Emigration, Folklore, and Sense of Place
By Louie Attebery Of the many expressions vulnerable to appropriation by demagogues and other unscrupulous manipulators of the public will, two are particularly vulnerable: "way of life" and "sense of place." They look and sound good, there is something compact and tidy about them, and yet one has been used in formats ranging from the justification of racism ("We must protect ouah way of life.") to absolving the violation of the landscape as motorcycle riders tear over the tilth in advertisements celebrating the "American way of life." "Sense of place," while not subject to misapplication in quite the same way, is liable to misuse as a filler and as a substitute for thought. This misuse has become a convenient way of avoiding having to deal in concrete terms with how and what a portion of topography means. It is clear that meaning is always connected with place, not space. Yet both are potentially useful expressions and employed responsibility can serve the writer and reader well. Not incidentally, they may serve well landscape and mode of living, too. An attempt to rehabilitate the expression "way of life" can be found in my book Sheep May Safely Graze, in which I developed insights borrowed from A. Whitney Griswold’s superb little book Farming and Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace 1948). My strategy was to show that the term might be most useful when applied to the manner in which people earn a living, suggesting that of all those many ways only agriculture and animal husbandry call for a total commitment of self to the tasks at hand. Thus only these rural folk can be said to have developed a way of life. Interestingly enough, rehabilitation of the other expression was anticipated by the medieval scholastic Friar Roger Bacon, who wrote with remarkable percipience, "The things of this world cannot be known except through a knowledge of the places in which they are contained." The writers who are most sensitive to place agree. I first heard the expression in a lecture in the early 1960's by Margaret Meade, who used "sense of place" in reference to England where this sense was highly developed. Here she found the nation to be like a garden. The landscape was garden-like, and the greater garden was balanced by gardens in miniature in the form of window boxes and individual and communal vegetable and flower gardens. The nation was thus a continually re-worked area of productive land. Such an area and such activity generated within each English citizen a sense of and a tie to place. Later I came to realize that "sense of place" had somehow displaced both the old regionalism of H.G. Merriam, whose voice was the journal Frontier and Midland and the new regionalism of Terry Jordan, who speaks for various frontiers in North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (U. Of New Mexico 1993) and The American Backwoods Frontier (with Matti Kaups, Baltimore 1989). Not that the regionalist were wrong, for surely their articulation of the history, values, and character of a certain extent of the globe in fiction, poetry, and insightful exposition provided quality reading and compelling fodder for the analysis of places and the population sustained in them. However, many writers cavilled at the notion that they were regionalist, fretful that identification with a section of the country meant limitation and restriction, at best, quaintness and parochialism, at worst. If, however, a writer is noted for expressing or evoking a sense of place, all merit is restored, and critical comments are likely to recognize the particular as a launching pad into the universal. By whatever term best describes it— regional or sense of place— imaginative writing which has been produced by this awareness of and loyalty to a fragment of the globe is often solid and, at its best, profound. If one example may be sited to secure this affirmation, let the reader turn to George Venn’s superb book of poetry, fiction, essays, and photographs (most of which were taken by his friend Jan Boles), Marking the Magic Circle (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1987). But human creativity has had another resource into which response to locale may be absorbed, and that resource is folklore. The temptation here is to define that term for it is frequently misunderstood and thus often misused to identify something that is nugatory: just folklore. But how powerful and pervasive these materials we call folklore are may be indicated in the estimate made by some scholars that 60 to 80 percent of all we do, know, and believe is firmly grounded in it. This estimate assumes a definition of folklore that subsumes material traditions and other aspects of folklife. If that is true, an analysis of certain kinds of folklore may reveal not only that a sense of place is crucial to an individual’s awareness of identity but that the grounding of self in place may reveal one of the deepest (if not the deepest) loyalties of which the species is capable. And when loyalty is expressed through narrative in the form of local legends, beliefs, superstitions, and memorates, among other genres of folklore, it is not difficult to see that identity—not only who we are but how we know who we are—and place are linked. One of the most easily accessible forms of