King of Prussia provided my basic education in contemporary landscape. Soon after it was completed, I moved to Washington, D.C. I settled in Georgetown, the capital’s oldest neighborhood, formerly an eighteenth-century city in its own right, preexisting Washington, and in every way the opposite of the emerging landscape of our time. Its strong agrarian aura still suggested that the edge of town was near. Everything about it, even the little observatory at Georgetown University, suggested a settlement sheltered under the stars but not intruded on by them. Georgetown slopes down to the Potomac steeply. When getting to know the neighborhood on foot, I often went that way. Once on the shore, I naturally sought a bridge. That would be Key Bridge, an open gently arching span in the European style. I developed a habit of walking to the middle. Turning upstream, I’d see steep, wooded shores and rapids: Georgetown, once a port, was situated at the last navigable point on the river. This was a wilderness scene. Looking back across the bridge, I saw the neighborhood on its hill, crowned by the castlelike university—a storybook sight. Downstream lay the city of Washington, its buildings restricted in height to 110 feet at the beginning of the twentieth century, creating a quality of thoughtful restraint over which the Capitol Building reigns supreme. Washington is a symbolic city, our only one, of a piece in style. What was not of apiece lay on the other end of the bridge, disconcertingly near: high-rises, oversized yet lightweight, new yet already old, obstreperous yet weak, glassy but dusty, crowding and frontal, disrupting the proportional logic of the larger scene in a way that seemed less braggardly than ignorant. This was the gateway to my next schoolroom, a world akin to King of Prussia but much larger. Once I walked across Key Bridge and into Rosslyn, Virginia, on the immediate far side, a mishmash of industry, business, and residential buildings that began going up in the 1970s: a predecessor of the edge city or even an early version but, in any event, not built with pedestrians in mind. Thereafter I went into my new schoolroom by car.
That schoolroom encompassed the area around Washington, the very venue in which Joel Garreau had identified edge cities as a contemporary form—though his attention was on newer, more glamorous, and globally oriented excrescences farther out. What I wanted to learn to see was the larger picture of which edge cities were a part, the semicontinuous development that was once called suburban sprawl, then urban sprawl, and finally just sprawl. This seemed an insufficient designation. The word itself was problematic. I had noticed that when one spoke it, people almost invariably said, “What?” as if you had said, “Arrrrgghh!” And, once understood, it was almost always taken as a negative term. How was I to learn to read this landscape if I had only a negative name for it, first of all? And, secondly, how could I settle for a term that suggested subordination to cities?
A better term was “metropolitan area,” though age-old and also implying subordination to a central city. The news of edge cities had been that they were not subordinate, radically skewing the old geography of city and surroundings. But then, the conception of edge cities that Garreau described as clusters was beginning to fray, because, as corporations of the first rank proliferated in what we called sprawl, they didn’t always cluster. You could get a single shard of international corporate or a sprinkling of shards, in any pattern, with or without the city-like rings of secondary businesses that had been defining to Garreau. If there was a rule of thumb, it was “anything goes.” Sometime later, I followed a Listserv in which urbanists, planners, and people interested in the political impact of changes in the metropolitan environment proposed new names for the proliferating edge city derivatives. “Edgeless cities” was one proposed by someone studying Florida. “Stealth cities” was my favorite, because of the way it captured an air these encampments can have, especially when in the woods, of having been erected overnight by Martians unfamiliar with our customs. “Scattered cities” was touching in its inherent desperation, since it didn’t mean that cities were situated apart from one another, as they have always been, but that the pieces of this new kind of city were scattered. How we cling to the word “city,” with its connotations of a citadel, a walled medieval town, at the very least a destination, something easy to find that you know you are in when you are there.
