A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he's finished.
~Zsa Zsa Gabor
A couple of Sundays ago, my betrothed and I married. The word betrothed is a synonym for "promised," and the first thing she made me promise was not to write about the wedding. But I wouldn't dream of writing about the wedding, anyway, and here's why: You don't reach my age without having sat through quite a number of these ceremonies. And the truth is, they're pretty predictable--I mean, how often does a bride or groom say, "I don't?" Oh, there are little surprises, sure, like the fact that our so-called "unity candle" kept going out. But I can't write about that.
When it comes to words, like "wedding," I am something of a strict constructionist; I construe the meaning narrowly to mean the ceremony itself. The rest of the experience, however, is fair game as far as I'm concerned.
]]> For example, there is the matter of the bagpiper. A dear friend of my beloved is married to one of the best pipers in this region. This is terrific, because there is nothing more splendid than to be led into a momentous event (historically, it should be noted, a battle) by the skirl of the pipes. This is especially true if your name is "North." The ancestral home of Clan North was a small island some distance north--what else?--of Scotland's Outer Hebrides. The Norths were a clan of warrior scribes who believed passionately that the pen is mightier than the sword. This belief was proven utterly and tragically incorrect one night, centuries ago, when they were virtually wiped out by a coalition of other Scottish clans because the Norths had made such a nuisance of themselves writing scurrilous screeds about their neighbors. The only survivors were my distant relatives, who'd somehow got wind of the impending attack and hid all night in a cave. It took some effort on my part to get our piper to substitute the sprightly "March of the Kings" as my processional instead of his first choice, the mournful "Cowards of Clan North."
But I digress. The point is that the lady of my life had made it abundantly clear that while it was fine for the groom to be piped in, she absolutely, positively did NOT want bagpipes for her own processional. She is English after all and, given the historic antipathy of her countrymen for the Scots, and vice versa, I made no attempt to dissuade her. Thus it was that I took it as an ominous portent when, after the March of Kings concluded and I took my place beside the minister, my bride arrived and hissed over her splendid bouquet, "How come the piper stopped?!"
I should have anticipated this, I suppose, because the truth is she had been behaving strangely for some months prior to the actual event. I understand this. You may have read that scientists have discovered a rogue gene in the DNA of every woman on earth that lies dormant until some imbecile, like me, asks her to marry him and she, despite the frantic warnings of her closest friends and all the people who know him well, consents. Suddenly, this bit of DNA--known to genetic researchers by its code: CB-1, for "one crazy bride"--clicks on and a complete stranger explodes from the woman with whom you thought you wanted to spend the rest of your life. It's like those fang-toothed creatures that burst out of the chests of infected astronauts in the movie Aliens.
This gene manifests itself in myriad ways, but we'll explore just one: wedding cake madness. Somebody tell me what the big deal is about the wedding cake. This is late summer. Wouldn't you think a nice organic, native blackberry and apple crumble would suffice? But no. The bride calls me from the city to say she's found the perfect wedding cake. It will be constructed in tiers by a really famous French bakery. But do I make a fuss? Of course not. That's because I had by then come to understand that my role in the wedding could be summarized in six words: Shut Up, Show Up, Pay Up. This last point was made clear when, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned what the cake would cost. I hung up and envisioned it slathered not in icing but in hundred dollar bills.
But honestly, the wedding was great. It was casual, a summer beach party held on a grassy terrace overlooking the water. The weather was splendid--which was mighty lucky, as there was no Plan B in case of rain. Everyone in the neighborhood pitched in, contributing tables and chairs, table cloths, plates and glasses, sun umbrellas, and more. The music was local and live. The food was amazing. We'd told our friends--both of mine and ninety-eight of hers--to make a favorite pot luck dish as a wedding gift that could be enjoyed by everyone who attended, and they outdid themselves. Or so we're told, because by the time we'd finished greeting everyone, the food was gone. Worse, most of the wine was, too. And so was the cake.
The only real blemish on the day was--and this will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog--my friend Bad Michael. In a moment of madness, I'd asked him to be my "Worst Man," and he took the task to heart. After a lyrical paean to the bride--who, it must be said, was (and is) stunningly beautiful, gracious, and talented--he seemed to go off the rails, launching into a vicious roast of the groom. This went on for some time, to the very great amusement of (almost) everyone.
Afterward, my sainted mother approached me and plucked at my elbow. I leaned down and she whispered, "Who WAS that guy?!"
I thought, thank goodness for moms: they never stop thinking you're terrific.
Then she said, "Boy, he sure has your number," and started laughing uncontrollably.
I hold that white bucks are a required item in any gentleman's wardrobe. And despite the fact that Bad Michael at the Burton coffee stand wisely refuses to accept my credentials as a gentleman, the fact is I personally have two pair. I have plain white bucks for casual affairs, which I often wear sockless with jeans, and wingtip patterned white bucks for more formal events, always worn with linen trousers and socks that match the linen (Seersucker is another, somewhat more Retro pairing). It is, by the way, never appropriate to wear white bucks of either trim style with knee socks and Bermuda shorts, unless one is in Bermuda, where the fact that this looks completely dorky seems never to have quite registered on the collective consciousness. But that's probably because the residents there have spent too much time in the sun sipping Pimm's Cup with mint. Whatever Pimm's Cup is.
Speaking of matters of liquid refreshment, the second thing about summer having arrived it that this is also the time when it is finally appropriate to drink gin and tonics without appearing to be (or actually being) a total lush.
]]> Gin and tonics are, as is well documented, not simply refreshing on a hot day but deeply medicinal, which is a four syllable word for "good for you." And don't we all want to consume only that which is good for us on this health conscious island? Gin was invented in Holland in 1650 to cure stomach disorders, but really hit its stride as a weapon against malaria (which must certainly be a looming threat on our increasingly tropical isle). Quinine cures malaria but tastes disgusting. Quinine water, aka "tonic," is nearly as bad unless, as the British in India discovered in the 1870s, you pair it with gin. Add a generous squeeze of lime and you're combating the scourge of scurvy right along with the malaria. Talk about good for you! Waiter! Another please; my health is in jeopardy!!And the third significant thing about summer's arrival is that our quiet off-season idyll has been shattered. The noisy season has arrived. I'm not referring to the decibel level at the Thriftway, the farmers' market or the shops all of which are now swollen with chatting summer people. The merchants need them. Nor am I referring to the Fourth of July; that's just fine (unless you're an animal, or British).
No, I refer to the roar of power mowers, the whine of weed-whackers, and the scream of grass blowers. I confess I miss the oddly soothing clickity-whirr of a push mower and the scrape of a rake, the use of which tools tends to turn one happily contemplative. Nowadays the cacophony of lawn maintenance is so perniciously persistent from dawn to dark you can't hear yourself think. And when you do get a chance to think, it occurs to you that here's something deeply absurd about a lawn: you spend a day in the spring spreading fertilizer and then you spend the whole rest of the season furiously cutting the grass back. Madness.
