From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

By Deborah Tall

Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Tall’s From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places—and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape that circumstance had brought her—the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people—from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed and were inspired by a spiritual resonance here. This edition includes an introduction by William Kittredge and a foreword by Stephen Kuusisto, both highlighting the book’s significance and Tall’s exquisite skill in tracing the relationship between homelands and storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653769

Book preview

Also by Deborah Tall:

Afterings (poetry)

A Family of Strangers

Summons (poetry)

The Island of the White Cow

Come Wind, Come Weather (poetry)

Ninth Life (poetry)

Eight Colors Wide (poetry)

Taking Note: From Poets’ Notebooks

(coedited with Stephen Kuusisto and David Weiss)

Originally published in a hardcover edition by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1993

Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1996

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from Little Gidding from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights outside the U.S. administered by Faber and Faber Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Excerpt from The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

T. C. McLuhan: Seven excerpts from pages 37, 54, 100, 131–33, and 156 from Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Experience by T. C. McLuhan (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971). Reprinted by permission of the author.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from From an Old House in America from The Fact of a Doorframe, Poems Selected and New, 1950–1984 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1984 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1975, 1978, by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1981 by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Syracuse University Press: Excerpts from American Indian Environments by Christopher Vecsey and Robert Venables (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission.

Turtle Quarterly: Excerpts from Humans and the Earth by Lisa M. Aug (volume 3, number 2, Spring/Summer 1989). Copyright © 1989 by Lisa M. Aug. Reprinted by permission.

Copyright © 2016 by David Weiss

Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Syracuse University Press Edition 2016

161718192021654321

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-1072-4 (paperback)978-0-8156-5376-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tall, Deborah, 1951– author.

Title: From where we stand : recovering a sense of place / Deborah Tall ; foreword by Stephen Kuusisto ; introduction by William Kittredge.

Description: First Syracuse University Press Edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004358 (print) | LCCN 2016010657 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815610724 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815653769 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Tall, Deborah, 1951– —Homes and haunts—New York (State)—Finger Lakes Region. | New York (State)—Intellectual life—20th century. | Poets, American—20th century—Biography. | Finger Lakes Region (N.Y.)—Biography. | Finger Lakes Region (N.Y.) —History. | Place (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC PS3570.A397 Z465 2016 (print) | LCC PS3570.A397 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004358

Manufactured in the United States of America

For David, Zoe, and Clea, partners in this place,

and in memory of my father, Max Tall

It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are.

—Eudora Welty

Contents

Foreword, STEPHEN KUUSISTO

Acknowledgments

Introduction, WILLIAM KITTREDGE

I. HERE

II. A PRETTY PLACE

III. DWELLING

IV. THE CENTER OF THE WORLD—I OWN IT

V. HOMEGROWN

VI. SUNG LAND

Notes

Index

Foreword

STEPHEN KUUSISTO

WHEN DEBORAH TALL’S From Where We Stand was first published in 1993, the confluence of literary nonfiction and geography was sufficiently misunderstood that a poet-surveyor would have to be adventurous of necessity. Deborah Tall was unshrinking. While American nature writing had always been about a sense of place, it wasn’t consistently amenable to speculations about what locale means on the inside—as though our land was there to be cataloged, described, and read like a book, sometimes as sacred text. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek turned nonfiction narrative toward introspection when she proposed in 1975 that landscape is scripture and script, asserting that place is more than a site of reaction:

I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle or a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about.

The turn toward narrated place was for writers like Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams a matter of recovering the sacred, and their work has been read in the tradition of the transcendentalists and Thoreau in particular. Deborah Tall’s book about the Finger Lakes Region of western New York derives its power from a different set of influences. Her approach to the local suggests beauty but in a remarkably unsentimental way. She was a geographer-poet rather than a Romantic. Moreover, she is a humanistic geographer rather than a humanist, a distinction famously described by Yi-Fu Tuan:

Human geography studies human relationships. Human geography’s optimism lies in its belief that asymmetrical relationships and exploitation can be removed, or reversed. What human geography does not consider, and what humanistic geography does, is the role [relationships] play in nearly all human contacts and exchanges . . . humanistic geography is neglected because it is too hard. Nevertheless, it should attract the tough-minded and idealistic, for it rests ultimately on the belief that we humans can face the most unpleasant facts, and even do something about them, without despair.