The term “metropolitan area” has been in use for quite a while. The concept of the larger area around a city as an extension of it is, in fact, an industrial-age notion that reflects the movement of economic and political power away from the agricultural country, and into the emergent, exponentially growing, manufacturing cities. Given that some central cities are now the hole in the doughnut of contemporary development, many “metros” have no “polis.” Latter-day political life has not adapted, yet, to the shift of power away from the center into the intermediate zone around many cities, because power hangs on to the old jurisdictions that are its base. But changed as the meaning is, “metropolitan area” has the worked-in quality of long usage while also capturing present-day reality. It can seem boring in its Latinate vowelliness but, looked at closely, it is filled with complex, apt tension. “Metro” suggests the middle of something, which in the age of the disappearing city captures a dumbfounding paradox of landscape in our age, and “area” suggests a blur for a landscape of indeterminate boundaries that we don’t yet know how to describe more precisely, and that is, in any event, constantly in the process of changing.
As a longtime believer in an etymological collective subconscious (now endangered by the disappearance of traditional spelling on the net), I am struck by the way the term “metropolitan area” also obscures reality. While acknowledging expansion, it quietly reassures us that the world is really as it always has been. It suggests that all that has really happened is that once again the city has become spatially enlarged: but it’s still a city. It’s not as if there is no truth to this. After all, no one truth, neither that of centralized forms, nor that of oceanic ones, clearly prevails. We live in an inside-out world in which the city, in many instances, is the empty place: but, then again, in many instances, it isn’t. It’s also true that except on the East Coast most metropolitan areas come to an end eventually and therefore are entities—can be seen as very big cities. A tolerance of ambiguity is essential to allowing our contemporary landscape to come into even vague focus.
But even then there is an amorphous quality—hard to pin down. One usage that has come to express just this elusiveness, as reflected in the contemporary metropolitan area, is double-barreled naming, as in Raleigh–Durham or Duluth–Superior, which creates a permanent but truthful locational dither, hemming and hawing and leaving us up in the air, trapped in ambivalence, imaginatively speaking. We even have trivalence, as in Albany–Troy–Schenectady or Middlesex–Somerset–Hunterdon, each with a pace on it, metrically speaking. Brownsville–Harlingen–San Benito and Melbourne–Titusville–Palm Bay are particularly fine, both in sound and rhythm, but that is not to say that trivalence is always better. Killeen–Temple is first class, not to mention the superb Fargo–Moorhead, though none can touch Champaign–Urbana, which has by now been centering and decentering for some time.
Some of this ambi- and trivalent naming has been the formal work of the Office of Management and Budget, and used by the Census Bureau, which has embraced the idea of the metropolitan area for purposes of counting people. These federally named entities not only subsume cities but also counties, sometimes many—twenty-eight in the case of Metropolitan Atlanta, one of our largest official metropolitan areas, somewhat disguised by its singular, utterly undislocated traditional name. Sometimes in listing constituent counties the Census Bureau throws municipalities in with counties, like the venerable towns Falls Church and Manassas which, in one census document I saw, are left undistinguished from the eighteen counties in the description of the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria Metropolitan Division—another designation. To me this shows that even bureaucrats, and even in their home territory, get mentally wobbly when dealing with our contemporary landscape. But metropolitan areas get named by others, by chambers of commerce, by regional planning boards, by bodies that name airports. In this wider usage, the metropolitan area often doesn’t respect state boundaries, though it has to be said that the Census Bureau has also recognized this tendency, crashing across state lines in defining its statistical divisions. In doing this it also added to their double- and triple-barreled names, little kite tails of grunts and sighs as in Davenport–Moline–Rock Island IA–IL or Boston–Worcester–Lawrence MA–NH–ME–CT. But sometimes metropolitan areas cross national boundaries, in which case they escape the purview of the Census Bureau: nevertheless, the kite tail usage has proved useful for those who strive to name national border crossing entities, as in San Diego–Tijuana US–MX or Detroit–Windsor US–CA.
