Columbia, Underground?

I just returned from teaching the University of Kansas Geography Field Camp near Can(y)on City, Colorado. The students there work on research projects in human and physical geography, and this year my cultural group got interested in alternative landscapes in the region, that is, those places that do not conform to and/or are not fully incorporated within the dominant state-capitalist framework. Bishop's Castle near Rye in the Wet Mountains is a great example -- Jim Bishop has constructed a life-size castle there complete with fire-breathing dragon, dungeons, buttresses, and moat. The county has repeatedly tried to shut him down (for insurance primarily - he has none), but he has prevailed thus far, accepting donations only and requiring visitors to sign a release.

Anyway, the students started to look for alternative landscapes in Can(y)on City, and in the process of sifting through all the officially sponsored/sanctioned tourism sites, they stumbled on the legends of a series of underground tunnels in the city. There is only one documented tunnel, an odd one: an underground shopping mall built in the late 1800s under the sidewalk in front of the town's first hotel -- it had a shoeshop, general store, and etc. -- and was illuminated by grates in the sidewalk above with small glass infillings. Apparently it was constructed as a novelty by the hotel's owner. But rumors (and evidence) of other tunnels exist, and most of these appear to be connected, in urban myth anyway, to the town's deep and dark history of conflict between the Ku Klux Klan and the region's (Italian) Catholics (there were no African Americans in the vicinity, so the KKK targeted Catholics). According to many accounts, the KKK built the tunnels to hold secret meetings and escape from meeting places, while the Catholics built tunnels to ferry Catholics (especially nuns) from the town's Abbey to safety across the railroad tracks.

The students weren't able to document/discover any of these other tunnels, although many signs of possible tunnels exist on the landscape: the same glass-inset grates in other places downtown; a sealed-in archway in the basement of a business on Main St., a doorway in the middle school (the KKK built the school in the 1920s) to a pipe room and then a sealed-in doorway beyond that. To me, the interesting thing was that this real-and-possible tunnel landscape -- especially the underground shop -- wasn't advertised or described in official tourism literature or by the staff at the Visitor's Center. It was urban legend of a history connected, in resident narratives at least, to the town's unsavory history of rule by the KKK (from ~1920s - 1950s).

So, I simply wonder: what is Columbia's underground landscape? I'm sure there are tunnels somewhere ... how do people describe/interpret them? Are they significant in local historical narratives? Are they as clandestine as those in Can(y)on City, Colorado? I know, for instance, that Lawrence, Kansas has maps of its underground tunnel networks, readily available to the public. No such maps -- or even willingness to have such maps produced (we asked the Historical Society!) -- exists in Can(y)on City; the burden of (KKK) history is too great, it seems, to unveil and sanitize this "underground" landscape for the public.

What might Columbia's tunnels and underground places reveal?

Beginngs III?

My formative and most memorable experiences with places stem from childhood exploration and adventure. I grew up on the north end of Fargo, North Dakota, (the 2011 worst weather city in the United States according to a weather.com competition) a portion of the city that full of small town character and seemingly immune to rapid economic development. Like many children growing up in a middle class residential neighborhood, I spent a majority of my waking hours exploring my home and neighborhood, inside and out. I vividly recall clambering up the maples in our backyard, stalking gray squirrels as they scampered across the wooden fence, playing basketball every weekday with the postman after he visited our mailbox, and collecting various rocks used for landscaping, sharing my discoveries with those of my neighborhood friends. These early adventures provided a fertile setting for developing a sense of place. 

As a child growing up in the 1990's, my sense of place rarely went beyond the bounds of my neighborhood and places that I could travel on foot or by bicycle. The daily experiences of the neighborhood were occasionally punctuated by trips to the grocery store, mall, and local parks as well as vacations at the lake cabin and to see relatives in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul, MN). Perhaps the most salient aspects of my developing sense of place were not what I did, or discovered, but how these childhood places made me feel, or how I felt about them. At home, I felt comfortable and secure, at the park and in the backyard I felt adventurous, at the pool I felt extremely nervous-to the point of sometimes feeling physically ill. Though I have memories of the most minute feelings (too numerous to go into detail here), some were more enduring and profound then others. I vividly remember the senses of awe that I felt one snowy December evening when I was 10 or 11, looking out the window at the white blanket of snow covering the lawn, the street, and houses. Large flakes fell silently to the earth, illuminated by the glow of the streetlights reflecting off of the cloak of clouds above. I recall a feeling of tranquility as I looked into the night sky after returning from Dairy Queen with my family one summer evening. After experiencing the perpetual traffic and endless concrete of South Fargo, I wondered how anything could look so serene. The feelings resulting from my early interactions with place helped cultivate a relationship with the place(s) I inhabited and experienced. 