And speaking of being driven mad, am I alone in thinking there should be an open season on jet skiers, as there is on deer? This is an island of people who care about the environment; disable a jet ski and you dramatically reduce air and noise pollution and cut down on gasoline consumption. It's all good, see? Not to mention the sporty aspect: it can't be easy drawing a bead on these tiny, fast, and nimble little devils.
But then there's also the good noise of summer, like the squeals of children. I wonder if there is any noise more happy-making? I was thinking back to last summer recently and about the magnetic properties of floating diving platforms. This is something science needs to look into. You built a wooden platform roughly eight feet square, as my neighbors have done, attach floats to the underside and anchor it, and the next thing you know kids are all over it--pushing and jumping, daring and diving, running from one corner to the other to make it pitch and roll. Screams and shouts of happiness all around, year after year, generation after generation. Young boys playing "king of the platform." Older girls shoving boys off the edge and shrieking with delight the way only pre-teen girls do when they succeed--the boys, after all, not trying too hard to resist. That's what most of today's fretful parents don't understand: all you have to do to provide seemingly endless opportunities for invention, entertainment, and mayhem at a beach is to build a floating platform. Even today's plugged-in kids, attached as they are to their cell phone, iPods, or video games, as if they were on life support systems--even they unplug and become like all the other kids over the years when the sun is on that offshore platform. It's magical.
Life is really as simple as an old wood float. Embrace your inner summer...but enough, already, with the mowers.
The sign said, "West Side Highway.
It's good, in these troubled times, to have things that set you to laughing, but this is just plain ludicrous: everyone knows that the West Side Highway is a six lane expressway that runs straight as an arrow down the length of Manhattan's west side (duh!) right along the Hudson River. The speed limit, as I recall, is fifty miles per hour, unless you are a yellow taxi, in which case, by law I think, it's ninety. I checked this with fellow New Yorker, Bad Michael, at the Burton Coffee Stand, and he agrees...not that that means much.
Vashon's "west side highway" (let's not honor it with capital letters), is a narrow, two-lane rural road that wanders hither and yon through the trees and salal shrubbery on the far side of the island. It looks like it was laid out by a drunk. Highway? I propose it immediately be renamed, clearly and accurately, the "west side byway." I mean, really; what were they thinking...
]]> For the time being, just to be fair, I'm leaving the Vashon "Highway" alone. After all, it is a mostly straight "way" that is often "high" (I refer, of course, to altitude) and runs the length of Vashon. Close enough.
And while we're on the subject of New York, did you know that Manzanita, on the shore of Maury Island, was promoted years ago as "the Staten Island of Tacoma." This is true. Trust me; you couldn't make this stuff up. Maury should have sued Staten Island, or Tacoma, or both. Absolute slander.
Moving on to other anomalies, let us now consider the Hardware Store. Imagine this scene: You're perhaps a guy who's met an intriguing woman--maybe while shopping in Seattle, at Nordstrom's. You hit it off, and you think, hey, I'd like to see this woman again! So what do you do? You take a deep breath and extend an invitation: "Say, I have an idea! Why don't we get together next Saturday on Vashon, at the Hardware Store!" Can you see the little thought bubble above her head? The one that says: "Wow! Now here's an exciting guy! Wait till we get to the plumbing section!"
I wonder if anyone has attempted to calculate the sheer tonnage of confusion the Hardware Store generates in a single year. I mean think about it: with this sort of logic, why isn't the TruValue called The Restaurant? Or Sporty's, the Public Library? What I'm saying is, if we say we want to "Keep Vashon Weird," why not rename everything? Why stop at the Hardware Store?
Here's another anomaly: if you look on a map of the island, you'll find that the area at the intersection of Vashon Highway and Cemetery Road is called "Center." Maybe I'm just ornery, but it's my natural tendency to ask, center of what? It isn't at the geographical center of the island, either north-south or east-west. And, the lively coffee roasterie notwithstanding, it isn't "the center" of "town," either. No, that's called "Vashon," which--just to keep things interesting--is the name of both the island and the locus of commercial activity on said island. But is that "Town?" It certainly isn't "Center," because that's already taken, farther south and off-center. Does anyone really say, "I'm going to Vashon" when they mean they're going to, say, the Thriftway? Of course not; we're already on Vashon! Pardon me for thinking this but, I'm guessing whoever was in charge here, say a hundred years ago, had a diabolical sense of humor.
If you live here long enough you come to understand that islanders have solved this particular problem with subtle use of prepositions (okay, I admit I had to look up "preposition") that let insiders known what each other is talking about, even if it doesn't really make sense. If you're going to that part of the island where most of the shops are, you're going "up" town. But of you're going to Seattle, you're going "over" town. These words are a kind of secret code language for much longer explanations of intention and direction. It's like using the turn signals on your car to indicate where you're going--which, of course, hardly anyone on the island does because, as you're only going twenty-five miles per hour, how much directional confusion can you really sow, anyway?
As it turns out, on Vashon where confusing anomalies reign, the answer is: Plenty.
A week ago, the state transportation department repaved sections of the main road across our island. It snarled traffic--such as it is on an island--for days. And the result is that the new pavement is way bumpier than what was there before.
I'm not trying to be cranky (I don't have to; it comes naturally), but I am a deeply caring person...at least for my car, Gigi. And no, that's not a vanity plate; it's one half of the license plate the state gave me. I'm protective of Gigi; I don't want her jarred unnecessarily.
For one thing, I just spent $3,000 having her overhauled. Her resale value is something less than $2,000.
Before you sneer, allow me to point out that this is not just any car.
]]> No, this is a 1986 red VW Golf GTI sports car--the car dubbed "The Pocket Rocket" and "one of the ten best cars ever made," by respected car magazines around the world (you know, those garish, hyperventilated car enthusiast rags that sit on the table in the waiting room when you're having your tires changed? Those magazines. Guy magazines).Maybe you think this investment--let's not call it "an idiotic expenditure of scarce family funds in a plunging economy"--is crazy (for the record, so does everyone else, including my partner, Susan, but then she's never driven Gigi, owing to an inability to drive a manual shift, poor benighted thing, so what does she know, really?).
I say, no! This isn't about an aging adolescent's obsessive passion for a small, powerful and--let's face it, very old--hunk of automotive steel.
No, of course not.
This is about the environment.
Because, you see, I am a much better environmental citizen than any of you folks who rushed out to buy your oh-so-politically correct Priuses or similar (and wussy) hybrid vehicles. That's right. Okay, so maybe you get somewhat better mileage than I do. But guess what? After 22 years and nearly 250,000 miles, Gigi still gets 28 mpg in the city and 34 on the Interstate. She probably gets even more here on the island, if only because she's so incredibly bored driving 25 miles per hour everywhere.