folklore is that of the family. Take, for example, the B family that moved from Missouri to Idaho in 1916, just 26 years after territorial status ended. The lore of this family has been collected across four generations, and although the progenitors and five of their children have passed on, four survive, three of whom still remember the relocation and the emigrant train on which they and their farm equipment were shipped west. These four survivors and their offspring plus the children of their siblings make up the numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins who comprise the family today, a family which still gathers to celebrate an anniversary, a birthday, or, sadly, to attend a funeral. But before examining specific items of traditional materials from this family, and from other sources, as appropriate, some of the recent critical thinking about place must be summoned. Of the many who have written on ethology—Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, C.R. Carpenter, Desmond Morris—Robert Ardrey is preeminent, The Territorial Imperative (Atheneum 1966) magisterial. As an aside, if the qualifier "recent" seems at odds with the publication date of this book, especially in a culture that breathlessly awaits the leader on the top Fifty, the latest political scandal, the present partner of the day’s top celebrity, I can only argue that the creation of the world was not a by-product of the free speech noise on the campus of a California university. Some products of the human imagination continue to endure and rightly so. Ardrey’s books—African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative, and The Social Contract (1970)—comprise a triad that should give his name currency through time, even had he not written stunning screen plays like Khartoum, starring Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and "a cast of thousands." As the reader scans the index of Imperative, nowhere does the word "place" appear. However, "territory", "site attachment," "ranges," and "security" direct the reader to pages in which Ardrey urges specifically and compellingly his central thesis, paraphrased thus: animals, of which humankind is one, have evolved as creatures attached to a private territory, and it is the necessity to defend that territory that has generated morality of a high order, a morality described as—to push the matter to its extreme—a willingness to sacrifice personal prerogatives (life, if necessary) in the interests of a larger agenda. The attachment to territory and the willingness to sacrifice for it are part of the innate makeup of creatures. Although it would be interesting and profitable to dwell on the Ardrey book, other writers must be summoned in order that a substantial critical foundation can be established. Thus readers of this essay will note the examples of folklore offered as incorporating or reflecting a sense of place, and they will, at the same time, be stimulated to examine their own family lore for that same highly desirable commodity. It may be unnecessary to say that literature is likely to be seen through different lenses as a result of this wholesome analysis. Among other writers clamoring for inclusion here, E. V. Walter deserves at least a paragraph for his fascinating book Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (North Carolina 1988). Walter tells us that a place can be large or small, that microtopes (a bit of jargon, perhaps, but Walter is something of a Greek scholar and likes to toss some of that language into his salad whenever he can) or little places, work by directing energy. These little places are ambiguous in the original Greek and poetic sense of leading in more than one direction. Macrotopes, on the other hand, are those large and powerful things—cathedrals, Stonehenge, Mt. Sinai—that lead to one set of responses or that generate one unambiguous set of responses and whose power is clear. But microtopes may be powerful as well: "As expressions of religious experience, sacred places [of whichever size] are as important as doctrine and ritual. They energize and sharpen religious meaning. They help to make religious experience intelligible. A sacred place... is an environment of sensory phenomena [and] a moral environment as well." (77) Following Walter, we can read Emily Dickinson’s "Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church" as much more than just another contribution to the ongoing debate between the advocates of natural theology and proponents of revealed religion. And we can understand the responses to Upper Monroe Creek recorded in the traditions of the B family as something more than just local color. The year 1988 must have been a vintage year for philosophers of place, for in that year the University of Iowa Press published a book edited by Michael Martone, A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest, yet another book on that subject. What an interesting thing to do, to change the emphasis by switching the words around to underscore the ideas of meaning, of value that the older philosophers called axiology. Perhaps Martone, too, worried about the adversary appropriating a good expression, so he metaphorically threw the Old Deluder off the track (also metaphorically). Of the several discrete essays in this book, Gary Comstock’s "Grandma’s Backbone, Dougie’s Ankles" stands out. "At one time or another," Comstock writes, "we all have to explain our lives to ourselves. We do this by remembering and then by telling the story... Recently I have been toying with the idea that my life can be explained as a battle between two places, places of big sense and places of little sense."