Learning to Love California 1
Learning to Love California:
Beginnings and Terrapsychological Inquiries
Kristi Kenney
Planetary Psychology
Craig Chalquist, PhD.
Summer 2009
Growing up in the Seattle area, I was indoctrinated with a dislike of California and Californians. The cultural mythology was that they were moving to the Northwest and ruining our states and cities; they drove badly and had a different kind of mentality that did not fit in with our Northwest way of being. I grew up thinking like this and I find these notions are pretty deeply embedded in me. Now that I have come over to the other side and actually live in Northern California, I find that I still wrestle with these thoughts. I am slowly beginning to let go of these preconceived notions and I am learning to love California.
Berkeley is beautiful and, despite my biases, I am coming to be attached to the hills and water, the fog and sun, the lushness and the dryness in these last five months of my new residency here. This paper offers the perfect opportunity to begin to deepen that emerging relationship through the lens of a terrapsychological analysis. I want to move out of the disorienting “homeless” feeling I have been experiencing that Glendinning (1994) speaks of: “Original trauma is the disorientation we experience, however consciously or unconsciously, because we do not live in the natural world. It is the psychic displacement, the exile, that is inherent in civilized life. It is our homelessness” (p. 64). During this quarter I have been spending more time outdoors writing about my new bioregion and I have been making more deliberate attempts to be mindful and notice the land around me. This paper will reflect those new explorations and employ some of the techniques of Terrapyschological Inquiry. The compelling ideas and techniques of a Terrapsychological Inquiry (TI), which “begins with the recognition that places behave as though they possess an imaginal interactivity or ‘presence’ that reflects what has been done to them and upon them, and they communicate this to their inhabitants and investigators through dreams, trauma, folklore, and the replays of unhealed past events” (Chalquist, 2007, p. 53) is like a beckoning and an invitation to go deeper into the dialogues, interactions, and even somatic communications I already have instinctively begun with places in my life both past and present.
Preparation Phase
I spent almost all of my first 34 years in the wet and lush Pacific Northwest and its natural areas are a solid part of my personality; I feel deeply intertwined with that landscape of ferns, moss, cedars, hemlocks, mountains, and waterways. Leaving it has felt like leaving a significant part of myself behind. I have mornings when I wake up and think I am still in Seattle; times when I look out at the Bay clouds in the distance and for a split second I mistake them for Mt. Rainier or snow covered Cascade ranges. Changing bioregions has been disorienting for me; this experience has only pointed deeper to the thing I have known since I was a child playing in the woods behind my parent’s house: we are a part of our landscapes and the natural world we are most familiar with is a part of us. Clayton and Opotow (2003) confirm this thought I have when they say that “ the natural environment serves to inform people about who they are” and “emotional connections to particular environmental aspects of places people have lived – rocky terrain, harsh winters, and the ocean shore – serve to shape individuals’ self-definition” (p. 9). Changing places can make us feel uprooted and ungrounded, wandering lost in foreign-feeling terrains. And so I am trying to learn to feel at home here in this East Bay Mediterranean climate.
The preparation phase of TI suggests that the “key facilitative attitude is one of sensitized innocence, an openness that willingly suspends ingrained prejudices long enough…to offer sufficient psychological space for whatever the place under study might reveal” (Chalquist, 2007, p. 55). This is the kind of council I need to help me come into relationship with California, bringing an open heart and mind (in fact, this mirrors one of the reasons I came to the Bay Area: to deepen a growing relationship with my partner). So I begin my inquiry with an open and even vulnerable heart, longing to know this strange place around me, hoping to call it home. My focus will be on allowing awareness to move from inner to outer, on questions, on imaginings, on somatic resonances, on active associations, on impressions, on witnessing and being witnessed, and ultimately, on harnessing a nomadic awareness (Chalquist, 2007, p. 55) that attempts to shed any residual cultural baggage and biases I have about California. Or, as Ableman (2005) suggests, I will simply (or not so simply) approach this new landscape with a “beginner’s mind: without presuppositions, open to seeing and learning from whatever I encounter” (p. 177).