But mileage isn't everything. Uh-uh. Not even close.
That's because the life cycle costs of your brand new, socially responsible Prius (what kind of a name is that, anyway?) cost the Earth, so to speak, to produce. Don't trust me, though, trust Toyota. A couple of years ago they discovered (you could almost hear them muttering Japanese curse words) that twenty-eight percent of all the carbon dioxide emissions created by one of their cars was created during manufacturing, before it ever rolled out of the showroom. High mileage? Big deal. Think about it: first you have to mine the minerals from which to make aluminum, steel, and plastic. Then you process them, using enormous amounts of electricity, then you fabricate the car (think of all those workers just driving to the factory), and so on. And on. Not to mention the environmental cost of dumping your last car, or the cost of dumping your new car, eventually.
Here's the big irony: hybrid vehicles have even higher lifetime environmental costs (experts call them "dust-to-dust" costs) than non-hybrid vehicles. How can that be? Well, for starters (no pun intended) they have two engines. How wasteful is that? What's more, one of them is made of batteries, and batteries are very ugly environmental risks.
So next time you and your hybrid are struggling to get up that long hill on our island, and a small red car passes you like you're standing still, because you nearly are, and you hear a voice yelling, "Neener-Neener!," just remember this: I'm a better citizen than you are.
Environmentally speaking, of course.
Poetry, you will recall, is what you compose if you are a truly exceptional writer and have inherited a lot of money. Or at least have a day job. Try to tell your mortgage company you're a poet.
Anyway, I was reminded of this while thinking about the first line of T.S. Eliot's long, famous, and generally impenetrable masterwork, "The Waste Land," the twentieth century's signature song of universal despair. Upbeat it's not.
The first line, of course, is: "April is the cruelest month."
Why was I thinking about it?
]]> Talk about cruel! And this was just the first day! Then there's the month's midpoint, the day that cinches April at the waist and squeezes each of us like a bag of potatoes tied in the middle. I refer, of course, to April 15th, the day that is proof that Uncle Sam has no sense of humor whatsoever: Tax Day.You'd think that would be enough cruelty for one month, wouldn't you? But nooo... For some of us, it got worse.
Did you see that guy walking around town last week with the shopping bag over his head and the squinty little cut-out eyes? That was me. No, I wasn't half a year behind on marking Halloween, though I'm behind on most things. I was hiding. And not from the tax man, either.
I was hiding from...everyone.
Some years ago, I helped a famous dermatologist write a book. A couple of weeks ago, concerned about some crusty spots on my face, I called in a few chips and visited her clinic in Seattle. She slung me into an examination room and peered at me through what, I swear, were space goggles. They made her already beautiful eyes absolutely enormous. And as I sat there thinking inappropriate thoughts, she made soft sounds: "Umm. Umm." Now in a more intimate setting, this would be, perhaps, a good thing. In a doctor's office, it generally isn't.
Finally, she straightened, whipped off the goggles, and shrugged a professional shrug.
"You're old," she said.
This is not nice. This is not friendly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're so old that there was no sunblock when you were a kid. Did you go to the beach a lot?"
"Um, yes."
"Uh-huh. Your face is covered with pre-cancerous lesions. We call them 'age spots.'"
April is the cruelest month...
This is where the brown shopping bag comes in. Turns out that what they do to treat the results of all that sunburn is...I am not making this up...burning you all over again. With a laser. This experience is a lot like sticking your head in the oven with the setting on "broil." And then, just a few days later, your face starts falling off in chunks. Big purple burned spots slough off slabs of flesh. It's like being a leper. Disgusted, my partner Susan made me sleep in the guest room. I didn't argue; I was bleeding on the pillow anyway. Last week a dead seal washed up on the beach opposite our house and as many as ten bald eagles showed up at a time to pick the carcass clean. I thought about laying down on the sand and letting them clean me up, too.
April is the cruelest month...
Call me crazy (everyone else does) but doesn't it seem to you just a teeny bit odd that the way they cure sunburn damage is to burn your face off? I mean think about that: Where's the logic? Better yet, where's my lawyer?
April is the cruelest month...
And here's the worst part: when the burning sensation recedes and the old, pre-cancerous, "age spots" fall off...I'm still stuck with the same old face! Where's the justice in that?
April is the cruelest month...
Oh yeah, and I had a birthday. I'm even older now.
Talk about cruel.
I was browsing the LARGE PRINT section. No, I haven't reached the stage of seniority (that's a couple of years off) or infirmity (open to debate) to need large print books. It's just that the aerobic machine I use at the local athletic club, where I strive to fend off infirmity, has a reading rack that is too far away for my reading glasses and too close for my distance glasses, and the thought of tri-focals is just too depressing to consider.
That's when I made my discovery, right there in the hushed confines of our library, and here it is: There is something terrifying going on in the LARGE PRINT section.
]]> Allow me to explain...First, while there is a smattering of nonfiction, almost all the books in this section of the library are fiction. Fine. I like fiction. But all these books fall into one or the other of only two literary genres: murder mysteries or steamy romance novels. What could explain this? Where are the classics? Where is contemporary literary fiction? Where are my own novels, not to put too fine a point on it? But I digress.
Maybe I've been reading too many detective stories myself, but here's what seems to me to be the deep and possibly sinister question: what does this say about the people who read LARGE PRINT books? Let's assume that the vast majority of LARGE PRINT book readers (I exempt those younger folks with sight limitations) have reached a certain venerable, wise, and decisive age where they are no longer willing to put up with the tiny little letters cheapskate book publishers use to save money on paper. I'm with them. Let's also assume that our esteemed library understands the reading preferences of those who choose LARGE PRINT books and stocks the shelves accordingly.
Does this mean older folks with failing eyesight have only two things in mind: Sex and Violence? I mean, think about this. Have they just been watching too much TV or is this where we will all soon end up? Or is this really where we all are anyway and older people have earned the right not to have to pretend otherwise?
But wait: there's more! If you look carefully at the spines of these books you discover something really chilling: the murder mysteries AND the romance novels are almost universally written by...Women!. Clearly, at least in the publishing world, they are adept at creating plots at either extreme. But what if this is who they truly are? I don't know about you, but this makes me look at my own partner with slightly different (and very focused) eyes. How are we men, blinded as we are by love and not that bright to begin with, to know whether the woman with whom we share our lives is a hopeless romantic or a potential murderess? What are the signs? Or--even more frightening--do they have the potential to be both? Do they alternate from one extreme (I hesitate to use the word "mood") to the other? Are there clues, such that one might be forewarned against putting one's large male foot into one's mouth on a given day, lest that be followed by a stiletto--and not of the heel variety?
I tell you what: a library's a very scary place.
Anyway, the thing is, being a wise guy is a birthright in New York. In fact, "wise guy" comes in the water in New York, with the fluoride. And the highest form of admiration and affection you can get from a New Yorker is a nearly continuous stream of insults, often mentioning members of your family in less than flattering ways.
