The Backwoods of Everywhere: Words From a Wandering Local

By R. E. Burrillo

Throughout personal essays spiked with humor and natural science, archaeologist R. E. Burrillo widens his range beyond his popular Behind the Bears Ears.

After an upstate New York childhood and a bartending stint in New Orleans’ French Quarter, seasonal resort work led R. E. Burrillo to the desert Southwest, whose redrock landscapes were a source of stability through mental and physical illness. In The Backwoods of Everywhere, archaeologist Burrillo excavates his past, examining Indigenous and tourist cultures, the complexities of American archaeology, and what it means to be a local. From the ancient canal systems of Phoenix, Arizona, to the modern Mayan communities of the Yucatan Peninsula, to the depths of the Grand Canyon, Burrillo brings readers on an entertaining romp chock-full of history, ecology, cultural preservation, and personal stories.

In the vein of Bill Bryson, Tim Cahill, and Ellen Meloy, Burrillo's is a fresh voice in humor-spiked nature writing and cultural commentary. Running throughout the wide-ranging topics of The Backwoods of Everywhere are themes of place and locality, and how these vary between cultures and individuals. Marrying the intensely personal with the complex and technical, Burrillo's candid voice brings humor, wonder, irony, and wit to each thought-provoking essay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948814621

Book preview

LOCALS ONLY

Few of us live lightly on this world. We interact with our neighbors—both human and nonhuman—to varying degrees of interest or intensity. We have friends, colleagues, and foes within calling and occasionally striking distance. We shop for goods and services locally, or order them online using the local cell towers and a prayer they won’t be rerouted to Antarctica. We mow or rake our lawns, sweep steps or sidewalks, chase sunbeams around our apartments with desperate houseplants, catch up on local news when nothing better is on, deal with local traffic jams and other local customs, complain about local politics and local weather, throw trash and recycling in local bins, drink at local bars, eat at local restaurants, and in general articulate with the places we live to an extent I’m not sure most people fully appreciate.

The lessons these places have to teach us can be as varied as the places themselves. Sometimes we fit where we are like the teeth of a key in a long-sought lock, high points and low points interdigitating like they were made for each other. Other times, it’s precisely the opposite.

The ways we interact with different places can also vary considerably. In some places, for example, I was a bartender. In others, for better or for worse, an archaeologist. Some places I’m the quiet guy, other places the loud one. Sometimes it’s the land itself that speaks loudest to me. Sometimes it’s the people. Or the local culture in general. Or local drama.

Sometimes it’s a deep and deafening silence.

Whatever the case, old Mark Twain was right when he described travel as fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. You can’t be a local everywhere, and it can occasionally take a long time—a lifetime, even—to find one’s true home. But the search can be rewarding all on its own.

And, anyway, what does being a local even mean? I’ve spent long hours obsessing over this question. Do you have to be born there, wherever there is? Do you have to love the place, to be considered a local there? Does the place have to love you back?

From everything I’ve seen, being a local means embodying the culture of the place where you live, for good or for ill, its definition being a definition both of itself and, to a certain extent, of you. When, in other words, the local customs, traditions, practices, and beliefs—the stereotypes, the expectations both good and bad, and the general, overall feel—of a given place are a reflection of your own, then you are as much a part of that place as it is a part of you.

That’s home. It doesn’t matter how you got there, whether by force or by choice, or at what time in your life. The door is always open to you, if you need it. For better or for worse, everything you want to know about your own self surrounds you like the childhood photos in your parents’ house, so that all you have to do is look around to see yourself.

Now, local is not the same as indigenous. Not by a long shot. I use that word a lot, sometimes with a lowercase i (as in a physical descriptor) and sometimes with an uppercase I (as in a cultural signifier, usually indicating the precontact inhabitants of postcolonial nations), and it’s one of those words that gets tossed around quite a bit by people who really don’t understand what it means. Since it comes up a lot in the essays that follow, I should probably flesh it out now.

