study of literature and landscape is the realization of very particular regional identities that create subjectivity surrounding the topic of the American landscape. Writers like Mary Austin have taught us that that regional landscape is very much a part of self-identity, and in a country spanning from Sarah Orne Jewett’s Dunnet Landing in New England to Austin’s southwestern dessert vistas and beyond, there is an incredible need to establish a sense of place.  Additionally, according to our sense of place, our concept of wilderness and of civilization may significantly alter. As Roderick Frazier Nash would say, “one man’s wilderness may be another’s roadside picnic ground” (Wilderness and the American Mind 1).
 
Like the regionalist writer Mary Austin, Jackson identifies a dual identity within one’s human nature. There is the individual, personal identity and there is that which identifies with a larger group or community that is tied to a particular place. In addressing the first part of our human nature Jackson writes, “we have to come to terms with nature if we are to survive. We have to understand nature and feel at home with it if we are to be true inhabitants of the earth” (11). Additionally, “none of us, no matter how self-reliant we may be, can survive alone for any extended length of time…there comes a moment when we begin to suffer psychologically and even physically, for the companionship of others” (11). American novels and short stories like Jack London’s Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire” would attest to this need for community. In a more recent account, John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which tells the real-life story of Christopher McCandless’s attempt to live alone in the wilderness of Alaska, argues the same point.
 
As part of our human nature, according to Jackson, we also need boundaries in our contemporary landscape, as they stabilize any social relationship. He writes, “Wherever we go in the contemporary landscape we run across these signs: boundaries, roads, and places of assembly. We read them at once, and we not only read them, we create them ourselves, almost without realizing that without them we could not function as members of society” (27). And it is true from the meager examples above which are better explained and almost ad nauseam by Jackson that community is a huge part of how we understand landscape and develop a sense of place. When one tries to deny this aspect of our human nature, disaster ensues. 

In his journal Henry David Thoreau writes:
"How can a man sit down and quietly pare his nails , while the earth goes on gyrating ahead amid such a din of sphere music, whirling his along about her axis some twenty four thousand miles between sun and sun? but mainly in a circle some tow millions of miles actual progress. And then such hurly burly on the surface—wind always blowing—now a zephyr, now a hurricane—tides never idle, even fluctuating, no rest for Niagara, but perpetual ran-tan on those limestone rocks—and then that summer simmering which our ears are used to which would otherwise be christened confusion worse confounded, but is now ironically called “silence audible”—and above all the incessant tinkering named hum of industry—the hurrying to and fro and confused jabbering of men—Can man do less than get up and shake himself?" (McKibben 3)
This passage, although at times akin to something of a tangent, seems applicable to Tuan’s chapter “Time in Experiential Space.” What Thoreau is getting at is much the same as Tuan’s opening argument about our experience of space and time.
 
The way we experience place is incredibly reliant upon our experience or understanding of our environment—our sense of place. As Tuan writes, “[c]onsider the possibility that a environment itself may have an effect on the elaboration of a spatio-temporal world. Natural environments vary conspicuously over the earth’s surface and cultural groups differ in the way they perceive and order their environments” (119). For Thoreau and most Westerners, we imagine space and time to be inseparable. Thoreau’s concept of space at, say, Walden Pond, is much different than the Pygmies described by Tuan or even the Hopi tribe in the American southwest. So there seems to be something to this idea that our reality is shaped by our sense of place, and perhaps even our identity, too. How we visualize ourselves in the world comes from our experience of the environment around us, and more specifically, the natural world in which we live.
 
Thoreau’s description is obviously tied to the natural world in a way most of his contemporaries wouldn’t have thought to consider. But his journal entry here (and in his longer works, too) reminds us that we too are tied to the natural physical world both literally and in consciousness and subconscious regardless of our cultural tendencies that perhaps lead us farther away from nature than some others, particularly in the East. What Thoreau’s quote seems to suggest is the overwhelming quality to not only a sense of place, but this larger sense of space in which we derive the very meaning of time and existence. Man must get up and shake himself to realize the sheer magnitude of space—as if this were a possible feat.

