Last night I took the dog to Peaks Island for a nighttime walk. The ferry was cold and I didn’t wear quite enough layers – perfect for the walk, but the wind coming across Casco Bay, combined with the perky pace of the Machigonne II car ferry, meant I was chilled to the bone when I got back to the mainland. I put the dog in the back of the car – after a three hour walk he curled up and immediately fell asleep – and I popped into a bar for a quick whisky to warm up. The woman next to me struck up a conversation when her husband excused himself to use the loo. She was from northern Vermont, she and her husband owned a craft brewery, and they had engineered a few days holiday in Portland around a “business tour” of a couple of breweries in town.
“Nice place, Portland,” she said. “It’s wicked warm here.” We talked about the north woods idea of “warm” for a bit – they still have two feet of snow on the ground up away towards Darby, hard on the Quebec border. “And this place is big. I mean, I go to Boston all the time to see the Celtics, but Portland has space – it’s so big.”
I had never thought of Portland as “big” relative to Portland. Indeed, I actually got reprimanded in eighth grade social studies by Rollie Moore when I said Portland was a “large town, or maybe a very small city” and in so doing had offended his sense of pride in Maine’s largest city. But big? Relative to Boston? Come on.
She was right, though, obviously. She was seeing with her eyes. Portland is bigger. The streets are wider, there’s more air between the buildings, there’s more air everywhere. Big is about space, not merely the size of the buildings or the size of the crowds. And Portland has big space.
My latest read is Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, a book now almost thirty years old by a Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor (well, he writes like a Canadian). I’m only on the early pages, but he writes about the linkages between identity and spatial orientation. Who we are, he describes, is as much a question of where we locate ourselves in space – physical space, social space, the space of the soul – as it is a question of anything. As I read that and reflected on my own journey through space, it occurred to me that he’s on to something.
I’ve moved around almost constantly since I left high school, after moving around almost not at all for the seventeen years from birth to the end of high school. My space was defined in childhood by the contours of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and even more than that, by a small triangle bounded on one side by the Atlantic Ocean, running from roughly Ocean House Road to Fort Williams, up through Oakhurst then Mitchell Roads to Route 77, and then over again along Route 77 to Ocean House Road. Inside that were the fields, ponds, suburban streets, abandoned trails, lighthouses, 19th century gun emplacements, paper route steps, library stacks, school buildings, friend’s houses, sand lots, lawns to be mowed, driveways to be shoveled, kitchens, bedrooms, cars, and people who defined me. I had excursions outside of the triangle but even now I can remember my vague apprehension when my parents would drive me to piano lessons or horseback riding on outer Washington Avenue, or summer camp in North Yarmouth, or to dinner with my father after work on Exchange Street or at his club. The triangle was my world, and it gave me the space to define myself with every tree – tightly packed birch and pine and maple – and every house, most of whose families I could name and tell some tale of their provenance.
Then I left.
I had been wanting to for a while. Within that triangle I was my own person, but outside of that triangle in Maine I was my father’s son, just an extension of a big, amazing man – someone I held in awe, someone I didn’t really know until after I had left – and I knew I needed to leave his space, his physical presence, if I was to become a person in the adult spaces of the world. I went to Georgetown, and then to Harvard, and while I was there I went to California and Czechoslovakia (my, I’m dating myself – I went to countries that no longer exist). Then I lived in San Francisco, and New York, and Seattle, and Edmonton, and London, back to Seattle, and now back to Maine. While being in all of those places I traveled all the time – not just as a corporate stooge in four star hotels but actually working in places like Johannesburg and Houston and Atlanta and Charleston and Singapore and Brisbane.
In all those travels, I saw space. I took notice of the sky – how huge it is in London even though the streets are closed and narrow, how brown and remote it felt in Johannesburg and how it melded into the brown ground, the way Iowa could feel blue in flood and green in seed, the way Accra stretched into infinity in the vacant lots between buildings and ruins and ghettoes. I noticed how people were different depending on the spaces they inhabited, depending on the spaces which had created them. Southend-on-Sea – I know a surprising number of people from there for someone raised in the triangle of Ocean House Road, the Atlantic, and Mitchell Road – became as familiar to me as Olds, Alberta, with its roads turned to sand on lingering spring days in May. I saw the spaces of a gold mine in central Nevada, with trucks the size of ships hauling ore to processing mills the size of mountains, and listened to the words of the miners as they inhabited a place larger than their own imaginations, playing golf on rented out pieces of Astroturf in a landscape the color of the moon.
