by Amy Benson
But here is a map drawn by county officials that clearly shows that the land is owned and the forest ends. Further, every acre is accounted for with last names printed along each side of the drawn lines. He retracts his hand from the map, and the light hairs of his forearm accidentally brush mine. We are looking at a representation of land, shrunk to the size of his kitchen table. Clearly, I knew other people owned parcels of this land, but I am suddenly forced to confront my illogical childhood sense that the land of the forest existed in some sort of prehistorical collective state. In one confused moment, I feel both the sharp, sudden splitting of the land into deeded chunks and the warmth of his tanned skin in illicit proximity.
The significance of his name next to mine on the map is elemental, mineral: we must share underground aquifers, there must be fossils with the same moment of expiration anchored on either side. As with an involuntary reflex, I hope he feels a secret satisfaction at his land leaning into my land, and mine leaning back, the great weight of us underground. His wife is here, talking to my father. She’s not from here. She came from a relatively more populated area in a different state to take a job teaching at the local school. She never wanted to stay, but she married him and this is his home. I want to say, leaning over the map—not being local, she couldn’t understand us. But I’m not from here either, and did I ever really intend to stay, to earn a right also to call this place home? Could he and I really speak so as to understand each other like natives?
In Second Treatise on Government, John Locke had a radical idea for a seventeenth-century Englishman. He thought that, ideally, you should only be able to acquire the right of ownership of land through your own physical exertions over it. What’s more, you should have rights over only the land that you can, unaided, tend. This proposition, of course, gets complicated in the industrial age, more so in the postindustrial age, but in his own time, when the vast majority physically worked land belonging to a tiny minority, the suggestion was rather staggering. An idea at its heart utilitarian. And hopeful. What faith he must have had in the goodness of human hands: they flex and they are deserving.
But what have we taken or purchased that we have not used? Locke could likely not imagine a society as casually ornamental as ours, as dumbly acquisitory, purchasing for the sake of purchasing. That given a small bit of surplus we all pulse toward largesse, frivolity. But could he imagine buying something because it is beautiful or because it fills our hearts to breaking and then our hearts break and we call it home? Would he forgive owning land because strands of it furled down inside of us when we were just children, before we had any choice, though we wouldn’t have chosen any differently? And even though we don’t live there, will never live there, will only visit in short bursts every summer, we want to own it, all of it, and we want it to stay exactly the same.
My dad owns a large, undeveloped shore lot about a half mile up the river from the Benson family land where we spent our summers. He bought it cheaply years ago before people realized there was a finite amount of shore acreage left in the world. Due to recent wetlands protection acts, my dad now can’t build the house he’d like to build on the lot—he’s too late for everything, the curse of the cautious man. Unless they want to build a house on stilts or concrete blocks, I doubt that any buyers could do much more than put a trailer or a small cabin on the lot. So now he wants to sell it. But the thought of that ignites a fever of greed in me. I’ll take over the taxes I can’t afford, I’ll apply for a loan for which I won’t be considered, anything so it doesn’t become someone else’s. This land is my land; it is not also your land.
How can we trust ourselves with property when it can be had merely for money and desire? Why are these two together reason enough to be able to take something and do with it what we will? There are many things I’ve wanted and taken and have not used or have not used well. I’m sure we all have these things. Still, we trust ourselves to be better stewards (if we can even imagine ourselves merely stewards) than other people who may or may not, in fact, be more destructive than ourselves. I want that land. I don’t want anyone else to have it. This is also how I have treated the sparkling-eyed boy, among others. I want to be able to leave, fill my stomach with pomegranate or abalone, my lungs with cologne or the carcinogenic fumes of buses; then come back and know my lot has been waiting, unchanged.
