Response 8: Solace

"Language, so compressed, becomes metaphorical."

I find the concept that the landscape of Wyoming has so affected its inhabitants intriguing. Unfortunately the only idea I have of what Wyoming might look like comes from a google image search and from watching Brokeback Mountain (while set in the Big Horns that Ehrlich discusses, it was actually filmed in the southern Canadian Rockies). I can see, however, from my limited experience with images of the West, how her assessments must be accurate - landscapes shape personalities and interactions with others.

One example of this came up earlier in the semester, through a story I read for fiction class. The story was set in Iceland, and the main character's neighbors help the main character when he is in distress, though the two parties don't necessarily like each other. We discussed how that aspect of the culture - helping others - is a feature of the landscape. Because the environment there is so harsh, if one didn't help another in need, the society would have never survived. So it goes, it seems, in Wyoming. When there's only one or two other people within miles, those few inhabitants must rely on each other.

History, too, has shaped our conception of loneliness and the romantic. Here in the west, we have a long tradition of pastoralism in our literature. The lonely shepherd who goes alone to live with nature is a tough character, but an ideal one, who is in touch with nature and therefore in harmony with, it would seem, everything. In Shakespeare specifically, the most ideal characters surface in As You Like It, with Rosalind (the woman posing as a man posing as a woman) and in The Winter's Tale, with Perdita, a shepherdess with a royal heritage. Both women end up marrying royalty. The characters at odds with nature in Shakespeare are, notably, King Lear, who rages against the tempests while totally naked and exposed. This is a stark contrast from the safe "green worlds" of the romances and comedies.

Point being, thanks to Shakespeare and others, we idealize the pastoral lives of Rosalind and Perdita while, in actuality, the experiences of ranchers in the West are probably more like Lear's (without the naked raging and insanity); they have made the land their own, and while they are sometimes at odds with it (when the temperature drops to forty below zero), they stay. The land owns the people as much as the people own the land.

In Japan the story is the same - the only way for the early Japanese to eke out a living was to live in a community and work the rice paddies together. Hundreds of years of a close community mentality has affected the way Japanese society works today: the primary social concern is not to inconvenience other people, and the individual always comes last. Only recently (since the Occupation) has the concept of an "individual" become well known in Japan. And so the land owns the people, just as the people own the land.

I'm not too sure how the New Jersey landscape has affected its people. I grew up in Barnegat, NJ. The name comes from the Dutch "Barendegat" which means "Island of the Breakers." My town in on Barnegat Bay, east of which lay two barrier islands with a channel to the ocean between their respective termini. To the west of my town lay the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, an expansive pine forest famous for its cranberries, blueberries, pygmy pines, and (of course) the Jersey Devil. I don't know if I could sum up the people in my town enough to postulate how the landscape has affected them, but I know that the landscape has shaped me.

I think of myself, sometimes, as having a salty personality - I can be harsh and abrasive or gentle and even healing, the way salt water can help heal wounds. It's easy to walk softly in the pines because of the sugar sand, easy to walk at night because the moon reflects the sand trails, and easy to walk unnoticed because of the thickness of the underbrush. I sometimes feel like I am a maze of mountain laurel, rhododendron, highbush blueberry, and sticker bushes inside. This is a topic that requires much more deliberation, but I don't know if I will ever be able to untangle myself and look objectively. Like the pine barrens, there's too much confusion and deception under the trees. In time.