Don't forget to bring your annotated bibliography to class on Tuesday!
Happy reading, researching, and writing,
kevin
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Journeys Around Home: The Accidental Explorer
Don't forget to bring your annotated bibliography to class on Tuesday!
Happy reading, researching, and writing,
kevin
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"The book is not some obligatory nod to nostalgia with funny stories told by old people'or a dusty artifact of distant, simpler times; or an academic exercise in linguistics. It is an atlas of how brilliantly the human mind can assemble knowledge of the world in a meaningful way" (214).
ReplyDeleteThis made me ask the question, "Can this help restore a lost sense of place?" Simpson talks about how when she's learned the Dena'ina names for Edmonds and Mirror Lake, she is suddenly transported to her personal experience there, and wondered at the way her relationship to the place. It seemed the opposite of what "the tourist" does: travel to a place in hopes of being "the first", without acknowledging the relationships and knowledge that precede them. I loved Simpson's exploration of the way place ties together identity and place: the difference between "labeling maps and knowing place" (216). When you know place, you can locate yourself in history and culture. I remember in another part of the book, Simpson said that language is the meeting place of time and space, and this seems especially true when it comes to names. If I remembered place names in relation to my personal history and experience, I think I would always be reminded of who I was and am becoming, which was an interesting thought to me. Simpson ends by saying. "The rest of it, I suppose, we'll discover as we walk, naming our way across the land" (225), which I thought kind of contradicted the idea of acknowledging its already-given, meaningful names,but is there a way to do both? Acknowledge its history but also its present-ness; the names of past meaning and the way it is still meaning? I love the thought of it, and when I thought of how I "name" various places and landmarks, it did remind me of my relationships to places; I don't know if I would say it necessarily restored a "sense of place" as much as a "sense of placeS" ("places" being both physcial and mental places at different times), but it was an interesting idea.
“ ‘ That’s interesting, following in people’s footsteps. You can never do that exactly, you know… You can never have their same thoughts. You can never know what it was like to be them at that time.’” (147). The idea of pilgrimages and following someone’s journey has been a common theme in the class, and it came up a bunch in this book as Simpson followed other stories to have her own adventures. This quote really made that stand out. Simpson says the statement made her question why she was travelling in the first place. And I wonder how many people make a specific journey because they heard about it from someone else’s story and they want to do something like it. In the chapter before, Simpson says about her trip to the van where Chris McCandless died, “ This is not a spiritual trek. I refuse to make this a pilgrimage. I will not make his journey my own.” (115) And yet, there were countless examples in the chapter of people doing just that. They had been drawn by the story of McCandless and wanted to get that feeling they believed he had experienced. They hadn’t had someone telling them they could never experience something in the same way that someone else did. How many times do we try to do just that? How many people travel the Grand Tour because they have seen the pictures or heard stories? How many people followed the path that Cheryl Strayed made on the PCT? There are countless examples of that idea of replicating someone else, and we forget that we are individuals. There will be different things that happen to each of us as we travel, and different things that will make us question why we are doing it. There will be different materials that we bring, and some people will be more prepared than others. So why is there a trend and this desire to replicate something that is impossible to replicate exactly?
ReplyDeleteJessika (Bambi) Caudy
ReplyDeleteNovember 15, 2015
When we picked up this book, I wasn’t expecting it to be a series of short autobiographical stories. It was actually fairly nice to read, I never felt burned out because her story always changed and each situation and journey presented a new struggle. I connected most with the chapter “Turning Back”. I myself have a bouncing, beautiful, blue heeler named Tasha. She and I go on frequent hikes and I take her on miles long trips through the woods to hunt and fish. Recently with age she has been slowing down and after two hip surgeries, she can’t make it the 15 miles to the lakes with me anymore. As I was reading “Turning Back” I cried with Sherry, and connected with her struggle to beat the ever ticking clock of age. My question became, “Does travel and the search for our place in the universe coincide with the exploration of how finite our time and place is in the world?”
