My Turn
January/February 2015
Judy Ray A Sense of Place
from her book
From Place to Place, Whirlybird Press, 2015
January/February 2015
Judy Ray A Sense of Place
from her book
From Place to Place, Whirlybird Press, 2015
Judy Ray
Judy Ray is author of several poetry collections that include To Fly Without Wings (Helicon Nine Editions). Her chapbooks include Fishing in Green Waters, Sleeping in the Larder: Poems of a Sussex Childhood, and Judy Ray: Greatest Hits. Earlier books are Pebble Rings, Pigeons in the Chandeliers, and a prose memoir about India, The Jaipur Sketchbook. While living in Kansas City, she was an associate editor of New Letters magazine, and then the first director of The Writers Place, a literary community center. She now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
A Sense of Place
Does one have to be uprooted in order to consider a sense of place? Perhaps the “placed” person (Wendell Berry’s term) does not even have to reflect on the concept because place itself is knowledge without comparison. Before we became a world of restless movers, there were more people who belonged to one place all their lives. And in those earlier days—in times of exploration or pioneering, and before the vicarious experience through photographic and electronic images—differences of place would have been greater. Within this one land, “civilization” or “progress” has brought the highway strip to all our towns, hiding what might have been their unique character behind skins of gaudy, flashing franchise, familiar from coast to coast, border to border—housed in cheap rectangular constructions. What does that proliferation of repetitive images do to a sense of place?
Judy Ray_From Place to Place_
Though I live in a city, my relation to place at a basic inherited level is to the natural landscape of an area. If I had been born and raised in an urban setting, perhaps my connection would be to rectangular form, road grids, sidewalk cracks, and plate glass reflections, to roots that grow from understanding the relationship between architecture and the city's inhabitants.
The landscape of my formative years was the green and compact countryside of southern England, dense with ancient oaks, beeches, chestnuts, elms; farmlands laced with hedgerows that were a link between natural and tamed growth, between artistry and utility; small fields of wheat or barley or oats; and pastures dotted with herds of sturdy Friesian or Shorthorn cattle. Country roads wound in an unhurried way through this land, the only straight stretches being those built over old Roman highways of the first centuries A.D., between sites where you can visit the ruins of communal Roman baths or admire a mosaic floor, and where ancient coins still turn up in furrows. I was born in a house that was about 300 years old, with a mid-1600s date on tiles close to the chimney. But an elaborately researched history of the area now claims there was almost certainly “a late open half-house on this site” in about 1500.
I left that green land decades ago, and have taken into my consciousness the sights, scents and sounds of many other landscapes. For nearly six years my seasons were the alternating wet and dry (tropical rains or red dust) of East Africa, with its own contrasts of densely green banana groves, open acacia-dotted plains, mountains, and the dry, thorny lands that make one think the inhabitants must have no word for “comfort” in their language. I lived in this place through changing times of celebration (for national independence) and of bitter power struggles. But I had no sense of my own relation to that land. It was a time of exploration, widening horizons, as have been most of my other long journeys and sojourns in varied parts of the world.
For writers Wallace Stegner of the West and Wendell Berry of the South, returning to the regions which shaped them has reinforced their sense of place. According to Stegner, travels and sojourns in other parts bring enlightenment and enlarge one’s perspective, but then the Westerner returns “to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment”….
The landscape of my formative years was the green and compact countryside of southern England, dense with ancient oaks, beeches, chestnuts, elms; farmlands laced with hedgerows that were a link between natural and tamed growth, between artistry and utility; small fields of wheat or barley or oats; and pastures dotted with herds of sturdy Friesian or Shorthorn cattle. Country roads wound in an unhurried way through this land, the only straight stretches being those built over old Roman highways of the first centuries A.D., between sites where you can visit the ruins of communal Roman baths or admire a mosaic floor, and where ancient coins still turn up in furrows. I was born in a house that was about 300 years old, with a mid-1600s date on tiles close to the chimney. But an elaborately researched history of the area now claims there was almost certainly “a late open half-house on this site” in about 1500.