In the end, the only name for this settlement pattern that is truly vernacular, that has in it the blood flow of real language as used, is “sprawl,” which seems sloppy and slangy as well as hard to catch when spoken but which is nonetheless a real unbureaucratic, un-made-up word, even if it did originally appear as the designation of planners in the form of “urban sprawl.” So as someone who believes in the etymological subconscious, I looked up the origins of “sprawl” before it was applied to landscape, learning, from the Oxford English Dictionary, that it is derived from the venerable “spreawlian,” an Old English word, or OE. This is a bodily word, related to the verbs “to writhe” and “to spurt” but also to the ideas of strewing, sprinkling, springing forth, and spreading the limbs in a relaxed, awkward, or unnatural position. We still use it that way, as in “I sprawled on the sidewalk.” This converted me, partly because the body remains one of the few measures that hasn’t changed, and therefore one whereby we might be able to relate the emergent world to the one we have known. One way I am trying to understand our landscape is to see a “figure in a landscape” as it today is, truly. Something I grapple with in this effort is that, given the strange new custodianship we human beings now have of the world, the more apt term can seem to be “landscape in a figure.” This is, I admit, esoteric. Could it be painted? But the final result of all this is that, while I have become entranced with the expressiveness of our ambi- and trivalent place-names—to the point that sometimes I can’t stop saying them: Appleton–Oshkosh–Neenah WI, Fort Pierce–Port St. Lucie FL: so cryptically poetic, so rhythmic, so primal: WI!, MA!, OR? ME! ILL!—for me, privately—though I don’t expect this to catch on—it’s the bodily Spreawlian OE.
So off I went across Key Bridge into Baltimore–Washington MD–D.C.–VA–WV. Immediately past Rosslyn I found myself in fierce King of Prussia–type close-packed jumble and heart-stopping pastoral country, too, as well as among Garreauvian edge cities, as well as multiple variations: tombstone processions, shards in the woods. Mixed in were confused old towns, blurred at their edges and even erstwhile country hamlets still dusty and faraway in feeling: the suspicious face in half-light behind the blackened bulging screen. The squat brick bungalows of Cold War suburban development, bright latter-day high-rise condos, a forest of grimly standardized apartment buildings, a five-point intersection of multi-laned roads. The place-syntax I had learned in King of Prussia stood me in good stead. Here it was blown out in scale with some new twists. You had the Pentagon, and you had the Pentagon City Mall. You had Little Saigon, a once large neighborhood that, pressured by gentrification, had devolved down to a single old strip mall where people smoked in the street and foreign-looking ducks hung plucked and whole in shop windows, with a gym patronized by white guys on the basement level. In a banal strip of shops on an overloaded route, an Ethiopian butcher. At a crossroads near a flatbed truck with squashed vehicles on it, Hispanic men massing your car in hopes of work. As I got deeper into the social patterns, massings rather than neighborhoods appeared: massings of black teenagers at a cineplex with no black-owned residences nearby, or massings of Koreans in a church but no Korean neighborhood. I came on a cute little old-fashioned street yet, at the end, it looked out on a colossal hodgepodge: turned out the cute street was a mall in the latest style. Fooled! In some parts, lawns were paved over for the cars of extended families, two, three, maybe four generations. I met a young Afghani woman from a mountainous redoubt who was confused because her American boyfriend took her to climb a mountain for fun. Millionaires in nearby neighborhoods were annoyed at households that slept in their beds in shifts. Much of this was Fairfax County. There were, at the time of my exploration, 165 languages spoken by students in the Fairfax County schools.
Of the nineteen counties in Baltimore–Washington, D.C.–MD–VA–WV, Loudoun County, Virginia, caught my attention because it had two clear personalities: a Martian realm in the east, in which AOL and WorldCom (as it was then) were at home and, with their ilk, had annihilated local terrain, and, in the west, horse country that looked not much different from what it was two centuries before, especially if you squinted over a few megamansions. Zoning that in some parts required fifty acres per parcel had kept it that way, but, as I learned, unsteadily; Loudoun’s body politic was, at that time, stuck in an internal argument, voting in and voting out land-use-control candidates in a repetitive lurch between tranquillity and earthquake. At the time of my exploration around the turn of the millennium, tranquillity was prevailing, driving up real estate prices. If you weren’t rich you had to look beyond Loudoun to WV, which was far too poor to preserve: it needed the earthquake. An odd experience was to take a drive, seemingly deeper and deeper into the pastoral landscape of western Loudoun, and then suddenly your country road becomes a four-lane highway amid condos and malls. In morning and evening, an almost unbroken stream of commuter traffic traveled the country roads of Loudoun, toward D.C. and the edge cities around it in the morning, and toward home in West Virginia in the evening.
