Dear Friends,

After more than five years of living in central Vermont, I still do not know well how to read this rural landscape. Its dense text is mostly incomprehensible to me. It’s true that, more often than not, I am awed by its beauty as it overwhelms my senses: the visual splendor of river lined valleys languid at the foot of the Green Mountains, or the flush of meadow aroma, sometimes so thick you can drink it through your mouth, or the blistery sub-zero air crinkling the moisture in my nostrils, or the echoing mania of a loon laughing across the pond at dawn, or – why not? – the sweetness of syrup tapped and boiled from a stand of maples just down the road. But these are easy, if no less glorious, pleasures, available without much effort; you can practically trip into such scenes and experiences in central Vermont. What I’m after, what I’m missing, is a deeper interpretation – and therefore, experience – of my rural home.

My ignorance of this environment has always been woefully obvious to me in contrast to my attunement and identification with urban settings, particularly the city of Philadelphia where I spent 20 some years before relocating to Vermont in 2015. To these thousands of days navigating and negotiating the spaces of the city add a practice of study, teaching, art making, and community organizing that sharpened my sense of the people, patterns, and layers of signs and meanings created over centuries. For me, what this deep awareness meant was that I could move through the city and more or less perceive many of the interconnected forces, histories, and interventions. To walk down a street was to cross-reference all my knowledge (experiential and academic) of how Philadelphia was designed, organized, and evolved (whether conscious or not) and how people inhabit its typology of public and private spaces,  thus reinforcing my sense of belonging.

Even in unfamiliar cities, I could use these frameworks and practiced ways of seeing to at least gain my bearings enough to begin to effectively explore a new place. For example: in Berlin I plotted my urban wanderings by collecting (in photographs, in memory) the tiny surveyor’s spikes (Messpunkt) that were hammered into sidewalks across its quickly gentrifying districts. I had learned long ago to seek out the more mundane traces of urban development and construction activities as one way to understand economic priorities and power dynamics. Another example: during a month’s stay in Alexandria, Egypt, my obviously white, European-descended male body created psychological ripples as I moved through crowded streets. City spaces have insiders and outsiders, locals and non-locals, and certain types of bodies have privileges where others do not. In that city I become acutely aware of my white male presence as a kind of passport allowing me to go where I wished and perform my artistic “research” with impunity. (In fact, while unknowingly trespassing with a group of local students I was working with, my actual passport – and the students’ fast talking – got us out of a sticky situation.)

But this citified sophistication doesn’t play well in Vermont. I feel inadequate in my ability to read the rural environment in all its unique, unfamiliar complexity: the wild, natural place, the managed forests, the pastures and cultivated farmland, homesteads, exurban devloplments, highway strips, hamlets, villages, and towns; and all the imprints left by its living inhabitants, wild and domesticated, human and non-human. So much of the rural text is more obscure to me, the ecosystemic patterns more numerous and subtle than in the cities I know. But I am learning, slowly, with difficulty, about the plants, animals, and features of the land here. I can walk through the meadow in summer and point to milkweed, joe-pye, goldenrod and aster (always together). I know now that the shaggy barked black willow trees always seem to hug the river’s edge to drink the water and shade my swims. I can anticipate feeling the damp coolness of the evening air as it emanates from the ferns in the lower grades only to dissipate into a wash of late day warmth as I crest the hillock. And when I hear a loud clacking rattle, I know I will soon see the belted kingfisher fly by, either to or from its home burrow in the dirt bank at bend in the river.

As for human interventions on the land, this, too, will take more study, so I’m reaching for familiar books on my shelf to help me see anew. The writer and cultural geographer J. B. Jackson, a great observer of the vernacular landscape in the U.S., offers a good entry into thinking about the political and the inhabited landscapes of rural places. Jackson meant “political” to describe the systems of boundaries, roads, infrastructure, and governmental apportionments that organize the land. “Inhabited” more closely captures the vernacular usage of land, the ways in which people build, enclose, cultivate, and otherwise shape places to meet their needs and enjoyments. For decades Jackson diligently cataloged and interpreted the everyday spaces that organize our experience of the land.

I draw on John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic as a guidebook to remind me to look closely at the often overlooked patterns of human intervention in the landscape: the power lines, fire breaks, culverts, fences and walls, foot paths et cetera that speak of how people and institutions make space. This book is a treasure, a must-have for anyone who wants to explore their local environment, whether suburban cul de sac, country lane, or city block. The opening paragraphs declare a challenge:

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted – all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic. 

I can also, literally, read the names on the land (to borrow the title of George Stewart’s book about the history of place names in the U.S.) which give insights into how past inhabitants sought to impress their legacy on these places, or at least develop a commonly understood way for describing here, there, and how to get from here to there. Vermont Public Radio produces an annual podcast tracking down the origins of Vermont road names. (Although, in Vermont, as the old joke goes, “you can’t there from here.”) 

Place names, like other physical traces, often do not capture other histories and stories in this rural Vermont landscape that have been whitewashed or untold, and I want to read them in this land as well. For all of their insights, the go-to books on my bookshelf have many blindspots too, and my expectations and awareness have evolved considerably since I was first introduced to them. What of the experiences of marginalized people here? What did the Vermont landscape mean to them, and how did they help shape it? What of the indigenous landscape, the land of the living Abenaki people who were (and remain) the ancestral stewards of this territory well before white colonial settlers unjustly occupied their territory and declared this place Verd Mont? It’s devastating to think that an entire people has been obliterated from a place, rendered invisible save for a few scant remnants on maps: the Winooski River or Lake Memphremagog.

I have much to learn. More to ponder. More to write. It occurs to me that I started writing poetry, in part, as a way to make sense of this landscape, so I’ll end this #longread with a poem from a few years ago:

Fox follows the interstate highway
straight a dozen yards then
dart left pause right
and on to whatever busyness.

The land erupts with 
traits, tracks, prints, paths
the movements all in a day.

Stop yourself from not seeing
not being not conversing
with the smallest of these
winter communications.

The messages can be deciphered,
read, absorbed, interrogated
maybe not voiced like notes
traipsing along the lines of a bar.

Fox plays – not for you –
but here it is anyway so
what will you do?

Warmly,

Jeremy

Ps. Last time, I linked to a visual essay in The New York Times that dates the invention of collage in 1912. Austin Kleon (an artist and writer I follow) posted about how the technique predates its Modernist usage by hundreds of years. Check it out.