These early place experiences laid a foundation for my interest in places both in my own backyard, far away, and even imagined. I feel that I could not have ever developed as a person without connecting to place. This notion is perhaps why I chose to pursue geography as a field of study. Even though the 1990's were not that long ago, I feel that children today are growing up apart from the places they inhabit. Even at a primal age, a child's life is increasingly technocentric and rootless. Virtual spaces in many aspects have supplanted or relegated physical places. This apparent shift in society seems to present a profound trend-where cell phones, videogames, the Internet, social media, etc. contributes more to a child's development than grass, trees, physical play, streets and sidewalks- the stuff of physical places. I am extremely interested in how the increasing tendency to rely on and utilize technology affects younger generations' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences with places. Moreover, I am also interested in the converse, the effects of limited interactions with places on the development of children. Ultimately, my interests and intents revolve around reconnecting children to the places they inhabit, investigate, and imagine. 

Technology is never going to go away, on the contrary, it will only continue to proliferate at an unfathomable pace. Society will continue to become more reliant on virtual spaces and nodes of connectivity rather than physical interaction and experience. Although there appears to be a strong dichotomy between the electronic realm and the physical world, this division can be reconciled. Fortunately, Bob Boone has realized this with his proposed Habitation project. The use of technology to collect, analyze, and disseminate information about places provides a wonderful mode of merger. What is most exciting for me is the potential a project like this has for connecting children with places. Considering the contemporary child's love of everything digital, technology has the potential to be used a way back into place. For children, the addition of a technological component may make the exploration of a place interesting and relevant. Moreover, an accessible, bioregional, and collaborative database is an exciting and meaningful medium for contributing to an open sense of place and community, for adults as well as children. 

I am excited and privileged to be a part of this endeavor to learn and share our discoveries and explorations of Columbia and Boone County Missouri. I look forward to learning more about the concepts of place, place-based education, and bioregionalism in order to help further the intentions of this idea and project. 

Habitation Tales

Habitation Tales--I wonder how long it will take before my penchant for giving everything a catchy name begins to irritate people...  In any case, such tales would become the part of the collection most familiar to me, as a long-term English/writing teacher.  I envision these to be first-person accounts of people's experience of living-in-place, which might provide the raw material for a different, less data-driven, analysis of community and the phenomenology of place. 

These might overlap with bits of what we usually call "nature writing," or with accounts that are collected for an ethnography, or with sections of autobiography.  Or, to reach toward a different discipline, place-accounts would likely contain the wisps of folklore--wisps because a genuine folklore is not simply a first-person account, but a bit of narrative or lore that is passed on, that becomes "traditional" within a community context.  Thinking in those terms might give an indirect measure of a bioregional community.  That is, will any such wisps, or personal anecdotes, personal accounts, be able to solidify into transmittable lore?  Or, are we too disjunct, too mobile, too distracted, to retain and amplify such stories?

And would recording and making public (web-public) such accounts of place-lore affect or promote the process of folklore creation?

Work to be done--I should meet with various teachers and writers and work toward creating writing prompts for such place-accounts, not to standardize the accounts, but to make it easier for people to tell their tales.  There wouldn't need to just be one prompt--different audiences might have different needs.  I need to find some teachers from Rockbridge and Hickman High Schools to sit down over a beer or coffee and talk about this process.

A variation of this might be to look more at the "story maps" of indigenous peoples--I should explore this with Mark Palmer.  Such maps don't worry about decimal degrees nor UTM projections.  They illustrate the subjective projections of one person's place-world, or sometimes, a community's vision of its place.  I would love to have grade-school kids draw the maps of their worlds, and maybe again in high school.  Even better, to have the maps they create, but also videotape each student explaining the map.

[Security--even after parental permissions, how to deal with the security of kids talking about the places they frequent?  Agree not to publish any kid-map or video for a full year?]

