Colin Ellard - You Are Here

I am here and so are you

My lack of posting here of late is actually a positive thing.  I've stopped languishing in post-Philippines physical illness, exhaustion, and, I admit, a little depression at the sheer scope of inequities in the world, and I'm knuckling back down to work on a revision of my book manuscript.  This, my first book, is a strange but not completely unpleasant experience for me.  I remember with great clarity the day that I dotted the final i's on the first draft.  It was a cool summer day in Nova Scotia with scattered rainshowers and dense fog.  I took a walk on the beach and then I took a long, hot bath with a glass of single malt scotch set up on a little table beside me.  For a few hours, I was the king of the world.  Then, some time not long after this, a friend of mine congratulated me on having finished what he called Phase One. 

I didn't really understand what he meant at the time, but it wasn't so welcome a message.  I had just finished a BOOK not a PHASE.  Now I get it.  What it takes to understand what you want to say is the writing of a first draft.  And then, having figured out your message, your theme, your thesis, you're all ready to.....write your book.  It's unfair in a way, that finishing is really starting, and that I'll have to spend much of this holiday season buried in my office, poring over manuscript.  On the other hand, this is surely a lot less traumatic than that moment, not so many months from now, when the final manuscript will leave my hands for the last time.  Scary thought.  But I know it'll be good.  I'm excited by the way things are shaping up.

How we decide where we live

I'm reading Witold Rybczynski's new book "Last Harvest" slowly.  In part this is because it's a book filled with complex ideas that I want to make sure I 'get' and in part it's because I find myself putting the book down for long periods of time to think about what he's been saying.  The book is a detailed description of the conversion of a farmer's field to a suburban housing development.  Along the way, we learn much of the history of North American architecture, planning, politics, and sociology. 

It's something we see every day as we whiz past the outer reaches of cities in Canada.  In my neighbourhood, the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region, we've seen accelerating growth, an influx of new workers spurred by a growing knowledge industry (I'm told that this year we're the world's most intelligent community, whatever that means), and until very recently, a merry game of rapid conversion of corn fields to tracts of cookie-cutter housing developments.  Like so many other urban centres in North America, the response to this growth, with some interesting marked exceptions has been the appearance of large tracts of bedroom bunkers, often miles from any interesting mixed use or employers, unfriendly to pedestrians and serviced by box store 'power centres' with parking lots extending off almost to the horizon. 

Why do we want to live this way?  The answers are, of course, many and complex.  One simple answer is to say 'we don't'.  In the clever mockumentary film Radiant City by Gary Burns and Jim Brown, we listen to actors tell stories based on real life experiences in which they sound as though they are trapped in some kind of vacuous middle zone between expectation, promise and reality.  They hover between the steak and the sizzle, not really being able to enjoy either. In Radiant City, we are invited to consider the possibility that perhaps suburban dwellers, understanding all the shortcomings of their living arrangements aren't that keen on the status quo but feel they have little choice.  Affordable housing in affluent cities is usually well outside the urban core, if it is available at all.  Even in my own relatively small  city, the only new housing developments in the urban core are trendy 'lofts' built in converted industrial spaces.  These homes are beautiful, compact, mostly unsuited to family life, and sometimes prohibitively expensive.  The classic, affordable, 3 bedroom family home is only available in the outer fringes of the city, far from any urban amenities.

Rybczynski's book, even in the early going, makes it clear that the answers to the question 'why suburbs?' are very much more complicated than this.  Average house and lot sizes in North America have tripled in the last 50 years.  Moving to the suburbs not only allows us to have a nice roof over our heads and a modern kitchen, but it also offers the possibility of gigantic multi-storey great rooms, vast master bedrooms with attached spa bathrooms, and backyards big enough to house small herds of sheep.  We're ineffably attracted to these large spaces at a biological level.  When imagining where we'd like to live, we look longingly at these grand vistas of space, both interior and exterior.  In short, these are the kinds of houses that are built because they are the kinds of houses that sell. 