Property may be humankind’s answer to our disillusionment with relationships—we find we can’t own people, at least not literally, through love, slavery, or reproduction. Unshackled, people are so slippery. What else can we pin down? Animals, the great backs of rock, the spines of trees. And why is shopping so often the refuge of unhappy people, the handles of those crisp, portable bags curled in their palms? Why at twenty-nine and three years single did I buy a house I could barely afford in a town where I didn’t intend to stay long?
How do we contain a parcel of land? How do we measure it and mark its boundaries? It seems like an abstract proposition, as impossible as turning this map in front of us into a swath of land that breathes through millions of tiny mouths we have chosen to call stomata (naming—another act of proprietorship). Individual parts of the land—needle, leaf, bud, stalk, pod, fruit—have their skins to contain them, to mark the end of themselves and the beginning of something else. But the scent of the forest, its rustlings, its moisture, sap, trickling streams, these things have no skin. Part of our forest is wafting north into Canada, part of it is dumping into the St. Mary’s River, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Indian Ocean.
Nonetheless, my father is having the Benson property surveyed. Animals piss or fight. Trees spread, prick, poison, or refuse to be digested. Rocks recline heavily into the ground. We have our own ways of marking property, utilitarian instincts acting extravagantly. Red sticks like a warning or enticement will be tamped in every eighth of a mile or so along the edge of our property, marking the end? the beginning? An age is over—I feel I’m learning the rules of ownership for the first time, and they seem bewildering, arbitrary. My great-grandfather bought this land for almost nothing (then and now) at the close of the nineteenth century. And yet we, by accident of birth, own just as soundly as the sparkling-eyed boy, who builds houses and barns and garages sixteen hours a day, six months a year, to buy his own land. And if I have children, they will own this land, too. And so on, for centuries, maybe. Astounding. Why do I feel like a child having to be told for the fourteenth time that the sky isn’t really blue, it just looks that way?
There is no undoing these patterns, is there? Surely we need rules for ownership, and those of familial inheritance seem to be the only ones we can count on—allowing our progeny to dote on us at our deathbeds and then take what we can’t take with us. But who is my father to tell me what I will own, who was his father, who will I be? And could something so primal as where we situate ourselves on the globe, what water we drink, what trees become the definition of tree, what temperatures we can stand, how we will treat the rest of the world for as long as we live, be determined by money, market, real estate? No. I think we should, at the very least, fight for our land and the elemental identity it brings along, fight and trail our intestines along behind us if we must, stain the ground we choose. We should fight not to conquer the land, but to be conquered by it.
This tepid map-making, this unintentional brushing of skin lightly on skin. I’m thinking that, instead, the sparkling-eyed boy and I should be rutting on our property line, the forest floor embedding itself in our hides, open maws threatening the insides of each other’s bodies. But that is another matter entirely, a matter I can try to invent in his wife’s eyes but that doesn’t exist in his.
When my great-grandfather bought this land, he got about a half mile of shore along the St. Mary’s River (a broad river five miles across that looks much more like a large lake) and a deeper, wider forest blooming behind it. He had a shadow wife and eight difficult children who never liked one another much. (I didn’t realize when I was small that not all families were afflict
ed with such enmity.) When he died, he left each of his eight children a shore lot to do with what that child would. Three of his children, including my grandfather, built small summer cabins in the fifties. Two more eventually put trailers on their lots, and the rest never used their land. But what to do about the approximately ninety acres of woods rising from the shore? Rather than carve up the woods into inheritable parcels, he left the woods to his children and their children, and so on, collectively. None of us can sell our woods property. What would we sell? A random square in the cedar bog? A triangle by the Oberly Pass? We are all (who knows how many now) bound to each other through ownership, taxes, our agreement to barely tolerate one another.
My father long ago acquired one of the shore lots from a childless uncle, and on it we built our one-room cabin and a shower house. It’s modest and rustic—it has no running water in the winter months, and he brought in the only phone line on the Benson land just a few years ago. No one, except now my father since he retired, lives on this property year-round. The road is too small, the snowfall too enthusiastic, the winter sun extracting light rather than shedding it. Even in the summer, when this particular slice of water and land are warmed to near perfection—or as near perfection as a blue-collar clan can hope to get—only a few Bensons visit, some for weekends from Detroit, some for the whole summer as we used to do and as my grandmother still does in her husband’s cabin, at eighty-nine a hearty widow.