Other sources--maybe the members of the local Sierra Club would agree to write their habitation tales.  Maybe some of the Columbia neighborhood associations.  Maybe, framed well, some churches ("building local community").
*****
What might go into such tales?  Probably a lot of what people do in a typical day--work, school, shopping, home, visiting friends.  Perhaps special places they like to visit.  And perhaps, under pressure of needing to write, people will, say, notice after a heavy summer rain, how the mist comes up through the trees and partly hides the road, and be reminded of Chinese landscape paintings.  Or recall the balloon festival or walking around to see Christmas lights or Homecoming decorations, or give us their Flood of '93 stories, or cicadas tales, or talk about taking their grandkids to see the Bur Oak.  All those things that might bind us to a place--or that might lead us toward being newly indigenous ourselves.

bob

The Photo project

This part may seem the least 'academic,' and I suppose it is, but I hope that we can build an interactive photo archive for Boone County, across the next century, to parallel other sorts of information we collect.  I don't think photos can replace written sources, nor are images really any more objective; the selection process itself--who chooses to take what image--shifts the knowledge status of any photo out of the objective.

Yet--other things are recorded in images.  Ideal, perhaps, might be that images we record provide others in some misty future with clues to life here that we have never thought to question, things that writers may simply not address.  It's hard to really "see" what we are too familiar with--the blind spots in our assumptions may say as much about us as what we actually do write down.  (And we need to make of record of who takes the photos, to be able to track those lines--I need to write about Habitation Tales soon.)

Difficult is finding an appropriate format and technology for this project.  I've got a gps digital camera now, which may or may not supply the information I want, and I hope we can get more gps cameras into our system soon.  Harder is the display.  Shannon White has suggested Google's MyMaps.  This is free and looks easy to use, but it doesn't look like it would support a project of any great size--even marking images on the maps with the pinpoints might get cluttered.  Not sure.

Just got introduced to ArcGISExplorer.  That system easily marks maps, lets us attach photos, etc.  Not sure this works as a stand-alone web page, vs. a tool to generate presentations.

What I'd like to produce, with many many others...a map of Boone County, probably a satellite image, with a road layer, addresses we could turn on, as a base for a great many gps-tagged photos and text descriptions.  We would need a way for people to zoom in on a specific area (like the box zoom in feature) or to call up photos along a certain road or in a specific neighborhood.  But then, we should also have a legend of categories people could click on to find other sets of photos.

For instance, categories such as:

• residences
• businesses
• construction
• trees
• wildflowers (I need to go out and start these photos tomorrow)
• events (like Roots and Blues, Earthday, the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival, Art in the Park, the Ashland Rodeo...)
• weather events

People will find more ways we need to look at things.  And this also needs to be date-searchable.

So, this is a lot of work.  I don't quite know how to set it up, but this aspect would be popular, and might get some support by various groups.  E.g., in better times, real estate folks might sponser us, or the Chamber of Commerce.  Or the towns of Centralia or Harrisburg.  Or the Boone County Historical Society. And Stephens and other schools might decide they want a visual presence on this.  And I rather hope this can generate projects in classes--whether as an exercise in a future MU gps class, or in human geography, updating Carl Sauer to the digital age, or a junior high neighborhood mapping project.

Well, we'll see.

bob

Beginnings, Pt. II

My advisor in graduate school once said that cultural geographers generally come from one of two kinds of upbringing, either a peripatetic childhood with many different "homes" over the years, or a childhood rooted in a particular place, often a rural area undergoing some sort of urban or industrial change. I am of the former type, having lived in Washington, DC, Tennessee, Georgia, (far upstate) New York, Illinois, and Montana during childhood and adolescence. But in both cases, the experience of place is especially salient. As for me, I was a perennial outsider trying to understand the locale and its inhabitants; I was the "new kid" from another place. In childhood my family vacationed at my grandfather's rustic cabin in western Tennesse--I became lost in the deep southern woods -- and later we moved to a rather remote section of land in the forest-primeval north of the Adirondaks where I spent hours clambering over deadfall, trapsing around muskeg, exploring the hidden places. And then the rural West captured my attention. What was it like to live in such remote locales? What was life like in far northern Canada, or eastern Montana, or northern Idaho? I vividly remember the class in which my advisor instructed us that these questions were part of cultural geography -- so I was hooked, and became a cultural geographer.

I started the process of becoming a professional geographer as an Anthropology/English double-major in college, and over time the degrees, research, and (thankfully) jobs required more relocation: from Illinois to Lawrence, Kansas, then a year and several summers living in an Aboriginal community in northern British Columbia, then back (briefly) to Illinois where my first son was born, a move to my first job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, and finally now, for the past six years, in Columbia, Missouri where I teach in the University's Department of Geography. Having moved so much, and traveling besides--and perhaps getting older plays a factor, too--I have increasingly felt the need to settle somewhere, get to know the region and develop ties in the landscape, and in so doing become part of the place. And besides, what a great way to teach a class: have the students learn Geography by doing it, tracking down and interpreting the myriad cultural landscapes in Boone County and beyond.