The same leapfrogging pattern appeared to the north. Montgomery County, Maryland—twenty-five-acre zoning in places—was full of forgotten-seeming, sleepy country landscapes in which you were lucky to find even a country store. In fact, this landscape was protected by state as well as county laws, Maryland being one of the most progressive states in the country where land-use controls are concerned. (“Progressive” in land use usually means landscape preservation.) So, like western Loudoun, Montgomery was not naturally occurring country but, rather, a landscape that reflected politics and law on at least two levels. To avoid zoning restrictions, developers had leapfrogged over Montgomery to free-for-all territory in Pennsylvania, to the north—ensuring that PA would soon be added to the local kite: D.C.–Washington–Baltimore–Arlington MD–VA–WV–PA; a good addition, sonorically speaking. For those commuters from new Pennsylvania developments, there would be I-270—usually at six lanes, but, in some places, counting exits, twelve—right through pastoral Montgomery to our capital city. Beltways are a part of this geography, too. Did ever man build circular roads before—well, yes: racetracks.
The bundle of mismatched roads, like balled-up bits of saved string in your grandmother’s drawer that I had found in King of Prussia, had evolved in the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area, on a much larger scale. Such confusion of roads can make it difficult to explore a metropolitan area—to get a sense of being well traveled in it. I came upon a 1990 article in a scholarly journal by Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias and student of spreawlian, in which he pointed out that people don’t really share a common sense of geography in such places but, rather, experience them as individual customary routes. This helped me develop a working conclusion that it is in the very character of such places that you don’t experience them as a common whole. (GPS has formalized this nearsightedness.) After a while I realized that probably only delivery people like FedEx or UPS employees really get to know a metropolitan area in the full way I was attempting to acquire, and maybe not even they if they use GPS. The mental map I was seeking to compile seemed ill suited to the very nature of this landscape that lent itself to the subjective approach, was anticontextual in a way that might be kin to how people experienced place before maps.
Sometimes a personal trip with no reportorial purpose at all was more revealing. A friend wants to go to a mall she has heard is upscale. For myself, I avoid malls unless in explorer mode, but I agree. It’s hard to find and takes much too long to get there—what is happening to my day!—and then, when we finally do, we find it in steep decline, many stores closed—a desolate situation. In the basement heaps of pawed-over clothing are tumbled together. Not only have I “lost” my day but I will never get out of here: that is my feeling. The idea of a landscape such as this robbing me of time reveals starkly my underlying, bred-in-the-bone aversion to spreawlian. In the fluorescent light a woman in a burka, her face not visible, is sorting through the goods swiftly, adeptly, as quick-fingered and sharp-eyed as an experienced forager gathering dinner in a wild field. Piercing my aversion, more forceful for the resistance, another of those experiences of having stumbled into the heart of America stills me with wonder, although this time it is accompanied by a sense of being in the very depths of the global enclosure of our time as well.
One of the great comforts of older landscapes is that expressions of death, such as graveyards, are completely at home in them. This is less so in cities perhaps, but a funeral in a city is a completely compatible scene: one can even feel that the city was in part created to hold such scenes and give them meaning. For cities—even fast-paced New York—are nothing if not time rooms in which past people mingle with present. Trinity Church, with its ancient graves surrounding, is not only natural on Wall Street but a perfect counterpoint to the upsurging energy. I had noticed that out in spreawlian, however, the rituals of death seemed silly and out of place: a mistake. A funeral procession passing the International House of Pancakes belonged to another movie.