Since the loggers had gorged themselves in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, nothing much was left for the next generation. Some of my great-grandfather’s children scattered, jobless. My grandfather and a few others moved downstate when they came of age. The car industry in Detroit called like a siren they already knew was ugly and deadly but had to run after anyway. Those boys wilted, came home when they could. But the next generation, the generation of my father and his cousins, born into the thirties, the war, the birth of the suburbs—they couldn’t find their way home as easily, a migratory pattern disturbed. My father, however, a Depression baby, a draftsman, felt exiled from this family land and never learned to sink into Detroit and take root. He perched, spending his every vacation and weekend as a young man on this land in the Upper Peninsula. He wouldn’t even buy a house in the city—he spent the first ten years of his marriage in his parents’ attic, imposing his exile on my mother as well. So he could spend the summer up north, he quit his non-union draftsman job every summer as soon as we were out of school and mildly hoped to get it back the next fall. He was born displaced and homesick, and he passed the sickness on to us.
My father, I think, has lost hope of my sister or me marrying, but I suspect he is secretly relieved, having told us many times about prenuptial agreements, as if we were the daughters of a Big Three executive rather than a draftsman. He’s worried about his land, someone taking it from him—rather, from the idea of himself reflected imperfectly in us. I might take this worry of his as a lack of confidence in my ability to choose a suitable mate: if not a lasting one, at least a kind and decent one. But I saw my painfully kind mother give him almost everything she had worked for just to get free from the marriage—and still he was suspicious, like a scavenger choked with offal, sure she would come after his family land. What can we say for ourselves if we cannot say that we understand even slightly the person we have lived with for thirty-five years? Or, rather, if we must admit that we understand and still can’t help our fears from rolling like lava over people we tried weakly to love.
But this is the point that I am grinding: we continue to trust in the sagacity of the human brain when we have such suffocating evidence to the contrary. We trust ourselves to own a thing that lives and breathes of its own accord. For some reason, we have not yet learned to fear ourselves enough—the great and terrible things we can do and our inability to tell the difference between them. Why this trust? Because we have such desires, such wood smoke, charred-cartilage-steeped desires, that we create elaborate and civilized-seeming systems such as property laws to disguise them. Thomas Hobbes described these instincts (the teeth, the claws), but he didn’t acknowledge that anything could be borne of them, even his own Leviathan.
The road to our habitable shore, just a path, really, a trail, dead-ends into nearly impassable shore/forest that stretches for miles down the St. Mary’s. We are the last humans for those same miles. The children of my great-grandfather, Wallace Benson, got together and put up a gate at the head of the path. I doubt it can actually swing shut anymore, but it hunkers there with a dark heart surging into signs—Keep Out, Private Property, and Posted: No Trespassing. What have we been guarding? What needs such protection? At the end of the dead-end road, we listened, suspicious of every stone popping under a wheel tire. “God damn it, can’t they read the sign?” Our blood would rise to our skin at the occasional stray car that would roll down, turn around, and roll back. Or the tourist couple out for a walk, raising a hand at us in a wave. We’d freeze as if we were a different species, as if something about us might be stolen. We wanted privacy before the world was crowded. It is a national epidemic, the idea of the frontier ticking in the core of each American, wearing out the cage of our ribs.
How did we survive Detroit and the pageantry of its suburbs? My father built an eight-foot wooden fence around our modest back patio before he would have dinner there. With it, he taught us the irreparable narcissism: everyone wants to look at us, everyone has a judgment. Some people who believe this try to put on a show, others use space as a shield, perhaps even as a weapon. Some people do both.
