No Expectations, No Desires. (All Desires, All Expectations.)

Usually, when I set out to explore a new place and/or start a new chapter of my life, I tell myself: "No expectations. No desires." In fact, I've written that advice / warning / injunction on the first page of several field journals. And, more than once, repeated it on a page halfway through, as a reminder / re-order. "[Really, I mean it this time:] NO EXPECTATIONS. NO DESIRES."

With desires, you're setting yourself up for likely disappointment. With expectations, even more so. I've learned this the hard way, over and over again. "Amaze me!", I asked the Adirondacks, for example. "Heal me!", I demanded of Badlands. "Just give me any small snippet of wildness?", I begged the prairies of Kansas and the woods around Oneonta. With the first two, I slunk away, crushed. The latter two, I came to resent. When I approached Gates of the Arctic desperately needing to feel whole again, naively expecting to feel wonder again, the place barely spit me back out alive.

Places don't care what we think or wish of them. They can't save a person. They can't fail a person. All they can do is be there, with their rocks and water and wildlife and skies, for us to look at, marvel over, talk about, think about, use, abuse, remember, forget, try to survive, and project all of our feelings and fears onto. The Adirondacks, Badlands, and Oneonta are perfectly lovely locations; my disappointment in them was just that--mine. Gates of the Arctic just did what it does--roar with water, slide with snow, teeter with rocks, surprise with storms, shroud in mist, carpet with tundra, erupt in flowers, ring with mountains, mountains, mountains, mountains, all tall, sharp, too steep for their slopes. It didn't fail me; I failed it, far too small and fragile to face such a place alone.

Beyond disappointment, the real danger is that if you go to a place already wanting it to be or do something for you, it's not an honest relationship. In seeking to fulfil personal goals, you'll treat the place differently, seeking particular beauty or meaning, ignoring any features or aspects that don't fit neatly into your criteria. You might miss out on something spectacular, or you might find yourself overeager, underwhelmed, more and more convinced that the world you're in can't live up to the world you remember or dream. When I returned to Black Canyon of the Gunnison for my second season, or Petrified Forest for my sixth, more examples, I wanted only to relive and recapture past joys. Of course, this backfired, as I not only failed to make new happy memories, but tarnished several old ones in the process.

But oh, my first experience of Petrified Forest. Still, almost 20 years later, I can remember my first view out across the wild, colorful expanse of the Painted Desert and, better yet, my first tentative, then joyous steps out into it. I had had no idea such a place existed. I never could have envisioned or imagined it, asked nothing of it in those moments. Experienced it with raw wonder. Same for Tongass, and Wrangell-St. Elias. I hadn't done much research before showing up at each of those, didn't really know where I was going or what I was getting myself into, and thus approached Alaska's forested seashores and glacier-laced mountains at face value, no preconceived notions. No expectations, no desires. Sheer awe.

All of this to say, I know better. 

After traveling to, working in, living in, thinking about, and hoping I'd learned something from places such as these, I [should] know better.

I've moved to south-central Utah: Bryce Canyon National Park. And I've come quite consciously and deliberately full of expectations and desires. I need to be here. I need this place, with its unlikely-eroded hoodoos, its impossibly-balanced rock spires, its arches and overhangs and bright pink cliffs blazing in the morning sun. I need this place, with its scent of ponderosas and junipers and freshly-fallen snow; its sound of wind and woodpeckers, peregrines' screams reverberating off the rock faces; its views out across mesas and canyons and mountains twenty, forty, ninety miles away. I need the skies, need the dust, need the millions of acres of surrounding public land at my fingertips and boot-heels. Millions of acres of forest and slickrock, canyons and sage, Wilderness designated and non-, I need it all.

(To amend Aldo Leopold's foreword to A Sand County Almanac : “There are some who can live without wild [places], and some who cannot." 

I cannot.)

I've come to Southern Utah's canyon country with the desire to rid myself of the stress and sorrow that I've accumulated over the course of many years. I desire to swap heartbreak and loneliness for solitude or, better yet, friends. I desire natural splendor and awe and a sense of real purpose. Is that too much to ask of a place? 

[Yes.] 

And yet, I expect [by which I mean: I very, very much hope] that the rocks and the falcons and the thunderstorms will oblige. Already, the sunrises are something to celebrate.

Place non-attachment

 Although generations of geographers (myself included) have studied “sense of place”—scrutinized, surveyed, and theorized; coined new terms and debated old ones; written papers and books and dissertations—anyone alive in the place-world (thus, everyone) intuitively recognizes: the more time a person spends in a place, the more we fill that place with memories and meanings. A simple matter of opportunity and exposure. More moments = more memories. More memories = more meaning.