I saw space and spaces and I got to listen to the people of those spaces, I got to see how their identity was shaped by those spaces. Along the way, my own identity expanded – not to fill those spaces, but by touching people of other space, my own identity has learned to see well beyond that original founding triangle, seeing it for what it is but also knowing that it couldn’t define me unless I stopped seeing those other spaces, knowing that if I could understand those other spaces, my own spatial awareness would keep growing, would keep embracing.
What maybe I’ve forgotten, though, is how most of us crave a sense of spatial precision. Most of the people I’m closest to share my experience of being “from” somewhere, but they also share my experience of exploding their own starting point through experience. Not through travel, mind you; travel is a kind of banality the way we usually do it, and I say that having done enough regular travel to know the difference. “What do we do once we create Utopia,” goes the phrase – “we travel” – because we need spice, we need reminding of what our Utopia is to ourselves. I don’t travel well that way. I travel at my best when I’m traveling to explode my Utopia and remind myself that an infinite number of Utopias are possible if I just open myself to another’s sense of space.
I’ve looked back at a few of my earlier essays – about Paris, about Valence – and it’s made me remember my experience of space while I was in London, when I had the opportunity to take apart my world and reassemble it in better form. A monastery in the Ardeche, hemmed in by scrub trees and scrabbly mountains. A drive with a good friend through Belgium and Holland, the skies open, the ground flat but so flat that every dip felt like you’d get flooded, every tiny rise in the country revealing a vista that went towards infinity. A dozen drives from Greenwich to Dover, either to get trapped in a cattle car and shipped underneath the Channel or else onto a box the size of a skyscraper on its side, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes on the deck watching white cliffs recede and sand bars come into view, the windswept barren and desolate expanses of parking lots on either side making you wonder how human beings could create such openness with just tarmac and poorly yet brilliantly separated bad concrete brutalist buildings.
I’d think about the family from Southend sitting in that endless see(sea?) of parking lot, waiting to roll onboard the ferry with their cases of wine and bickering children, taking them back to knick knack suburbia with the culvert in front. I’d think about the other family from Southend, with a sullen teenager in back plotting his quest for success. I’d think about the Belgian family on the other side, silent all four, dreading the return to their steeply peaked roof home and their even deeper silence and their even deeper gloom, despite the light, despite the air, despite the plane trees evenly placed stretching into the distance on roads that should inspire only wonder, but really just inspired fear.
On one of the final drives back to Seattle from Edmonton, the dog and I stopped in the high foothills west of Red Deer and spent a couple days in a cottage. We got lost in the trails – the dog chased a herd of deer for an hour, until I was hoarse from trying to call him back, until at just the edge of despair he trotted up from behind me and shook off the dust and wondered when we were going to be home. There were no houses to be seen; we were still a few miles from the cottage. It was not quiet – the stream bubbled in a cool late fall afternoon, birds of prey shrieked as they descended towards their squirrels and rabbits, and the wind made that beautiful hollow drone that only comes from aspen shed of their leaves. That space was mine, too. We walked back to the cottage. I grilled a steak, we shared it, and I cleaned up the plates. Inside the cottage was small, cozy, warm. The spaces there shaped me too.
Most recently I was in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was bright, sunny – I’ve been explaining my late winter sunburn endlessly to the Mainers I’ve met since I got back – and the grid was endless, long low ranch houses with low trees knocked sideways by hurricanes past, the main strip just an endless set of old laundromats and tire stores now being fixed up as doggie salons, brew pubs, and coffee shops. The space was in transition, although the light, the sun, the short shadows in the alleyways and the spiky Florida grass the same as it had been since everything shot up in the 20s. I saw space again, not that I had ever stopped looking.
Anywhere can be home. Anywhere can define you. I’ve been defined and therefore I know how it works. I’ll redefine my space many times again yet before I leave this earth. I’m not sure that’s freedom, but I think it comes as close as I’ll know, and it’s good.