My question is pretty philosophical I suppose. What I’m getting at is that by traveling and exploring, we discover how big and diverse the world and its people are. This has a minimizing effect on me, and most likely others. By understanding the vastness of our world and how for billions of years the landscape has changed, I discover that me, as a single human, living only about 80-90 years, who just enjoys long walks with her dogs has a very finite place in the universe. I got Tasha when she was only 2 months old and I was 10 years of age. A decade together filled with adventuring and exploring, in hindsight, only feels to have been a day. Now with her age catching up and her life coming to an end, I realize that my own place and time, in the grand scheme of things, only appears as a faint blip on the timeline of everything else. The same way Tasha’s life has become a passing blip on the timeline of my life.
I can see pretty clearly that Sherry discovers a very similar concept on her trek with Jenny. Life is short, and passes by so quickly. She understands that half of her life is already over and that her dog’s life is almost complete as well. This forces her to face up to the idea of death and explore her own idea of finite time on earth.
Many of the ideas in this book came together for me when I read about the chronotope (209). Bringing language into discussions about travel and a sense of place – thinking about the lost children instead of just the beautiful woman – is fundamentally important. Philosopher Bakhtin’s chronotope, which “points in the geography of a community where time and space fuse,” belongs in our discussions; specifically, (Anthropologist) Thornton’s idea of Tlingit names as chronotopes is where the chronotope meets travel. In addition, since knowing the Tlingit names of places is necessary to understand (although understand may be too strong of a word here) those places, the term chronotope is an attempt to define what those Tlingit names are about or what they mean.
ReplyDeleteAs Hayes’ book describes, people are tied to the land and the land cannot be separated from people. Simpson’s book, for me, was the exploration of this idea by a traveler – not connected in the same ways to the land (at least in the beginning) as a local, and not pretending to be. Perhaps if any type of “tourist” can be redeemed, it is Simpson’s “explorer;” searching eagerly for knowledge, letting go of pride and preconceptions, and letting the land take control of her, as well as of her travel. A travel of truly learning about the place you’ve come to – not where you impose your own ideas upon a new place, but where you let the place and its people teach you – perhaps this is how travel could be used as a tool for decolonization instead a continuation of colonization. Is this possible? You decide.
Simpson’s Accidental Explorer made me step further into thinking about place, as in our place – Alaska, Some existential questions came to me, particularly with how we, as Alaskans, deal with community and loss. We have seen a lot of it here in Juneau lately. It seems as though we are just skimming the surface of a deep lake of drugs and violence, one that our small town hasn’t really known. What is it about now (in time) that sees these issues unfolding? Is it influences traveling up from larger urban areas? Is it geographical and economic restrictions that lend to a climbing rate of suicide, murder, and overdosing?
ReplyDelete“Circumnavigation” was a particularly moving chapter. When Simpson stated, “Not everyone returns, even from the most modest of expeditions. Boats are found drifting…bodies float low like waterlogged driftwood, nibbled into anonymity by the sea and its creatures (p. 101),” I immediately thought of friends I’ve lost to boating accidents, small plane crashes, and avalanches. Simpson has a way of capturing horrific things, the way a journalist would, but turning them into something beautiful, the way a poet would. I thought further on her quote about modest expeditions and being nibbled into anonymity. It could be said that this is also a figurative look into addiction or depression…
To close on a lighter note, another quote that I loved was, “In Southeast Alaska there exist more beaches, more mountains, more secrets than I can ever know (p. 112).” Simpson calls her literary exploration, “an atlas (p. 214),” which I really liked. It brought a stronger sense of place in the word choice alone. It evoked a sense of connection.
Do you think traveling vicariously through another person’s writing can be enough to take the place of actually going to a place?
