Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  Take a moment to imagine the landscape you now inhabit or, alternatively, a treasured landscape from your past. What memories have you attached to that place? How has that place helped to shape the person you are today? How have your experiences there informed your way of seeing yourself, your family, the place itself? Now try this thought experiment. Imagine a landscape—every landscape—in which emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, or spiritually significant vernacular experiences are geographically located, recorded, and commemorated. What might a place like that look like? How would our imagination of the landscape change if the small but vitally important events that happen to regular people every day were neither privatized nor erased but instead communally celebrated—memorialized in our conception of our local geography? “I was engaged to be married here, standing waist-deep with her in this snaky slough in the Fakahatchee swamp.” “My sister had a life-changing realization there, under that broken-topped cottonwood tree across the arroyo.” You had an intimation of mortality or immortality there, you fell in love, or perhaps you breathed your final breath right here—on this spot. Now go further: imagine a map of the world containing an individualized, place-based record of every important vernacular experience that has ever occurred. We, our people, our sons and daughters, were born here, somewhere, in a place. Someplace is where we experienced ineffable joy or grief; some place, a poignant, hidden place unmarked on every map. In the cartography of memory—the cartography of the spirit—our local landscapes are rich with such invisible associations.

  Imagine from your childhood a place that is rich with layers of memory, experience, and imagination. This is not simply a place where things happened, it is a place because things happened—the events of perception, memory, and experience cause this place to glow forth from an otherwise undifferentiated quotidian geography. Even if they build a light-spewing Walmart on your place, would the place beneath it be any less hallowed? If we pave paradise and put up a parking lot, wouldn’t you still care about the exact place where you were born, or fell in love, or where you will die, even if it were entombed in asphalt? Shouldn’t we somehow mark the spots where we gave or received compassion—where we witnessed the triumph of the better angels of our own or a fellow traveler’s nature? Some of us believe we should.

  Allow me to briefly explain the inspiration, goals, and benefits of a new environmental and emotional global mapping project called V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S.—an acronym that stands for Vernacular Experiential Cartographic Traces on Regions, Landscapes, or Specific Sites. The project seeks to map—in both space and time, and both in narrative forms and through accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates—the precise locations of transformative vernacular experiences. Our project aims to significantly change how landscapes are mapped, described, and remembered, and it has the potential to influence not only the ways places are conceived, named, and marked but also how they are treated. At present, we are using seed grants to conduct a pilot version of the project.

  Phase one of V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. involves gathering significant place-based vernacular narratives, however brief or informal, accompanied by a set of GPS coordinates identifying the exact spot upon which the described event took place. In the project’s second phase we construct precise maps of various scales depicting landscapes as they have been animated by potentially innumerable vernacular experiences. The third phase involves GPS-matrixed cartographic draping (to use the technical term), through which we generate experientially specific layers of mapped data that can be overlaid, like multiple transparencies, to allow for more sophisticated terrain visualizations. For example, here is a map of all the spots in the township of Washington Park (in Washington County, Washington) where people reported falling suddenly, hopelessly in love. Now we can “drape” over this love map any other data set—say, a map of all the places in the township where someone picked up a beautiful rock, or saw a ghost, or witnessed the sun break through the clouds in absolute majesty. The fourth phase requires that we project these draped data sets along an infinitely extended temporal axis. So here is a map of all the places in your town where someone now long gone experienced a transformative moment of inspiration or, conversely, a painful moment of religious doubt. As our data sets proliferate over time, we can successively drape onto this other maps depicting different sites and events in the same area over time. For example, we can overlay on the inspirational moment or religious doubt map an infinite number of other maps—say, maps of Native American geoglyph or of hidden veins of iron ore, of copper bootlegger kettles, or of the powdered bones of buried dogs.

  We do not presently have adequate technology to achieve the fifth and final phase of the project, but we’re confident that we soon will. This fifth phase is built upon the platform of all the accrued and draped vernacular event cartographies I’ve described—it is a kind of single meta-hyper-draped map—but also extends to include the record of all important events in the nonhuman natural world. Of course we can already map a fossil bed or earthquake fault, but we do not know the precise spot where, about ten thousand years ago, the last American cheetah crushed the skull of a pronghorn antelope in her jaws and filled her gut before lying down to die beneath the glowing light of the Pleiades. We know that this event did occur; we simply don’t know precisely where and when. In its fullest articulation, this final phase of V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. is so ambitious as to be difficult for some people to imagine. But who wouldn’t want to know the location of the exact branch upon which the last passenger pigeon to survive in the wild built its nest?

  If phase five sounds unrealistic, consider this: we’ve already mapped the imbricated labyrinth of the human genome. And we mapped the human genome because that’s what we wanted to map. We made a choice about what to observe, record, and remember—just as every map is a mirror that reflects, in its scale, frame, and minutiae, the cartographer’s values and sensibility, fears and dreams. Or consider that we have an excellent record—through written accounts, photographs, and video—of the precise spot on the particular tree where the ivory-billed woodpecker, long believed extinct, was once again sighted, thus bringing a momentary infusion of hope to the world. That place in the forest, at that moment on that day, can be located in space and time—it can and has been recorded—so as never to be forgotten. To map such a place in time is vitally important for spiritual as well as scientific reasons, for what would it say about us as a people if we simply forgot which tree it was or which day? What if we felled that tree and made ammunition crates from it because nobody bothered to remember?

