Week 5

Minke whale, Ross Sea, Antarctica

The frontier has been a fundamental part of America and a frontier without a mythology is unimaginable. I don’t know that the blame for the mythology of the American frontier can entirely be laid at Frederick Jackson Turner’s feet. As Popper notes, there were more than a dozen biographies of Daniel Boone written before the 1880s. All cultures have had myths and heroes. The difference is that our heroes weren’t gods. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill. As an unnamed person said in The Significance of the Frontier in American History “when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow.” Even the fictional characters were just men.
Even some sixty years after the Census had determined that the frontier was gone, men like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were still exploring a frontier. On June 21^st, 2004, the first private manned spaceflight occurred. This should have been one of those brass band and fireworks events in our history. It merited perhaps five minutes of time on CNN. Now, the frontier is the ‘urban fringe’ and we treat the mythology like that god-awful lamp an elderly aunt has given us. We are embarrassed to own it but we can’t get rid of it. We don’t have an identifiable frontier and we can’t take risks. Sure, there are extreme sports and adrenaline junkies but there is a difference between strapping a snowboard to your feet and jumping from an airplane and strapping snowshoes to your feet and exploring the length of the Rockies or hauling hundreds of pounds of glass photographic negative plates thousands of miles to photograph Yosemite. As a society, we’ve abandoned the back roads for the security and comfort of the freeway. And that’s too bad.

Bless you Sir Edmund Hillary. I hope there’s a special place for trailblazers.

If You Ain't the Lead Dog...

I don’t know what to make of Cultural Geography: A Survey of Perceptions Held by Cultural Geography Specialty Group Members. A ranking like that is going to be subjective. The Cultural Geography Specialty Group has taken measures to make the ranking in a variety of ways, it is still subjective. I did get some interesting titles from the article! How could I resist a title like Fast Food, Stock Cars, and Rock ‘n’ Roll?

So many books, so little time. There is a lot of writing about geography out there, so it isn’t just about maps, but about what and why something is there. Pierce Lewis says, “…literate description and clear thinking … we find it in… guides prepared by and for professional geographers. More often we find it in writings by folklorists, cultural historians, and landscape architects, by scholars and laymen of any calling. Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Literature isn’t all academia. Some of my favorite stories aren’t about geography, but place. Lewis Grizzard, long-time columnist for The Atlanta Journal, had a tremendous ability to describe small town life. Tony Hillerman writes stories set in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, featuring Native American tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Sharon McCrumb’s setting is Appalachia. She takes a folk tale or ballad and fills in the untold parts. At the same time she tells a parallel story set in contemporary times and weaves the two stories together. In The Ballad of Frankie Silver she tells the story of Frankie Silver, a young woman convicted of killing her husband and burning the body and the story of Lafayette ‘Fate’ Harkrider who is awaiting execution for a particularly gruesome killing and why neither character will tell the truth about what occurred, even if it means their life. Writing about regions needn’t be purely academic, it can be for fun.

Lewis’ Small Town in Pennsylvania was of particular interest. Open Google Earth and type “Camas Valley, OR” into the ‘fly to’ bar. That is a small town. The “Entering Camas Valley” and “Leaving Camas Valley” signs aren’t quite nailed to the same post, but a kid with a strong arm could maybe throw a mudball from one to the other. If you move the cursor to 43.00.53.98N 123.40.35.42W (the se end of Burma Road, you’ll see a collection of buildings. There was if, I remember right, a house, a barn, a woodshed, a chicken coop and a detached garage (used mostly for butchering jacklighted deer). The only time it was used for a car was if the jacklighted deer was still in the trunk of the car. That’s one of many places I lived as a kid. There was a beaver pond nearby. It was impossible to sneak up on them but if you sat quiet and still, after a while they’d reappear until you moved or made a sound. Then a slap of tail and they’d vanish. Most summer days weren’t spent at home. There was nothing there we needed. There were apple trees, huckleberries, thimbleberries and hazelnut bushes out in the fields. We’d usually take a sandwich on our excursion but it was more of a courtesy than a necessity. There patches of wild strawberries. They were about the size of my little fingernail and tasted like strawberry flavored sugar. Strawberries from the grocery store are a disappointment. They’re huge, but just don’t have the taste. The visual has replaced the flavor. That isn’t just a memory of the “good old days.” Down the road a piece, (a piece being an actual distance for us), was a cherry tree. That tree was strictly off limits. Which means that we would often be found straddling the branches of that cherry tree gorging on the fruit and spiting the seeds at each other. Cherries still taste just as good today. It was a great time and place to be a kid. Then you grow up and there’s nothing there. Logging has been banned and the mills are closed. The nearest college is about a hundred miles away. The little girls you threw mudballs at still hold a grudge. The small town is obsolete. It once had a function but the automobile and the suburbs ended that. It was hoped by some that the Internet and telecommuting would be the salvation of the small town, but it’s cheaper to outsource to India. I doubt that Camas Valley will become a ghost town. I think that the suburbs will expand and absorb everything, like The Blob did.

The common thread I see in the articles is about communicating your observations. Several of the articles are about geographic writing. Cultural Geography: A Survey of Perceptions Held by Cultural Geography Specialty Group Members is less about ranking and more about being able to communicate.