]]> A true New Yorker, you see, has only one ambition in life: being "one up" on the next guy by means of witty remarks. It is, for us, like breathing. It is the principal reason for being alive.The other regulars at the coffee stand understand this. In fact, they pay extra for the entertainment. As well they should: They're gaining valuable new verbal skills; it's like in-service training on the Borscht Belt comedy circuit just standing there. It's a privilege.
Not surprisingly, the period just after 8:00 a.m. has come to be called "Insult Hour." All are welcome. On occasion, however, in the midst of a perfectly normal exchange of vicious hilarity, one that has left one of us lacerated and the other in a state of helpless delight, we will notice a look of shock on the face of some new patron and have to stop right there and explain that we are simply New Yorkers holding a friendly conversation.
Invariably, the shocked patron will be a member of the majority demographic group in this region, disproportionately represented on our island, to wit: "the Northwest Nice." Bad Michael and I, of course, know this already; had the stranger been a New Yorker, he or she would have slung a cleverly cutting insult into the conversation before even introducing themselves. That's how we say, "Hi" in New York.
To Bad Michael and me, the Northwest Nice are like aliens from a planet not even a part of our universe. We don't understand them. And we don't trust them. They're too nice. They smile out of context and say nice things. And they never, ever, honk their horns. This is deeply puzzling to us. Cars are made with horns. You may have noticed they're not options like, say, eight speaker stereo or Corinthian leather. They are standard equipment and their purpose is to protect you, just like air bags. The difference is that they're there not to protect you from someone else. They're there to protect you from having an apoplectic fit yourself while waiting for the Northwest Nice driver in front of you to let pedestrians, other cars, and entire seasons pass before proceeding through the intersection.
And then there's our supermarket. Everyone who works there smiles. And there's no turnover in personnel. Same smiling people, month after month, year after year. Northwest Nice people no doubt think this is, well, nice. Not me. I think it's creepy. Sinister. Here's my guess: employees come to work, punch in, and are met by someone in a fake nurse's uniform who hands each of them a little paper cup with a pill in it and they have to swallow it before they can put on their supermarket smocks. By the time they reach their registers--ta da!--big smile. Don't tell me this is normal.
Here's something else that makes no sense: people here only cross the street at the corner. Anyone with half a brain (and this, naturally, would rule out Bad Michael) knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Euclid, another New Yorker as I recall, proved this--what?--at least a century ago. You wanna cross the street, whaddaya do? You step off the curb and stride directly and purposefully across the pavement to wherever you're going. That's why they have curbs the whole length of the block: to step off of! But here's what's really bizarre. If you cross like a New Yorker--which is to say, anywhere you like--here on our island, oncoming cars stop. Right there in the middle of the block! What's that about? This is a real hazard. In New York, it is understood that cars and street-crossers weave through and around each other with almost balletic grace, just the way pedestrians do on the sidewalk. If they didn't, if cars just stopped to let street-crossers cross, the entire city would lock up in a knot. Chaos. Pandemonium. Not to mention lots of rear-endings. Besides, it's ecologically wrong to cross only at the corner; a terrific waste of precious energy (especially for old guys like Bad Michael).
So enough, already, with the Northwest Nice. All this sweetness is killin' me; I gotta go take a shot of insulin. See you at the coffee stand.
Come armed.
]]> D. H. Lawrence
Studies in Classic American Literature
Four years ago, I walked some fourteen hundred miles through most of southern England with a pack on my back. Sometimes I stayed at inns or bed and breakfasts, sometimes I pitched a tent. On days I camped, I noticed something curious: I would sometimes walk hours longer than I'd planned, despite fatigue and advancing darkness, until I found a spot that was "right." Was I being picky? I don't think so. And I wasn't looking for a spot that was scenic, or even one that felt particularly safe (one of my favorites was a narrow rock ledge a hundred feet above the Atlantic): I was looking for the place where I belonged, even if just for a night--a place I liked, but that also liked me, a marriage of person and place.
Each of us has stumbled upon places that possessed an almost magical sense of rightness--a condition that we are hard-pressed to describe solely by means of the material elements of which they are composed. There is a phrase in Latin which captures this condition: genius loci. In Classical times, the word "genius" was synonymous with "spirit": it was understood that distinct spirits or demi-gods inhabited special places--gods one was at pains to please and with whom it was unwise to trifle. Indigenous peoples, like Native Americans, have a similar belief system.
We, however--by which I mean Americans of European descent--do not. We are products of the Age of Reason. When René Descartes wrote, "I think, therefore I am" in 1637, he ushered in an era that worshipped the intellect and mistrusted the senses. America's Founders were men of their Age; they had a passion for rational discourse and a devotion to individual freedom. When they declared our independence they proclaimed the revolutionary notion that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: were our "inalienable rights." But wait--in the first draft, the phrase was "life, liberty, and property." I suspect Jefferson changed it to "happiness" to make it more palatable. Nonetheless, over time, the pursuit of happiness/property in America has not just ignored genius loci but, sadly, has gradually eroded our sense of community--not just community with others, but communion with the inherent value, or spirit, of the natural world we inhabit. If today we mourn the loss of places that have special meaning, then we must acknowledge that both the loss and the alienation that comes from it are self-inflicted.
This is the seventh and last in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, Comfort, Delight, and Dwelling as components of "home." This column explores the notion of Spirit.
]]> The irony of attempting to "deconstruct" the feeling of home, to identify and understand the parts of its anatomy, is of course that this effort is itself a relic of the Age of Reason. The plain fact is that some significant aspect of "home"--that part we might call "the spirit of place"--is beyond reason; it exists principally in the realm of the senses.But I make no apology for attempting to make sense of the sense of home, and here's why: If we do not take pains to understand what, specifically, gives meaning and value to the place we call home, we stand a very good chance of losing it, piece by piece, element by element. You cannot attend to, care for, cultivate, and protect something if you do not know what it is made of. As individuals, we may not have the power or the opportunity to alter the pace at which change is producing placelessness in America, but we do have the power and opportunity to preserve the genius loci--the spirit of place--in the place where we live.
On most mornings, sometime after eight o'clock, the dogs and I can usually be found at a neighborhood coffee stand. The coffee and scones are excellent, but that's not why I'm there. I'm there because of the spirit of that very particular place and of the island as a whole. It's about the sense of community that thrives there every morning. Or perhaps I should say "communities," because if you come early and stay late you'll notice that the coffee stand is home to several communities. By 7:30 on weekdays, the stand is crammed with guys with pickups. They're craftsmen on their way to projects, and they all know each other. They visit, share job problems, tell stories on one another, joke. Then they're gone, replaced by the folks I know best: neighbors and friends who grab a cup of coffee our morning walk. Stay a little longer and you'll meet the gang from the local rowing club--lithe, red-cheeked, dampish men and women shivering in line and longing for coffee as much to warm their hands as their innards. On weekends, especially in summer, the next wave will be the cyclists. Each is a community unto itself, and yet they are knit together, partly by the warmth of the woman who runs the coffee stand, and partly because of their joshing affection for each other and the communal comfort of knowing they will be there every day, like clockwork, like the tide slipping in and out of the harbor.
