Coordinates (a submission for the magazine of the same name)
By Luke Wetzel
When Jon first asked me if I would write something for a magazine about place, I instantly set to retracing my footprints through familiar ground as well as some territory I’d almost forgotten. In the long months since then, I’ve compiled this scrap heap of ideas, anecdotes and pet theories about the concept of place.
One of my favorite things about traveling is hearing about places my friends have been. I can file away their impressions until I have the chance to form my own, and I wind up feeling better traveled than I really am. In the same spirit, I am presenting this regional road map full of detours to different ideas and stories, ones that I hope can be useful to you in looking at how you personally explore and experience place.
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If you travel enough, you can learn to make everywhere your home. And when “home” becomes a relative term, exciting things can happen. The few things you carry with you -- a jacket, notebook or backpack -- take on an almost talismanic value. The people you meet along the way become the most important people in the world. You, meanwhile, are free to assume any persona you please, and in doing so, you find out who you really are.
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If you spend too much time thinking about what city you should be living in, it's easy to be distracted from just living. In these situations, I find it's best to put on some music, read Whitman or do whatever it takes to remind yourself that the open road will be waiting whenever you're ready to find it.
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There is a slight but significant difference between “traveling” and “wandering.” One is intentionally going some place; the other is traversing the earth with no great concerns or purpose. Personally, I prefer some combination of the two. I like to pick a destination, or at least a direction, but I also like to hop in a car or train just to shake off the numbness fed by routine. As Robert Louis Stevenson says, "the great affair is to move."
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One of my favorite pastimes I've developed while skipping back and forth between two continents is finding the familiar in a foreign context. This might be as simple as hearing your favorite jukebox hits at a bar overseas, or marching with a group of World Cup victory-flushed Italians through their small village, pumping your fists while you all howl the melody to “Seven Nation Army.” Or climbing to the ruins of the fortress overlooking Ancient Corinth and comparing it to "Corinth Square," the modern-day shopping plaza in Prairie Village, Kansas.
Finding a reminder of once place in another can be disorienting, but it can also provide you with a satisfying sense of reconciliation, as if two different aspects of your life have finally been brought into stereo. For example, the spires of a manufacturing plant that used to stand just east of Lawrence always reminded me of Drachenfels, a crumbling castle that overlooks a bend in the Rhine near where I used to live. Drachenfels' industrial Kansas equivalent was much less celebrated a structure, but it had its own banal majesty.
Finding an element of one place in a different culture can occur unexpectedly, like the time I got lost in Chicago and came across a red lantern mounted on a brick building just before dawn. I was certain I'd discovered a speakeasy brothel founded by some Amsterdam émigré. As exciting as this was, I decided not to verify my suspicion. I would have been disappointed if it wasn’t some Old World whorehouse, and if it was, the 3 dollars in my pocket probably wouldn’t have gone so far.
Or it can be surprisingly personal, like my discovery of an estranged family member in Germany. For Christmas one year, my father bought the family a Pinbot pinball machine, the same one Tom Hanks plays in the movie “Big.” Years later, in a smoky student bar in the basement of my friend’s building in Germany, I found myself face to face with the Bride of Pinbot, a resplendent robotic lady whom I immediately adopted as my long-lost pinball parent. I was humbled by the encounter, and I left the bar that night a grateful pin-baby.
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If and when the apocalypse comes to Kansas, I'll probably wait for it at the feet of the ancient Greek-looking statue at Burcham Park, just beside the river. With certain neo-classical artwork, like the faux-Roman ruins at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, I worry that the anthropological incongruity might puzzle park-goers and mislead future historians. But the anachronistic oracle at Burcham Park looks perfectly at home.
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While driving around in the country one night, some friends of mine came across one of the decommissioned missiles silos just outside of Topeka. I went back with them a month later to explore the inside, drink beer and light firecrackers. Aside from a few bats, nobody seemed to mind us trespassing. My friends said that the first time they went, the entrance had been blocked by an unnaturally large cow. Though I didn’t see it myself, I often imagined the dark shape of a bull framed against the starlight, faintly glowing waves emanating from its hide, like the golden cattle of Helios gone radioactively wrong.
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Sometimes I worry that my tendency to assign mythical identities to the unexciting places around me might be unhealthy -- an early indication of an eventual break with reality, perhaps. But without projecting our boldest visions on the places around us, we would be unable to bring about any real change. The land south of Brush Creek where William Rockhill Nelson founded his estate was believed by his contemporaries to only be good for pig farming. Nelson, however, believed otherwise, and if he hadn’t dedicated his time, fortune and self to the area, the museum, sculpture garden and golden luminescent new Bloch building might today only be a pig-sty.
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There are advantages to growing up in a relatively dull environment. You learn to romanticize anything, to take selective snapshots of your surroundings until you've created a collage of images and impressions that anyone could consider interesting. By sharpening your pen on the dull pavement of your hometown, you develop an aesthetic sensitivity that will be pleasantly overwhelmed once confronted with beautiful or foreign surroundings.