*image from my road trip through the Smoky Mountains

I found Tuan’s opening chapters particularly interesting, especially in regard to knowledge and experience. In the introduction he explains how space or a place changes or is significantly enhanced when it is historicized or mythologized (i.e. Hamlet and his supposed castle). The human person, according to Tuan, is “animal, fantasist, and computer combined,” and I think this description is particularly helpful to keep in mind when reading his chapter “Space, Place, and Child” and also “Mythical Space and Place” (5).
 
It is not surprising that Tuan’s description of how we experience space is primarily sensory, but the details he gives about how these sensory experiences change with age are not only quite fascinating, but, I would argue, give us a glimpse of what it means to be human—one of the outlined goals of Tuan’s book.

When Tuan writes in Chapter 3 that “highly charged moments of the past are sometimes captured by poets” I began to think of the Romantic manifesto of Wordsworth who claimed that poetry was “a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility.” The Romantic poets fit well into the individualistic, and, as some might say, egocentric perspective that Tuan describes when he talks about perspective: “We more readily assume a God-like position, looking at the earth from above, than from the perspective of another mortal living on the same level as ourselves” (28). In this way, sense of place, I would argue, is highly individual.
 
It is interesting to me that a particular nostalgia is attached to sensory memories for adults in a way that children lack. Memory of experience is crucial to the adult understanding of place. When Blake wrote “Songs of Innocence and Experience” he seemed to be capturing Tuan’s concept twofold. For one, his theme is quite obviously connected to the idea that children and adults experience the world in very different ways because of the lack of knowledge or experience on part of the child. At the same time, the likeness to childhood nursery songs of his opening poem to the collection make it more poignant as it is filled with nostalgia and sadness for an adult while the child takes the song at face value. (Here’s a link to the poem)
 
Finally, as a sort of side note, I find it incredibly interesting that Tuan notes that “[t]hings are not quite real until they acquire names and can be classified in some way” (29). Therefore, our sense of place is reliant on our ability to articulate a description of it, much like we were asked to do in our first assignment.

The short clip we watched in class with images of Old Alexandria, VA reminded me very much of the Georgian style houses in Dublin. These row houses, which do in fact create a sense of a room, have since been converted into hotels, bars, clubs, apartments, and the like; however their proximity to one another—one flush against the next—creates a very particular sense of place, and one I might dare call “good.”

 
To know a bit about the history of these buildings helps to add to its character, or “sense of place” as we call it. The style, “Georgian,” becomes very appropriate when we learn that it was indeed derived from the historical period beginning around 1714, which marked the start of the reign of King George I of Great Britiain (and of Ireland) until the death in 1830 of King George IV. During this period four Georges reigned over both of the respective countries, as we know them today. Hence the word Georgian not only covers this period in time but also suggests a particular and unified style that is precisely what “Georgian” has come to signify.

 
Amidst the political turmoil that the city of Dublin experienced, and the rest of Ireland for that matter, the Georgian style persists. It not only transports us back in time but creates a sense of place of both that historical period and our own. To know nothing of the history of the buildings, its unified architectural and political significance, the use of iron rails that are missing from the buildings’’ facades for use of weaponry would be to miss out on a significant part of the sense of place. But apart from its historical significance, if while walking down a street around Saint Stephen’s Green one would still in face experience a sense of place that is good. The buildings still stand, they enclose, they almost hug you.
 
So while the historical significance of Georgian style buildings in Dublin are clearly a part of what creates its sense of place, a newcomer without any prior knowledge may still experience the streets of the city in a similarly positive way. There is a physical presence that these buildings emit that cannot go unnoticed. They transport us back in time even if we’re not sure exactly where. And as if we did not have enough of these buildings with their brightly painted doors that appear to be all attached—an image that evokes the city of Bath, England--a turn around the corner into the green park-like setting that is Saint Stephen’s Green will create yet another simply good sense of place.