  Now simply extrapolate from this example. All that is required for the success of V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. phase five is that we make a collective commitment to continue this sort of attentiveness for the next, say, ten thousand years, after which, if we have cared enough to notice, we should know the exact location of each sparrow’s fall—of every flash of black and red and ivory that restores hope to the world—at least within the sphere of human observation. To extend our project’s scope beyond the radically circumscribed sphere of human observation will be our children’s work.

  The V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. pilot program involves the collection of what we call “vernacular witnessings,” which are GPS-located narratives of meaningful personal experiences in place.

  For example, here is vernacular witnessing number 780, received by text on October 14, 2014—and, of course, accompanied by accurate GPS coordinates: “I had just come off the flight after visiting my mother in LA. As I was going through the security gate a man in front of me began to stagger, and a woman—his wife, I’m sure—tried to hold him up, but he fell forward onto the floor, then rolled, clutching his chest and moaning. The poor woman was so scared, and she started screaming for help. I’ll never forget the look of terror on her face. The security guards ran over and cleared people back, and the EMTs arrived quickly, lifted the man onto a stretcher, rushed through a security door to an ambulance that almost in a single motion pulled up, loaded th
e gurney in, and sped away. There was this odd silence for a few seconds. Then one of the guards bent down and picked up a pen that had fallen out of the man’s breast pocket and slid it into his own breast pocket. After that they just started running everybody through again, and in less than a minute there was absolutely no trace of the man. I sat on a bench and tried to calm myself down. Anybody who got in that line even a minute later had no idea what had happened there, and by the end of the day thousands of people had stepped on the exact spot where his cheek had hit the floor. Maybe millions have stepped there by now. And I don’t even know if he lived or died. Shouldn’t there be a trace of him—some trace?”

  And here is vernacular witnessing number 1270, received by e-mail with GPS coordinates on April 9, 2016. “My wife was pregnant with our first kid, and we were right around the due date when her water broke in the middle of the night. So I jump up and I’m tired and mixed up, like when you wake up from a weird dream and then realize you’re still dreaming it. So I run around grabbing our stuff up, and then we head out the front door. It’s real frosty outside. I turn on the porch light, and we start walking down the walk to the truck. In the eaves of our house, right over the walk, there’s this swallow’s nest—just mud and sticks and horsehair. Barn swallows. They’ve been there five years running and raised up a batch of young every year and two batches last year. Even though they crap on the walk I never wanted to chase them out—especially with those babies in there. So I’m walking to the truck to drive into town for my kid to get born, and as I’m walking a feather falls out of this nest, somehow, and it drifts down. Well, without changing my stride I just catch it in my hand and keep going. That next morning our daughter was born, and healthy. I know it sounds like a steaming pile of horseshit, but that’s what happened. And that’s where it happened—right there, between the front door and the truck, under that nest.”

  V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. has already generated a number of provocative research questions that will guide the future of the project. Here are several of them:

  QUESTION 1

  What is the nature of vernacular experiential hot spots and clusters?

  Our initial research suggests that an exhaustive analysis of any single geographical spot over time is extremely revealing. For example, as we gather more data and begin draping data set upon data set, map upon map, we find that certain places have been especially active loci of significant vernacular events. Even preliminary layered cartography reveals, for example, that in the past half century a variety of important events have occurred at one spot on a high bank above the north bend in the Washington Run River (near Washingtonville, Washington): thirty-seven people saw the full moon rise, twenty-two people had good ideas, twelve performed acts of kindness, eight people had sex (two of them for the first time), four wrote all or part of a song or poem, three children saw their first shooting stars, two couples were engaged to be married (though years later one of those couples decided, on the same spot, to divorce), and one pregnant woman went into labor. Yet comparable draped data sets for a similar bank on the next bend of the Washington Run reveal a sort of experiential wasteland. Here two day hikers contracted giardiasis, and one old fisherman caught a catfish that already had a hook in its mouth. Nothing more—at least so far.

  Obviously, extending our analysis into the future might produce very different results. We hope that enriched data and increasingly sophisticated analysis will help us explain the nature of these mysterious vernacular hot spots within local landscapes. Once we have a complete map of these unusual places, we feel it would be appropriate to construct holographic memorials that convey the remarkable richness of these places over time. Obviously it will be necessary to develop and integrate mobile apps for use by the many who will make pilgrimages to these special places.

  QUESTION 2

  Is there also a vernacular landscape of missed opportunities?

  On April 6, 1327, during “the first hour of the day,” in one particular spot in the Church of St. Claire in Avignon, France, Francesco Petrarch cast his eyes upon Laura, a young woman whom he would never know but a mere glimpse of whose beauty would inspire in him a lifetime of radiant poems. On the one hand, this is obviously a transformative vernacular experience in a local landscape; on the other, it is also a poignant missed opportunity. While we have had good initial success gathering vernacular witnessings of events that did happen, we also seek a way to map those events that didn’t happen—or, put otherwise, to chart events that might have occurred but did not.