Death came up on a trip I took in the period of my Balt–Wash education, but as part of a group interested in preservation. Traveling in a bus, we visited the estate of a wealthy Maryland landowner, a man of lineage, outgoing and elegant yet rather ordinary, too, as a duke might be—a businessman in good, vaguely equestrian clothes. He welcomed us to his eighteenth-century house—old brick, rosy with memory—on a hill overlooking a rippled countryside of blues and greens, of moving shadows and swatches of light. His forefathers had built the house, and his family had farmed the land for generations, and he wore house and land as easily as his clothes; indeed, they seemed to be an extension of his very person. Though his wife was brittle as glass, and intent on keeping herself formally separate from us plebeians, this American duke’s geniality could not be faulted.
We had just previously visited another eighteenth-century house, down in the valley, owned by people newly rich who reverentially presented the house as greater than themselves. This made the house thingish and separate from normal life. It was strange to see people relating to their actual home as curators—how could they relax?—yet there was in their humility an offering of the house to us as on an equal standing with them which was impressive. Now that my fellow bus riders had met the duke, they were whispering disparagingly about the first couple, saying that the duke was the “real thing.” I knew they were right, in a way, but it made me mad. I was instantly on the side of the people in the valley.
After our tour of the house—fine proportions, intimate social rooms, family portraits, a scene recently painted in a primitive style of a foxhunting meet in front of the house—the duke showed us around the grounds. Extending outward from the edge of his lawns were soybean fields; by way of pointing them out, he squatted down and snapped off a soybean sprig, fingering the beans while looking at the sky in a way that conveyed an attractive, manly connection to the earth. I did not believe for a moment that he did a lick of work on those soybeans.
Several times during our tour the duke mentioned his death in a jocular way, though he was a hale man in his sixties and seemingly in no way endangered. He mentioned it apropos of a family graveyard, where he told us he would be buried, and which he promised to show us before our visit was over. It was something to look forward to, a treat. I thought at first that this reference to death was an attempt to blur the social distinction between himself and us on the tour—death, after all, is the great leveler—and this made me warm to him. As it turned out, the graveyard only accentuated his elevated social station. It was small, but it went back far in time; the money had not been squandered among too many children; we could see that. It was on a high point, a crest overlooking the breathtaking Maryland landscape. We stood there stupidly. Who among us had a private graveyard on ancestral land? But it was not social inequality that bothered me. I don’t really care if some people are rich if all have the necessities and the opportunity to rise if they choose. What provoked me was that he seemed to me to be expressing a kind of contextual comfort in the cradle of providence that has in fact vanished from the world, as if class could achieve that, a privilege conferred on superior souls.
Our host said—entirely without humor—that he looked forward to being buried there because of the view. I found myself in the grips of a paroxysm of hilarity for which I felt ashamed. I was going too far. He was hospitable; nothing obliged him to take time with us. I was just envious. Well, that was true. Looking out at the view, I knew it would be hard to find a countryside that more perfectly embodied my deepest attachments: the blues and the greens and the luscious dark clusters of woodland to the horizon, expressing harmony between God and man. The world is a paradise in which man—a man, this man—is safely encompassed in a web of connectedness and meaning. For a moment I seemed to be in a world altogether different from the one in which I normally lived. Then I remembered that we were, in fact, well inside Balt–Wash—by any definition.
I asked the duke how it had come to be that such a seamless pastoral prospect had remained intact in such a location, when the economics of farming had long ago been marginalized and the economics of real estate development were ascendant. He answered that the landscape was in fact preserved by the State of Maryland. How could I have forgotten that Maryland was in the forefront of containing contemporary development in the East? Preserving large sections of old countryside—calling them “hubs,” formerly a word for cities and an example of inversion in contemporary landscape form—was a part of that effort. Here before me was a superlative outcome of Maryland policy. The illusion that this countryside extended indefinitely was perfect.