Critics, racists, and others skeptical of the term’s very existence are often wont to point out how, given our collective point of evolutionary origin, nobody is technically indigenous to anywhere except Africa. Thus, they smugly conclude, everyone in places like the Americas are all immigrants, including the ones who arrived by paddling boats or chasing caribou or whatever tens of thousands of years ago. In a sense, this is true—in the same sense that every plant on earth is an invasive and every animal is really just a complicated amoeba. It is, in other words, an impractical and highly suspect interpretation of the facts.

Human beings as we know them today do appear to have emerged in Africa, although there is some tantalizing evidence that other late-stage hominid species developed separately in other parts of the world before recombining with anatomically modern Homo sapiens to share some of the fun genes they’d innovated on their own. Even so, the point of origin for all those later Homo variants, wherever and however many there were, appears to be Africa. But the keyword here is emerged, rather than the more commonly used evolved, and for one crucial reason: evolution doesn’t have an OFF switch. We learn that the hard way every time pesky pathogens manage to outsmart our medicines.

Similarly, plant and animal species—including our own—do not grow to fit a particular environmental niche and then just call it quits. That might work on a planet where environments never, ever change, but this is not that planet. Because of the near-constantly shifting nature of nature, natural selection never really stops occurring. Moreover, given that environmental systems are interrelated in the complicated dance of ecology, everything else in the environment also plays a transactional role.

Take the case of bears. A specialist that has adapted to dense, temperate forest is in big trouble if it finds itself in open, mountainous terrain full of large rivals, and even bigger trouble if it somehow finds itself in a snowbank. Hence black bears, grizzly bears, and polar bears, respectively—all of which evolved during the Eocene (some fifty-five to thirty-eight million years ago) from doglike ancestors in Eurasia. But they are definitely indigenous to the places they now occupy, despite being Eocene immigrants from Eurasia, because both they and the environment have evolved to include one another. Pluck the polar bears out of the Arctic, and not only would they die but the seal population would explode to the point where they’d also begin to starve. Pluck the grizzly bears out of the mainland United States, and … well, in fact, we already ran this experiment. Eradication of apex predators like grizzlies, cougars, and wolves are the reason vast hordes of very skinny deer are currently drawing straws to see which one will dash in front of your car tomorrow morning.

It works that way with people, too. Indigenous residents of the Andes and Himalayas have enlarged lungs and higher hemoglobin density to endure the thinner atmosphere, while visitors are often compelled to bring canned atmospheres with them or risk getting the last headache they’ll ever have. The various Inuit peoples are all but immune to snow glare and can subsist on a diet of something like 90 percent seal blubber, which I would frankly love to see non-Inuit people try sometime. And so on.

I live in in the Sonoran Desert, these days, and I couldn’t possibly do so without air conditioning and sturdy boots. Meanwhile, local Indigenous folks like the Tohono O’odham people seem at ease with both the heat and the cactus barbs. They don’t require nearly as much water as I do while working outdoors all day long. And they can eat chiltepins—a tiny pepper native to Sonora that ranks in the upper 20 percent on most heat-intensity scales—like candy, at least when they’re around me.

Granted, I’m the type of masochist who puts ghost pepper sauce on his potato chips. I grew up that way. But enjoying the fact that it burns like hell and causes profuse sweating doesn’t change the fact that it burns like hell and causes profuse sweating. Nor does the fact that hiking in open-air convection oven still feels like hiking in an open-air convection oven no matter how much practice I get. No matter how much fun I’m having, I am also and at all times well aware that I am distantly, woefully out of my element.

So, as far as I can tell, that’s what it means for a people to be indigenous to a place: they and the landscape are intimately interconnected in a way that simply isn’t possible for newcomers. Conceived as a spectrum, Indigenous would be way out on the opposite end from Tourist. Settler or Colonist would be nearer the Tourist end, while Local would fall a bit nearer the Indigenous end. Right in the middle would be where I am, most of the time—simultaneously Home and Lost.