  Imagine a windy, dust-colored crossroads beneath a single power line, under an immense sky, in the middle of a vast ocean of sagebrush. Here a young man waits in the dry wind for the bus that will take him to town for the weekend. On that bus is the woman with whom, unbeknownst to him, he is about to fall deeply in love. Perhaps one of their children will cure cancer or negotiate peace in the Middle East—who can know? In any case, these two people are destined for a lifetime of shared affection, perhaps fifty fine Christmases together. As it turns out, however, this crossroads is not the locus of the significant vernacular experience. That spot is a mile and a half up the road, where the bus sits motionless at the roadside while its driver sweats in the desert heat as he changes the left rear tire, which has just blown out. The man, becoming impatient, at last walks back to his little house. Twenty-two minutes later the bus speeds by. Will the man eventually die after a long and empty life? Perhaps not, but who can know? The crossroads at which the man stands must now be placed on a different kind of vernacular map—a map of missed opportunities. That is, the spot where the man is not standing when the bus passes is a vitally important place in a global matrix of places where life-changing events almost happened. We hope to develop more sensitive mechanisms to record such incidents, since we cannot depend upon vernacular witnesses to record events that did not occur. Do you have such missed appointments in your own life? In time, V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. might help you to find out.

  QUESTION 3

  Is there an unexperienced inch of ground on earth?

  While the answer will depend upon the temporal and experiential parameters we establish for our inquiry, this question remains extremely important to our project’s staff. We ask one another this: When V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. is complete, will it be a map of everything? Most of our researchers now agree that, assuming sufficient temporal depth in the model, results will show that every point on earth, however remote or minute, has at some time been the site of some significant human experience. But there are still a few holdouts, mostly among the senior researchers, who cling to the perhaps romantic belief that somewhere on earth (maybe only in a few spots, they acknowledge) there exists some bit of ground—a few centimeters, perhaps, of tundra, ice, or rock—that yet remains unmarked by human experience. The search for these unexperienced vernacular landscapes has become a specialty for certain researchers, whose quest is not for sites of vernacular experience but rather for the mythic purity of a place that remains free from them. On one thing, however, we all agree: if such places do exist and can be located, they will need to be placed on an entirely new kind of map.

  QUESTION 4

  Can the project’s findings be used to protect places?

  If you are Native American and can prove that a developer’s planned golf course is about to be constructed atop your people’s ancestral burial ground, you have at least a chance of saving your sacred site. But some of the V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. scientists have taken this kind of resistance to a radical extreme. These researchers—closet activists, really—are motivated by the belief that the project, in proving the richness of vernacular experience in places, can provide ammunition to the enemies of development. I might as well confess that I am one of these people.

  Consider this. Even in our current judicial system certain relationships between people and nature are constitutionally protected as expressions of religious freedom. I once read of a case in which some folks prevented construction of a Walmart in their
local forest by persuading a judge that they used that forest as a place to pray. The day after reading the article I joined the Universal Pantheist Society (I’ve been a dues-paying member ever since) and began documenting my devotional use of my favorite place—a hanging canyon hidden at 8,000 feet in the forked embrace of the split summit of my home mountain. I now have hundreds of pages of dated journal entries describing the spiritually illuminating experiences I’ve had in this high, wet canyon here in the heart of sage country, and I’ve taken more than seven hundred photographs, now spanning almost fourteen years, of myself “praying” in front of juniper and mountain mahogany, pack rat nests and granite boulders, the perennial spring at the head of the canyon, the carcass of a mule deer freshly killed by a mountain lion.

  When they try to build the ski lodge or drill the fracking well there, I’ll be ready. I have demonstrable evidence that I am a long-term member of a recognized religious sect (we pantheists even have a newsletter) and that my religious freedom would be threatened if I am deprived of this specific site. And because I worship all the natural elements of this montane desert ecosystem in their complex relationship to one another, my conscience will not allow me to sacrifice even a single serrated leaf of a snow-bent cottonwood, or a button from the vibrating tail of a Great Basin rattler, or a tuft of reddish fur from the ear of a coyote pup crossing this high meadow full of snowberry on its way to seek shelter among the aspen. I won’t burn your church, you don’t pave my mountain. I have incontrovertible evidence, and I’ll take my case to the Supreme Court if I have to.

  Now extrapolate from this to your own important place. If V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. can scientifically prove that your place is comparably rich with associations that are crucial to your faith—whatever that faith might be—then it might help you make the case that they should not build the Walmart on the spot where your grandfather set the cornerstone of his farmhouse, or where your son caught his first glistening brook trout, or where your little brother saw a tanager flash scarlet in the emerald canopy of a shagbark hickory . . . or maybe that spot on the summit of Moonrise where your daughter, on her sixth birthday, discovered the curving, bone-white arch of a perfect mule deer antler.