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I’m fascinated with places that become a flashpoint for people seeking out adventurous or even psychedelic experiences. The best Kansas example I can think of is Clinton Lake. Since I was in high school, kids I’ve known have gone there to drink, swim, take drugs, hike, stay in secret campsites, and basically be free.
I’ve read about the history of the towns that were submerged when the Wakarusa was dammed, and I’ve even invented some Clinton Lake folklore of my own. For example, the reservoir rat who claims he went AWOL from the Army Corps of Engineers because he felt guilty about the effectiveness with which he wiped the little ghost towns out of existence. Or the Native American man who went on a vision quest in the region armed with only a shoulder-mounted fax machine and the goal of sending back a series of poetic telexes from the wilderness.
But as many stories as I’ve invented about it, and as many good times as I’ve had there, what makes Clinton Lake important to me is its status as a reservoir for other people's experiences, a collective time/space capsule for anyone who has ever come to its shores in a reckless and youthful pursuit of beauty.
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A tree house is definitely the most awesome of kid hangouts. Like something out of a Newberry Medal-winning paperback, the bird observatory in the Baker Wetlands has become my personal favorite secret clubhouse. The wood shutters of the hexagonal structure are the perfect filter for the vast Kansas fields and sky, and a great place to take pictures, write haiku or just hide out for an afternoon.
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What happens to ghosts once their place of residence is destroyed? My friend and I asked each other this while watching a row of old houses get torn down in the alley behind Tennessee street. I asked the same thing while first driving by the rubble that used to be the famously haunted Stull church. But it’s not just spooky locations that spark my interest in the fate of displaced spirits. I recently went back to where my grandparents’ house had stood for fifty years and watched the sun set from a viewpoint previously obstructed by barns and work sheds. When the wind blew through the trees, I felt something calling out to me in the form of a guitar melody. It was a simple melody, but one I suspected I would never hear again.
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The most poignant representation of separation I've seen might be this photograph of a grave in a Weimar cemetery. The stone statue of a young girl waits on the sleek black tombstone of a loved one while evergreens grow all around them – a juxtaposition of the dead, non-living and living that conveys an undying sorrow.
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Recently I read a collection of hippie memoirs that referred to Lawrence as “Baghdad on the Kaw,” because of its wide availability of exotic and illegal substances during the sixties. Reading that light-hearted description of Baghdad as our sister city was a painful reminder about what life must be like there now, but it also gave birth to the tiny hope that we might establish some kind of a cultural exchange when better times arrive.
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Everyone should have a place where they can go off the map, get lost and forget themselves for as long as they are there. For almost a year, my favorite such place was Amsterdam's Vondelpark, a soft green landscape full of willow trees, ducks, bicycles, rose gardens, bridges, ponds – a setting so dreamlike I often found myself straddling memory and forgetfulness. The faces of people I knew and loved would appear to me and linger, as if waiting for me to return. But as I soon as I made a motion to do so, they would vanish again, back to the internal wellspring from which they appeared.
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The ease and speed with which we can communicate across great distances sometimes seems to only highlight that distance. E-mail is convenient, but arrives with a speed that’s almost intrusive. As rare as it is, my favorite form of long-distance communication is still the handwritten letter. A letter is the perfect balance between an instant message and a message in a bottle – what it loses in immediacy it gains in intimacy, providing hope with the time and air it needs to grow.
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I would love to be able to use a warp whistle from a Nintendo game in real life at least once. But until game systems get more advanced, my best bet for instantly transcending time and space is probably still dreaming.
It is said that dreams follow their own logic. And what a dreamy logic it is. You can find yourself absolutely anywhere, having an imaginary milkshake with someone you haven’t seen in years. When people slip into your dreams after years' absence, you don't feel bad about not thinking of them any more in your regular life. The very fact that you're dreaming about them proves they are still relevant to you on some level. In the pleasant parameters of dream-life, you're free to forget what never happened.
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There’s a lot to be said for immobility, an activity that gets a bad rap in our hustle-bustle culture. I recently overheard a lady in my office discussing an in-law of hers, whom she regarded as bizarre because of his fondness for sitting alone in his house in the country and doing nothing. If the man had been there to speak in his defense, he might have cited these words from Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
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I still don't know exactly what miracles I’m hoping to find in my aimless drives, hikes and bike rides across Kansas. After spending several years covering hundreds of miles, I must have surely explored every back highway, rock quarry, or riverfront trail within 40 miles of Lawrence. But somehow -- with the help of friends -- I still manage to find new places, new photo-ops, new ideas. No matter how long I live here, I imagine I'll keep on searching for the visions that may be just around the bend.
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Luke would like to wish you pleasant travels. He encourages you to write and take pictures along the way, and hopes that the next coordinates you find here will be the ones that you submit. More of his writing can be seen at www.lucubrations.net.
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