When we were little, our grandfather would take us on long walks in the woods.
We would always start in the same place: up at the top of the hill by the water tower. There was a break in the tree line created by Papa with a tractor. Depending on when he had last cleared the route, the path could be wide, or overgrown with fast encroaching blackberry vines and alder saplings.
Usually we followed the tire marks of the tractor, but my cousins and I always begged to get
What we meant was that we wanted Papa to hand over his machete, which he would only do to the oldest boy, who was years younger than the three oldest girls.
Then, we would dive into the woods. Usually starting with old logging roads and using those to navigate through the densely forested hill. Quite quickly we would be lost, but Papa never said which way to go. Our solution would be to start following the dog, who mostly stuck to elk trails, occasionally disappearing to go chase something rustling in the undergrowth.
We would pretend to be scared that the dog wouldn't return and that we would be lost in the woods forever. Chances are we were never lost. Papa knew the way home.
My cousins and I would argue:
where to turn,
which elk path to take,
whether the droppings one of us had stepped in was bobcat or mountain lion,
and most importantly, how fresh it was.
We were confident that the dog would have no problem defending us from any animal that dared approach.
Eventually, exhausted, muddy, with scrapes and bruises we would find our way home. Probably with some gentle guidance from Papa that went over our heads.
In What’s the Use, Sara Ahmed describes the peculiar nature of a path, “The more people travel on a path, the flatter and smoother the surface becomes… the more a path is followed, the easier it is to follow” (Ahmed, 2019, p.41). It is through repetition that some things are established, and often it takes consistent maintenance through additional repetition for it to remain. Papa was diligent about maintaining the loop by the water tower. But the forest was equally as determined to reclaim it. During the winter, when the ground was too wet to take the tractor into the woods, we would return to fallen trees, vines and spiderwebs woven through the path. When the rains ended, Papa would mow it all down and use a chainsaw on the fallen trees, while Nana would move sticks which she deemed tripping hazards.
Yet, despite having this path, maintained with love, we all wanted to make a new one. We wanted an adventure. So we decided to create our own path, making a journey by following the most circuitous route home possible, leaving a trail of muddy boot prints and hacked branches.
The main components of a journey are time, place, and narrative. If we imagine a journey in its simplest form, there is movement between places, which takes up time. The boundaries that determine the beginning and end of a journey are what establishes the narrative or storyline. If the perspective is zoomed out, a life could be seen as a journey, a line, stretching from birth to death. If zoomed way out, perhaps the journey is generational. Zoomed in, it could become a circular coming-of-age story, leaving to return home matured. Without definition or intention, there is no journey, just inevitable movement and the progression of time, and the body's continuous existence in changing surroundings.
When it comes to novels, authors build a narrative. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s article, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” she describes fiction as a container, in which the narrator holds the curated components that make up the story (Le Guin, 1986). Le Guin proposes that authors set boundaries by curating events in a way that causes a relationship to develop between them. The idea of a carrier bag is not dissimilar to how the Tralfamadorian aliens, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, describe their literature. The aliens, who have no perception of time, say, “There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no morals, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” (Vonnegut, 1969). The Tralfamadorian literature is shaped by choices of inclusion and exclusion. While their literature is different from our novels, which rely on the inevitable experience of time by the reader, their process of selection is closer to how a painting might be viewed, where everything is “read” at once.
As Science Fiction writers, Le Guin and Vonnegut’s works often push the limits of linear time as elements of the extraordinary are introduced. Literature in general is a form of time travel. It is assumed that readers will travel forward and backwards with the aid of foreshadowing and memories. Stories can move perpendicularly from character to character, offering simultaneous perspectives. In the book Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, David Wittenberg suggests that the only element of Science Fiction time travel that is unique is that the characters need a technological device to move through time and space (Wittenberg, 2016). In all storytelling, jumps in chronology are often integral to the narrative.
Before I was born, a lumber company bought land on the hill. My grandparents told me that the trees were all cut down and the company has been waiting for them to regrow.
I am now grown and so are the trees, ready to be chopped down and removed. But, the catch is, the lumber company is unable to reach their land. They need a new easement to access their forest. This isn’t possible because of a feud between the company and an adjoining landowner. The lumber company had an easement with the previous owner of the land so that the trees could be accessed. After many years the easement expired. By that time the land was no longer owned by the same person. During negotiations with the new landowner, a manager at the lumber company threatened legal action over the landowner’s driveway, which was too wide at one curve, and infringed onto the lumber company’s land by a couple of feet. It turns out a sledgehammer could remove the extra few feet of pavement, narrowing a small section, and solving the problem. Unfortunately for the lumber company, this was the same driveway that they needed an easement across to access their trees. They couldn’t get the signature of the resentful owner. Since then, every few years, a representative of the lumber company reaches out to see if they can negotiate a new easement agreement. So far, they are always rebuffed.
