9. Where did they go? The roads that have taken people away can also be thought of in the same way as fences-as physical manifestations of our interior feelings about place and the land. As we've seen, they are the quickest way out of town for our writers, our children, our friends, ourselves but also the way back. Roads too form our boundaries. The section roads lie like a net over the land, divide it, define it, parcel it out, and impose the order of place. But the road is also a common way owned by no one and everyone. When we usually think of the literature of the road, say of Kerouac, we think of the road as a conveyor, as something that moves through, something that is part of somewhere else. Yet, it is also part of the things that stay put. We treat the road as Euclideans would have us treat a line-the distance between two points having no width. But the road, the sidewalk, the corners, the squares are rich with metaphoric meanings where once again the individual meets the group of which he or she is a part. The road may bound us, but it also binds us together. The road is a place itself, as a fence row is, and both must be thought of more as transmitting membranes, like skin, at once tough and intimate.
10. Can you be more specific? Good writing is always specific. Henry James wrote that good writing is "selected perception and amplification." There is literally a world of difference between using one word over another, "a" instead of "the." As a writer selects words, he or she is making a series of choices that include or exclude parts of the world. William Faulkner called the county in Mississippi he wrote about his "postage stamp of land." Though writers narrow and select, they often cordon off a precinct sacred to them. Readers discover that within those boundaries there are areas of human experience that seem unlimited. Perhaps it is a quirk in the way we are made, but it appears the more specific a writer is, the easier it is for a reader to generalize. In geometry, we know that a finite plane bounded on all sides still contains infinite points. Stories, poems, essays work that way, too. The more tightly bounded, the more restricted a work is, the richer we find it. Author and authority are related words. To be author of a specific place is, in a way, to be its god, its creator. But the place a god creates can never be as detailed as the larger world it is part of, for the writer faces the fact that he or she is limited, mortal. Writing then, by its limitation, by acknowledging its human scale, still participates in something grand. The writer shares in the creation of the universe by creating a postage stamp. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a character receives a letter addressed to her, her street, her town, her state, her country, her planet, her solar system, and on until it ends with the mind of God. Her thrilled response is that it got here anyway. It got here.
11. Can you tell us a story? If books are like places, then places are like books. Let me tell you a story. I was helping a farmer during planting. I was driving a tractor vibra-shanking a field of soybean stubble as the farmer followed behind me planting corn. The operation I was asked to do was an easy one, but I don't have much aptitude for machines. I wound up during one pass almost sliding into a ditch of water when I tried to make the turn. Braking, I stalled the engine, and shaken, I couldn't get the thing in gear to start up again. The farmer all this time was steadily catching up. The harder I tried to free myself and prove my competence, the worse things got. The farmer's son was working in the next field. He yelled to me that he was on his way to help. In a few minutes I saw him poling down the ditch on a raft made of old fence posts, and he saved the day. There isn't much to the story. That's not why I told it. What is interesting is that when I visit that farm now sooner or later that little story is told again-how Michael got stuck and Eric came to the rescue. Sometimes it is told to people who haven't heard the story. But more often than not, we tell it to ourselves. It is as if the story is another building constructed a few springs ago. It is a part of the layout of the place, part of the map. This little story takes its place with hundreds of others. The field where I had my adventure is called Cottonwood for the tree that used to be there sixty years ago. When Farmer Brown tells Eric to cultivate Cottonwood, it is a one-word story. The tree no longer exists. The story does. Places exist in two dimensions. They exist in the physical realm, but also in time. I will exist as part of a place on that farm as long as people tell the story. Though the dirt, the ditch, the crops exist; a place needs a person to name it. Cottonwood. It is interesting what we call the documents that transfer land: deeds and titles. The land itself carries its own deeds and titles. To gain a sense of place is to be sensitive to stories about places.
12. Here's your hat; what's your hurry? A sense of place is a complex idea further confounded by our relationship to it. We all labor to resolve two opposing forces in our lives. On one hand we have a desire to be rooted, to belong-literally to be long-in a place. On the other hand, we wish to be free of those connections, to keep moving through. As with all compelling conflicts, this one is not easily resolved, probably not to be resolved. People now move far more than they stay put. By moving we find it easier to ignore those limits imposed on our lives. The fences on either side of the road seem more like a chute channeling us on to some wonderful future. To have a sense of place is to sense limits, to sense our own deaths, a specific plot of ground where we will be buried and where our bodies will become part of the plot of ground. By accepting the limits a place imposes, we gain the ability to leave a mark. By being part of a place, we become it.
Sympathetic Pregnancies
1
I found myself in a room with nine pregnant women. All of the women were in the very late stages of their pregnancies-very late. Their deliveries past due, they waited in this converted surgical recovery room for their labors to commence. All of them were massive. Their shapeless hospital gowns taking on now the sweeping contours of their swelling bellies and breasts amplified their heft by defining it, the fabric stretched taut across the rounded middles. They all were hugely uncomfortable, in pain, of course, and in various postures of steeping agony-standing, sitting, or splayed in a bed. They had all been induced, that is to say the synthetic hormone pitocin had been introduced into their blood streams via an intravenous drip to spark their bodies into productive contractions. And it was working in spades. The spasms now slamming through them were juiced by the chemical, boosted, turbo-charged. The kick they were receiving packed a bigger wallop than if the body had kicked off on the process of its own accord. This was truly gut-wrenching, a doubled definition of "spike" of pain. Some were hooked up to monitors that spit out a graph paper narrative scored with these mountain ranges of ragged edges that finally climbed and climbed-no denouement but only the inked evidence of one endlessly upward sloping excruciation.