Reading out of Doors: How Nature Becomes Text and Vice-Versa Richmond Minor Eustis Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2010 Reading Out of Doors: How Nature Becomes Text and Vice-Versa Richmond Minor Eustis Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Eustis, Richmond Minor, "Reading Out of Doors: How Nature Becomes Text and Vice-Versa" (2010). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3174. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3174 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. READING OUT OF DOORS: HOW NATURE BECOMES TEXT AND VICE-VERSA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Literature by Richmond Minor Eustis, Jr. B.A., Boston University, 1994 M.A., University of Georgia, 1996 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2007 May 2010 Dedication For my father, Richmond M. Eustis, Sr. (Nov. 24, 1945-May 30 2009) who taught me how to get to work ii Acknowledgments An enormous part of completing of a project like this one is attributable to the efforts and endurance of people other than the one who writes it. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation director, Dr. Gregory B. Stone, who, in addition to setting an example of daring, thoughtful, scholarship, somehow also negotiated an ideal balance between prodding me, reining me in, and letting me run on my own. I am grateful to have benefited from his guidance, and fortunate to enjoy his friendship. Also, I must thank my dissertation readers for their encouragement and their challenges to my work. Professors Kevin Bongiorni, John Protevi, and Joseph Ricapito were indispensible sources of advice and insight. I am fortunate to have worked with such splendid scholars and teachers. Dr. J. Gerald Kennedy, the dean’s representative, was a gift from the graduate school, and an insightful reader of my work. Dr. J. Jefferson Humphries, too, was immensely generous with his time and advice. I also must mention Dr. Adelaide Russo for her tireless efforts on behalf of the Program in Comparative Literature, and for her support and encouragement. Thanks are also due my friends and fellow graduate students at Louisiana State University and elsewhere for their commiseration, encouragement, and extra sets of eyes. There are too many to name them all, but Thomas Halloran, Marianne Bessy, Logan Connors, Ioanna Panos and Greg Molchan figure prominently. My classmate in comparative literature, Rachel Spear, deserves special thanks for her ongoing willingness to provide advice and feedback, as does Meenakshi Dutta for her patience in listening repeatedly and indulgently to spoken-word drafts of this text. Since my work is so concerned with the environment in which people read and write, I should mention my time in residence at White Plantation in Lafourche Parish—surely the most iii pastoral (or bucolic) locus amoenus imaginable to complete a dissertation contending with the entanglement of nature and culture. Last, I lack words powerful enough to thank my sisters, brother, and mother, who have been remarkable models of strength and love in what at times has been a difficult period for us all. Without their grace, patience, forbearance, and faith I could never have begun this work, much less completed it. iv Preface This work took shape in several different environments: in the Northern Rockies and San Juan Islands, where I scribbled notes on backcountry permits and index cards jammed into backpacks and drybags; in my office in Baton Rouge; in the dining room of my family’s farm in Lafourche Parish during an unusually frigid January; in the den of my parents’ house in New Orleans, where I watched movies and read books with my father as he struggled with cancer. It’s worthwhile to mention this because much of my research focuses on the act of reading nature as a function of the reader’s environment. The text, I contend, is as much influenced by the environment in which the reader construes it as it is by the environment in which the writer writes it. This is not to maintain that the acts of reading and writing are somehow determined by environment. Nor do I believe, however, that interacting with text through reading and writing is as pure an act as some critical theorists would have us believe. One reads differently—construes a different text—when one is browsing a text in a digital file on an office laptop, or turning pages quietly on a sofa while Red River plays on cable, or lying in a hammock at sundown on the deserted northernmost tip of Orcas Island in the Pacific. The divisions between text and mind, and between mind and the environment it perceives, I maintain, are far less distinct than some critics might contend. The same holds for the ancient distinction between human and nature—a binary ever more blurred by the application of technology to both sides of the divide. An encounter I had in August 2009 may illustrate the way in which humans have begun to collapse the distinction between nature and culture. After a summer of guiding sea kayakers in the San Juan Islands, I took a solo paddling trip into the Southeast Arm of Yellowstone Lake. Camping at sites miles from other people (and half a day’s hard paddle from any road) certainly v constitutes a wilderness experience for many park visitors. However, as with all sites in Yellowstone, visitors must register with park rangers and obtain a permit to camp in the Southeast Arm. Because it is prime grizzly habitat, the Southeast Arm opens very late in the season. By happenstance, I obtained one of the very first permits available, with a launch date out of Sedge Bay. The morning of August 14th was cold and gray, and I packed my kayak quickly, hoping to cover as much distance as I could before the lake’s notorious afternoon winds hit and conditions became dangerous for a lone boater. As I was hiking up my spray skirt and fastening my drytop gaskets against the cold and damp air, a pickup truck with the park rangers’ crest on the door pulled up to the beach where I intended to launch. The ranger got out with a smile and asked me something I didn’t quite catch about Global Positioning System devices. “I don’t carry one,” I said, a little uneasy. Was this some new park regulation I hadn’t heard of? “I use a chart and compass.” The ranger nodded, still smiling. “Would you carry one?” she said. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I actually think chart and compass are more reliable.” This time the ranger laughed. “I mean, would you carry one for us—as part of a study we’re doing?” The Park Service, the ranger explained, was studying grizzly activity in the Southeast Arm, in an effort to determine how close humans and grizzlies come to interacting in the earliest weeks the region is open to people. The grizzlies were all collared, transmitting their location, she said, and a GPS transmitter would transmit my position too. Then researchers could measure how close the bears and I came to each other. “So you’re going to collar me too?” I asked. vi “Just temporarily,” the ranger said, grinning. “What happens if our locations match up right on top of each other?” “Then we’ll cite you for eating grizzlies,” she deadpanned, making notes on her clipboard. I agreed to carry their GPS transmitter. I didn’t see any grizzlies, but I did see signs of bear activity. For the duration of my trip I was aware of the degree to which I had been placed on a grid, subject to measurement, observation. Had I wandered too far out of my campsite on my after-dinner explorations? Was my chosen itinerary OK? Could the rangers see where I was at any given moment? For a few days I inhabited the same physical space as the grizzlies under study, the bears navigating with sense of smell, with claw and muscle and guile, and I with map and compass, with white gas stove and Capilene clothing, and with carbon fiber paddle. For those few days, the bears and I also inhabited the same textual space, the same data set, the same study under process. Under observation by the Park Service, both the bears and I became numbers—nature and culture subject to the same scrutiny in the not-quite-always-but- almost totally wild space. During the time the bears and I were providing data for the Yellowstone rangers, President Barack Obama visited the park for the day with his family and a media entourage. They made the usual stops: the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Geyser Basin, Old Faithful, and they took the usual promotional photos. The question of nature is an important one for this new administration. Though certainly his call for renewed offshore drilling makes for a mixed environmental record, the president has demonstrated an inclination to preserve the National Parks and extend wilderness protection to some of the wilder country in the United States. This study, in its way, is an effort to help make sense of the way we encounter nature in vii text—the basis on which we humans make decisions about how we interact with the nonhuman.