On the border of their property the lumber company has many “NO TRESPASSING” signs. But also, they are unable to get to their land without trespassing themselves.
This forest is unusable to the lumber company because it can no longer be chopped down. My family is not supposed to use the land because we do not own it. When we ignore the signs we misuse the land. Sara Ahmed points out that, “Use often comes with instructions that are about maintaining bodily and social boundaries. Sometimes instructions are about who is allowed to use what for what.” (Ahmed, 2018). I imagine the boundaries are unknown to the trees, the animals, the insects, the mushrooms, and the banana slugs. But they are on borrowed land and borrowed time if the lumber company gets a signature.
Before I was born, when my dad was the age I am now, the hill had recently been logged and it was a field of foxgloves. Very early in the morning someone knocked on the door. A man had been foraging for mushrooms and had gotten lost in the surrounding mountains during a sudden storm. He had spent the day and night wandering south, until he reached this purple bald hill. He followed the logging roads until he reached a gravel driveway. Nana invited him into the house, fed him breakfast, and Papa drove him home. For the forager, this hill was an unfamiliar landscape that did not offer the same certainty and reliability that I would come to associate with it.
When we were young, my dad would tell my sister and me the story of the forager, to warn us of the risks of going unprepared into the forest.
When I was a teenager I went with my sister, a friend, and my dog into an unknown forest. It was our first time backpacking. My friend was overconfident that she could read a map and compass. I was confident I could not. The trail followed a river most of the way before looping back to the car. We would camp one night. That was pretty much the extent of our planning. While hiking we quickly discovered that the trail frequently stopped at the river’s edge. The problem was that the path rarely actually stopped at the river’s edge where we were supposed to cross. Instead, overtime, other confused hikers had missed the crossing and walked a bit farther along the river's edge before realizing their error. With each person who walked there-and-back this false path became more obvious than the actual one. Each time we added our own footprints to the wrong trail we reinforced the mistake, making it more likely that future hikers would be misled.
This was not the hill I was used to getting lost on. Instead I was truly semi-lost, in a strange forest. There were no familiar landmarks to orient myself. The dog did not lead us. Papa was not there to nudge us in the right direction.
I remember walking in the woods with my cousins, getting lost, but feeling that on the hill we were invincible. Getting lost was part of the story, it was part of the game.
The mushroom forager, my cousins, and I all wanted to bushwack a new path into existence through sheer willpower. This arrogance is what convinced me to go into a strange forest with a map and compass I knew I couldn’t read. We sought out the unknown, perhaps for similar reasons as Emma Cocker when she said, “Not knowing is encountered as an opening in the fabric of what is known, which requires a reciprocal openness, receptivity to its potential” (Cocker, 2013). Adventures happen in these unknowns. Getting lost and starving alone in the woods happens in these unknowns.
Our adventures in the woods were fueled by both childish wonder and an abundance of stories that acted as inspiration. Every night my mom would read to my sister and me before bed. Instinctively, we picked up on the connection between adventure, nature, and the unknown. Popular novels like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels from the 18th century helped solidify this relationship. During the age of Imperialism the diaries of explorers were widely read. In the United States, legends of the Wild West fueled the drive for Manifest Destiny (Horsman, 1981). In the present day, stories about travel or outdoor recreation are often bestsellers. My sister and I are not alone in finding exploration compelling.
Another aspect, sometimes explicit in adventure books, is the allure of conquest. To have what one did not possess before, whether that is knowledge, wealth, property, or glory. It drove countries to expand into empires and start wars over boundaries. One of the many problems with romanticizing conquest is that, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes, “The drive’s goal—to reach its object—is ‘false,’ it masks its ‘true’ aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement” (Žižek, 2019). When the goal is the constant accumulation of more, despite catastrophic human and environmental costs, there becomes no clear end point as the desire for more can not be satisfied.
The narratives I grew up with were part of a wider tradition. Lloyd Kramer, in Nationalism in Europe and America, looks at how “The construction of nations in writing often fused with the construction of nations in military or political conflicts because the meaning of nations depended on narratives about cultural differences” (Kramer, 2011, p.80). These writings and the formation of a national identity “…justified and shaped the intellectual labor of national writers and teachers, whose work in turn justified and shaped the nationalism that people learned from their newspapers, schools, and history books” (Kramer, 2011, p.80). It is hard to deconstruct what is innate desire and what is indoctrination from generations of colonial narratives.