The spirit of place is alive and well at the coffee stand. And everyone knows that preserving it is a communal task. Without spirit, there is no place.
Martin Heidegger, the brilliant, if often impenetrable and historically controversial twentieth-century German philosopher (he was equivocal about Nazism) was a man possessed by the question of what it means to be in a place, to truly dwell in it.
What's that got to do with home? Almost everything. Bear with me for a moment.
Words have histories that are often revealing. The words "being" and "dwelling," for example, have the same Germanic linguistic root: the word buan. So to say in German, "Ich bin," or, "I am" also means, "I dwell." What's more, the Old Saxon word wuon, which is related to buan, adds a very important, if subtle additional meaning: that of "sparing" or "preserving"--that is, being in an actively caretaking relationship with the place where you live.
When we use the word "home" in casual conversation, as in, "I'm going home," we're generally talking about the house or apartment we live in, our dwelling. But "dwelling" is both and noun and verb, a thing and an action. When we say we feel "at home" someplace, we don't just mean the four walls of the structure to which we return at night. No, there's more to it than that. The place where we feel "at home," is a place to which we attach a certain affection and for which we have a feeling of protectiveness. It not only protects us, as a refuge, but brings out the protectiveness in us, a sense of caretaking. It's a place we care about and take care of. This, of course, is why God made vacuum cleaners: so we could take care of our homes.
But seriously: a house is inert; a home is alive with, well...living.
This is the sixth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, Comfort, and Delight as components of "home." This column explores the notion of Dwelling.
]]> It's the Christmas season. And for some years now we've been able to scroll through the menu of cable TV stations during this season and find a channel whose entire programming consists of nothing more than music and a continuous video image of logs burning in a fireplace. Why is that? It's because nothing quite captures the primitively comforting sense of "home" than a warm hearth. Houses with working fireplaces command a premium in the real estate market because the hearth is symbolically the heating source, the cooking mechanism, and the gathering place of a home. Furniture is always oriented toward the fireplace for a reason: it is the focal point. When a house has no hearth, it feels not so much like a home as it does a containment vessel.This is where Heidegger's contemporary and philosophical opposite, the Modernist Swiss architect and designer Le Corbusier, got it horribly wrong. "A house is a machine for living in," he said. Right. That's why cities throughout much of the western world are demolishing modernism-inspired cell-block-style apartment buildings that were not so much dwelling places as they were soul-deadening storage units for human beings. I once interviewed a city planner outside Paris who said of the crime-ridden mid-century high-rise complexes that blighted his town, "We had a crisis in population growth at the same time as we had a crisis in architecture."
But you don't have to stack these storage units to the sky to make them isolated and sterile; you can achieve the same effect by spreading them across the landscape, enclosing them with a wall, and guarding them with a gate. Almost a decade ago, the 2001 Census found that sixteen million people in America, roughly six percent of the total, lived in places designed explicitly to be walled off and guarded from the community in which they're located. Roughly twice as many more people lived in subdivisions with a walled perimeter but no active security at the entrance.
These are not "homes" in any sense that Heidegger would comprehend, and living in these developments is not "dwelling." Such places are often called "gated communities," but they possess is no identifiable sense of community, other than a name out front. Residents seldom know their neighbors. There are no sidewalks to encourage visiting; it's an automobile-dominated environment (that's why garages, not porches, face the street). About the only person who has a sense of community is the guard at the gatehouse; he knows everyone. Superficially. And he probably wouldn't be admitted as a resident, even if he could afford it.
So far, and thanks in part to water supply limitations on construction, the island where I live is still a place which retains an intact sense of home, of community, of shared caring, of preserving. The population may be dispersed across the island, but it is devilishly and thankfully difficult to spend less than twenty minutes at the grocery store, the post office, the library, the hardware stores, the book stores, or any other place in town because you keep running into neighbors and friends and chatting. And as for preserving? This holiday season and throughout the year, people and businesses are actively involved in raising money for the food bank and many other local institutions and charities.
At least on this island, as winter closes in upon us, it seems that we are gathering around an unseen but universally acknowledged hearth we might call "our home," the place where we dwell, the place we seek to preserve.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I made my first visit to Port Orchard, Washington the other day. I rather wish I hadn't. Port Orchard, on the mainland not far from the island where I live, is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints, and big box superstores, but its core is dying. You know a community is struggling when second hand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.
I don't think I'm alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others simply delightful?
This is the fifth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, and Comfort as components of "home." Today we explore Delight.
]]> It is an unfortunate fact of life in America today that the places where we live often do not delight us at all; they're simply where we go at the end of the workday. It's just as well we'll soon be closing our eyes. But let's say you and your family decide to spend a pleasant weekend somewhere else; where do you decide to go? My guess it's someplace that is delightful to you, a place that you find pleasurable and comforting in some way, a place that seems reassuring and validating of some sense you have of "rightness."
Ever wonder what it is about such places that makes them feel delightful? You'd think that it was something ephemeral, almost magical, wouldn't you? It's not. It's predictable. Because delightful places have two things in common other places don't share. They have roughly equal portions of order and complexity.
Here's what I mean: let's say you climb to the top of a church steeple in an old community in northern New England, or a hill town in Italy, or a fishing port in England, to name but a few. What do you see? If you look carefully, you see a certain orderliness in the way buildings are constructed and the community is composed. They're made of similar and largely local materials. There are things that tie them together--their roofs, for example: cedar shingles in New England, red tiles in Italy, gray slate in England. But there is also complexity in the variations among each of the buildings in the community, and the way they are distributed within the townscape. They are both distinct and also a part of a whole; they knit together easily, almost seamlessly, but don't lose their character.
Places that have one of these characteristics, but not both, are not delightful. When there is order, but no complexity, for example, the result is boredom. After WWII, Arthur Leavitt built Levittowns for returning soldiers and their families, vast subdivisions composed of inexpensive and identical houses on identical lots. The economics of such developments were such that building them was like printing money for the developers and they spread like wildfire, and still do. Malvina Reynolds's song, "Little Boxes," captured the aesthetic, such as it was: "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."
What was missing was complexity. But the reverse--complexity without order--is just as deadening. That's what strip development yields. As you approach Port Orchard (and the majority of communities in America) you have complexity run amok. There are so many shopping strips and so many signs telling you what's there and demanding your attention that you actually can't take all the information in. There is no order by which to make sense of it.
