The Places Where We Belong: Recent Episodes
Bret Wallach
Bret Wallach, a geographer who was minted at Berkeley in 1968 and who retired 50 years later from the University of Oklahoma, visits Australia, Zimbabwe, Scotland, Romania, Israel, the West Bank, India, Micronesia, Peru, Bangladesh, Canada, and more--all while searching for something he scarcely knew he wanted.
"I'm flying out to Reno so I can visit Virginia City. It's an old mining town about an hour south of Reno."
"Why?"
"Why what? You have to stop asking that question. The answer is always the same: To look around."
"That's seriously unprofessional.. You're supposed to have a hypothesis, a methodology, and some data."
"I'm retired."
"Hell, you've always been retired."
"Can we talk about it some other time? The sun's shining."
This is a rewrite of a paper read in 2014 for the Delhi meeting of the Indian Society of Landscape Architects (2014). The original version was posted here on Nov 14, 2018.
Merida, Uxmal, Kabah, Hormiguero, Chicanna, Began, Xpujil, Calakmul, and Campeche. For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
Vijayawada, Amaravati, Ghantasala, Machilipatnam, Guntupalli, Undavalli, Nagarjunakonda, Panigiri, Jaggaiahpet, Chennai government museum, and Hyderabad.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
A visit to an old mining town in Nevada.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
Lima, Arequipa, Mollendo, Puno and Pomata, Trujillo (Huaca de la Luna, Chanchan) Huaca de la Cao Viejo), Chimbote (Caral and Cerro Sechin), Chiclayo (Chotuna, Tucume, and Huaca Rajada).
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
This episode is an account of a visit to a handful of the temples of the Cauvery Delta in South India. It may be hard to catch their names on the fly, so here they are spelled out: the Ranganatha, Jambukeswara, and Mangalyeswarar temples near Trichy, the Brihadeshwarar temple near Thanjavur, the Airavateswarar, Nageswarar, and Adi Kumbeswaram temples at Tanjore, the Gangaikondcholapuram and Malakadambur temples en route to Chidambaram, and the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram.
For photos, see India-Peninsular, then Cauvery, at greatmirror.com
This episode recounts a visit Zimbabwe and South Africa, where I visted the ruins at Naletale, Dhlo-Dhlo, Khami, and Mapungubwe and then found something more fundamental and arresting than any of those places I had come to see.
For photos, see Four Other Zimbabwes, under Zimbabwe at greatmirror.com
This episode is an account of a visit to the the northern tip of Sri Lanka soon after commercial flights resumed from India late in 1919.
For photos, see Jaffna, under Sri Lanka at greatmirror.com
I arrive in Sydney, Australia, stroll around Darling Harbour, and explain why such places, however popular and even pleasant, are never what we really want. That word explain suggests that I'm not behaving the way many people think geographers should behave. "What's there to explain?" they say: "X is the capital of Y. This river joins that river. End story." So say I'm guilty of academic trespass, of wandering into judgmental, even philosophical territories for which I am grossly unqualified. Too bad, so sad: this episode is foundational to the dozen episodes that follow.
Not knowing that I am looking for environmental freedom, I set out simply to find a place that is honest. I fly to Adelaide and drive north through a series of towns reminding me of the harshness of pioneer life and the toughness of pioneers.
I arrive at the original home town of the BHP Group, one of the world's biggest mining companies today. The company left Broken Hill about 80 years ago--the mine was finished--and the company's founders had left decades earlier to enjoy their fortunes. Dependent now more on tourists than on mineral production, Broken Hill still displays plenty of the honesty I was looking for. It's so easy to wax romantic about giant mines: they're right up there with giant dams, but Broken Hill is a good reminder freedom, at least in mining towns, is in short supply. Few people here have ever pretended otherwise. That's honesty for you.
I meet Uluru, formerly Ayers Rock. A flood of tourists arrives daily by air and is corralled and shepherded by guides. For some of those visitors, Uluru might as well be a digital billboard, and some day it may get the full son et lumiére treatment, but for now Uluru is big enough to be immune to commercial abuse. It has the power to make solitary visitors feel the air they breathe. That's another name for freedom, isn't it? It's what I'm after.
