My Ghost Town

CHAPTER 4 WRITING ABOUT PLACES AND ENVIRONMENTS FIGURE 4.1 TERRY FALKE, “TRAIL TO BALANCED ROCK,” 1998 FIGURE 4.2 SCREENSHOT FROM “SECOND LIFE,” 2007 Browse a bookstore, and you’ll often find that the items most prominently displayed, bestsellers aside, are lavish volumes of photographs printed in rich tones on outsized pages. Photographer Terry Falke’s “Trail to Balanced Rock” (Item 4.1) comes from just such a collection, a book of images capturing his often-ironic perspective on the scenic American Southwest, a favorite subject of so-called coffee table books. But you’ll find similar anthologies chronicling every imaginable spot on the planet, from the plains of the Serengeti to the streets of Paris to the ballparks of America. Through both words and pictures, people love to mark the places they’ve been (or might go), the neighborhoods they’ve explored or inhabited, and the experiences they have had there—and the more exotic the better. We are all tourists on the big blue marble. But sometimes we need to look closely at the places around us to appreciate how they shape our lives or we shape them. Consider Falke’s photograph more closely. Highlighted in golden sunlight, a spectacular red rock formation from Arches National Park dominates the upper half of “Trail to Balancing Rock.” If you’ve been to Utah, New Mexico, or Arizona, you’ve surely experienced scenery like this stretching across vast horizons. Ah, wilderness! People yearn for such open, untouched spaces. Or do they? The lower and darker half of Falke’s image offers a contrary perspective, perhaps reminding us of the ways humans intrude on nature and despoil it. Not only is there an outlined trail to the spectacular rock formation, but an arc of fussy National Park Service signposts separates a parent and child from the site. We cannot help but ponder the ironies in the image of place Falke has captured—or perhaps we just smile at it? But places aren’t defined solely by nature or humankind’s complex interactions with it. People make places too, creating environments where they live and work. Sometimes those settings are carefully planned and engineered—like the daring museums that innovative architects around the world have created in the past decade. Or they may places that have grown largely unplanned over decades or centuries, great cities or unpredictable suburban neighborhoods or even college campuses with their jumble of buildings and spaces serving dozens of needs. Yet we know too that places aren’t always real or physical. Middle Earth is a richly imagined land to people who have read The Lord of the Rings, as is Batman’s Gotham City or even Hamlet’s Denmark. Yet no fictional work has stretched the notion of place quite as much as recent electronic technologies. Perhaps it began with fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but many people now spend hours of their day in virtual environments either created for them or which they shape themselves. A web place like Second Life allows its citizens—over 7 million to date—to live and interact in a virtual world, even buying land in cyberspace and building sites of their own imagining (see Item 4.2). And social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are lived-in places as well, where people meet and interact, raising endless questions about the quality of such experiences and how people should behave there. So when we speak of places and environments these days, we may all be imagining different things. But the notion of home, neighborhood, or environment remains central to our identities and our social, political, and cultural relationships. Everyday places such as shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, classrooms, parks doubtlessly shape our lives, defining where and how we work, play, eat, do business, express ourselves, and communicate. But so do the landscapes of our dreams and imaginations. No wonder than that we can’t resist reading and writing about them and shaping them in other ways just as they compose our lives. Reading Texts About Places and Environments At first, it may be hard to imagine that some places can become texts worth reading, studying, and responding to. How might one analyze a barren stretch of interstate—or a photograph of such a site? Doesn’t one convenience store look exactly like every other 7-Eleven in town? And what could possibly be thought-provoking about a small town in Texas or an ethnic restaurant? Wouldn’t it require the sensitivity of talented writers or photographers to make us appreciate how places, ordinary or extraordinary, relate to our lives and culture? Perhaps. We certainly do respond to their photo essays, documentary films, and essays about all sorts of locales. But almost any of us can learn to read places and texts about them ably enough to respond powerfully. All it takes is paying attention. Cultural meanings and patterns certainly are easier to spot when they appear in spectacular landscapes or situations—Las Vegas’s neon skyline clearly says something about American attitudes toward money while wrenching photographs showing New Orleans devastated after Hurricane Katrina in 1995 exposed fissures in understandings or race and class (see Gallery Item 4.3). Yet the same habits of observation that enable you to spot meanings like these can also help you find patterns in less obvious or traditional places. When you encounter a place or an image of one, first ask, “Where am I?” and “What sort of place is this?” Maybe the text you’re examining focuses on natural environments—for example, mountains, deserts, oceans, or plains. In their purest form, such places incorporate nothing man-made—they are composed of the terrain, climate, geological formations, and animal and plant life. When you encounter either a natural environment or an image depicting one, pay close attention first to the natural features present. What makes the place unique, powerful, beautiful, or worth noticing? From what vantage point are you seeing this environment or how does an artist frame it? Then consider the relationship the place has to human activities and structures. What is the human mark? Artistic renderings of the natural world, such as landscapes and seascapes, have long encouraged viewers to reflect on the power and beauty of untouched nature and then to consider the place of human beings in the larger world (see Gallery Item 4.4). In contrast to natural environments, built environments are made, in whole or part, by human beings. Whether these spaces have been casually crafted (such as a Laundromat or a roadside produce stand) or formally designed by a professional city planner, landscape engineer, or, maybe, software designer, all serve specific functions and reflect the choices of the people who imagined them. One could easily study that crowded Laundromat (see Gallery Item 4.5), edgy new museum (see Item 4.6), or virtual landscape as a text that tells important stories about the people who fashioned and visit it. And, of course, writers, and poets, and artists do exactly that, helping us to understand the history and layers of cultural experience embedded in such places (see Gallery Item 4.7). Indeed, historical and social contexts add to our understanding of any environments, natural or built. Can one look at images of the great American plains and not think about the native peoples removed from them? Can the site of a concentration camp or gulag ever escape its history? Do we even consider that the homes we live and the suburbs we build have a history—that their shape and character aren’t accidental. Obviously, the contexts within which we interpret places are complicated and constantly evolving, changing from generation to generation. Early explorers of the American West sometimes regarded its soaring mountains and formidable canyons as impediments to progress. Today, we make them national parks and visit them like pilgrims worshipping at shrines. How we experience and read places depends, too, on how they have been imagined, structured, and arranged by the people who live there, the designers who shape these environments, and the writers and artists who re-imagine them. We might take for granted the categories by which we name places—tropical rain forest, high plains, suburban enclave, inner city neighborhood—but terms like these are coined at some point to make sense of our experiences. Sometimes such words don’t work or have to be revised, but we need to be self-conscious whenever we describe a place as if we know it. Always ask skeptical questions. We similarly need to be aware of the boundaries and borders we put on places, again to make them more manageable. Some boundaries seem natural—like rivers or mountains that become parts of natural borders. Other frames are created by people: communities coalesce around schools or churches or an interstate highway becomes the dividing line between races and classes. Writer often help us realize how such structures function or they may be the ones who create such divisions to help us see things in specific ways (see Gallery Item 4.8). So look for the way places are framed and borders created. Natural or artificial, cultural or political, such lines make a difference when we read texts about places and environments (see Gallery Item 4.9). To lead us to such perceptions, artists and writers may use various media or methods. Writers may offer essays, memoirs and poems or fall back on the conventions of the travelogue; artists in other media may express their reaction to environments through painting or photography or video.

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