(111) Comstock, who teaches at Iowa State University, declares that Iowa is, in the main, "a place of little sense" but immediately cautions, "Do not confuse such places with places of no sense, or of nonsense. Places of little sense have very much sense; it is just of a modest, local, sort... [where] people have a good deal of practical wisdom, knowledge located in bones and bellies." (111-112) On the other hand, Chicago, where he grew up, and the University of Chicago, where he earned his graduate degrees, are places of big sense. It was a renowned professor of religion at that university who told entering graduate students to publish and get famous and declared that if those weren’t their plans the students were in the wrong place: "I wondered what I was doing there." (112) He survived that place of big sense and went to Iowa State to teach religion, where, he writes, "We are a small fish in the big pond of the sciences and humanities... We do not tell our students to get famous or get out." (112) He writes that when he finished at Chicago he was told by a professor that Iowa State was a third-rate university, "but since I have been here I have heard unending arguments that we are second, not third...Like farmers of my grandpa’s generation who used to introduce themselves as "just farmers,’ we are preoccupied with the perception of our own mediocrity." (113) How can places of little sense be explained? They cannot be: "We should not try to explain [them]. There is no General Theory of Little Places into which each particular Iowa county, farm community, or religious sect can fit. How do we talk about such places? By telling stories about them, one by one." (115) Narration, then, rather than exposition, is the mode by which the axiology of places of little sense can be explored. Let places of big sense (is it necessary to call the reader’s attention to the two letters that abbreviate that expression?) worry through Jurgen Habermas’ aspiration to have some kind of never-never land established where all ethical judgments would be made by people whose individual identities have been removed. But Iowans in their places of little sense tell stories. "And for as long as the tale lasts, nothing else matters; there is peace on earth...as we give ourselves to once upon a time." (117) That is a powerful claim, valid unless too narrow an understanding of what is meant by "tale" is insisted upon. As the B family members settled in to make a home of their Idaho residence, they began to absorb the legendary material of the country as they asked, for instance, how this or that piece of topography got its name. Mrs. B’s brother had preceded her family from Missouri, so he supplied the information that he had had to acquire. How did Payette get its name? How did Indian Grove get its name? Why is it Mann’s Creek but Monroe instead of Monroe’s Creek? Why do some of the neighbors pronounce the word "crick" instead of "creek"? The answer to other questions were obvious: Quaking Asp Grove was a grove of quaking aspens, a bright spot of green and white on another wise undifferentiated sage-grey and umber hogback, except, of course, in the spring when grass and those yellow blossoms covered the hillsides, beginning in April. What are they called? Applegate Springs must have been named for somebody with that name. What is the source of that rich, sweet smell that is so strong just about the time the yellow flowers come out in April? Sense of place is not just a visual sense; all the five and country senses may be involved. What plant yields those little stickers that invade the socks of hay hands and itch like fire? What kind of wood did Old Man Yardley use to give his smoked pork such a wonderful flavor? What about this business of turning water from the creek into alfalfa fields in a pattern often referred to as "shoestring irrigation" since it was confined to the narrow valleys of the flood plain? Even for the vegetable garden? We did not do that back in Missouri. And speaking of the creek, what are those two kinds of fish that swim up each spring and occasionally end up in a hay field with the irrigation water? Are they related to the smaller fish left in ditches after the crop has been irrigated? Where can a man get a drink in the dry hills while he is riding for cattle? These and other questions about sights, smells, names on the land, and natural processes like migration of salmon and steelhead were answered in the course of time as the family put down roots in the little valley above Weiser, Idaho. The world of this family was fairly well outlined by several macrotopes. To the north, Hitt Mountain provided a land mark and a meteorological instrument, for progression of autumn could be noted first in the dusting of snow on the summit, settling lower and lower until the totally white feature indicated winter for sure. And until the snow was gone in the late spring, planting the garden had to be suspended, for snow on the mountain meant the probability of killing frosts. To the east, the Weiser River Mountains, Squaw Butte, and Shaffer Butte provided familiar landmarks. Looking south, the family members would see the Owyhee Mountains with Cinnabar, War Eagle, and Three Fingers prominent. West, it was Indianhead Mountain and Lookout Mountain. These features circumscribed the world in which these migrants began to learn about their new place of little sense. ‘Uncle Ol told us," begins one legend collected from the third child of the B family, "that in the early days there was a ferry over at Washoe before there was a Payette, and he had a wife named Ettie. When the passengers went to him to pay their fare, he’d say to them, ‘Pay Ettie.’ And that was how Payette got its name, although they don’t pronounce it ‘Ettie’ any more." Two strands of meaning develop from an explication of this legend. First, the Missouri immigrants (including Mrs. B’s brother, Uncle Ol) had no knowledge of the "real" history of the area, no awareness of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its fur trading posts and their factors, of whom Francois Payette was one, conducting the affairs of Old Fort Boise. And second, these folk had considerable uncertainty about how to pronounce that strange looking name; they probably did pronounce it "Pay-ettie"...at first. That was in the story Uncle Ol had told them, and it satisfied their etiological need. Indian Grove, well, a bunch of early day stockmen caught an Indian who had stolen a horse, and they hanged him in a grove of giant cottonwood and alder trees on one of the forks of Scott’s Creek, north of Weiser about 20 miles. The yellow flowers that covered the hillsides in April (just about the same time that rich, sweet smell manifested itself) they called "soap root," not realizing that taxonomists had already named it "arrowleaf balsamroot." The lovely fragrance they came to associate with what they called, after local usage, "buckrush." It is bitterbrush, or Purshia tridentata. When, in the course of haying, the men began to scratch their ankles because there were fiery little stickers that penetrated their socks, it was natural that they should call the weed from which they originated "fireweed." Among botanists it is fiddleneck. The wood that gave Old Man Yardley’s hams, bacon, and jowls that delicious smoky sweet flavor was the native alder. The great fish that migrated up Monroe Creek and Mann’s Creek and most of the other streams in the area were, of course, chinook salmon and steelhead trout. They migrated in greater numbers up the Weiser River and the Little Weiser, and the family would often combine salmon gigging expeditions (legal then) with camping out on the upper reaches of one or the other of those rivers. These salmon were indeed related to the smaller trout that ended up in irrigation ditches. Water, good water, in a dry land is priceless. Here, unlike the streams the family knew in Missouri, the creeks and rivers ran crystal clear and could be drunk from with impunity. But because there were few streams in the dry hills, it was essential that they know the location of reliable springs, that is, springs that never ran dry, Such springs or wells of "living water" as those on the Kiefer Place, the Putney Place, Howard Martin’s Place, and the Nuslein Place were carefully incorporated into the survival strategies by which the B family made the valley a place of little sense, in Gary Comstock’s words. Consideration of the pronunciation of "creek" leads to the rich and complicated matter of dialectology, sometimes referred to as linguistic geography. It is helpful to recall that Missouri was the staging area for those thousands upon thousands of emigrants heading out for the Oregon Territory over what came to be called the Oregon Trail. These travelers came from New England, from the mid-Atlantic states, and from the South, bringing their speech patterns with them and creating a Babel of tongues. In the face of such dialect confusion, is it any wonder that Missourians developed the skepticism reflected in that state’s motto? They heard emigrants from Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania call a small running stream a "crick"; people from Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee called it a "creek" (rhymes with "peek"). The same folk whose fried chicken might be too greasy heard their Midland and Southern friends call such chicken "greazy." How does sense of place manifest itself? One of the ways, certainly, is through the stories, both the act of telling and the content. Central to the stories of the B family is the microtope of Upper Monroe Creek within the context of the macrotope whose boundaries were previously delineated. This was the stage, the setting. Here these lives were lived, and after nearly 80 years family reunions are still centered on "the time we all went salmon gigging and Uncle L. terrified us with campfire stories of mountain go-atters," "the time Old Red foundered himself and we thought we’d have to shoot him," "the time we all went to the dance at Harrises." Sense of place and places of the heart are, perhaps, one and the same.
Louie Attebery is a professor of literature and folklore at Albertson College in Caldwell. Bibliography(Pertinent materials not identified in the text)
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