Not so those places in New England, or Europe, or the island where I live. You get off the ferry and drive south and the structures you see, nestled amongst the trees, while they differ, also are orderly in that they tend to be of similar scale and are built with similar materials. (Oh sure, we have our McMansions, but they're well hidden.) You arrive in the village at the island's center and what you find is a cluster of businesses mostly modest in scale, varied in construction, yet nonetheless companionable. And the necessities of living are provided in a concise, walkable arrangement--in short, a community. There are grocers, bakers, banks, cafes, restaurants, bookstores, hardware stores, gift shops, a pharmacy, gas station, bike shop, insurance and real estate agents, florists, an eye clinic, a veterinary clinic, a holistic health center, the library, post office, consignment shops, the farmers' market, and on and on. Not to mention people you look forward to seeing and speaking with every day.
There it is: order and complexity, side by side. And one more thing: enticement--the sense that just around the next corner there will be some pleasant surprise: something new in a shop window, a neighbor you haven't seen for a while, a patiently waiting dog, all the tiny little elements which, when combined in just the right proportion, yield that ineffable quality of home called...Delight.
As Shelley said, it comes rarely.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I made my first visit to Port Orchard, Washington the other day. I rather wish I hadn't. Port Orchard, on the mainland not far from the island where I live, is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints, and big box superstores, but its core is dying. You know a community is struggling when second hand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.
I don't think I'm alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others simply delightful?
This is the fifth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, and Comfort as components of "home." Today we explore Delight.
]]> It is an unfortunate fact of life in America today that the places where we live often do not delight us at all; they're simply where we go at the end of the workday. It's just as well we'll soon be closing our eyes. But let's say you and your family decide to spend a pleasant weekend somewhere else; where do you decide to go? My guess it's someplace that is delightful to you, a place that you find pleasurable and comforting in some way, a place that seems reassuring and validating of some sense you have of "rightness."
Ever wonder what it is about such places that makes them feel delightful? You'd think that it was something ephemeral, almost magical, wouldn't you? It's not. It's predictable. Because delightful places have two things in common other places don't share. They have roughly equal portions of order and complexity.
Here's what I mean: let's say you climb to the top of a church steeple in an old community in northern New England, or a hill town in Italy, or a fishing port in England, to name but a few. What do you see? If you look carefully, you see a certain orderliness in the way buildings are constructed and the community is composed. They're made of similar and largely local materials. There are things that tie them together--their roofs, for example: cedar shingles in New England, red tiles in Italy, gray slate in England. But there is also complexity in the variations among each of the buildings in the community, and the way they are distributed within the townscape. They are both distinct and also a part of a whole; they knit together easily, almost seamlessly, but don't lose their character.
Places that have one of these characteristics, but not both, are not delightful. When there is order, but no complexity, for example, the result is boredom. After WWII, Arthur Leavitt built Levittowns for returning soldiers and their families, vast subdivisions composed of inexpensive and identical houses on identical lots. The economics of such developments were such that building them was like printing money for the developers and they spread like wildfire, and still do. Malvina Reynolds's song, "Little Boxes," captured the aesthetic, such as it was: "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."
What was missing was complexity. But the reverse--complexity without order--is just as deadening. That's what strip development yields. As you approach Port Orchard (and the majority of communities in America) you have complexity run amok. There are so many shopping strips and so many signs telling you what's there and demanding your attention that you actually can't take all the information in. There is no order by which to make sense of it.
Not so those places in New England, or Europe, or the island where I live. You get off the ferry and drive south and the structures you see, nestled amongst the trees, while they differ, also are orderly in that they tend to be of similar scale and are built with similar materials. (Oh sure, we have our McMansions, but they're well hidden.) You arrive in the village at the island's center and what you find is a cluster of businesses mostly modest in scale, varied in construction, yet nonetheless companionable. And the necessities of living are provided in a concise, walkable arrangement--in short, a community. There are grocers, bakers, banks, cafes, restaurants, bookstores, hardware stores, gift shops, a pharmacy, gas station, bike shop, insurance and real estate agents, florists, an eye clinic, a veterinary clinic, a holistic health center, the library, post office, consignment shops, the farmers' market, and on and on. Not to mention people you look forward to seeing and speaking with every day.
There it is: order and complexity, side by side. And one more thing: enticement--the sense that just around the next corner there will be some pleasant surprise: something new in a shop window, a neighbor you haven't seen for a while, a patiently waiting dog, all the tiny little elements which, when combined in just the right proportion, yield that ineffable quality of home called...Delight.
As Shelley said, it comes rarely.
I made my first visit to Port Orchard, Washington the other day. I rather wish I hadn't. Port Orchard, on the mainland not far from the island where I live, is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints, and big box superstores, but its core is dying. You know a community is struggling when second hand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.
I don't think I'm alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others simply delightful?
This is the fifth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, and Comfort as components of "home." Today we explore Delight.
It is an unfortunate fact of life in America today that the places where we live often do not delight us at all; they're simply where we go at the end of the workday. It's just as well we'll soon be closing our eyes. But let's say you and your family decide to spend a pleasant weekend somewhere else; where do you decide to go? My guess it's someplace that is delightful to you, a place that you find pleasurable and comforting in some way, a place that seems reassuring and validating of some sense you have of "rightness."
Ever wonder what it is about such places that makes them feel delightful? You'd think that it was something ephemeral, almost magical, wouldn't you? It's not. It's predictable. Because delightful places have two things in common other places don't share. They have roughly equal portions of order and complexity.
Here's what I mean: let's say you climb to the top of a church steeple in an old community in northern New England, or a hill town in Italy, or a fishing port in England, to name but a few. What do you see? If you look carefully, you see a certain orderliness in the way buildings are constructed and the community is composed. They're made of similar and largely local materials. There are things that tie them together--their roofs, for example: cedar shingles in New England, red tiles in Italy, gray slate in England. But there is also complexity in the variations among each of the buildings in the community, and the way they are distributed within the townscape. They are both distinct and also a part of a whole; they knit together easily, almost seamlessly, but don't lose their character.
Places that have one of these characteristics, but not both, are not delightful. When there is order, but no complexity, for example, the result is boredom. After WWII, Arthur Leavitt built Levittowns for returning soldiers and their families, vast subdivisions composed of inexpensive and identical houses on identical lots. The economics of such developments were such that building them was like printing money for the developers and they spread like wildfire, and still do. Malvina Reynolds's song, "Little Boxes," captured the aesthetic, such as it was: "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."
What was missing was complexity. But the reverse--complexity without order--is just as deadening. That's what strip development yields. As you approach Port Orchard (and the majority of communities in America) you have complexity run amok. There are so many shopping strips and so many signs telling you what's there and demanding your attention that you actually can't take all the information in. There is no order by which to make sense of it.
