After yesterday’s post about placefinding, along with the immediate response I decided to cook up a really simple blog which you can find here: Placefinding.wordpress.com. The premise is really simple-it will explore the way people connect and reconnect to place via their lifestyles, writing, art, and other expressions as well as just placefinding as an ethic and ethos that seems to be somehow within, outside of, and underlying our cultural lexicon all at the same time.
Please subscribe and let me know how you like this project. I’m looking for ideas, perhaps starting with this one: how do you define your relationship to place?
As always the point was getting off the map. This place halfway up Cerro Amigo–a rock outcrop covered in cypress and wild rose–wasn’t any more ‘special’ than a patch of grass along an I-80 exit ramp. Except of course it’s where I happened to be right then, along with a pair of Caranchos (South American hawks) who seemed, somehow, to be showing off, screeching, buzzing closer than necessary, then floating in the wind that rolled out of some Pacific cold front, blowing across Chile and over the Andes, now hitting us (and providing good lift) here on the cliffs.
I kept thinking about a phrase that occurred to me on the hike up: placefinding. There seem to be plenty of words categorizing what we are, but so few that adequately describe what we do. From the time I was a college sophomore and the 10 years of official ‘work’ that followed, my title was educator. But what I really did was search for different places (and if not search, then just ‘find’ the place, wherever it was or wherever we happened to be).
Skill-wise, I taught people how to paddle. I led people down rivers (Chattahoochee, Nantahala). I taught people how to set up no-trace camps, and camped out with both adults and kids in the Tallulah headwaters, and along the Chattooga. We explored forests from the Piedmont region in Georgia to Edisto Island, out to alpine montane in Colorado.
Then, as now, there was always some ostensible ‘mission,’ whether it was learning the local history of the region or how to identify trees or build shelters. But looking back on it, the real lessons were the places themselves.
If I was trying to teach anything, it was simply to share the act of placefinding, the feelings it gave you. That by going wherever it was with the understanding (or at least trying to understand) that the places you found, no matter how you initially perceived them, always had their own histories, connections to other times, connections to other people with their own stories–many of which had been lost–and that, if you simply spent time listening, watching, asking questions, if you simply allowed yourself to get into the flow of whatever the place or terrain was, you would keep learning and discovering more about the place and about yourself forever. It wouldn’t end.
I stood in the wind a bit longer looking at the town below. The scale of the place seemed tiny compared to the mountains. Somehow this always helped me walk back down there into it. I had a name now for what I was doing. On the way back I stopped in a windbreak and wrote it on the inside of my arm.
Got interviewed at The Accidental Expats. Here was one of the questions / answers:
Can you describe the process behind deciding to travel/ become an expat?
As far as traveling, for me it’s never a rational process. I’m not even the biggest fan of “traveling,” per se, it’s really a form of suffering. I just like exploring new terrain (and the culture, cuisine, music, language that reflects it), especially in the Americas. For the most part I’ve never had enough money to travel in any other way besides total dirt-bagging along coastal areas in Latin America where it’s uber cheap and I can camp out and surf.
I never thought of “becoming an expat” in those explicit terms and still don’t; for me I think of it as just moving to Argentina. This was definitely a conscious and rational decision though, something that my wife and I felt like was a good plan for raising our family.We recognized certain elements of this place when we visited for the first time in 2005. Although there’s a great little town and a slowly developing tourist infrastructure, it has a very strong agrarian economy (it’s the center of fine fruit production in all of Argentina). This means that the place itself, what makes it unique, its land usage and the underlying economic system is all much more sustainable than other places in Argentina (or the US for that matter).
We also recognized an unusually well-educated population exists here, a result of waves of middle class urbanites who came from Buenos Aires during the 70’s. finally, we recognized that this is a place where we could raise our daughter very freely and in a culture where we both feel very at ease.
So all of this said, it was a very rational, thought-at process as far as deciding to move here, but it’s worth noting that the original visit here seemed just like a total random flow. Still, we felt so strongly about the place that when we first saw it in 2005 we bought a small plot of land here with the intention of coming back one day and building a cabin. That’s our goal over the next year.
view of the andes from camno de los nogales, el bolson, patagonia
took this shot on the way into town via camino de los nogales. from the map, it looks like the snowfields and terrain pictured here are accessible from refugio hielo azul.
wrote piece earlier today at the Traveler’s Notebook about walking this road.
Sky finally clear after 5 days of rain. Feeling like I need to get up into the mountains for some kind of aerial view of life, a descriptive phrase I one heard applied to literature. Mental health-wise it seems to help looking at places from far enough away that you can see the cars and people moving down below, the dust rising, but not hear anything. For some reason it’s easier afterward to walk down there and join everyone again.
Some strange, ill-defined emotions right now. Last night I wrote up interview questions for Patagonia ambassador Liz Clark, who is currently sailing around the world on global surf mission. As I came up with the questions (Current # of days at sea? Best surf conditions scored?) I felt momentarily ‘connected.’ Part of it was the notion that she would be reading these questions and answering them, but it went beyond that. I imagined both of us off on these distinct missions essentially charging something that almost nobody else was and leaving behind friends and family to do it. It seemed ‘poetic,’ always a tipoff that something is wrong with your thinking. I took my new coffee cup (remembering a detail from Liz Clark’s story–she’d learned how to sharpen a knife on the bottom of a mug), filled it with Malbec, then walked through Barrio Arrayanes to our plot of land on the other side of the arroyo.
Thinking about this more today, I realize how last night’s imaginings are examples of the most idiotic kind of thinking, the most deceptive emotions: I don’t know Liz. I have never met her. And while I super admire what she’s doing, I really have no idea what she’s like besides what I’ve read from her in Surfer’s Journal. And yet I was associating my own vision with her, and worse, not even her as a person in real-life, but with my own mental construct of her persona or brand.
It’s human nature to look for symbols. It’s also human nature to want to emulate people you admire. You could argue that people emulating or imitating other people they don’t actually know (such as celebrities) has been around as long as mass media.
But as we continue accelerating into the era of personal brands I wonder if the default mode for communication won’t devolve into unconsciously reducing all people to personas for quick and easy brand association / alignment / identification.
Which leads me to other questions:
If people’s real-selves aren’t as smart or cool or well-intentioned or relevant as what they believe the overall ‘perception’ of their brands to be, how does that affect the way they communicate or associate with people in the real world? Do they just start hiding behind their hyper personal identities and/or walk around as their personae?
Then there’s this troubling thought: Is categorizing and making spontaneous brands out of strangers we see in the street already our default mode of thinking, something that predates branding as a marketing concept, going back to survival instincts, rapidly assessing someone as a potential threat?
Finally: If you lived a life 100% free of internet / computer and lived in a small town where you knew everyone, would you see people as more ‘individual’ and less symbolically?
I would really appreciate your insights on this while I go look for a path up Cerro Piltriquitron.