The distinction isn’t subtle. Local history, under the lens of humanistic geography, is tough minded and thorough. For Tall, reclaiming a sense of place meant challenging neglect. When she arrived in Geneva, New York, in 1982, having accepted a teaching assignment at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was struck by the genteel, down-at-the-heels campus and town, which stand at the northern tip of Seneca Lake in the heart of the Finger Lakes. The place wasn’t Tinker Creek or Walden. The region’s isolation and poverty were clear, impossible to blink away. Just a short walk from the scenic college, Tall found a severely eroded place:

For Rent signs pepper the formerly prosperous Exchange Street, so named in honor of the volume of business once conducted behind its doors. Business, though, as in so many American towns, has been siphoned off by the highway and routed out to shopping plazas. A mile and a half of strip begins just west of the college with the Town and Country Plaza—a former frontier edge—and continues along so-called 5 & 20, U.S. Route 20 here coinciding with New York Route 5, both offspring of the Genesee Road, which by and large traces the Iroquois longhouse trail. Once the symbolic and literal aligning route of the League, the trail across which Iroquois runners ferried information from Buffalo to Albany in just three days, the road now connects in a matter of hours the major cities and towns of upstate New York, flanked by car dealerships and junk-food outlets.

One finds in Tall’s narration, palimpsests of Iroquois sites, sacred graves hidden under gas stations, and a generalized forgetfulness spreading across the fields:

As places lose distinction, even the boundaries between them blur. Towns like Geneva don’t end in any definite way; they dribble themselves out into farmland.

As the American poet Gary Snyder once observed, to know a culture, you must know its craft—and Tall’s survey of upstate New York towns uncovers artlessness and amnesia; as she put it: places are hemorrhaging. Accordingly, there are demands, albeit self-imposed, on the writer who seeks to make sense of a place, for the art of necessity is self-taught and the way is steep. For Tall, the art of the local came with leavened admiration. If the region she sought to reclaim was reluctant, often battered by more than a century’s worth of neglect, it was also surpassingly beautiful:

Whose assigned landscape is Seneca Lake? In dead of winter, early morning, huge columns of mist erupt from the warmish surface of the water, rise into the icy air, and let sunlight prism through them, become dancing rainbowed goddesses, subject only to the building heat of the sun. By afternoon they’ve vanished. The lake is turbulent, sullen. And now the trees are hypnotized by sudden snow, a lake-effect squall, black clouds blasting across the water and dumping themselves on the eastern shore, an inch in minutes. A hard west wind sends gusts of snow chasing across fields. I chase after, dazed by the sudden blankness, the closing down of the sky, as if a god had stamped its foot, turned its back, and let the world turn a terrifying, unbound white, shelterless. Where can we turn?

As Yi-Fu Tuan puts it, a place may be said to have ‘spirit’ or ‘personality’ but only human beings can have a sense of place. The poet’s job is to conceive of aesthetic space. One finds in these pages Tall’s self-instructions, a daybook in which she trains her eye to see in forgotten sites the genius loci—an immersion requiring both art and scholarship. Tall’s project is to recover the past, to learn how to read and reimagine the history of the land—to, in effect, restore to what might seem blighted the richness of the past. It’s redemptive work. From the story of Mary Jemison and the Iroquois to the region’s nineteenth-century burnt over religious fervor, Tall brings forward the complicated stories of America’s first frontier.

I often wonder how Deborah Tall would see the region she aimed to resurrect nowadays since much has changed, particularly over the past decade. Geneva now boasts a vibrant local theater and music scene; wineries have grown; an emergent pride in the Finger Lakes has transformed some, though not necessarily all, of the area. Yates County, just south of Geneva, still remains one of the poorest areas of New York State. One can still drive through towns where the windows of shops are boarded up and weeds grow through the sidewalks. Ultimately, From Where We Stand is about the ethos of what we call the local, and it demands of readers that they appreciate what such a thing can mean.

Syracuse, New York

August 2015

Acknowledgments

I HAVE RELIED ON the generosity of many people in the making of this book. My colleagues at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, have warmly shared their knowledge and helped in many ways. I thank especially Bill Ahrnsbrak, Marvin Bram, Elena Ciletti, Jim Crenner, Jose de Vinck, Toni Flores, Rebecca Fox, Stephen Kuusisto, Frank O’Laughlin, Mara O’Laughlin, John Loftus, Eric Patterson, Lee Quinby, Don Woodrow, and the library and secretarial staffs. The colleges supported me with research grants, and several students helped—Miriam Karmel, Uzma Khan, and Jennifer Miller.

Enormous aid came from the Geneva Historical Society, especially its archivist, Eleanor Clise, and former director, Michael Wadja, and from Cayuga chief Frank Bonarnie, Sherwin Cooper, Jeri Engle, Madeleine Grumet, Andrew Harvey, Peter Jemison, Tamar March, Christopher Millis, Fran Nicolucci-Aspromonte, Stephen Scully, Christopher Vecsey, Rosanna Warren, and Rebecca Weiner. For their patience and encouragement, I thank my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, and editor, Corona Machemer.