Not so those places in New England, or Europe, or the island where I live. You get off the ferry and drive south and the structures you see, nestled amongst the trees, while they differ, also are orderly in that they tend to be of similar scale and are built with similar materials. (Oh sure, we have our McMansions, but they're well hidden.) You arrive in the village at the island's center and what you find is a cluster of businesses mostly modest in scale, varied in construction, yet nonetheless companionable. And the necessities of living are provided in a concise, walkable arrangement--in short, a community. There are grocers, bakers, banks, cafes, restaurants, bookstores, hardware stores, gift shops, a pharmacy, gas station, bike shop, insurance and real estate agents, florists, an eye clinic, a veterinary clinic, a holistic health center, the library, post office, consignment shops, the farmers' market, and on and on. Not to mention people you look forward to seeing and speaking with every day.
There it is: order and complexity, side by side. And one more thing: enticement--the sense that just around the next corner there will be some pleasant surprise: something new in a shop window, a neighbor you haven't seen for a while, a patiently waiting dog, all the tiny little elements which, when combined in just the right proportion, yield that ineffable quality of home called...Delight.
As Shelley said, it comes rarely.
Some years ago, I'd been interviewing Grant Hildebrand, emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Washington and a renowned expert on what creates pleasure in the built landscape around us. We'd just discovered we were both in love with a very small town in England, called Burford. It's a nearly linear village of largely medieval limestone dwellings and shops running cheek-by-jowl down both sides of a steep street that ends at a one-lane, hump-backed stone bridge over the pretty little river Windrush. I doubt anyone can stand at the top of that village, looking down this ancient street, and not be moved by its nearly heartbreaking charm, peace, and comfort. You want to move in immediately. I didn't find Hildebrand's emotional response the least bit theatrical, because I have the very same reaction every time I visit Burford.
Why is that? Why do some places grab us by the throat, the way a good detective mystery does right from the first paragraph, so we can't let go? What is it about them that makes us feel so comfortable?
This is the fourth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, and Beauty. Today we explore Comfort.
]]>Let's turn the question upside down: Have you ever been someplace you absolutely, positively knew--in your bone marrow, in your smallest cells--you didn't belong? Of course you have, unless you've led a very sheltered life. Why was that? That's right, because it made you feel uncomfortable. What makes some places comfortable and others decidedly not?
Several decades ago a team of thinkers led by Canadian architect Christopher Alexander decided to try to understand why, for example, charming European villages...well, charmed us. The result was a thick, brilliant, though rather academic book called, A Pattern Language. Academic or not, it's so important that it's still in print. I do immense injustice when I summarize it by saying the authors noted that places that feel comfortable and welcoming tend to be clustered around intimate public spaces and have buildings no more than four stories high. They have traffic patterns that cause involvement rather than disengagement. They have "public living rooms"--sidewalk cafes, pubs, plazas for seeing and being seen. And much more. There is, in short, both order and complexity in such comfortable places--and all of it is built at a human scale.
Hildebrand and Appleton, though, said that wasn't enough: "Alexander tells us what gives us comfort," Hildebrand told me, "but not why." Why, indeed?
Instead of answering directly, let me give an example. I live on a beach overlooking a harbor on a small island in Puget Sound. From the windows of my study I can see a great expanse of water stretching southward, embraced by two encompassing and protecting arms of land. It is a splendid prospect. And in just a few more weeks it is also likely to be a dramatic one, as the prevailing winters storms will scream right up from the south toward my windows. But I will not be uncomfortable about this. Why? Because, first of all, I have prospect: I can see threats coming and prepare. Second, I have refuge: I have tight windows, strong walls, a gas range, a wood stove with plenty of stacked and split Madrona wood, and lots of candles.
Prospect and refuge. They're needs that go back to our cave man days; needs that are deeply encoded in the DNA of our species. They're all about staying safe, and safety is perhaps the most primitive definition of comfort.
An island sometimes seems a small and perilous thing, especially in winter. But with just a few adjustments and preparations, it can also be an island of comfort--a place a part of and yet apart from the rest of the world, enfolding, encompassing, protected, and protecting.
]]>For example, I grew up in a neighborhood near the Bronx that no one could call "beautiful." It was deteriorating at a speed and with an inevitability that were more like terminal cancer than dry rot. But from our little apartment I had a panoramic view of the majestic Hudson River and, on the opposite shore, the forested basaltic cliffs of the Palisades. And ever since then, my sense of natural beauty has required expanses of water and greenery. In the same way, other people need--the same urgent way they need food or water or oxygen--the big sky of the Northern Plains, or the astringent, juniper-perfumed air of the Southwest desert, or the insistent verticality of the Rockies. So--the unquestionable erudition of Lord Clark notwithstanding--the only really certain thing we can say about the beauty of places is that it is, indeed, "in the eye of the beholder."
This is the third in a series I'm calling "The Anatomy of Home." The first two columns explored "Place" and "Shape." This one examines "Beauty."
]]> Something we tend to forget is that the whole notion that the natural world could be thought of as "beautiful" is a very recent thing."Beauty," to choose a common definition, "is the quality that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction." Obvious, huh? But until the mid-eighteenth century, the perceptual experience most people had of the natural world was stark terror. No one in his right mind ventured into the wilds to take in the view. The roads--where there were any--were treacherous, the accommodations spotty and often dismal, and the likelihood of being robbed at gunpoint high. Mountains were horrifying, not sublime; bodies of water were dangerous, not scenic. The idea that one would even bother to paint "landscapes" arose only in the late 1600s, with the Dutch painters. Before that, and throughout the Renaissance, landscapes were backgrounds, and highly stylized ones at that, fraught with allegorical meanings but seldom standing for themselves.
All that changed just before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Suddenly, the countryside was all the rage, and the wilder the scenery, the better. Turner and Constable were painting it; Wordsworth was writing poetry about it. People traveled in search of "picturesque" scenes--and by this they meant, quite literally, landscapes that looked like pictures. There were guidebooks published directing travelers to approved picturesque places. But these settings were not meant to be viewed directly; oh, no. No, you put your back to the view and gazed into your "Claude glass," a sort of handheld mirror by which the real scene behind you could be transformed--voila!--into a framed landscape picture.
The island in Puget Sound where I live is full of "picturesque" scenes and you don't need a Claude glass to appreciate them. My own favorite is curve on a low hill where there's a sweeping view over the gleaming masts of sailboats in the harbor and, in the far distance, the snow-capped fourteen thousand foot cone of Mount Rainier. On any clear day, but especially in late afternoon with the sun low and the snow burnished gold, it's a guaranteed "Wow."
