Wende says:
What interests me is how each of us has experienced and been affected by
place and geography?
What did we notice about the impact of the geography of
the places where we have lived?
What have we noticed about the societies, culture and norms
of each of the geographical areas in which we have lived?
Wende's delicious Question has me coursing the territory —indeed the Geography— of rabbit holes through 79 years of personal entanglement with specific bits of space and spatial knowledge and spatial engagement. So many things bubble to the surface, and it's difficult to know how to wrestle them into an efficient narrative order. Because I am an anthropologist whose interests have always been spatial, my library shelves fairly groan with books relevant to this Question, many of them New England-centric, but others relevant to many other Geographies I have interested myself in from time to time:
***** Geography is what surrounds you wherever you are plunked down; geography exercises determinative effects (and affects) upon anybody thus plunked. Where can one escape the effects and forces of geography? Pretty much nowhere. Which brings to mind the old saw
No matter where you go, there you are. which I'm delighted to discover goes back at least as far as
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471):Wherever you go, you take yourself with you,
and you will always find yourself...
you cannot escape it, wherever you flee.(And of course Jon Kabat-Zinn Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (2005) is significant for some of us.)
My first intuition is: look at Maps of territories of interest. Everywhere I've gone has led to acquisition of maps... atlases... books about Landscape and Topography... the empyrean view of satellite and remote sensing imagery which I read for what they can tell us about human organization and activity. This cartographic fascination goes back to very early memories of the National Geographic maps on the staircase of my childhood home at 42 Quincy Street in Cambridge. And the map of Cambridge (which I distributed from my Information stand on Cambridge Street)
... and various Sarawak maps that brought river systems and regions to salience ... and the map of Northeastern North America that pointed me to Nova Scotia in 1969, and the maps of Nova Scotia that pointed me to the Annapolis Valley, and thence to agriculture ... and the Delorme Atlas of Virginia that I brought along to my 1992 interview at Washington & Lee ... the panoply of state-by-state Appalachian Trail maps that defined 11 years of adventuring between Maine and Georgia ... These were all proxies for the process of learning about places and regions: doing the geography of wherever I was. To possess a map was to have a key to the mysteries of landscape.
On to Wende's specific questions:
* Cambridge was the Center of the Universe for about 60 years, surely Destiny at work in the first 10 years of my life on the Edges of Harvard, and then Harvard Square and its bookstores, music stores, camera stores, eateries. I was drawn back to Harvard Square all during the Nova Scotia years, and frequented constantly during the 1991-1992 Simmons years.The fact that Boston was my father's city prepared me to join (or at least appreciate and benefit from) that fraternity of echt Bostonians, though in fact I left that arena in 1965, and ever since have been only a vicarious and very occasional participant observer in that culture.
* ...and deeply affected by the landscape at Horton Landing, the territory I was nominally studying. But I find that I was and remain ignorant about so many aspects. On the other hand, I know about but am not involved in any of the ongoing dramas of the locale (glad to hear about them from Kate's perspective, but I have no responsibilities or part to play). This will give you some idea of the surrounding area (at about 1:30 is Horton Landing, and 2:05 you'll see the Curry farm, which Kate's house is surrounded by):
* Affected by Lexington VA? Not. I was incurious about the region around, but deeply involved with the Appalachian Trail, footfall after footfall (map by Kate, of course). My Lexington life was back and forth, house to library, away most weekends, hiking.
* Affected by St. George? That's still deeply entangled with Alice and Wick, though that essentially concluded 3 years ago. I am bonded to the place via its roads (and trash, for the last 6 years), and Drift Inn and Marshall Point and maybe Clark Island, but not the actual water surrounding us...
I'm not sure what Wende meant, but my answer would begin in physical geography and have to include Ice Ages and maybe back a billion years (stopping to commune with the Flower's Cove thrombolites for a few hours along the way), and then to the ephemeral sands of Drift Inn beach ... and a step sideways into the quarry era, about which I know far too little ... and the Big Question of how has the Midcoast thrived and foundered in the last 300 years (an oubliette into which I could easily be sucked).At Horton Landing it's the TIDE that's at the heart of the Grand Pre marsh ecosystem and ecology, as modified by dyking to keep the TIDE out, and then benefiting from the great fertility of Bay of Fundy alluvium, laid down over thousands of years...
An anthropologist is assumed to be a past master of this noticing. I'm often surprised to (re-)learn that I miss a lot ... and that I'm too inclined to fall back lazily on ragged characterizations of the great actual subtlety before me... What I discover again and again is how little I understand what people actually do and why <== which ought to be my professional stock in trade. Fortunately nothing depends on the ineptitude of my alleged professional role. Nobody's watching.What I've mostly noticed are *how much I don't notice and don't have the context to understand; and *things I would never do, exchanges I don't comprehend, activities I would avoid and abjure. These things limit the social interactions I'm able to enjoy, or just barely imagine tolerating. Trivia Night at the local dive bar? Town Meeting? I think not, too much that would be contentious. My "community participation" is limited to the trash pickup, an anti-social enactment of something slightly praiseworthy, if incomprehensible. I've been an outsider in each of the places we have lived, sheltering under a curious and somewhat hazy identity but being generally harmless and not annoyingly In the Way of anybody. Pretty good camouflage.