But when we get there, move our furniture into these cavernous spaces and sit down to take it all in, we soon come to understand the inevitable down side.  We're all alone in our huge electric caves and there isn't that much to do there.   We dash to the electronic agora -- television and the Internet -- to recapture what we've left behind in the city.  Even though the picture quality is not better (indeed, it is often worse!) we rush to fill walls of our homes with gigantic screens as if to try to readmit the world we severed from our lives by moving outward to less crowded environs.

Our attractions to wide spaces, the prospect of seeing far off into the distance (especially if we feel as though we own it!) from the comfort of a protected picture window looking out on a manicured yard or a swath of greenbelt is so compelling because it soothes ancient impulses designed to protect us from predators and to lead us to plenty.  We know what we like, though it may no longer be what is good for us.

Why this book?

I’ve always been a believer in the power of long walks to unravel hard problems and to even out sour moods. The problem is – I’m inclined to get lost. One of my favourite walking spots is a small area of forest with the apt name, Sudden Tract. I’m not sure if the name comes from the way that the park suddenly appears on the side of an ordinary stretch of Ontario county road, or if it is more because of the sudden events that seem to take place there. On my first visit there, some years ago, I suddenly became lost in Sudden Tract.  

 It was a cold, January afternoon. I was a few weeks into my first sabbatical, casting about for ideas for a long textbook on the evolution of the brain that I thought I wanted to write. I went for a drive to liberate some thoughts. There’s something about slipping along quiet highways with a rush of blurred colour passing by the windows that always jogs free unexpected ideas from my murky mental backwaters. On this occasion, though, I saw the Sudden sign, let loose a squawk of delight, and took a hard turn into the gravel parking lot. A single, winding trail led from the lot into the woods, offering just the right combination of mystery, expectation and promise to lure me quickly out of my seat and in among the trees. I wasn’t dressed for the cold, and my sneakers didn’t do well in the deep snow, but I only planned to stay for a few minutes, just the first few turns in the trail. I came quickly to a choice point with four criss-crossing pathways. I chose one, continued on for a minute to a crow’s foot intersection and then picked another path at random. The twists and turns, the interesting bumps and hills, and the perfect mix of softwood spruce and birch trees pulled me out of myself and made me lose track completely of time and place. My mind wandered over the hills, around the next corner, and farther afield. I imagined myself high above the forest, looking down at my path, trying to imagine where I was in the bigger picture, a dot among the fallow, snow-covered corn fields of southwestern Ontario. Then my mind flew home, in my basement study, making notes about peculiar arrangements of receptors in insect eyes. The inevitable conclusion of this nimble mental voyage was the presence of a flabby, out-of-shape psychologist, standing breathless in the middle of a perfect quiet winter forest without a clue about where he was or how he was going to get home. As the sun began to set and the cloud of frosty breath around my head betrayed the drop in temperature, I had my first thought that, absurd as it might seem, I could be in some trouble here. The overcast sky blotted out the sun’s position, giving me very little clue as to direction in the deepening dusk. The woods looked equally inscrutable in all directions. All of that wonderful mystery had now converted to a growing unease and a quickening feeling of anxiety in my guts. In a way, this was crazy. I knew from faint recollections of maps of the area that this must be a tiny space, probably no bigger than a large shopping mall. I knew I’d have to be ineffably stupid to freeze out here, but I sensed a growing possibility that I’d emerge from the park at some other place than the parking lot and then I’d have to beg a passing driver for help. What if no-one came by? I could wander the roads for hours trying to find the turn-off where I’d left my car. I hurried off down the first trail I saw, picking paths through the labyrinth by trying to guess whether I’d seen each vista before or not. Clinging to a faint sense of the familiar to make my choices, I made mistake after mistake, once even turning up in another empty parking lot that looked so much like the one where I’d left my car that I entertained fleetingly the idea that the car had been stolen. Eventually, my remaining stamina, the mathematics of the random walk which always eventually returns you to where you began, and probably a bit of luck found me standing at my car door breathless, freezing, and soaked with sweat. On the humbled drive home, I had found a new topic for my research and for a book. I wanted to know why we get lost.