At least for me. And that's the point: Aesthetic appreciation of a place is individual. It's a combination of "Seeing," by which I mean perceiving through one's senses; "Understanding," by which I mean appreciation and knowledge of what one is seeing (as we explored in the last column in this series); and "Feeling," by which I mean the emotional response we have and the associations from our own experience we bring to the view. As a child, the only beauty I had available to me was that view across the Hudson to the cliffs beyond. Little wonder, then, that the expanse of glittering water in the harbor and the mountain in the distance evoke an emotional response in me. It's perception colored by emotion, emotion shaped by personal history. I can certainly appreciate, intellectually, the limitless expanse of the Northern Great Plains, or the arid grandeur of the Grand Canyon, but none of it produces that wave of pleasure and comfort I get every time the ferry from Seattle approaches the dock on our island. It's a language of beauty I can understand.
It's the language of belonging.
]]>This is the second in a series of columns exploring what seem to me to be the component parts of what we might call, "The Anatomy of Home." Today, we consider Shape--the way the landscape influences our experience of home.
]]> A landscape, being visual, seems simple to appreciate. But in fact even the word itself is problematic. The commonest English definition of the word is "an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view." That's because for the last three hundred years or so landscape meant a picture of a view--literally a painting. But the word has ancient Germanic roots. A land typically meant a defined plot that was plowed. And the word scape, which is related to the word "sheaf," meant a bundle or collection of similar things. So landscape long meant a composition of manmade spaces on the land--which is a far cry from "scenery."
The manmade spaces in the western two-thirds of the United States are organized on a stunningly artificial--not to mention monotonous--system: the survey grid. We have Thomas Jefferson to thank for this. He's the chap who got Congress to order the surveying of the West, the result of which is that all the land west of the Appalachians looks like a net was dropped from space to capture and tame it. The grid has no respect for Mother Nature. As an easterner, I was accustomed to roads that conformed themselves to the contours of the land. They do sensible things, like avoiding steep hills or bodies of water. When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that streets there are both airborne and amphibious: they climb up and over hills, leap from vertical bluffs, dive under Lake Union, for example, and reappear on the opposite shore, streaking onward, relentlessly and arrow straight to, I suppose, infinity.
Then there's the numbers. Today I live on a dead end street on an island, overlooking a wide harbor. Where I come from, this street would have a charming and descriptive name--something like "Outer Harbor Lane," or "Beach Drive." Out here it's called SW 242nd Street. This, it seems to me, raises far more questions than it answers: Southwest of what? Where do the numbers begin? Do they ever end? I haven't a clue and I'll bet I'm in the majority. But I digress...
Let's return to the island I call home. How does one understand the almost feminine shapeliness of the landscape of this island--so different from, say, the rocky peaks and cliffs of Orcas Island in the San Juans to the north? It's simple, really: My island is a sort of geological landfill, a dumping ground of gravel, sand, and mud left behind by a messy retreating glacier. The island's contours are soft today because the pile of rubble is slowly--very slowly--eroding away. Soon--geologically speaking anyway--it won't be here at all. Maybe that's why property values are dropping.
Consider also the woods. Visitors comment on how lushly forested the island is, how undeveloped. They should stop by the historical museum some day and see pictures of what many parts of the island looked like just a hundred years or so ago: raw, bleak, stripped of timber--a kind of temperate zone moonscape. Take a walk through the woods and you can still see the stumps of the giants that once furred these slopes. Today's woods, while lovely, are like some adolescent boy's wispy attempt at a beard compared to what once was.
And then there are the fruit trees. In early fall, almost anywhere on the island, scraggly old apple and Italian plum trees rain neglected fruit on overgrown lots and the lonely yards of departed summer people. These trees are what's left of an island that, before and for many years after WWII, was a major producer of orchard and vine fruits: apples, plums, peaches, loganberries, raspberries, currants and, of course, strawberries. Up where the airstrip now is, imagine strawberries as far as the eye could see. Truly vast tracts were under cultivation. The same is true of poultry farms; there were dozens of enormous, two- and three-level hen houses with thousands of pullets. The manmade landscape that resulted is almost all gone now, returning inexorably to "scenery." The wartime internment of the Japanese-American families who owned many of the berry farms was one blow, but eventually it was the cost of labor and other market changes that drove them out of business.
So when Constable tells us that "We see nothing until we truly understand it," he's reminding us that while the shape of the landscape we call home is important, it's also more than just the picture we see of it at this moment. That's like looking at a single frame of a movie and assuming we can understand the whole story from that one still image.
As with people, the history and character of a place is written on its body.
When you ask someone what it means to feel at home someplace, they'll say something vague like, "It's where you feel comfortable." That's not good enough for me. I want to know what the bits and pieces of experience are which, when taken together, give us a sense of belonging to one particular place and not another.
]]> I've spent several years pursuing this...well, okay, this obsession...and I've concluded that there is a structure--an anatomy--to home. I think it's composed of seven key components: Place, Shape, Beauty, Comfort, Delight, Dwelling, and Spirit. And since how much each of these characteristics means varies with each of us, what feels like home varies, too. This blog category takes a look at each and at what it is about my island that makes it feel so seductively like home.Let's begin with Place.
Genesis tells us that, "In the beginning...the earth was without form, and void." I wonder if there is any phrase, in any language, more terrifying than this one. Imagine it: there was only space (since the earth was without form), and time (since there was a beginning). Beyond that, nothing. So how does space become place? To me, place is space given meaning. Space is abstract and meaning-less. Place is particular, human, and meaning-rich, for only humans confer meaning. I'm intrigued by the fact that, in our language, space is defined by prepositions (forgive me, I'm a writer) like "at," "in," "over," or "under." Place, on the other hand, is defined by nouns, like "valley," "beach," "hill," "shop," and so on--the places that have meaning on this island.
See what I mean? Place is particular. And yet one of the most soul-destroying aspects of contemporary America is its increasing placelessness--the loss of particular character. More and more of the places Americans call "home" are what I call, "American generic": strip malls with the same shops, residential subdivisions that look alike, characterless office "parks." You could be anywhere--and to me, that's the same as nowhere.
But the island where I live? Uh-uh. It has its own distinct sense of place. It's partly a package of natural gifts--the scalloped shoreline, the soft hills, the meadows and farms, the deeply eroded hollows, the harbors. But that doesn't explain how, separated by a scant couple of miles, it can be so utterly distinct from, say, Seattle, or any of the other islands in Puget Sound. And I would submit, though I'm certainly no expert, that it's partly to do with this particular island's stubborn refusal to lose its soul. Oh yes, things change; anyone who's grown up here can and will tell you that. But something real persists. The people who live here make sure it does. The evidence is all around: in the crowded farmers' market, in the honor system farm and flower stands, in the deep support of local and charitable organizations, the arts, and so much more.
And there's another thing: the people who live here do it by choice. They didn't just end up here because of a job, for example. It's not on the way to anywhere. They sought it out. When you live on an island, there are certain obvious inconveniences. But for the people who live here--the ones who were born here and either decided to stay or eventually returned, and the people who visited here and, like me, decided not to leave--the placeness of this island, its particularness, has meaning that far outweighs the inconveniences.
We call that meaning, Home.