These thoughts and nascent motivations were percolating when I met Bob in a Departmental seminar. I learned about his ideas for Habitation, The Next 100 Years, and immediately intellectual and other connections began forming. During the course of my academic career, I have been especially interested in the ethical possibilities intrinsic to a strong (yet tolerant, or "open") sense of place. Isn't place the context for all our experiences, encounters, and knowledge? If so, could this existential perspective on place reveal some groundlines for ethical relationships and action? A number of philosophers (Emmanuel Levinas, Jeff Malpas, Ed Casey) and bioregionalists have answered in the affirmative to this question. So if we could use a digital medium to stimulate interest in (and care for) the local environment, perhaps it would contribute to more ethical outcomes here, in this place. Bob was probably thinking along these lines when he designed the project for a minimum of 100 years, which I believe was intended to diffuse the power structure inherent to the division between designers/managers and others (contributers, actual and prospective; community members). The New Media make such open access and participatory exploration possible within a networked multiplicity of actors all contributing to common purposes and communication, but without power concentrated an overarching director/manager, a structural center, or a logical rubric. In this sense, cultivating a collective sense of place could become a kind of anarchist bioregional politics...

By way of conclusion - my approach to this project comes first out of a childhood of hiking the woods and vacationing in rustic cabins; my ethnographic research with Aboriginal peoples in North America (and the related literature; especially powerful for me were Hugh Body's Maps and Dreams and Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits In Places); later, from my study of existential phenomenology (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Sartre); and most recently, my reading of the literature on place-based education and critical pedagogy (Freire, Cajete, Linda Tuhawaii Smith, Sobel, Orr, Louv).

Beginnings

Habitation is a long-term project that I have recently returned to.  I first tried to start this at Columbia College in 1999, with the less-inspired name, Into the 22nd Century.  But there was no real support for it in those days.  It seems more possible now, in connection with the Geography Department at UMC.

Part of the problem has always been concisely describing what this project is, without sounding too crazy.  Key terms--a bioregional archive, focused on Boone County, Missouri.  By that, I meant a collection of information about how people live, work and think about the natural and social worlds they live in and construct here.  More than that though--I wanted to set this up as an interactive collection, an interactive, public database that people could add to, comment on, expand--and one that would not at all strive to be a "neutral" data collection.  I hope this might become a source of community direction, a cyber version of the elders' wisdom, or, through its human parts, its own sort of conscious, artificial intelligence...

Ah, I grew up with The Foundation Trilogy.  Humor me.

"Bioregion" is quite a loaded term in itself.  There is an extensive literature to back that up.  My favorite is Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land, though his vision of political organization around the bioregion, and his condemnation of urban areas ["ecological parasites"], both might have to be qualified.  Wendell Berry is a good, grounding voice in all this, as is Gary Snyder, and further back, Lewis Mumford.  Deep Ecology appeals to me, and seems to me to be only the broader vision of bioregionalism.  I would also look to communities like Gaviotas, in Colombia--with the difference that Paolo Lugeri started on the barren, empty llanos/grasslands, and built what he wanted.  Here, we have already built cities and roads and traditions.  And we need to work within, not against, what already exists here.

Place-based education is a thread to explore.  There are links to be made to studies of indigenous education models, as well as the critical pedagogy of Paulo Friere.

A research focus, for me, might be how identity is constructed now, in our hectic, globalized world.  Traditional communities operate and sustain local commons and collective beliefs because they are generally face-to-face societies--tribes and their small-town successors.  That just isn't the case for anyone in Columbia just now.  Whatever "we" are, we are pulled in dozens of directions, with identities split among nation, state, employer(s), politics, religion, sports teams, facebook links, video game obsessions, consumer groups, and on and on.  This even before we apply all those statistics about how much and how often Americans move.  I suspect that our selves are so fractured that very little is left for even wisps of identification with the immediate landscape or the people we bump into day to day.

And with little place-based identity, what happens to our role as stewards, caretakers, of the land we inhabit?  If "inhabit" can mean anything for us...  Do we have any ethical center in relation to place anymore?  And if not, will we simply use and destroy the land around us?

Well, all this is what I want to study, make self-conscious in this community, collecting anything/everything about the way we live in this place, and engaging as many people as possible.

Oh--and I propose this project should continue for the next hundred years.

bob