A few days ago my father and I took a walk down the shore. This has never before been possible in my lifetime. In an apparently normal fluctuation, the water has retracted so that there is land where there wasn’t land before. The new ground stretches like a leg after the cast has been removed—pale, damp, hairy with the stubble of reeds. But for a shore walk, we will take what we can get. And what we get is deer and fox at the edge of the trees, evidence of fish caught and mauled, and a bald eagle in its nest about a mile from our home. The eagles have chosen an old tree on Carlton Point—a spit of land that juts out about fifty yards from the shoreline. When we reach the point, my father tells me what he clearly has been worrying over for months, with stomachfuls of acid, sleepless nights. An unnamed corporate interest has acquired the point and a good bit of land beyond it—pure limestone and dolomite under the scalp of forest. They might mine it, as another company mined Lime Island across the bay, and still another today quarries Drummond Island, twenty miles down the river at the mouth of Lake Huron. If they build a quarry, there will be dynamite, cranes, bulldozers, cargo freighters, pulling up to the point, widening rainbows of fuel on the water, white powder settling over everything. They will open up our stunted road to daily, heavy, peering traffic.
He has rolled up the map, and his wife’s face tells me it’s time to go. Owning produces a crucible of our worst impulses: we would do anything to protect our interests—hurt, lie, steal, cheat—because they are ours. But there can also be great love, love that we seem to read along our bones, when we are wed to what we know is ours. We are ashamed to be in love with land, though, so we find other words for the relationship: ownership, proprietorship. Because we don’t know how to love and then let go, we find other words for that, too. The sparkling-eyed boy is buying property, and though in my fears I want to seduce him, I would rather he stayed with his wife, raised children who will also stay and learn the difficult way to be owned by this land.
Souvenirs, Summer 2001
I can’t wait to be submerged. Home again to where this one Great Lake is cold and impossibly clear. I have been an inconstant lover, leaving and returning sporadically. But the lake could never miss me the way I miss it. Besides the slight bit of heat it’s drawing from my body, it is indifferent to me; whereas I try to embrace it over and over as I wade in. It drips from my puckered skin.
About seventy yards out, the water is well over my head. I look down at my bo
dy dangling under the surface in milky, translucent underwear. I can see my clothes in a dark pile on the empty beach. I haven’t considered what I might do if someone comes along—someones so rarely do. My tiny car—its engine hot from the long drive, its trunk still full of my bags—is parked out of sight at the side of the two-lane highway next to a small green sign that says Great Lakes Circle Tour. But I feel as if this shore, this lake, must be my secret. Under me I can see the sand perfectly repeating the same ridge all the way to shore. The sun in the water looks tangible, shattering against the bottom and zagging everywhere. This is a show only the three of us could put on, sun and water and human eyes.
I will be thirty shortly. I have forty-five years left. Perhaps more, perhaps not nearly so many. That isn’t a lot of time, really, and I have been courting the wrong beasts: water, sunlight, summer, married boys with sparkling eyes embedded with pieces of myself. Which of these could I squeeze in my lined palm until its breakable bones hurt? I want something that is mine, that stays.
This beach has always been here, hasn’t it, its boulders on either end, soft; sand stretched across its middle? At least, for an “always” I can imagine. This is the same beach where he carried me down to the water, cried into my jeans. Where my dog, who’s now dead, left her fierce, running footprints; where my sister and I as girls dug tunnels in the sand until our hands met as our hands never meet now; where I walked back and forth every summer for seventeen years, dragging my toes in the sand, studying the line where water thins to damp nothing and land swells up into pebbles, then sand, then blade, then road, then tree to infinity; where stones have waited patiently on shore to be roughly stroked by waves into sand or to be plucked one by one for their greenness or their pinkness or their deep glitter or their fossilized creatures and taken home to dressers and gardens where, once dry, they will inevitably disappoint. Would I like to say I have learned to leave these stones behind? I am almost thirty. I know the drill. I will take a few with me when I leave.