Ruminations

Rudolfo the Red-Nosed Llama, Calloa, Peru

I’ve been thinking about the readings of the past several weeks and I’ve concluded that I have a ruminantary brain. That isn’t a misspelling of rudimentary, although that’s quite likely also. A ruminant is an animal with multiple stomachs that chews a mouthful of food, swallows it, partially digests the food, regurgitates it and chews some more, then repeats the process through all the stomachs. My brain seems to work like that. Chew. Swallow. Ruminate. Regurgitate. Repeat. Even to the point that anything not assimilated gets passed as b.s. and gas…

Yi-Fu Tuan’s Surface Phenomena and Aesthetic Experience becomes a little more meaningful after reading Wallach’s Sheep Ranching in the Dry Corner of Wyoming and The West Side Oil Fields of California. Wallach gives a detailed description of the geology underlying the areas but the focus is on the observable surface. The depth, to a large extent forms the surface, but the surface is what is observed. Both depth and surface exist but surface is what humans interact with. I realize that the resources are under the surface, but there is no interaction until it reaches the surface, either by being pumped up or the surface stripped away.

On one of the blogs, someone asked “Is Florida considered part of the South?” and my response would be “Partly.” I’ve lived all over the South and I see anything north of Orlando as Southern and anything south of the city as Northern. North Florida is more Southern than south Florida. Northern Florida shares language/accent with the South, and food and religion are similar. Southern Florida is more urban and urbane. Urbane meaning they serve cheese with a toothpick instead of with a grilled hamburger patty and a couple of slices of bacon as would be proper.

I’ve been thinking about the theme “region” and I realize that I don’t have a definition that really works. Why is one place a region and another not? Why are two regions not the same thing? Ideas?

Still reading week three

Wallach’s question “Will a future generation look back at the relics of today's mineral boom and regret the passing of coal and trona?” got me thinking about what has disappeared from my landscapes. One that came to mind was that gas stations were once called “service stations” Like Wallach’s Elk Hills, they are still there; they’re just not the same. There once was a time when a driver arrived at a service station and a young man (usually) would greet the driver, ascertain what was desired, and begin servicing the car. While the gas was pumped, the attendant would at least clean the windshield and check the oil. The attendant would bring the oil dipstick to the driver to show whether or not any oil was needed. If the gas was still pumping, the air pressure in the car tires would be checked and the other car windows would be cleaned. Once the gas was done pumping the attendant would take the payment and return with the change. If someone came trotting toward my car at a gas station today, he’d likely get shot on the assumption that he was a car-jacker. Or maybe not since anyone stealing my car would be doing me a favor.

Wallach’s essays describe how people adapt landscapes for their own purposes. In a country dominated by beef, the Red Desert was divided for cattle ranching. The region is better suited to sheep and so it became sheep country. Later, the cost of importing wool is less than the cost of raising sheep and the minerals below the land shape the region. Things change. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. A classmate has written about disagreements with her husband about whether, with the completion of the extension of I-395, the narrowing the main street in Carson City will be beneficial or detrimental. It might be both. I compare it to the construction of I-80 through Reno. It was a disaster for the businesses on 4^th Street but a boon for businesses on North Virginia. I think I would prefer change, with all its related problems, to a static environment.

50 People who could save the planet. The ones on the list I think most likely are those who are creating cheaper ways to do things. Vicki Buck working on fuel from algae. Guy Lamsaes who has devised an inexpensive way to make refrigerators more efficient. Reducing the cost of green technology is probably going to be more effective than those on the list whose contributions are little more than “Reduce your carbon footprint and we’ll save the Earth!” I was truly surprised to see Bjorn Lomborg on the list. Lomborg suggests that solving problems such as providing clean water or eradicating AIDS and malaria might be cheaper and more effective in reducing human misery than ending global warming. I’m reading his book Cool It now. I question some of his claims and he sometimes seems to contradict himself but the book is thought provoking.

I will catch up on my reading if I just stop buying books

I’ve finished Air Apparent, Ghost Map, McPhee’s Irons in the Fire and Longitude by Dava Sobel. I’m working on Cool It! by Bjorn Lomborg. I liked Ghost Map but found it sad that the first victim of the outbreak was an infant named Lewis and the last victim a month later, was the little girl’s father.

I think from the response to Fraser’s Presidential Address, it would be safe to assume that Golledge et al are scientists. I didn’t see anything from Fraser calling for a “return to the nonscientific dark ages.” He did warn against adopting science just because science is seen as superior. “Our goal as geographers should be high quality scholarship, and we should not fret about whether our good scholarly work happens to fit some particular definition of Science.” As I read the address and the response, I thought about the essay The Gravel Page in Irons in the Fire. In the essay, a forensic geologist determines where a body has been buried from a soil sample. The science determines what the soil is composed of but composition determines where the sample came from. The geography wouldn’t have been possible without the science, but the science wasn’t the information being sought. Not all questions are scientific and not all questions are geographic, but they aren’t mutually exclusive.

For those of you who liked Ghost Map, if you like this type of reading, The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck, both by Erik Larson are similar in style.