I left that green land decades ago, and have taken into my consciousness the sights, scents and sounds of many other landscapes. For nearly six years my seasons were the alternating wet and dry (tropical rains or red dust) of East Africa, with its own contrasts of densely green banana groves, open acacia-dotted plains, mountains, and the dry, thorny lands that make one think the inhabitants must have no word for “comfort” in their language. I lived in this place through changing times of celebration (for national independence) and of bitter power struggles. But I had no sense of my own relation to that land. It was a time of exploration, widening horizons, as have been most of my other long journeys and sojourns in varied parts of the world.
For writers Wallace Stegner of the West and Wendell Berry of the South, returning to the regions which shaped them has reinforced their sense of place. According to Stegner, travels and sojourns in other parts bring enlightenment and enlarge one’s perspective, but then the Westerner returns “to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment”….
Thoughts of place arise with acute immediacy when we travel from the Midwest of the United States (home base for more than twenty years) across the plains and panhandles, the desert and abrupt mountains towards the Southwest and the saguaro land of Arizona. We cross the Continental Divide on a seemingly level dusty plain, and I think of the translation of geographical expectations. There is no obvious north/south ridge here to represent the great divide. I am reminded of the southwest tip of the Australian continent where many shipwrecks have occurred within sight of the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse. I heard someone joke that he took a visitor there and said, “See, this is where two oceans meet—the Indian Ocean and the Southern Sea. Do you see the line between them stretching away there from the lighthouse?” And the visitor had claimed to see this phenomenon of a line drawn on water, distinct as the place where a muddy brown tributary flows into the waters of a fast, green river. So, too, one might look for the girdle of the equator—a shadow across waves, a hairline crack across continents….
On the first day after our move to Tucson, I wrote in my journal: “I have an instinctive urge to start digging in this sandy waste, to make compost, to plant something, to save water from rainfall and kitchen, to make a magic garden grow. But the recommended action is to bring the desert to your door, plant cactus among boulders, root out the craving for rooted green.” I read Stegner’s essays in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, essays with telling titles such as “Thoughts in a Dry Land” and “Living Dry,” in which he explores western landscape and the adaptation of outsiders to its scale and qualities. “Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.... Sagebrush is an acquired taste, as are raw earth and alkali flats....You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time....”
In these arid lands—Australia, Arizona, wherever—my steps are tentative. My sense is of a place where neither I nor any of my neighbors in a desert city belong: I am afraid we cannot tread lightly enough across this land, yet I am in awe of its subtle palette.
From Place to Place: Personal Essays by Judy Ray
© copyright 2015 by Judy Ray
Whirlybird Press, Shawnee, Kansas
http://www.whirlybirdpress.com/
Paperback, 170 pages; ISBN 978-0-9647053-8-8
Cover art by Suzanne Stryk, Lives of the Birds #1, mixed media
On the first day after our move to Tucson, I wrote in my journal: “I have an instinctive urge to start digging in this sandy waste, to make compost, to plant something, to save water from rainfall and kitchen, to make a magic garden grow. But the recommended action is to bring the desert to your door, plant cactus among boulders, root out the craving for rooted green.” I read Stegner’s essays in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, essays with telling titles such as “Thoughts in a Dry Land” and “Living Dry,” in which he explores western landscape and the adaptation of outsiders to its scale and qualities. “Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.... Sagebrush is an acquired taste, as are raw earth and alkali flats....You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time....”
In these arid lands—Australia, Arizona, wherever—my steps are tentative. My sense is of a place where neither I nor any of my neighbors in a desert city belong: I am afraid we cannot tread lightly enough across this land, yet I am in awe of its subtle palette.
From Place to Place: Personal Essays by Judy Ray
© copyright 2015 by Judy Ray
Whirlybird Press, Shawnee, Kansas
http://www.whirlybirdpress.com/
Paperback, 170 pages; ISBN 978-0-9647053-8-8
Cover art by Suzanne Stryk, Lives of the Birds #1, mixed media