ReplyDeleteWe have discussed many of the motivations behind travel in this class, and in the last couple of weeks we have begun to circle around the question of whether or not people should travel at all. In our other readings, the travel writer freely names their destination and some of them even encourage others to follow in their footsteps. But Simpson brings us face-to-face with this question of, “Should we?” Simpson expresses a desire to share the wilderness of Alaska and to show its beauty to others, but also wants to preserve these places as best she can. She narrates her journey through a place in Alaska and doesn’t disclose its name (aside from giving a creek the nickname “Bad Ass Creek”). I thought this was a radical way of writing a travel narrative; to describe a place and refrain from naming it, in order to prevent other travelers from blazing onto the trail and dramatically changing it. Personally, I was satisfied to listen to this story and experience it on the page. I felt like I had been there and seen the place that Simpson described. But I don't always feel that way after reading a book about travel. Often after seeing pictures or reading about an amazing place, I do feel a twinge of wanderlust. I think many readers will have the desire to go out and find a place of their own, a place to inhabit and populate with their own stories. As Simpson writes, "I don’t know how else we can keep such places from becoming another Denali or Glacier Bay or Yellowstone, except by deciding, each of us on our own, not to go there" (57). We will need to consciously fight the colonial and imperialistic ideologies imbedded in travel, if we are to overcome this desire to possess a place.
I’m still reeling from Ernestine’s visit last week and I’m not sure I can go back. Sherry Simpson is Ernestine’s writing mentor and she does much to honor Native people. Also, I certainly enjoyed the feeling of adventure, her taste for cold, damp, hard and loving nature. Still, her book is very much within the travel literature tropes we’ve been discussing throughout the semester. The idea of a pristine place, untouched, while somewhat-critically examined by Simpson, was still quite embraced by her as well. The unnamed “wild” territory she explored, the adventure she had, was structurally within the same ballpark as John Muir.
ReplyDeleteSo while she attempts to critically examine and give due notice to the critiques of her genre, and to recognize indigenous voices, she is still all-in on the genre. Does it make it better? Does being self-aware of the problems of colonialism—all the while basking in its privileges and conceits—mitigate its destructive side? I think you need to change the structure. You need to undo the power imbalances. You need to start from square one. I don’t think Simpson is doing that. She still needs her glorified Romantic wilderness, and she needs an audience to tell it to. It is still perpetuating the problematic colonial patterns we’ve been discussing all semester. Even so, her championing marginalized voices, such as with her work with Ernestine, has been a good example outside of her writing.
Sherry Simpson wraps up not just the experience of travel but also the experience of being a travel writer. "Now the trip is done and the story takes over... the stories are the only riches I discovered." (27) Why not share the wealth when you return? It is in the way that we share that become ethically challenging to understand. By sharing the stories it does come off to be for our own ego. A kind of "Look how cool I am to have adventures like these." It sparks the consumerist quality that is imprinted on us in our globalized culture. We see something and we want it. But why? Why must we have it all? Do we not already have it all right where we are? Why are we not satisfied with "explornography"? Maybe it is because of the excitement of discovery. There may be few places that would be considered new territory to the world or even to a nation, but it can be new to you. These new things become part of you. Claiming new experiences for your own does boost your ego, but not just the ego that resides within other view of you but the ego that is solely your own. "That story that remains is the one thing in this world that belongs only to you. That story is your new home. It is your life."(31)
ReplyDeleteWhen we reach into the farthest place that a human being can reside nothing really exists. This is kind of an odd concept to talk about, but as Simpson unpacks per bag of all unnecessary things and nothing remains this is were I am talking about. We need almost nothing, but throughout life we acquire memories that remain and are nessicarily for our being (or at least we feel they are necessary). The "painful beauty of our ordinary day" will always exist as long as we follow the norms of the culture we live in. Human culture and even biology tells us that the seeking of new things is not unnatural. The question remains though: How do we satisfy our desire to explore with out creating damaging effects? I do not think it is possible with the western mindset that dominates a culture that is always growing.
There are so many thing to think about and I'm hoping that it will all come together during discussion tonight!
In the same vein as Leesha’s post, I was also wondering why exactly do we replicate these travels? While simultaneously sneer at people who do it anyway. So why is there this almost this dual faced do or don’t idea in travel? Is our travel ever really our own travel? “We were too cynical to read entry after entry from people looking for meaning in the life and death of a man who rejected his family, mooched his way across the country,” (Simpson 127). While yes, people like McCandless have inspired many of our next great adventurers, they also have created a whole generation that believes in a “grand journey”. This creates a negative view on travel and that perpetuates a negativity on the people who travel. It becomes this cycle, and I’m not sure there’s a way to stop it. We continue to push people to have these grand journeys, but to do it their own way, but they could find an easy plan from any travel novel. I completely acknowledge that some of these stories may be incredibly inspirational to some, but we also have the push behind us to not rely too heavily on those who do inspire us. Leesha also brings up a good point that we lose individuality when we try to reenact these journeys, but is there a way to do the same journeys but have a completely separate experience? Or are we doomed to continue this cycle of unsuccessful repetition?
