September 2011
Verandah Man
I’ve stolen a few moments from the waning weeks of summer to ponder several of the ways in which our relationship with our land changes.
I'm not the first person to consider such phenomena. Others have gone further and more thoroughly than this brief essay will. Two works in my collection come immediately to mind. The first is The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, by Paul Carter. Among other things, Carter examines the impact that occurred when European concepts of geography collided with our antipodean ‘Botany Bay’.
The other is Behind the Mountain: Return to Tasmania, an autobiographical exploration of Tasmania by expat academic Peter Conrad. Conrad teaches English Lit. at Christ Church College, Oxford, which I think is a nice little invasion inversion, and his tale is a rewarding, if demanding, read.
My local landscape observations are simple and quite subjective.
I was reading Conrad’s book this morning, cradling my hot cup of Irish tea on the verandah, when the various coursings and stayings of people in the park across the street arrested my attention. Two things occurred to me.
The first is that every single bench in the park faces away from the sun. As a species, sun worship seems hardwired into our imaginings and memory. The pagans had Ra and Apollo, among the many. It is hardly surprising that early Christians chose to imagine a winter solstice messianic birth; the hope-filled emergence of the son / sun (a convenient pun in English). After his passing into night / the dark, we have the angelic messenger emerging from Jesus’ empty tomb ‘just after sunrise’.
Through our deep and dark northern winter months we crave the sun’s return, yet it is from that great, brilliant orb that we habitually turn, shielding ourselves from that oft too-harsh penetration. (Reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s tale of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov, but that’s another story…)
Focusing again on my little park in Youngstown, then, how antithetical to our yearnings that this planned parkland purposefully tempers the sun’s impact.
My second little insight here this morning is that in two great sweeping arcs every single bench in the park faces the children’s playground. The whole worshipful setup is focused on them.
Yards away, the Niagara River flows violently into Lake Ontario, and over there on the opposing shore Canada squats peacefully.
We’ve a newly established Peace Garden, celebrating the two hundred years of peace since the War of 1812.
Yet our wooden thrones of passivity ignore it, and cast their watchful gazes on slide and swings and monkey bars. Even as I type this I keep looking up to see my kids are doing fine at the children’s play fountain.
Turning from the sun and to our kids – such telling patterns emerge when we take the time to sit and watch. They emerged for me in a single, unifying moment of “A-ha”! – unplanned and unlettered.
[Caveat emptor to my brilliance: I have been looking over at the park for seven years now. It is not as if a greater mind than mine might not have come to that conclusion a few years earlier....]
Further observations: various vehicles continue to arrive in the parking lot, boots and backs of trucks stuffed to the gills with bikes.
This village park, which I have always considered as a ‘destination’, is more than that. It is a launching site; a foundation for further adventures.
While the park is a trailhead to further adventures, I need to note that these are adventures inebriated by peace. In Youngstown, the land is flat and no longer threatening: beyond the village spreads out acres of apple orchards and cornfields. Once a frontier, the land has been quite literally pacified.
For the land was also a military thoroughfare.
Fifty three years before the War of 1812, since which American forces have maintained undisputed control of the region, French Fort Niagara was under British siege. Anticipating French relief troops from the south, British troops under Lieutenant Colonel Massey marched three kilometres south on July 24, 1759, through what is now ‘my park’, to a point where the portage trail opened into a clearing which is now known as La Belle-Famille.
Captain Le Marchand de Lignery’s relief troops were decimated as they wandered into La Belle-Famille’s open ground against Massey’s dug-in troops. After the victory, Massey returned north, and two days later the French surrendered, setting off a chain of events which led to the French losing the entirety of their North American territories…
But many years have passed. ‘Old’ Fort Niagara up the road – once the vital linchpin, the gateway for the exploration of the interior of a continent – is now a manicured state park. The US Army officially deactivated Fort Niagara in 1963, and the wooden arch proclaiming “Through this gate the world’s best marksmen pass” is now the entry to a vast complex of green soccer fields, where my kids and thousands of others spend their springtime evenings learning ‘the beautiful game’.
Further evidence of how pleasant things here have become includes a father-son duo who just emerged from a green Buick sedan. Mountain bikes banged out of the boot (sssh – but there isn’t bloody mountain for fifty miles!) and helmets on, the father reaches into the backseat for their expedition provisions – and slings that plastic shopping bag over a handle bar, locks the door, and trundles off.
Nothing says ‘adventure’ like a micro-thin supermarket shopping bag.
Another family: Mom and Dad, a boy and a girl, return on bikes to their black Chevy Silverado. They present a perfect family picture: paper rolled under dad’s arm, one of the kids sucking on a plastic sports-drink bottle.
But something is wrong with the picture.
Where are the Big M’s or Oak cartons of flavoured milk? The grit of sand from the beach or the bush soil of eroded sandstone and loam?
In my Australian imagination, the boy should be stuffing his hands into a scalding hot package of chips from the milk bar, bbq sauce both lubricating his descent and making it impossible to grab those last few fat chips at the bottom without squishing them open and bursting the hot starchy potato out of its chopped, rectangular casing.
Even as I gradually accept the longevity of my American existence, there are these moments in which my ancient Australian reality breaks through: flickering jiffies of reality shimmering beyond the surface, perhaps beyond the artifice, of the landscape of my American life that I daily construct for myself.
Even as I willingly engage in it, it appears as if this daily papering-over of my deeper reality is doomed.
It is not as if I am inadept at creating my new life. It is more a case that the rocky geography of my own past, my own self, cannot be so rudely covered over by this flat landscape. No Niagara can wash away some of the essentials of my Australian self. It is a reassuring thing, even as it unsettles my vision from this porch / verandah. On the days in which I care enough to stare I am jangled out of domesticity into a new, and sometimes fearful, symmetry.
Kookaburra