The idea of locals as people for whom the culture or feel or flavor of a place is an accurate reflection of their own still holds some relevance. You can take the person out of [Place], but you can’t take [Place] out of the person, as people tend to say almost everywhere I go. But localness does count. A lot. And it seems like every locality has its own special form of initiation ritual.

I began attending the University of New Orleans (alias UNO) as a teenager way back in 1998, for no better reason than it wasn’t my hometown in upstate New York.

My sense of wanderlust, barely containable within my insecure rurbanite¹* frame, had found a friend in my curiosity about the diverse and unusual—and, having teamed up with my almost total hatred for my natal hood and my almost total lack of regard for self-preservation, their combined efforts converged upon New Orleans as the best possible alternative. It wasn’t as far away as Europe or Mars, which appealed to my budget (namely its glaring scarcity). It similarly didn’t require a passport or international visas, which I only recently bothered to acquire. And its inhabitants spoke my own language, to a point. New Orleans was also the most diverse, unique, and bizarre culture that I could find in my admittedly limited search within the States, representing at once a place that was appealingly foreign and yet comfortably within Greyhound distance.

Upon my arrival, I was given the wholly unappealing task of budgeting my own funds. I would receive a weekly allowance from home, fifty bucks to be exact, of which I could spend however much I wanted on whatever I wanted, room and board being covered by student loans. I was expected to spend it wisely, which is precisely what I failed to do. Why I learned all about quadratic equations instead of fiscal responsibility in high school mystifies me still.

Nearly all of this money was spent on drinking, the activity that follows immediately after breathing on the list of many New Orleans residents’ vital daily rituals, and nearly all of this drinking was done with only my conservative Floridian roommate as a companion. Or it was until the day Hurricane Georges—both ends of the word pronounced like the Z in azure—scared most of the city into evacuating. That day, the majority of UNO’s student body crowded into borrowed school buses in front of the dorms, while all the students with cars, including my roommate, formed a motorcade behind them. He agreed to take me in his car.

At just over twenty-three miles, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge in the world, and it can feel a whole lot longer than that when traffic across the thing is backed up bumper-to-bumper. The caravan crossed the lake at the breakneck pace of half a mile per hour, while storm-infused waves rose up all around, threatening to crash clear over the narrow bridge and wash us off the opposite side. My roommate’s car was a tiny Honda Civic, and I doubted its capacity as a flotation device.

We made our way to the largely abandoned LSU campus in Hammond, on the far side of the lake, which I thought was just splendidly ironic. Wed been evacuated from our on-campus beds to be housed, without beds, at another evacuated campus.

School personnel unloaded the overcrowded buses in front of the gymnasium, waited for those of us who drove to check in, and took roll. The clustered school officials then explained the rules, which were few and simple: no fighting, no loud noises after dark, and no smoking or drinking allowed inside the gymnasium. My roommate and I staked out an area of hardwood floor just in front of the west-facing wall, near the bathrooms and a little lounge with some bookcases in it. We unrolled our school-provided sleeping pads, laid out blankets and pillows, and tried to be nice to one another.

A few hours later, once the boredom started to settle in, I gave my roommate a few dollars for beer and he took off to see if any of the grocery stores in Hammond were still open. I wandered around by myself. Across the gymnasium, on the far side of a sea of collegiate refugees, the resident assistants (RAs) had set up a row of tables where they were answering questions, fielding complaints, and so on. The tables were also a staging and socialization area for bored, friendless freshmen like me.

We dined in cattle feedlot fashion—corralled as a big, restless group into the school’s cafeteria. The cooks and food servers, imported from UNO’s student dining service department, served up our food in high school cafeteria fashion. This caused a lot of recessive behavior.

Can I have another scoop of watery potato chunks, lunch lady?

You wanna kiss my ass?

Good times.

We also delineated cliques, in the classic juvenile fashion, with the RAs occupying one table and each little subgroup occupying their own. There were the jocks over by the windows; the music students in a blob, separated by genre but still loosely congregated and away from everyone else; the art students together at another table (silently); and so on.