I have been telling my friends back home that Berkeley always smells like flowers. And it is true. It seems that everything is always in bloom. All the wind here brings the flowers to you, catching you by surprise, making you smile. I catch it on the air. I notice this especially at night, maybe because, in the dark, my other senses are muted; my sense of smell is amplified. I especially notice the honeysuckle and jasmine; they are incessant, constant, welcomed presences.
Assessment Phase: Locale, Infrastructure, Community
As a newcomer here without a car I am often outside getting from one place to another. And so I find myself in constant dialogue with the streets around me; this is, in essence, a mixture of locale, infrastructure, and community. I see it all. This car-free existence is a direct way to experience the “physical configurations and dimensions of the area”, “the human-built components”, and the current “cultural-communal components” (Chalquist, 2007, p. 56). These all combine to make up the “patterns of interaction between people and places” (Chalquist, 2007, p. 49). I am in it; dialoguing with the world around me, opening to this strange and new landscape.
One of the first things I did after moving here was go and buy tree, plant, and bird guide books to the area; I have been so used to just knowing the plants and animals of the Northwest, I feel lost here, no names on my tongue, or reference for habitat and home. This action points to my bias towards the locale, all that is “natural” in the area. This is what I so easily breathe and feel: the air and wind, the water, the plants, the climate, the waterways, and all that makes up the local ecosystem, me not excluded. I am learning the language of my new home; as Spirn (1998) suggests this language is a tool in becoming closer to place: “The language of landscape recovers the dynamic connection between place and those who dwell there” (p. 4). I am beginning a new and intricate dialogue, sometimes below auditory levels.
It is often breezy here in my pocket of Berkeley; the trees are in motion, the sound of their leaves’ movement is the background soundtrack to my quiet wanderings. These wandering are an attempt to get to know my new bioregion and get over my Northwest-centric view of nature. The trees that have caught my eye: Bluegum Eucalyptus, California Live Oak, California-bay, California Buckeye, Incense – cedar and the magnificent Redwood. The crazy succulents always attract my attention; limited to houseplant life in the northwest, they run rampant and uncaged here; taking over parking strips and rough edges. Different birds abound here; I have particularly seen a bunch of Mourning Doves (which I often hear as well), Brown Creepers, Anna’s Hummingbirds and Copper’s Hawks (which nest and hunt just down the road from me). Each pocket of Berkeley is unique and changes rapidly - the minutiae of microclimates - often alternating from block to block it seems.
I know I will have to get to know the locale and bioregional intricacies first before I become more open to the infrastructure and (human) community past and present. Though, as Orr (2004) points out, “what we mean by nature is complicated by our being bound up in it in ways that are hard to fathom” (p. 2). Infrastructure and community are really part and parcel of locale, bioregion, or the “natural” world. There is no (or no longer) much separation. However, I need to start somewhere to begin this deeper communication, this heart dialogue, this forging of a new relationship and so I pick the closest “green” spot to my apartment – Claremont Canyon. The lower region of this steep and surprisingly large Regional Preserve is just six blocks from my house. I have begun to go there regularly to watch, walk, and listen.
At the edge of Derby and Piedmont is the Tanglewood Footpath, an entrance to the steep, dry slopes of Claremont Canyon. I linger at the mouth of this shaded gateway, leaning on street curb, listening to running water in the pipes and cement thinking of diverted natural waterways. The off kilter pathway leads to this often visited corridor, where the eucalyptus greets me. It’s hazy or foggy out beyond today – I still haven’t learned the difference – the city is obscured and the Bay water melds into sky. I can still feel cool air currents traveling up this barrier of hills in the late sunny morning; so surprisingly cool and welcome on my skin. Eucalyptus leaves litter the ground here and seem to stifle other growth – the understory is largely bare. Erosion and exposed root systems, dust and mourning doves; there is something strangely beautiful and surprisingly intimate about pausing, listening, and naming. Steep, steep, steep; good smells of dry earth, Mt. Tamalpais’ dark uppermost edge in the unclear distance. Microclimates on different slopes just feet from each other, rapid temperature changes, up, up, up. So much bigger and more expansive than I realized from below; the thing that ends my excursions here is not fatigue or dampness like back home, but heat, sun, and scarce shade. This adds a fearful edge to my journeys to these canyons…
At the lower regions of Claremont Canyon, explorers can pick up a brochure about the Regional Preserve, here I learn that the protected lands stretch about 200 acres and that this area became a regional preserve in the Seventies. But the history of the place stretches much farther back and points to all kinds of interesting things. As a book nut, I have been collecting odds and ends about my new home and here I have found beautiful little essays and interesting facts too, that speak to locale and community. Pancoast (in McArdle, 1988) tells us that “Within a period of seventy years, Claremont Canyon changed from Indian land to Mexican pasture to an early American communications corridor” (p. 58). The word corridor seems fitting for this surrounded piece of undeveloped land. In the 1850’s the first telegraph cables passed through here and stretched all the way to the East Coast, this place was picked because it was the lowest pass in the central regions of the Contra Costa Hills and there was yet to be a tunnel here (Pancoast in McArdle, 1988, p. 58). My readings also point to hillside springs that once percolated in the uppermost regions of Claremont Canyon, which eventually became a part of the East Bay Municipal Utility District watershed (Pancoast in McArdel, 1988, p. 60). All of this history points to themes, patterns, and connections that are becoming clearer to me here in my new home; I see themes of water in this dry land and multiple invasions, occupations, and changes over hundreds of years.
