Phthursday Musings: Place and People

I started writing a longer META-SPIEL piece about some of this, but couldn’t really figure out how I wanted to tie it off. And with a library deadline for returning a couple of books, it’s time to just throw out some ideas about things I’ve read and the connections I’ve made from them. Three books in play here:

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, largely about his time spent in the early 1950s as a park ranger at what was then Arches National Monument in eastern Utah. It is a meditative reading on the high desert, but could also be fairly interpreted as a series of love letters to the vast, wild, open country of the American Southwest.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, a recent ecological but also anthropological look at what humans have done with, and done to, the Great Lakes an the life within, and how the lakes and those life forms have responded.

Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic by Jim Simeone, a very dense investigation by a political scientist into the frontier politics of Southern Illinois in the 1820s. Jim was one of my college professors, and taught what I think was my favorite class, on regulatory policy. (I should probably not admit that my favorite college course was on regulatory policy.)

I found interesting overlaps between Abbey and Egan, but have had trouble figuring out how to speak to all of it without getting really weird. But I think I see a way to write about it all by including a very different kind of book. All three books ultimately are about the interactions of humans with the places they occupy, a theme I frequently explore myself.

Visiting Utah, I wanted to read about it, and Edward Abbey was the logical choice. This was a part of the country I’d never seen and was curious what it would feel like, but I also wanted some sort of sense of how people associated with it. Much of Abbey’s focus is on the enormity, the overwhelmingness of the high desert. He also gets into the notion of having, or not having, a relationship with the space. It’s this notion of relationship which I want to dwell upon.

Egan also writes about an enormous, overwhelming subject in the Great Lakes. But enormity isn’t his focus; rather, it’s the susceptibility of the ecosystems. It’s about how human engagement has dramatically altered what organisms are and aren’t present and how it all comes back around to impact people. The relationship then is a two-way street, much more so than is the case with the solitary high desert.

The “bottomland republic” that Simeone refers to is the land flanking the great rivers and major tributaries of Southern Illinois, and the attendant formulation of a strand of republicanism a generation removed from Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer. He’s not attempting to address ecology, but I think the anthropology serves as a suitable stand-in for our purposes here. The land is there to be broken, unlike Abbey’s high desert, where at most the land is there to be explored, but better left completely undisturbed. It’s a completely different take on human relationship with their environment.

(My own ancestors weren’t in Southern Illinois in the 1820s, but they were there a decade later, in the farmland of Marion and Jefferson Counties south of Centralia. I wasn’t expecting a loose tie-in with my own familial tradition, but one of the first Huckelberrys in Southern Illinois was apparently a Methodist horseback preacher, and there’s some irony that the first scholarly work I’ve read that is at all close to the time and place was being worked on by a professor of mine while I was in his class!)

Coming from Northern Illinois, I suppose I identify more with the open prairie, but also somewhat with the forest. Rockford began its existence as Forest City, and the vestiges of the great forests of the region remain across the northern counties of the state (notably including Cook County - it can be easy to forget how much forest preserve acreage there is here (indeed I broke my collarbone in a Cook County Forest Preserve!)) I don’t identify with the desert or the lakes, and honestly not much with the river either. But really I’m a city kid. Relative to almost anything that existed 300 years ago, Rockford is a big city and deserves to be thought of that way. (The 10th largest city in Europe in the year 1800 had a population of about 153,000, right about Rockford’s today. Maybe you’ve heard of that other city. It’s called Rome.)

I’ve long been fascinated by people’s relationship with places, with the nature of buildings and neighborhoods and roads and the motion or lack thereof. But this is more place-as-unit. Southern Utah defines a much larger place. Lake Huron defines a much larger place. And I think as the places become larger, and the enormity of them defies the idea of individual relationships, we get into something different, the relationships between collections of people and enormous spaces. I don’t mean political spaces either, I don’t mean someone’s relationship with their city or country. I mean that the very definition of an enormous space is intertwined with the collective relationship we as humans have with it.

I think there’s a fascinating intellectual curiosity to contemplating the enormity of a space like the high desert. And yet there’s also something weird about it… Abbey was writing about a space nobody else had written about, trying to wrestle with it all.

Egan did something different though. He turned the enormity on its head. He wrote passionately of the tenuousness of the Great Lakes. He didn’t reduce the enormity, but rather he connected it. Not just to isolated people… it was the first book I’d read where I felt like in reading about Lake Michigan, I was reading about my lake. It makes me want to explore it more deeply, to experience pulling a fish out of it. To connect.

Abbey and Egan both wrote about Glen Canyon in Southern Utah. Abbey was there before the dam went up creating Lake Powell. Egan was there to report on how the invasive zebra and quagga mussels had made it to Lake Powell. As it so happened I’d read just a couple months before in Smithsonian Magazine about how the lower water levels in Lake Powell had unexpectedly revealed canyons previously lost.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where Lake Powell was.

Sometimes when we read things, or see things or hear things or watch things certainly, but I think especially when we read things, we can read things that are not necessarily that closely related but come away associating them. And it can color the experience in a way that when we discuss what we’ve read with others, that color can sneak in. It can enhance the shared knowledge.

Reading Abbey and Egan back to back was, intentionally or not, an astute thing to do. I think I got more out of Egan by being more attuned to some of Abbey’s themes. Even in our own lives the things we do aren’t in isolation from one another.

If it should come to pass that Jim Simeone reads this - and I will invite him to! - he will no doubt be bemused by the idea that I might have been slightly colored in my reading of bottomland republicans by Edward Abbey or Dan Egan.

Admittedly though I’ve been trying to think for weeks about a larger narrative around time and place. Via Egan I even stumbled into something about the continental divides. There are two National Historic Sites in Illinois. One of them is the Abraham Lincoln home in Springfield. The other one, as it so happens, is four miles to the east of here. Among other notable historic happenings, the Chicago Portage is the site of this silliness:

The Portage is not exactly a dot on the map, it’s more of a former swamp, where on the east side, a raindrop would ultimately make its way to Lake Michigan, and on the west side, a raindrop would ultimately make its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, today, it’s all different. The Chicago Portage National Historic Site is just part of what was the original portage, which today is substantially Interstate 55, the Sanitary and Shipping Canal, Harlem Avenue, and, uh, Stickney, I guess.

I’ve come to understand a great many things relative to my understanding of the Portage, of the reversal of the Chicago River, of the inherent weirdness that is Chicago. I very highly recommend Benjamin Sells’ A History of the Chicago Portage. Actually I recommend reading this before you read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. It also so happens that understanding the Portage at length provides vital context to how stunted the political development of Southern Illinois was… something that reading about the “bottomland republic” has helped immensely with clarifying, as it lays the context for where things were before everything got stunted.

(I actually have a lot more to write about the Portage, and the continental divide, and Dan Egan… but I am mulling over how to turn this into an article to be published elsewhere. Stay tuned!)

Anyway! I’ve been promising something more about Utah and the desert for a while, and this has been a completely ridiculous result, where I somehow turned it into telling you all that Rockford is a big city. I mean, you should have seen that coming. But still.

As a parting gift, in the earliest days of Illinois statehood, to the extent that population was concentrated, it was in what we now call the Metro East region. That region, about 175 years after statehood, produced the often imitated but never surpassed collective genius of Uncle Tupelo. And what more appropriate song could there be for this week’s installment?