There is a naivety when looking for adventure. It is naive to think nothing will be lost and something worthy found. When my cousins and I trampled the underbrush, crushed burrows, and tore webs, we went on a journey and left destruction in our wake.
One reason that going on a journey is compelling is that it can temporarily shift a person's perception of the passage of time. Peter Becker, in the book Whose Journeys?, describes the appeal of going on an adventure: “In contrast to the elongation of routine, eventless everyday life, in the experience of adventurers the passage of time is reduced to the pure present. At the boulder, in the surf, in the torrent of water or in the forest at night there are moments of ‘fulfilled time’, in which the subjects are completely involved, and which make the epic length of their usual everyday life seem like a collection of trifles.” (Humberstone, 2003, p.96). During an adventure, emotions are heightened as the new is experienced and challenges obstruct progress, forcing the adventurer into an increased state of awareness of the present.
Anecdotally, time moves faster as you age. Nana reminds me of this often. She bakes banana bread and as we eat at the table, she reminds me that the doctors say her heart beats too fast, that she wants to meet her future great-grandchildren, that she remembers what it was like to be my age, but can’t understand how time has passed so quickly since then. She tells me to make the most of the next fifty-six years of my life, and that maybe I should start thinking about those great-grandchildren before her heart grows more impatient. I want to get up from the table and go looking for the unknown in the forest.
If you dig on the hill, it does not take long to hit red clay. When Papa tore out a whole hillside of blackberry brambles and bushes, what was left after a rainstorm was a slide. We would attempt to climb as high as possible before either the footholds or handholds would collapse beneath us and we would go sliding back down.
Unlike Sisyphus, we did eventually make it to the top, victorious, to then run down once again.
We returned home, wet and covered in red clay that would never quite wash out, no matter how many cycles it went through.
Papa is now in his eighties. He no longer drives his tractor through the woods. He rarely drives his tractor at all. A few years ago he drove himself over the side of the hill. He jumped and rolled down beside the machine. He was mostly fine, bruises, a sprained wrist, a cracked rib, and clothing covered in red clay and blood that wouldn’t completely wash out. The tractor was done for.
Not long ago, Papa was setting a fire for a burn pile. He was wearing his diesel canister on his back and drew a line from the bonfire back to himself, his sleeves wet with oil. He came home with blackened clothes that no longer held together.
Nana wants him off of machinery and away from fire.
Now the loop by the water tower is getting lost.
My grandparents are scared. They think the hill will be wiped clean, not by the loggers, but by wildfires.
Papa takes my sister and me on a walk through the woods along an overgrown logging road. He tells us how this path we walk will one day be a fire road; a dirt line that will act as a barricade against the oncoming apocalypse. He will clear everything so that two fire trucks can drive side by side. He will make this into a road.
My sister and I know he will not. It is too long, too much work, too many machines, too much time.
Nana walks me around the house. She points to pictures on the wall, rabbit figurines in cabinets, tablecloths in drawers. I am told a story for each. She says someone has to know them. She doesn’t want us to forget, for these artifacts to be lost.
One year had an unusually rainy spring, but by the time August came, there was the usual drought with fire warnings. As long as the wind blew inland, we couldn’t smell the smoke of the forest fires. For us the heat was an excuse to go swimming in the rivers and find shade under the canopy of leaves on the hill. There were two herds of elk and a black bear that gave birth to a cub. I saw the elk often. The bears were seen in cameras set up by a hunter who didn't have time to bother with proper permits or the exact dates of bear hunting season.
Another year we drove through Paradise, California, to get to the hill. On one side of the road was black char, on the other, the surviving portion of the town.
Once, as we drove we watched the fires climb the trees on the side of the highway. It was night, but beside the fire our headlights seemed dull.
One summer, the small town below the hill filled with tents and campers. The tents were for the firefighters. The campers were for the people who had to evacuate their homes by the river.
Evergreen forests can benefit from fire. Some plants are “… strictly fire-dependent in that they could not persist (without human intervention) in the absence of fire” (Greenberg, 2021). The forest will regrow, but first it will burn.
While sitting on a mossy patch surrounded by ferns, it is hard to accept the destruction of this hill. It is also hard to imagine the old growth forest that was once here. I don’t know how many times the hill has been logged, and so I don’t know how far back my imagination needs to go.
