landscape, language, and poetic self-fashioning (part I)

Riverside Towers, Minneapolis, December 2007

I am a migrant.

I've chosen my migrancy: I didn't flee civil war, or lose my home to natural disaster. For £400 and a ten-hour flight, I could go back and see the street I grew up on, intact. But I don't need to. Twenty years in the same place formed me so that I could identify a house from my city by just a few details: dark wood trim in white rooms, arched doorways from living room to dining room, built-in cabinets. Here are the words that mean Minneapolis, the city I was born in and where I lived, in the same house, from the age of four until I was 25: windowsill, prairie square, lake , parkway, mill.

Kitchen on 4th St., Minneapolis, 2003

I count seventeen lakes inside the city. Eight other bodies of water (ponds and wetlands). The Mississippi River, useful tool for teaching US geography and English letter-names to French highschoolers, runs through it, fed by Minnehaha Creek. The lakes are called Hiawatha, Nokomis, Calhoun, Harriet, -of-the-Isles, Diamond, Cedar, Loring, Powderhorn, Birch, Wirth, Ryan, Brownie, Spring, Mother, Taft, and Grass.

My students' concept of midwestern geography (Dole, France, 2007)

The city is on a grid, and the grid runs to the edges, where it meanders into the cul-de-sacs and loopy drives of suburban space. But in places the grid runs itself right off the map, becoming rural routes and county highways. The beginning edges of what's left of the Big Woods on one side, the Great Plains on the other. The grid means any street you walk down could go on forever. You could walk to the Pacific. Or squint to see the wheatfields, a pale yellow glow in the distance, covering western Minnesota and South Dakota.

Red Wing, Minnesota, July, 2006

A city grid was a formal, material representation of Progress: Onwards! was the slogan, which didn't look to see who, what, or where it trampled, caught in its wheels, and lost. It was a way of taming the landscape, rendering it. Ordering it (and the streets run east/west, and the avenues run north/south; they count up from downtown; run in whimsical alphabets; name Presidents, seasons). Claiming it: the application of a language 'we' could call 'ours' meant the land we named was ours, too. And, tacitly, not yours. Not theirs. Ours not always (not, in history's terms, often) the inclusive second-person plural.

But to me, the grid means possibility. It means expansiveness. Opening. Before I could take the city apart to see its existential injustice (Minneapolis sits on land used for centuries by the Dakota people), I knew the straight roads led out of the city to everywhere. And I cannot lose this connotation: the grid connected me to the rest of the world.

Mayfly hatch, Minnesota, July 2006

If the grid represented what could be to me, what was outside the city both continued and arrested that feeling. It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been in the middle of a prairie what that experience is. The sense that the world goes on, limitlessly as far as you can tell, in every direction--360° and the whole hemisphere of sky--feels like flying. Feels like being in a cage, too. In that much space, how far could I ever really go?

Who I am, I made and was made in this space, which both contained me and freed me. The contradiction of a wide-open space is that from it I could go anywhere, but leaving it--by sheer geography, by miles and dollars, by gasoline, bus tickets, and interstate signs--is a lot longer thing than just my say-so. At one point in time, I would have had to walk out of this place, or sit on boards at the back of a wagon, and a day's journey might not get me across state lines. When I left, I flew to Chicago and then to London, and for the first flight I could see the grid of the city get smaller, and then the country grid, another scale entirely. The little pill-shaped window by my seat contained the places I had come from.

Because I come from a place where space seems as endless, as expendable, as other things we take for (ruthless) granted, like water or electricity, my relationship to space itself is a particular one. Living in England I sometimes feel confined, knowing that in ten hours I would have hit the furthest edge of the country (from where I live, by train). Knowing everywhere here there is water nearby, or hills, or peaks, or cities--something to obstruct the eye in ways a prairie doesn't. I imagined the landscape everywhere could be as big as my midwestern, North American one, which stretched and was full of the sound of crickets and cicadas.

Minehead, England, May 2008

I am learning a new vocabulary in this place, words that mean England to me, like 'allotment' (now I know, Jane, it's a little garden anyone can have, and they are beautiful), and 'close,' which is the word here for what we'd call a cul-de-sac, and 'commons,' land which is privately held, but open to certain public uses. Words that have to do with ownership, right to land, interiority, belonging. All the land here fits on this island that is smaller than my state (about 80,000 square miles, compared to Minnesota's 87,000). But at the edge of land there is the ocean (people here tend to call it the sea). Which both contains the island and points away, showing where else I could go.

Dunes at St Andrews, Scotland, March 2008