Edges: Where Things Occur
Part 4: Architecture
Architecture
It is Lopez’ belief that “a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age.” He notes that “[t]he visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation, and hues of a [land]scape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms.” For Lopez, the visual landscape’s role is not singular in the development of one’s imagination from youth. “The way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air; by what the North American composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.” My imagination was molded by the “architecture” of rural upstate New York, growing up surrounded by fields and forests.
From my earliest memories, we lived in a farmhouse on a nonoperational farm in the rolling countryside of Stillwater, New York. On three sides of the house were unmanaged fields overrun with thickets of bramble amid overgrown grasses, weeds and wildflowers. The fields were peppered with dilapidated outbuildings, a moldering bulldozer and a very old car somehow embedded, upside down, in a small, dirt cliffside. Beyond, the farm was bounded to the west and north by acres of forest through which a fire road edged with blackberry bushes led to Plum Creek. To the south, an unruly meadow lay, submitting only to our rowdy play and to the seasonal visits from the hay tedder and baler—the bales scattered like throw pillows across the field. Below the meadow, cutting into the hillside was a gravel pit, strictly off limits to me and my brothers. It was a rule we broke, jumping from the grassy edge to slither down the soft sandy expanse exposed by excavation. During the summer, in an undulating field across the street, stood an army of cow corn, arrayed in a formation as organized as any battalion, frozen in a march that would cease with autumn’s scything.
My oldest recollections come from this place. The expanse surrounding our home that I encountered with my brothers provided the “architecture” that molded my young imagination that still shapes my photography today. Hour upon hour we roamed, and we rambled, wholly unsupervised living in the sole house for miles on a street with few passersby. Summer play, bounded only by our imaginations—and the road running by our house—was embroidered with the sonic landscape of birdsong. The rhythmic “cheery, cheery, cheery, cheery, cheer, cheer” vocals of the American Robin, ever accompanied by the chirpy, “see bee, see bee” backing of the Black-capped Chickadee and the melancholy croon of the Mourning Dove’s “hooOOA, hoo, hoo, hoo.” And from the balcony of the upper branches of the Sugar Maples sentineled before our home, the heckling of the Crow’s “caw, caw, caw, caw, caw!” rounded out the sonic landscape.
Scents varied from season to season and place to place in the acreage we wandered. Loam and an earthy, damp heaviness scented the air in spring from soil upturned for the corn’s impending procession, an aroma that returned more pungent with fall’s decay. The appearance of sweet grassy aromas in the spring and summer morphed into a sharpish, woody tang wafting in the air after the fall reaping of the little bluestem, Indiangrass and switchgrass in the meadow to the south of our house. Summer brought fragrances of golden rod, common milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, whose subtle aromas demanded from me the same intimacy of a flitting Monarch butterfly in order to appreciate their elusive scents: licorice, a delicate vanilla and a fresh carroty smell, respectively. After a summer rain, a concoction of moist freshness spiked with the electric tang of ozone permeated the air, greeting us as we bolted from the confines of the house. Winter’s knife-sharp cold scraped our nostrils with an astringent paucity of odor that amounted to an odor as distinct as any, escaping our faces in an atmospheric vapor. When we roamed the edge of the yard to the north in summer, we were greeted with wild rhubarb’s “tart, zingy and sharp, at the same time refreshing, sweet, fruity and green” scent, bringing cups of sugar to dip our fresh plucked stalks, cutting the overbearing tang. When we covertly explored the upturned sedan, embedded in a small dirt cliffside, we were assaulted by decay’s overripe perfume—clammy, loamy and cloying in the summer; shrill, strident and claylike in the winter.
My imagination sprung from these environs, by the “architecture” I encountered outside my door. But it was one incident mere steps from that door that has left an indelible mark on me. It has become a runestone raised in my imagination, inscribed with the otherworldly wonder, magic and majesty that one may encounter in even the most familiar and ordinary of places. It was Easter Sunday. I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old. We boys glumly readied for church, the delight of leaving church with a memento of a woven palm cross the week before a distant memory, the doldrums of a lengthy sermon in the offing. As we boys dribbed and drabbed out of the house onto the porch, waiting for our adult subjugators, a cool springtime air, fragrant with the season, and laced with a foggy mist, blanketed the countryside, rendering much of it hidden. Standing on the porch, shuffling our feet and fidgeting with tight collars and clip on ties, we heard a distant, rhythmic rumble, soothing in its cadence as it neared, its source hidden in the haze. The rumble became ever louder, menacing and intriguing. I stepped off the porch and stood in the gravel driveway. I stared into the blank face of fog as the rumble neared. The approaching clamor entered my body through the soles of my feet. It surged upward, through my trembling legs and set up shop in my stomach, fluttering the wings of butterflies uncocooned. Like lightning following thunder, the prow of an unbridled horse, nostrils flared, split the mist mere steps from where I stood. It roared toward me, wild mane flailing over a brindled, bobbing neck, like chiseled marble in motion, ahead of muscled haunches that clenched a tail that thrashed in front of a fleet of chargers like a conductor’s baton leading an orchestra of chaos. Frozen in place, rooted as a runestone by a grave, the string of horses, too numerous for my young mind to comprehend, split and flowed around me like rapids around a rock, all force and brawn in roaring, cacophonous movement, regimented, yet frenzied, sublime and unconstrained by even the hint of domesticity, disappearing into the fog once again.
There is little doubt now that those horses were steeds of a local farmer escaped from a nearby stable. Even so, the legend of the wild horse stampede engulfing me on a foggy Easter morning stands as a reminder to expect the unexpected even in your own yard. A reminder to remain open to what is offered in the rumble of the unseen that approaches in the fog in which we wrap ourselves. A reminder to let loose those preconceived notions and expectations we carry with us everywhere we go. I try very hard to carry that experience with me whenever I engage with Place, for whatever purpose, endeavoring to remain open, to propose rather than impose in a search for Lopez’ “reciprocal relationship” that will sustain me. For I, like Lopez, “long to become the companion of a place, not its authority, not its owner” most especially when engaged creatively with any given place, including Poland Brook Wildlife Management Area.