I am extremely grateful as well to the Ingram Merrill Foundation and to Yaddo for providing much-needed writing time.

And I have relied, as always, on my husband, David Weiss, for his critical astuteness and countless generosities. My children helped by being themselves.

Introduction

WILLIAM KITTREDGE

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO, say 1980, the divisive civil rights and Vietnam eras having partly calmed down across the nation, many of us (including me) were seeking essentially peaceful homelands where citizens value each other and try to care for their territory. I’d grown up in one such place and wandered to another in the Northern Rockies, in and around Missoula, Montana. Deborah Tall found hers in the Finger Lake District of upstate New York.

Having spent years on short stories and frustrated by attempts to concoct novels, I switched to personal essays and a nonfiction book, Hole in the Sky, which was published in 1991. A year or two later, someone sent me a copy of From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place.

I cannot overstate the degree to which I was surprised, gratified, and impressed, underlining, and reading passages aloud to students at the University of Montana, and talking the book up at parties. No doubt some of my enthusiasm was generated by the fact that this woman in New York had spent a number of years walking shorelines and thinking over the relationship between storytelling and location, and had come to conclusions much like the ones I and a number of other writers, had come to in the West.

Many of us spent decades worrying at the significance of place in determining our personal sense of who we might be and ought to be—and here came this woman, pondering the same things. Summing up, she said, The need for an identity rooted in a known place is evident in most cultures.

I’d grown up in a valley on a fringe of the Great Basin. My memories from that upbringing cluster around thousands of water birds in a clear, springtime sky—Canadian honkers and tiny green-winged teal and mallards and canvasbacks and the like. Their calling and the sighing of their wings as they rose and headed toward nesting grounds in Canada and Alaska drew me into a sight of paradise. Still seems that way, almost eighty years later. Who I am today comes from growing up surrounded by creatures, fecundity, and family.

Deborah Tall’s background was very different. She grew up in the abstract grid of a Levittown-like development near Philadelphia, and attended the University of Michigan, where she met a visiting Irish playwright. Following her graduation in 1970, she went to Ireland with him, where she lived for five years on the small island of Inishbofin—no electricity, no television, not many tourists.

At the same time, however, she was in the Irish literary scene. Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky visited. But much of life was physical, on and of the earth, out in the rains and dirt, all that it hadn’t been for Deborah in the United States. But maybe the island was too small. She started spending time in Dublin and Paris. Back in the United States she wrote a book about Inishbofin, The Island of the White Cow, where she first became aware of the importance of locating in a place with its own idiosyncratic stories, defining stories, stories that she knew. She had played a part in some of them.

After a year in New York City, working as computer typesetter and traveling to Goddard College in Vermont, Deborah earned an MFA in poetry, and, in 1982, when Deborah was thirty-one years old—After years of pursuing myself through the world—she got a teaching job at Hobart and William Smith, and she and David Weiss, her husband, came to upstate New York.

From the beginning, living on a lakeshore near Geneva, she seems to have been conscious of having found a homeland in which to locate that sense of herself that she had been pursuing. Eventually, they moved to Ithaca. It was an hour’s drive to work but she was nevertheless traveling through territory that she found fascinating and was coming to revere. She had her topic, and began reading and studying and seeing the landscape brought to life as story. The result, most of a decade later, was this wonderful book.

In it, Deborah gives us a detailed poetic vision of the Iroquois Indians, their history, their lives, and democratic politics and husbandry, often so much more civilized than that of white folks, and the destruction of their longhouse culture by the British at about the time of the Revolutionary War. I was struck by the resemblance of the longhouse living arrangement to that of the tribes on the coastline of British Columbia, where I found the Hole in Sky totem pole.

I’d come to believe that places are defined by the stories we know and tell about them. It’s a notion both Deborah Tall and I seem to have partway intuited and found underlined in books like those of Leslie Silko, and Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso, a study of storytelling traditions among the western Apache, who live in a land in which geographic features are named for events—for instance, Widows Pause for Breath. As Deborah says, The landscape as true repository, the cultural and spiritual revelations of its human history as vivid as the rocks and trees you can touch, the past made visible, a family tree, and a future into which you can confidently walk.

If only she were still walking. Deborah Tall died of breast cancer in 2006. But she’s left us From Where We Stand. It’s clearly part of a recent stream of memoirs, essays, and novels centered on storytelling and homelands, finding ourselves in the land—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and The Meadow by James Galvin; books by Gretel Ehrlich about Wyoming and Greenland and the northeast coast of Japan after the tsunami in 2011; Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams; All but the Waltz by Mary Blew; Fools Crow by James Welch, from northern Montana; Ceremony by Leslie Silko, from Laguna Pueblo; and Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson, both about southwestern Iowa. This list could go on. Deborah Tall left us with an enormously useful set of insights into the arts of seeking a homeland.