ReplyDeleteOn page 23 of her book, Sherry Simpson states, "Death waits all around us. So does boredom." I was a little surprised to read this, but then I considered it in the larger context of what she was saying. We read all the time about people dying in plane disasters and train wrecks, people dying from spats of strange obscure diseases and also bear attacks. But she's right, it doesn't seem very often that we hear about people dying on their way to work (unless the car accident makes the news), about people dying in their beds, etc. When people go out to travel in the backcountry of Alaska, they are always concerned about dying in some kind of wild wilderness encounter: mauled by a bear, crushed by a glacier, poisoned by berries. So my question for the week is this: are we subconsciously seeking misadventure and harm when we travel?
ReplyDeleteObviously we aren't consciously seeking it, but I think that there's definitely a sense of disappointment that comes from a trip that goes perfectly fine. We've discussed plenty of times in class how people enjoy telling the stories about things that go wrong on their journeys. This is the same, I think, with people who go on big trips to the Alaskan wilderness and don't encounter bears. They have the bear spray, the bear bells, they sing as they walk places in order to let the bears know that they're there. And if they have to return from their trip without seeing any bears, they're disappointed and a little upset. They aren't consciously desirous of encountering a bear, of being at risk, of wanting to have to use their bear spray - but if they don't see a bear and get that thrill of potential danger, they're definitely disappointed. Just something to think about.
One consideration that I happened upon while reading Simpson was in reference to (once again, I know I bring it up a lot) colonization and travel. Early in the book, Simpson begins talking about early exploration of Alaska and cartography; she states, "I couldn't help but suspect the land itself was blank until cartographers conjured it into existence by laying eyes upon it and making it real" (Simpson 9), and, "the discoverer's task was to invent the land, subdue it, possess it. What once was empty, on the map and in the mind, would be rendered safe and knowable simply by inscribing it with familiar names, trails, trade routes, settlements-all the useful templates that had served so well before" (Simpson 10). During the first day we brought in personal critical texts, I discussed the way that mapping and naming in Australia functioned as a colonial method to disrupt the already existent historicity of a geographical location set up by an indigenous people group. I see that again in these passages and it makes me think, geography is only authenticated through the validation of writing. If it is not mapped and named, it simply does not exist; it is similar to the concept of wilderness which she posits of the ideological separation of humans and wilderness; "a place seemingly untouched by humans". In this sense, if a human (specifically a European man) has not traipsed a certain ground, it is outside the realm of human existence.
ReplyDeleteThe Accidental Explorer was a marvelous book that tied theoretic questions and ideas into short journeys of the author. One of my favorite questions is pondered during the journey along the coast with the 3 men - Hank, Richard and Mark. Simpson goes back and forth on the issue of preserving the “wilderness” and never comes to a clear conclusion on what should be done. My question is essentially the same, as I find it so thought provoking. I would like to take one or several journeys like Simpson and many others have – trekking through the wilderness with only the contents of my backpack, but I too feel a great love for unseen and unheard places and desire to keep them as they are. I feel like it would be hypocritical to allow myself to go experience such natural beauty but not want to allow others the same privilege. I’ve come to a semi stable conclusion that maybe we are disturbing and changing some landscape or some environment slightly with our intrusion, but that if we don’t explore and learn about these places, why are we here? We are animals too – we don’t blame the bear for making the squirrel move out of its path. As long as we follow the natural cycle and participate in nature as we should, as the Indians did, and be respectful of it, I don’t think it can hurt to lie beneath the stars and listen to the ocean every once in a while instead of hiding in our warm houses not having ever experienced the world’s beauty firsthand.
ReplyDelete