It reminds me of Walt Whitman’s poem, “This Compost” where the narrator, while sitting in a forest that that he loves, describes a moment of realization, asking,
“Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.” (Whitman, 1856)
It may be childish, but I want a future where the trees grow infinitely taller. My desire is contrary to the cyclical nature of growth, of compost, but part of me is conditioned to value linear progress and to avoid backtracking. Tim Ingold, in his book, Lines, shows that growth is not linear, yet, “In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. Indeed the straight line has emerged as a virtual icon of modernity, an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world.” (Ingold, 2016, p.156). Progress is straight. Efficiency the straightest and most direct path. In a “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin critiques the idea, “… that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark” (Le Guin, 1986).
The forest works in cycles, in loops. Destruction is part of it. When evergreen trees die, their nutrients are returned to the soil through decomposition for future plants (Greenberg, 2021). When the lumber companies haul the trees off, this regenerative loop is disrupted.
The narrative shape of a cycle is closer to a carrier bag than a line, but still the carrier bag has limits, a shape. Continuous, indefinite, cycles exist and intertwine creating a story that is rarely told and when attempted, inevitably simplified and defined.
More than likely, eventually, the hill will burn. The Santa Ana winds will blow from inland, and bring with them heat and sparks, and a wall of flames that can jump rivers and climb trees. When that day comes people will evacuate their homes. The firefighters will station themselves on the road below this hill. In between them and the ocean will be small plots of lily bulb farms and grazing land for horses and cows.
We used to pick apples to feed to the neighbor’s cows. My sister tried to teach the rest of us how to split the apples in half with our hands. She had honed the skill working in horse barns. I watched her bury her fingers into the flesh, and the apple would come apart effortlessly. I never figured it out. I passed every apple to her. She would feed one half to one cow and I would feed the other to a different cow.
Every summer we would meet the new cows and fatten them up with apples. The slaughterhouse was not a far drive down the road.
One year there were no cows in the field. The land had been sold. That fall, we didn't pick enough apples and the little tree trunk split in two, unable to bear its own weight.
While those cows have been gone for a while, hopefully when the fire comes, the rest of the fields will also be empty, with the livestock packed into trailers and taken somewhere with less smoke.
When the fires come there will be nothing on the hill but ash and skeletons of homes, and perhaps, if the lumber company has not yet gotten the signature they need, the trees will stand bare, dead black sticks rising into the red and grey sky.
I will remember a forest that was once beautiful, with conifers, redwoods, and waist high ferns. When nothing is left, the forest will only exist if we maintain it in our memories with the same love that drove Papa to maintain the path that once existed by the water tower.
We can remember following the dog, knowing he knew the way home even when we didn’t. We can ignore that when the dog got very old he forgot his way home. He kept disappearing, making his way down the hill, crossing roads and farmland, to get to the beach. It became our job to go find him and lead him back home. One day we may grow old enough to forget the hill and our adventures.
Once the forest is gone I am not sure if there will be any use walking on the hill, reliving the memories of elk trails. In my mind I created a narrative, giving the hill a significance that does not exist. I asked one of my cousins if she remembers the walks on the back of the hill with Papa and the dog. She does, but she remembers hating them. She grew tired, bored, thirsty, and is still convinced we were truly lost, that Papa didn’t know the way home either. I don’t know who is right, whether we were lost or exploring.
My dad has a childhood memory of Papa placing him bareback on an unfamiliar horse in one of the pastures below the hill. The horse startled and took off across the field. My dad eventually fell off, mostly unharmed.
Papa swears this never happened. Nana insists that Papa would never be so irresponsible. She says that my dad was very young and is confusing this memory with another, where my dad’s cousin was flung off the back of an unbroken horse. Nana says that my dad confabulated the memory, creating an imaginary version in his mind. Now, my dad isn’t sure what happened.
I have taken thousands of photos of this hill and the surrounding areas. When I look through them I see moments I do not remember. I found hundreds of photos of particular trees or plants, but I can no longer say where the photos were taken, they blend with the rest despite having at some point been noteworthy to me. I discovered that walks I was convinced my sister went on too, were actually just me and our cousins. Other moments that I vividly remember were never photographed. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities describes photography as “… only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated” (Anderson, 1983). It is hard to determine where my memory is real and where it has been fabricated to fill in gaps in order to make sense of the past.
Maybe the walks were a waste of everyone’s time and we should have stayed on the path. Maybe we were villains to the forest, which we traipsed through with a sword, swinging away at imaginary foes. My cousins and I climbed fences to reach places we didn’t belong with pockets full of apples for cows. Our only achievement, to prepare them for slaughter, by fattening them with fruit. There is a nebulous perspective that shifts and is impossible to accurately define. Stories can be formed in order to justify and explain the self. Nana gave me a tour of all her belongings because she sees her own story, her self, in those objects.