I

HERE

A here from which the world discloses itself.

—Eric Dardel

UPSTATE NEW YORK—anything north of the Bronx, as Ed Koch once put it—terra incognita. Miles of it feathered out from the car window of my first visit, wheaten, gray, mauve of March, lit only by persistent sumac and the gold plaint of wintering willows. I was interviewing for a teaching job in Geneva, New York. I’d never been up here before. The kind student driving me chattered apologetically about how it wasn’t much of a place, not much going on.

On the map I’d studied the night before, there were lakes, the so-called Finger Lakes, eleven long claw marks left where glaciers gouged blue water out of the hard land. Or the scratch of an eleven-fingered god. Elsewhere in New York State, lakes meander like question marks, but here they are unequivocal exclamations. The book I consulted said they are edged by gorges and waterfalls, that two of them are so deep they’re below sea level, that they are a topographically unique occurrence . . . without parallel elsewhere in all the wide world. Promising stuff. Seneca Lake, the one I was coming to, is longest and deepest: nearly forty miles north-south, three miles across, more than six hundred feet deep, one of the deepest lakes in the country. It has frozen over completely only four times in recorded history.

At my first glimpse of it, I felt tremendous relief. It stretched into the southern horizon, a startling sheet of blue held by hills. Long a walker of shorelines, I had feared the loss of coast this move upstate from the city would mean—that edge from which new continents can be journeyed to, a precipice, the avant-garde. Over two hundred miles into upstate New York, it might as well be the Midwest, landlocked, adrift in that large blob of country I’d no means to orient myself to. Centrally isolated, the region boasts of itself. It was a vague mass to me, uncharted by any sense of its cities or history. I knew only that it was big, thinly populated, and cold, and that my mother once got stranded in it for three days by a snowstorm.

When the job was offered and we decided to come, the lake was what I kept telling my husband, David, about, not the slightly seedy town that hung on to the side of the campus like an embarrassing stepparent. That lively inland sea would be my consolation for the loss of ocean. It gave me hope. I imagined it would help me feel somewhere.

Imagination gathered fact. Officially, it turned out, we wouldn’t be landlocked after all. Through canals, rivers, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence Seaway, with a sound boat and time to spare, one could reach the Atlantic easily. Rumor even persists of a subterranean passage to the sea from the Finger Lakes. There are mysterious tides in Seneca Lake, a sudden rise in the water of as much as a foot, which some locals like to ascribe to its hidden oceanic connection. Saltwater fish have a number of times been caught. Louis Agassiz, on one of his famous research trips through western New York, found small herring in the lake, seawater natives that quickly died in the fresh water; he too hypothesized a passage to the sea. And it’s not hard to imagine in the hardly imaginable depths of the lake, 174 feet below sea level. Even at the recorded bottom there is no rock, but built-up sediment, so the lake is thought to go down another 400 feet at least. The Seneca Indians called it bottomless.

All of this was reassuring to my mind’s geography, even after a local geoscientist explained away the lake’s mysterious tides as an internal long-wave phenomenon—which scientists can’t fully explain either. While men believe in the infinite, says Thoreau, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. For the moment, that suited me fine.

Like so many Americans raised in suburbia, I have never really belonged to an American landscape. The narrow strips of spared trees buffering my several childhood housing tracts from nearby highways don’t qualify as much of a landscape. Nor does landscaping, clumped shrubbery from the nursery transplanted under maternal directive on Saturday mornings—a row of squat evergreens screening the house’s cement foundation. Bulldozed, paved, it was a terrain as homogeneous and orderly as the developer’s desktop model. As Gertrude Stein said, When you get there, there is no there there. The land’s dull tidiness was hard to escape, except in the brief adventures of childhood when I could crawl beneath a bush or clothe myself in a willow tree. Before long, tall enough to look out the kitchen window, I saw the tree tamed by perspective, the bush that could be hurdled, my yard effectively mimicked up and down the block: one house, two trees, one house, two trees, all the way to the vanishing point.

A stripped landscape is a grief for a dreamy child. I searched our yard for magic, gravitated to the mimosa tree, which mysteriously closed its leaves when I touched them. It seemed a kind of friend. At dusk it closed itself, and I would close up too, go inside.

The moments I was touched by the larger natural world were few and far between: days at the beach, plunging far out into the ocean past human voices to lie back alone with the sky; or vacations in the country, rapt in the backseat of the car, taking in the sweep of scenery as if it held an answer to my undefined disquiet (A penny for your thoughts—"Nothing, just looking at the

Reviews for From Where We Stand

[Jonathan Jefferson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thorough accounting of the history of the Finger Lakes region of New York from the Iroquois to the new millennium.