This is how I came to know the Seattle crew, a group of six girls and three guys who lived together in a shared apartment suite on campus. They were called that because most of them were from either Seattle itself or the suburb of Bellingham, although in fact two of the three guys were exchange students from Germany.

The Seattle crew became my primary social group after the Hurricane Georges debacle was over, and we spent much of the rest of the school year hanging out together. They introduced me to Pacific Northwest things like drum circles, Ben Harper, and a battery of interesting drinking games. Together, we had some of the craziest, wildest times I’ve ever spent, and I finally had what I considered a genuine college experience. Although most of the time they were, in fact, not so much college experiences as New Orleans experiences.

For example: One night, we all gathered at the Seattle crew’s apartment to watch the original Jaws on a wide-screen TV. We had an entire bottle of cheap wine per person, and we consumed them all by the end of the movie, at which point one of the crew—on reflection, I really hope he was the sober one—suggested that we pile into the back of his pickup truck and go carousing. We sped out of campus like a bowling ball, but only made it as far as the nearest neighborhood before he pulled the truck over to the side of the street. Spread out before us, loud and (literally) gay, was a wedding reception, and the attendees enthusiastically waved us over. We danced and cavorted with plucky strangers until the party wound down, and both husbands insisted that we take as much of the copious leftovers home as we could reasonably manage.

We helped ourselves to the punchbowl—punch, bowl, and ladle—and a sixty-pound bag of uncooked oysters, climbed into the back of the pickup, and sped off into the night. Whenever we saw someone walking on the sidewalk or along the street we would screech to a halt, ladle punch into their mouths, and then squeal away screaming with laughter. We were like reverse pirates, accosting strangers from atop our vessel and doling out booty as we cruised along. We kept this up until the punch was gone, just before sunrise, and then made our way back to campus, where the gigantic bag of oysters took up the bottom half of their refrigerator until someone finally got sick of the smell a few weeks later.

This became known as Jaws Night.

This is what I considered New Orleans at its best. I’ve been on both the giving and receiving ends of invitations involving house parties and total strangers who just happened to be passing by on the street. All that stuff most of us learned about not taking candy from strangers holds no truck with that town, especially during Carnival season, when teeming masses of people line up along parade routes for precisely that purpose.

Not that my time in New Orleans wasn’t also rich with genuinely useful life lessons. It was. I received, for example, the following gem from an elderly bisexual restauranteur named Armand with whom I’d often sit at the bar after his staff went home:

You wanna know the secret to longevity in life, kid? Fish sauce. You know that really smelly stuff they put in Thai food? Every morning, after brushing my teeth, I take a straight shot of fermented Asian fish sauce. One point five ounces—standard pour. No ice or mixers. Then I go about my day. Because of this, no potential partner has ever wanted to stick around past breakfast, let alone get married or have children. So, that’s the secret to longevity in life. Fish sauce.

I really miss that guy.

Such were the high points of the local culture in that most storied of cities. The kindness of strangers. The food and the music. The rampant disregard for the health and diet fads that often sway so many other Americans. But New Orleans has its low points as well. The crime and the weather, for a start—the combination of which conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke once described as like taking a sauna in a high-crime drainage ditch. Not to be outdone, local law enforcement in New Orleans is legendary for being among the most corrupt and evil in the country, or it was until a 2013 consent decree helped turn them into one of the country’s finest.

I wasn’t there for that. I was there for the start of the last decade of the old-school NOLA cops. And what I learned from them, and the culture they policed, helped me to realize my long search for home hadn’t ended yet. It had just begun.

It was Lundi Gras (Fat Monday), the night just before Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), the traditional high-voltage peak of the Carnival season, and everyone was at the height of Carnival lunacy.

The gang gathered in front of Café Brazil in the bohemian Faubourg Marigny district of the downtown area, where all the rowdiest of New Orleans’ young, dirty, and rebellious types had congregated to perform a public wedding ceremony. There were probably two hundred people, including my friends and I, gathered around the social core of the event: earthy, heavily pierced and tattooed freaks, one-part hippie and one-part wolverine. It was like someone had dipped a giant ice-cream scoop into the crowd at Burning Man and upended it just east of the French Quarter.