Creating narratives, like art, can be as the painter Philip Guston once described his own artistic process, “‘Oh, Jesus, I’m just self-indulgent. You tussle with that...I mean, at the bottom of the barrel, all you’ve really got is your instinct.” (Guston, 1974). Part of that instinct is to survive, and perhaps to outlast the body through memories and artifacts.
The scale of time for land is incomprehensible compared with the humble duration of a human lifetime. Yet, humanity has made a definitive and irreversible impression on the land. Our actions leave marks, and the land holds memory. In 1967 the artist Richard Long created a work called, A Line Made By Walking. He walked back and forth in a field until an impression of his journey was made, which he photographed. In an interview he explained, "There is a point of view…that if you go into the landscape you should only leave footprints and take photographs. The other extreme is making monuments. I have no interest in making monuments. But I think there is a fascinating territory between those two positions. I can move things from place to place. I can manipulate the world by leaving stones on the road. And they don't disappear because the stone is still in the world – but completely anonymously" (Higgens, 2012). While I have never made a monument, my cousins and I have left more than footprints and have taken more than just photographs from this hill. As Long suggests, most of our actions will remain anonymous. The main proof we have of our adventures and the impact of the hill on us mostly comes from memories, supplemented with photos and videos.
My family has lived on this hill, walked most parts of this hill, and my grandparents will likely die on this hill. Maybe the next generation will know this hill as well, or maybe the land will be sold, with no one from the younger generation wanting to live in this small town that has few jobs to offer. Maybe they will get to know this place only through stories, photographs, and videos.
The town used to be mostly lumber, but now most of the jobs are gone with only one mill left. Perhaps the lumber company that owns land on the hill will go out of business. Or, one day, the lumber company may get the signature it needs.
Someday I might be older than these trees. And once again the lumber company will have to wait for the trees to grow. By then, I could have nieces and nephews that grow up with the trees too.
The story of this hill is longer than I know. But the small bits I have seen are jumbled, and collaged, and probably misremembered. Each memory is distinct, but also irrevocably linked. Time moves on and narratives are redefined. In “Little Gidding” T. S. Eliot writes, “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time” (Eliot, 1943). This narrative is not a straight line. It is more of a knot. What happened before determines what happens later, and what is important now is unknown before and forgotten later. I have failed to capture the present, again and again, and so instead, I relive the past and imagine the future in order to make sense of place, time, and myself.
People understand themselves and others through constructed narratives of identity. The sociologist Gerhard Schulze thinks that, “The stage-managing of the present is not untruthful but playful; it does not deceive but wants to shape…The essence of this form is that people make themselves real by staging themselves” (Schulze, 1999, p.11). This “staging” is a way to frame oneself in order to create a chronological identity, a sense of self with continuity.
For the sake of my own nostalgia and a desire for continuity, I will create an ending on this hill, but because it is the future, it only exists as a manifestation of the past. A future that inherently loops backward to the beginning.
So lets say, the forest still stands:
the fire comes later and the lumber company has not resolved its feud.
We decide to go on a walk in the woods.
We take the dogs.
We start by the water tower.
The trail is fairly overgrown. It’s been a while since my dad last drove up here in the tractor.
That doesn’t bother us, we won’t stay on the path long.
We decide to get
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Note on Images
Since my memories are flawed anyway, when selecting the images to accompany this text, I decided to prioritize precision over accuracy. Some of the images come from the hill and other images come from walks I took with my family in the surrounding areas. Some come from the exact moments I described, others from years before or after. It seemed more important that the images came from a particular context rather than be limited by time.
The photographs and videos that I took, selected, and edited, are as biased as the rest of the text. They come from years of photographing and documenting the hill as I grew up. They are a way for me to interact with the hill while I am far away. In an interview, Louise Bourgeois said, “Art is restoration…to make something that is fragmented — which is what fear and anxiety does to oneself — to be whole” (Castro, 2005). I have taken fragments of memory and selected images in a similar way that I collect textile materials and layer/collage/patchwork them together in my art practice. The title of the text, “Loop,” was embroidered and then removed from one such fabric piece that reminded me of the table linens that Nana collects. Through associations and connections, I hope that the individual pieces combine to make a landscape. This methodology of using experience, narrative, imagery, and technology as a way to interact with a landscape is an important part of my art practice and how I understand my relationship to land.
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