Senses of Place

Katie D.

January 6, 2009 - 11:29 AM

During this term I will be taking a literature class entitled "Senses of Place." It is through the English department, and after the first day of class I'm really excited about the idea of how we interact with the physical and cultural aspects of the places we inhabit. There is an intrinsic difference between people in rural Alabama and intercity New York. I think where we live influences how we live and the ways we relate to people and how we imagine the world.

Part of the curriculum is writing about our individual perspectives on a place we have lived and our interactions with that place. What a cool assignment: to think of a place I've lived as an aspect of myself and my life, and not as mere context for what happens as the days go by. Our professor asked us about our interest in the class, and I just said briefly that there is a difference between the suburbs of Denver (shades of beige and a sort of unspoken conformity) and Eugene. Of course that was obvious to everyone: we all know that Eugene is a unique place. And I think the quirks of the city have shaped the population, encouraging individuality and strangeness in turn. One might wonder which came first: the quirky population or the quirky city. I suppose each exists in constant affirmation of the other.

The places we grow up in stay with us forever. Or at least I think that will be true in my life. I grew up in a beautiful place, with the Rocky Mountains a constant background to the flat space I inhabited. Denver's altitude, its summer heat and winter snow, and the plants and animals that inhabit its spaces are those that are most familiar to me, and I will probably spend the rest of my life thinking of each new place in comparison to the first home I knew well. But living in Eugene now, I know that there are places much more suitable to my passions and aesthetic desires. And there are other places I have visited that have left a deep impression on my self-identity. As a budding traveler, I spend a good amount of my time thinking about places as goals, and past places as key to my identity. So one place leads to another...

After Denver and Eugene, the most important city in my life is Valdivia, Chile. I imagine I will eventually write my class paper on that. It was not a city I grew up in, nor one that houses years of memory. But returning to the city by bus after my trip to Peru in June 2008, the city felt like home. Returning was a homecoming, not just a trip back to another foreign city. Valdivia entered into my body and mind. I never considered myself a native there, obviously. But it was my city nonetheless. My kind strangers, my rivers, my cafes and dance clubs and graffiti and elementary schools. My trees and my parks, my street crossings and familiar routes to school and friends' houses. My bus line, my night sky.

There is a rhythm to different places. And some rhythms are compatible with our own inner beats. Much as I loved the city of Buenos Aires, I did not belong there. There was no reaction to the place as an essential piece of me. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, held an intense few weeks of study and familiarization, but when I returned after a day trip outside the city I did not feel myself returning home. I felt the relief of the familiar street, the miracle of finding my way back to the place where I planned to that night. But it was not home. There were little pieces of home there in the city: most notably at the cafe I loved: Cafe Luna, which had the best hot chocolate in the world, was decorated on all sides with moons, and whose tables I frequented on a nearly daily basis. The mood in there was homey. But the city was not home. Rhythms grated, and somehow the sense of place never became a true comfort.

As a traveler, I know that it is possible to take pieces of your home with you, that there can be small objects that make a space your own. In my three residences in Eugene I have always had the same bright blue sarong hanging over the wall above my bed. I got it in Ireland when I was fifteen. It has a beautiful Celtic knot on it, and combines with other room aspects in a "shades of blue" color scheme. I trace the knot patterns sometimes when falling asleep. It means home.

When traveling to places that are not my home, I always have a couple of pictures. Just two, really. The first is of myself and my seven best college friends. It was taken freshman year on the steps of Chapman Hall. They are my college family, and that picture means that no matter where I go I am not alone: I am forever a part of that group, that set of wonderful people.

The second picture I carry with me is one of the Inside-Out prison group. I cannot explain exactly why I carry that picture: thirty people, half young college students, the other half prison inmates in blue, but it is a picture of me at a daring crossroads, falling in love with education beyond academia. And those men were my friends, but people I will never see again. So they deserve to travel with me at all times, as they do in my thoughts. Maybe this is a strange thing to write for the world to read if it wills. But that experience changed me profoundly, and I carry that picture as a reminder: of the friends I made and of what I learned about myself and my potential as a writer, thinker, and member of our human family. It also reminds me of the incredible opportunities I have, how my every action is the hugest of privileges and freedoms, and that nothing should be taken for granted. This is especially true when I travel: I travel knowing the Inside students I knew are frozen in place, and I think of them as I travel. I think of all of that and I carry the picture. While at home in Eugene it is on the wall beside my desk, with all my other pictures of my moments of greatest achievement or happiness. But it is part of my sense of place, and I never go on long trips without that photo.

I travel with the same backpack. I always have a couple of novels, often ones read before because there is comfort in the familiar. I carry my music with me, which grounds me in my life and my Place in a world of music. There are several pieces of jewelry I would never leave behind: an antique key on a string a friend gave me, my Guatemalan coin earrings I made, the necklace given me by a long-ago boyfriend, the necklace with a glass bead I made, my lapis earrings from my Chilean family, and my spiral necklace from Cusco.

I remain "me" while I make these place transformations. But I also become part of my place, and my surroundings work on my psyche. The Colorado Rockies speak to me in some ways, and in others the biodiversity of Oregon, the towering trees and morning fogs fill my soul. Is it not interesting how we carry our homes with us, and how we search for places that make us more completely ourselves?

I hope this term's exploration of the subject is as fulfilling as these few preliminary musings have been. I can't wait to discuss authors who have built fiction around the love of a setting: Thoreau, Wendel Berry, and Sandra Cisneros among others.

And I wonder how much those places left behind hold sway over my sense of myself. I wonder how much of me will always identify with my Colorado home, and how much is in tune with Valdivia that was so briefly and intensely my adoptive home. Will Eugene be my Place? And where else in the world will have that magical combination of rhythm and landscape to make me feel connected, centered in that place?