Memory-full and meaning-full does not, however, mean memorable much less meaningful. Sense of place does not automatically translate to place-attachment, an affinity for a place.

After living in a small city in Upstate New York for nearly nine years, I have left. I am not sorry to go.

It’s a perfectly nice little city: safe, comfortable, scenic in its nestled-in-a-river-valley-surrounded-by-farms-and-forest-coated-hills-rural-Upstate-calendar-scene sort of way. The valley fills with fog in the spring and the hillsides erupt in color come autumn. Geese honk along the river and I’ve seen more than one bald eagle soar right over Main Street. The city itself is eminently livable: downtown features shops with classic brick storefront charm, creative restaurants and college-town bars, a plaza for the seasonal farmers' market, Christmas tree, and an endless parade of parades. (The town sure loves parades.) Elsewhere, there are tree-lined streets with big old houses, parks with tennis courts and baseball diamonds, people on the sidewalk who wave and say hello. It’s the sort of town where strangers saw me out walking and stopped to offer a ride, even in the middle of the pandemic.

I walked a lot. Some 30,000 miles, I estimate, through several pairs of shoes. That’s how I get to know a place. Memories, meanings, step by step.

I remember walking up the hill to the college where I worked. Not a steep hill, but enough to get the blood flowing 6 a.m.-ish. Peaceful in the pre-dawn darkness: past sleeping houses, a dark patch of woods, a starry open stretch onto campus, just me and the deer and a steady line of cars. Relaxing in reverse, near or post-sunset: more people on the sidewalks, more traffic on the streets. Sheltered enough during rainstorms, pleasantly cool in late summer; less enjoyable in winter, when I came to anticipate which sidewalks would be shoveled and which would be knee-deep in snow or slippery-smooth with ice. I must have walked up and down that hill 700 or 800 times. It was a nice enough commute, but I will not miss it.

I remember the long loop around—a full eight miles up and down hills, past hops fields, hayfields, horse pastures, trees, trees, trees. In some spots, a view out across the entire valley; in others, tight ribbons of water tumbling through steep streams. I came to know where to look for the first trout lilies and where to keep an eye out for porcupines; where there are apple trees in autumn and maples tapped in spring. Where drivers tend to be distracted and cut corners. When the school bus drivers honk and wave hello. That route, I probably only walked a few hundred times. I will not miss it.

Then there’s the stretch of road leading west of town, along the river valley, between the highway and the railroad tracks, river itself inaccessible. Finally, free from trees, houses, sidewalks, with an open view of wetlands, hills, sky. (Electric wires, buildings, traffic.) That, I must have walked at least a thousand times, each direction. I walked through white-outs and thunderstorms, past herons and eagles, a hundred red-winged blackbirds and a million peepers singing to the spring. Hawks on electric poles, beavers and turtles not quite dodging traffic. Near-daily photos of cloudscapes. I will not miss it.

Better yet, the town is full of trails. Well-maintained and well-used, yet never overrun by hordes of hikers or mountain bikers. I got lost dozens of times in the tangle of routes in the woods behind the college, spent Sundays looping the flats down by the river, and, most importantly, found solace in the network directly behind my house. Clad in sandals in summer or snowshoes in winter, I could step out my door, up into the woods, and wind around for hours. Alongside a pine-studded ravine running with waterfalls or icefalls, speckled bright in the morning sun. Past series of stone fences, laboriously constructed, now fading into moss and fallen leaves. Through birch groves and brush glowing green in summer, grey-white in winter, and color upon color upon color in autumn. I couldn’t possibly count how many times I paced those trails, or simply went up into the woods and found a spot to sit. Unlike the walks to campus or around town, those weren’t part of a daily routine—that space was my refuge, where I went when I needed to think or unthink, the only area I might possibly have missed.

But then, last fall, a diamond-shaped, bright orange sign appeared at the entrance: “Logging in process. Keep out.”

I kept out for a little over a month, while machines tore up the trail and tore down the ash trees (and any other trees in their wake.) Then, when it seemed like the operations were done, I crept carefully up the wide, muddy tank-wide scar to stand in a tangle of logs, stumps, and branches. Everything I’d known there was gone: the pine, the birch, the brush, the trail. Rationally, I know that it was a salvage operation—an attempt to prevent the spread of the invasive emerald ash borer—and that the woods will eventually recover. But that knowledge/hope doesn’t change what I saw and how I felt. Devastation. Devastated.

It was all wrong. For nearly nine years, I kept rationalizing, reasoning, trying to figure out why I couldn’t appreciate the landscape and community the way anyone ought to be able to. It’s such a nice town, such kind people, such a pretty place. But, through all of my walking and thinking, my moments and memory-making, I knew: not my place, not my place, not my place.

And that's okay?