Assessment Phase: Genius Loci
How do I move from here, my curious wanderings and eyes full of new and foreign places and plants, to a deeper level where I open up to the soul of this place? Claremont Canyon has been one gateway. Beyond the locale and my beginning inquiries into the history of that corridor, what are other things that I have seen emerging? What might point to what Fisher (2002) calls “a suffering in the soul of the natural world” (p. 5)? On the surface the Bay Area is so beautiful and “green,” but what might be hidden or underneath? How does the following passage I wrote speak of possible ecotranference or ecological complexes?
There is something odd about Claremont Canyon that I can’t quite place, can’t quite name it or locate it - even my language in unsettled, like this land, struggling with metaphors. Last time I was here there was a fire down below in the Berkeley lowlands. The air came alive up here in a strange and almost eerie way. The wind shifted, the smoke billowed below, the sirens moved through the far-away streets. And here, there was an aliveness, a stirring, an indescribable quality in the air. The land was dry and restless, the air felt almost hostile, the smoke invaded these uplands from so far below and I could taste the house fire miles away. Everything was odd, suspended and electric; and then it passed. Something scaled moved near me in this exposed savannah climate, so strange and new to me; the moment shifted and the calm “naturalness” came back. (Incidentally, there have been three fires in Berkeley in the last month or so, two of which I have witnessed and one that I heard late last night. Two have been on the block next to my boyfriend’s house, both just blocks from each other, and one was on my street but father west - this seems very strange.)
Since I moved here I have been thinking a lot about water; the scarcity-mentality of it in California and also the water of the Bay, and the many (and often hidden) creeks of the East Bay. My thoughts about water and California have been similar to my previously mentioned Northwest bias, something along the lines of “those Californians are stealing all the water from us”. Now that I live here and I have been hearing so much about drought and water rationing (something we don’t hear about that often in the Seattle area), I thought it was time to learn a little more about what is really going with California and its water. What I have found is that my previous notions were only half correct; it seems Southern California is taking water from the Colorado River via many hundreds of miles of aqueducts and they also take water from Northern California, from the rivers, the Bay, and the Delta here. Up in Northern California, we do get most of our water from somewhat local rivers and snow pack. The problems seem to revolve around drought and tons of acres of agriculture and not-so-wise water use which result in problems like rapidly emptying reservoirs and salination. Water issues here seem quite complex; I am just beginning to learn. Snyder (in Gilbar, 1998) confirms this, “As Mark Reisner makes clear in Cadillac Desert, much of the agriculture and ranching of the West exists by virtue of a complicated and very expensive sort of government welfare: big dams and water plans” (p. 362). Further Lopez (in Gilbar, 1998), tells of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, once habitat for migrating White Geese, and now, “Today, ninety percent of this land has been absorbed for agricultural, industrial, and urban expansion” (p. 138). I feel drawn to knowing more about these rivers and the beautiful Bay out there, that is a constant background presence in my new life. And, because of the enormity of the water issues in this state, I feel the need to start very close to home and learn from there.