The wedding itself, a distinctly retro-Beat affair, went off with many a shriek, and all the various countercultural elements in attendance blended into a celebratory amalgam. Strong drinks were consumed, makeshift torches were lit, drums were banged; a trumpet sounded, a trombone responded, and yelling and screaming joined in; bodies danced, leapt, and flailed in undulating rhythms …

The crowd grew, and with each additional person came a new addition to the madness. Another instrument (take me: I was banging a bottle against a lamppost), another howling voice, or simply another body for the roiling mass. In the midst of all of this, while everyone was apparently looking elsewhere, someone gathered a pile of cardboard boxes into the center of the street and lit a fire. The crowd instantly gathered around it in a spinning, stomping frenzy.

Soon, and not unexpectedly, a policeman arrived on the scene. He doused the fire with a fire extinguisher pulled from his cruiser, made note of the power lines overhead (wouldn’t want to melt those things), and left.

Soon after, the smoldering boxes and debris were carried a safe distance from the vulnerable overhead cables, and another, larger fire was lit. The frenzy continued.

The cop returned, this time accompanied by a fire truck. The blaze was extinguished—with rather more force, this time—we were asked nicely but firmly to disperse, and we nicely but firmly refused. The fire truck trundled away, its drivers shaking their heads, while the officer, arms crossed, stood beside his cruiser eyeing us warily. We eyed him back. Finally, after ten or twenty minutes without incident, he decided that we’d learned our lesson and drove away.

Within moments the fire was rekindled, bigger than ever. The crowd stomped and banged and screamed and wailed and danced like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

And then the police returned. All of them.

The Orleans Parish police, the Lakefront police, the horseback French Quarter contingent, a small army of state patrollers, and others I can’t even remember showed up en masse from several different angles. They showed up looking distinctly unhappy, barking orders to disperse through several megaphones. They also showed up with their weapons already drawn, which is a bit of a no-no in anything other than a declared state of martial law.

A few people edged away, or squeezed into the already overpacked Café Brazil, but most of the crowd stood motionless, frozen with fear, wonder, or outrage (or, in my case, all three). Someone yelled something about the cops and their little toys, and several people began to murmur, No violence, no violence, no violence …

The chant got louder, was joined by more and more people, until the entire crowd was chanting NO VIOLENCE! NO VIOLENCE! at the top of their lungs, over and over, in a throbbing rhythm. Someone started to bang a drum. Someone else started to bang a drum. A naively confident young fellow in motley garb approached one of the policemen and started talking to him.

In response to whatever he was saying, the officer swung his club into the back of the kid’s knees. The kid pitched forward into the arms of another officer, who then slammed his body face-first onto the hood of a police cruiser, cuffed him, and shoved his now limp and bleeding form into the back.

The chanting abruptly ceased.

In the chilling moments after the kid was viciously roughed up, everyone within seeing or listening distance stopped dead still. A silent, heavy tension settled over the area, as everyone, police and revelers alike, watched each other like poised vipers. Lundi Gras continued unabated in every other part of the city, as loud and raucous as ever—but within that one block, now occupied by about 350 panting, sweating, tensely energized and destructively primed human bodies, there was little else but the sound of breathing.

Then a bottle whistled through the air, crashed into the windshield of a police cruiser, and all hell broke loose. Bodies were pushed, tackled, and smashed into windows, walls, cars, and other bodies. Bottles, unbroken and otherwise, were swung or flung. Rocks, sticks, and all manner of detritus flew through the air—an air thick with curses, shouts, screams of rage and pain and fear.

I stood rooted to the ground in comingled shock and wonder. I started to run in one direction; two people were swearing at an officer, who was holding them at bay with a shotgun and swearing back at them. I turned again; a body, young and male from the looks of it, flew into a lamppost, spun around it like ribbon, and fell limp along the sidewalk. I turned yet again; someone fell—or was thrown—into the glowing red remains of the fire with a piercing scream.

When I turned around for the last time,