Thinking about Edward Soja’s thirdspace and the relations between regionalism (critical) and the west as always real and imagined space. Only the leisure class of white upper middle class Americans can hop from one reality and imagined space to another. For example, an Atlanta CEO sees the west all day in his imagination at his desk as a place to escape to; it is still edenic, even with the obvious, gaping maws of toxicity in the city of Butte. However this CEO of upper class America can look past the scars and see what it allows him to do. He can see the west as a retreat from concrete and race and poverty and overcrowding. And when he goes there, he can afford to purchase that escape at a fee. The more one spends, the further insulated one can be, and when he is there in that leather recliner in a rented 3000 square foot cabin, sipping Big Sky micro brews or scotch, there is nothing but the myth and the imagination. He bought the myth, and it happens every day in western places like Bozeman, Missoula, Ft. Smith, Big Sky, and other much written about, and therefore mythologized cities throughout Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest. Susan Kollin has written a lot about the mythical status of Alaska as well.
The single dad working in a fly shop for $9.00 an hour and paying $230 a month in child support doesn’t get the insulated fantasy. He gets the labor part, but he gets to watch others live the dream, and he might sit on his stool at the register and imagine one day living that dream. He might fantasize about being a guide, on the river every day, in the sun, hooking up these guys with nice fish. Or, he might determine that he is where he needs to be; fishing in the evenings after work, after the guides are all home and the summer orange glow of 8:00 caddis hatches and spinner falls sit over the willows, is what it is all about. He’s in the know, and he appreciates this place for its gifts that don’t require AmEx.
Others live in poverty, working at Wal-Mart, or suffering from mental illness, roaming the streets of Bozeman with 44 ounce Cokes and headphones. Another rides his bike miles throughout the city collecting aluminum cans in the ditches, which he cashes in for less than a dollar a pound.
So how did this executive get where he is, and what did it take for him to negotiate the business world? Part of this is being born into a culture that emphasizes education, and possibly better educations than others have access to. He probably was told that good schooling opens doors. The more education the better, and this starts in private schools in New England, or Texas, or Southern California. In these institutions he learns to socialize and network, and make ties with professors and peers, and their parents. One parent is friends with Leigh Perkins (maybe that’s going too far, but maybe not) and they take the boys to an Orvis camp one summer. A love of fly fishing stirs within him, an appreciation for nature, and trees, insects, and water.
But the career push calls, and the higher he goes, the more he can buy. He appreciates good rods and cars, and drink, and the career push allows him to keep living it. He lives it more and more and gets deeper into the competition of the workplace and long days leave him zapped on the weekends when the family wants his attention. Eventually, a wealthy corked corporate manager is about to pop, and this month’s issue of Fly Fisherman arrives, and a trip to the Big Horn is described, with blue river pictures and thousands of acres of golden fields spread out around it. He calls and books a trip.
Those in poverty can’t escape it. They haven’t learned the navigation skills, they haven’t learned to read and write effectively. They can’t see past tonight’s dinner.
That is what Neil Campbell and Edward Soja and Susan Kollin and others are talking about.
Who gets the opportunity to declare himself or herself a bum? John Gierach, who I am gaining more appreciation of, published a collection of essays called Trout Bum. The Drake magazine has a trout bum contest where the entrants have to prove how much of trout bums they are through writing e-journals and sending .jpgs to the editor. The even send in digi-video clips of themselves being bums. They are from the same classes. Young middle and upper middle class college age kids in SUVs or Subaru’s. Middle aged guys on a two week bender, and the occasional group of hotties that were probably hired to beautify the pages.
But bums can’t choose to be bums, most of the time, and the homeless don’t have the ability to negotiate different classes of Americana. No way can I lease a Gulfstream to go visit another state. Nor could I rent a Toyota Sequoia for two weeks. My checkbook and my credit limit that! However, I could go down, intentionally, and have at times. I lived in my brother’s dining room for 6 months with a cardboard box for a dividing wall. I even had sex in there.
I have camped for months, haven’t showered for days, haven’t cut my hair for a year, or my beard, and I slept in the dirt at a lot of Grateful Dead shows. But I could always go back up a little way. I could recreate and climb vertical rock because I was bored and needed a challenge. I ice climbed and spent a week in the Olympic Mountains eating granola and Powerbars for the same reasons. And no one doing these things with me were black, or Native American, or rarely Mexican or Hispanic. They were white. A lot Irish, a lot of kids from back east, presumably to enjoy this life before they have to commit to the eastern life. Their money goes further out here. We could afford beer and pot, and gas to drive to Califorrnia to dance for 3 days.
We imagined where we lived as a place to embrace and we chose to work as little as possible to enjoy it as much as possible. The CEO imagines it as a place he needs to work incredibly hard for so he can go here and enjoy it as much as possible. This is a paradox, and each sees the other’s as a paradox, if they think about it at all. Often those metacognitive and othercognition opportunities arise in our lives, and we think about our thinking, and we think about the way others think. I had a wealthy man who just signed an AmEx receipt for over $6000.000 look me in the eyes and say “You must really live the life.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or choke, and I think I just looked down at the til, and made sure his receipt was in the right slot.
Pt. II
Other examples of real and imagined, or ideological space “Jackson always understood that space was ideological and that in analyzing its uses, meanings, and designs on could understand the wider political climate of the age” (Campbell 63). Yeah, like the notion of statehood. Many of these borders and boundaries are ideological, not geographical or representative of a culture’s values. On a micro scale, the contemporary reservation in Montana is another ideological, or political distinction. All one needs to do is go search Montana tribal maps, and a clear picture what was initially determined as tribal land, and what is now tribal land, is purely a result of conflicting values and dominant white capitalistic power. http://www.wimssite.nl/?pagina=hobby&onderwerp=125
Another map of 1922 Montana will help you reflect on how quickly whites realized the value of tribal land (http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/35/00/3526/3526.pdf)
Our common perception of blocks in a city, and in a bigger square, sections in the western ranch world, all are representative of humanities artificial shaping of space, and rarely can we imagine space without these lines lurking in the back of our minds. “As the crow flies” exists as a phrase because of man-made as well as topographical structures. Within fences and section roads and ravines, our western landscape is divided and extended.
In Campbell’s article he refers to Homi Babba’s and Kathleen Stewart’s work as a descendant of Jackson. He talks about seeing the side of the road as a place that tells history of America. I think back to my dad’s experiences as an avid runner in the “country”. He used to comment if he picked up all the cans (primarily beer) he could buy himself a new pair of running shoes every 6 months.
Our roads are lined with detritus of our lives, including valuable $.05beer cans. What does this say about our driving habits, or those of our passengers, or our commitment to the environment, or our health, or our pocketbooks? Without looking in these margins, the history of our behavior would disappear in the muddy floods and rapid grasses of decades. All of these scholars listed in Campbell’s article are working in a 50 year Jacksonian tradition of reframing regionalism “in order to bread down this sentimental, nostalgic vision and to reassert its more radical potential” (70).
The banks of rivers, or the put ins and take outs of stretches of floatable river, would be great places to explore the fringes of fishing culture in the west. What is the detritus we leave behind? Fly fishermen leave strike indicators, boat anchors, sandals, flies and tippet and split shot in willows and submerged limbs. Other river goers leave Styrofoam worm containers, red and white bobbers, Rapallas wrapped in tree limbs and willows, beer cans, escaped or flattened innertubes, and the common super tanker pop cup. In some areas frequented by kids and urbanites, condoms, cigarette butts, bottle caps and firework remnants. Our rivers are more than sanctuaries for fly fisherman, local or not.
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