I land in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. People a lifetime ago called it one of Africa's most modern cities, but the people who said that were usually White, and there are very few Whites left in Harare, or in Zimbabwe. The architectural bones they built are still mostly in place, but modernity means more than bones, and there's precious little of its other attributes--schools, hospitals, democratic institutions--evident in Harare or Zimbabwe today. I drive south to Chivhu and Masvingo, tough places to live a century ago and tough still, with none of the high-rise pretensions of the national capital.
At last: a cultural landscape as natural as Uluru. It's not often you can explore a World Heritage Site without lots of company, but here's one of them. Great Zimbabwe is unusual in a more important way, too, because its structures were built intuitively, without the precise measurements that are a hallmark of so-called advanced societies. There's a freedom displayed here that is absent in the engineered monuments left by high cultures, and if we're stuck in our own time with a lack of freedom--and we are well and truly stuck--Great Zimbabwe does make you wonder why we think we're so smart.
I look around Glasgow to see how, for better and for worse, we have detached ourselves from the natural world. I grudgingly admit that Glasgow's tenements are an improvement on Victorian slums, but after looking at the once-posh Woodlands I bump into the great mistake of believing that all we need are security, comfort, and respectability. They're not, no matter if you define comfort to include a hundred entertainments.
Looking for a pre-industrial Europe, I visit Romania's Saxon villages and discover why it is that prosperous homes in rich countries are often decorated with handmade antiques that their owners will never use. It's like touching Uluru or the stones of Great Zimbabwe: these pre-industrial peasant villages are hand-made on the spot. I want to touch the doors, the chairs, the beams overhead, and this is true even though life in these villages was no picnic. It's the mother of all trade-offs, though we are lucky enough to have the option of blending the two worlds.
I visit the White City of Tel Aviv, a World Heritage site, and then go the Old City of Jerusalem, where I bump into America's legalistic refusal to approve World Heritage status for a site that even the Americans acknowledged was worthy of listing.
I visit Bethlehem and then Battir, a nearby village granted World Heritage status over the objections of UNESCO's experts as well as of both Israel and the United States.
I visit Hebron's wonderful but imperiled Old City, which, like Battir, won World Heritage status despite opposition from both Israel and the United States. This time, however, unlike at Battir, both countries not only expressed outrage but acted on it, withdrawing from UNESCO. This was colossally stupid on its merits but doubly so in the case of the United States, because the World Heritage Program owes its existence to the United States. I review the pertinent institutional history, which would embarrass Americans if they hadn't conveniently managed to forget it.
I visit the Ajanta Caves, monastic retreats abandoned for a thousand years, and come to a faded painting telling the story of a queen who discovers, too late, what she really wants.
En route from Ajanta to Bishnupur, I poke around two cities seemingly preoccupied with the pursuit of the things that people who see with their ears believe will make them happy.
I head west from Kolkata across India's modernizing countryside and land in Bishnupur, famous for temples that seem to anticipate the Prozone Life. Vishnu sets me straight, not only about those temples but about seeing with my eyes instead of my ears.
I visit an island where people learned long ago to ignore outsiders pushing Progress and Advancement.
Prompted by Great Zimbabwe, I visit Cuzco and several nearby sites where walls are works of art.
Twice in the 1980s I visited Rabindranath Tagore's home in rural Bengal. Here's what I saw. Aside from a spontaneous introduction and a few interpolations, the text comes from my Losing Asia (Johns Hopkins, 1996).
This is the first and most personal chapter of my At Odds With Progress (University of Arizona Press, 1991).
By special request, this narrative has been retrieved from the Fall, 1988, issue of Focus, a journal of the American Geographical Society. I recorded it "cold," without having read it in thirty years, and my reaction to the ending caught me by surprise. For the record, Clara Dodgson Millner, here called Granny, died in 2004 at age 101.
Along with an impromptu introduction and some interpolations, this is my presentation at the 2014 annual meeting of the Indian Society of Landscape Architects. The Society subsequently published the meeting's proceedings in a volume called A Sense of Place.