Geography ranges across scales from the terrestrial to the very local <== indeed, to the rocks and vegetation upon which we stand, and thus to the lithic geography, to which I've devoted a lot of photographic time in the last 5+ years. We have lifetimes of moving through space, and of valuing spaces that we think of as ours, and of gaining knowledge of spaces we inhabit and share with other beings.
How elaborated are the memories of the spaces we've inhabited? How often do you revisit them, and what do you find waiting when you do? What unknowns can you still discover? How have those spaces, that geography, FORMED you. Or perhaps that's not how it feels: perhaps other forces than space/geography are much more salient as formative influences. But for me, the spatial/geographic is a hyperconscious dimension of what I take to be Reality.Physical or vicarious Return to significant geographies of the past is something we all do, but it's of variable importance. For me that spatial/geographical dimension has been and continues to be very important, indeed pretty central to who I am and have been, and every memorial rock I turn over has worlds of detail beneath it.
A lot of who we are is rooted in where we are, and formed by where we have been. Our Destiny is a path that evolves, and not something foreordained by mischievous gods, or by rolls of genetic dice, or by Grand Narratives of which we are pawns. We make our own destinies by the choices we make and by interactions with myriad others. A cosmic pinball machine...
*****
Three things on the Tuesday agenda, so far:
- John-the-son sent a link to an analysis of Minas Basin --energetics, geology, etc.-- which I need to digest and incorporate
Some fragments, each of which unfolds into a Tale of its own: 
Glooscap, who lived on Cape Blomidon at the base of Cape Split...
... Cape Split to Parrsboro Shore is (only) 5km
... Minas Basin also contains about 1,330 hectares of low salt marsh, almost 80% of which is concentrated around the Southern Bight,
... At Avonport, Grand Pré, and Hortonville, "drumlins", low elongated mounds of rocks and clay, shaped like half an egg and formed during the passage of heavy ice sheets, attest to the presence of glaciers more than 12,000 years ago. The Triassic sandstones contain an iron-rich binding material (haematite) that gives them their characteristic deep red colour. This oxidises and crumbles on exposure to air, allowing the coast to erode rapidly. The released sand and silt wash onto the tidal flats to form wide beaches, mudflats and broad salt marshes cut by deep river channels. The northern shore of the Basin consists of a discontinuous chain of high, basalt bluffs and rocky islands, fronted by broad tidal flats.
... During the notorious "Saxby Gale" of 1869, a deadly combination of high tide, gale force winds and low atmospheric pressure lifted the sea at the head of the Basin to a remarkable 21.6 metres, causing massive flooding and devastation.
... more than 10 cubic kilometres of seawater, weighing 10 billion tonnes, to flow into and out of the Basin twice daily, more than forty times the flow of the St. Lawrence River
... The burrowing amphipod Corophium volutator crowds the mudflats of the Southern Bight, with up to 60,000 rice-sized animals per square metre.
... The high tidal range was ideally suited to the weir fishery, which for generations was the most popular harvest method.
... It has been estimated that only about one and half percent of the Basin's extensive tidal flats, or about 445 hectares, have the ideal mix of sand and mud for prime clam habitat. The most productive clam flats are located along the northern shore of the Basin, particularly between Five Islands and Bass River. In recent decades, production has once again declined,
... Waterfowl and shorebirds. The critical importance of the mudflats as foraging areas for millions of migrating sandpipers ... Evangeline Beach, for example, is world famous for the awesome summertime aerial ballets by flocks of tens of thousands semipalmated sandpipers.
... Fundy tidal power. The engineers have not lost interest, but are simply awaiting a more favourable economic climate. ... It is only a matter of time before interest in tidal power development revives, and its profound social, economic and ecological consequences will have to be examined.
... the energies personified:
(both taken near the mouth of the Shubenacadie River)
- I need to do a census of my various resources of the empyrean perspective: The Earth From Above and the myriad of photobooks featuring aerial perspective on various geographies
- some more careful thoughts about Destiny
Destiny of the Endless, from The SandmanPace Neil Gaiman, there is no great Book in which it is All Written. I assert that we make our own destinies, out of interactions with places and things and people and ideas encountered. Some people are more and some less constrained by circumstances (often glossed as "luck", but more usually structural than stochastic). And the branching paths before the young adventurer have consequences and associated probabilities of eventual outcome. Some choices turn out to be the right ones for blesséd states. Some are gutterballs. Beware of own petards. Be Kind. No Exceptions.
To be born and (as they say) bred in a particular Geographic locale surely does present opportunities and constraints, as Gilbert and Sullivan remind us:
(and we remind ourselves that, to the English, wogs begin at Calais...)*****
And there might need to be a side track to Power Spots. One such (for the participants at least) might be Burning Man:
Gigapixel Photo of Burning Man Shows Desert Festival in Extreme Detail
(via PetaPixel)Back in those awesome early 1970s, it was common to hear Cape Blomidon and especially its end at Cape Split spoken of as a Power Spot (in the cosmic sense). If you can last past the initial silliness and the canned music, the drone footage here is spectacular!
Steve and Donna Do Cape Split
drone shots from 3:49*****
And on Wednesday morning, Destiny came calling.