Certainly I would not have preferred to see a built-up landscape from the hilltop—though I was jarred, it’s true, to learn that progressive land-use policy had ended up providing a proper view from the grave of a man such as the duke. When I later looked back at the scene in the little graveyard, and, in particular, at the duke’s jocular attitude toward his death, his air of getting away with something began to make sense. I saw him as like the magician’s assistant who emerges in one piece from a coffin after it has been sawed in two, though his actual trick was to get into his own coffin in one piece. Through a sleight of hand the duke would amazingly escape the universal robbery of the world, slipping into his stage-set graveyard in a stage-set landscape just as the curtain came down.
I was pretty sure at the time of our visit that the soybean fields around the duke’s house were more exterior decoration than the source of his economic well-being. But saving old landscapes and architecture seems to me a good job for rich people. And, after all, I knew he did not actually have a more reassuring grave than the rest of us. My annoyance didn’t last. Still, I was a little shocked when, later, I learned that he had substantial interests in real estate development, despite his having implicitly presented himself to a busload of preservationists as embodying values opposed to exactly that. I decided to go have a look at a development in which he had been an investor.
To get there you drove down country lanes—part of the preserved landscape. Once you got to the development, it was easy to get lost—the layout seemed almost intentionally disorienting. The houses were capacious, in a medley of traditional designs, many of stone, rather close to one another, as has become the fashion, with large transplanted trees shading them, suggesting that they had been there a long time. On the whole, it was a tasteful development. The duke might even have conceived of it as a progressive experiment.
Whatever the case, this, not the soybeans, was his true plantation. This was where his grave should have been. Ah, but graveyards in a housing development in what was still essentially spreawlian? That would be as jarring as the hearse passing IHOP. Perhaps a solution is to be found in the work of Thomas Lynch, the poet-undertaker who has suggested that we solve the interment problem—there are too many of us—by having our bodies mixed into an alloy and shaped into hood ornaments for cars: a rather old-fashioned idea at this point, given that cars have receded in symbolic charisma and going places doesn’t mean what it did. For the duke, I thought, a period brass knocker in his development would do nicely.
Extraordinary events in spreawlian can, at least momentarily, create a sense of shared geography in the otherwise subjective landscape of personal routes. Death had a part in one such extended moment. During a ten-day period in my Georgetown years, people were shot dead by a sniper at random spots throughout Balt–Wash. The sharpshooter picked off his victims as they went about ordinary metropolitan area routines—one was pumping gas, another walking across a Home Depot parking lot: places far separate from one another yet all in the “area.” The precision contrasted with a quality of vagueness in this whole terrain, a feeling of nothing being fixed, as if locations had borrowed from traffic and were sliding around, too. The sniper, after picking off his quarry, easily disappeared into traffic. But the locations of the deaths created a constellation that pinned Balt–Wash down. Maps appeared in the newspaper. A context was created, something made up of more than just private routes. Edgeless as the entity was, these deaths of ordinary people in it became meaningful to all, just as the threat of random violence, affecting everyone, created common cause.
Divisions also appeared. Progressive people, who, on principle, love cities and despise spreawlian, made the point during the sniper terror that the perpetrator could not have vanished so easily in an urban street grid. It seemed an inopportune time to indulge in this piety. The police assumed in this period of fear that the shooter was male and also white. This inverted the usual prejudicial assumption that crimes are committed by black people, though it was equally revealing. Who but a white male could so elude the authorities, could hold a whole region in fear? As it turned out, there were two perpetrators, both black: a drifter and a teenage boy, who had done the actual shooting, directed by the older man. Evil incarnate. They were eventually apprehended at an I-70 rest stop, where they were sleeping in their car. That most unlocated of places also appeared on maps in the newspaper, not only in relation to the spots where shootings had taken place, but in the context of the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan region generally, including the two old cities and the interstates and beltways that were a part of it: Balt–Wash had, for a few weeks, become a landscape in its true role as the theater of life.
The nature of the District of Columbia distorts the truth of contemporary metropolitan form in that, because the federal government has not fled to Third World countries as industry has, the District has an intact centrality, greatly reinforced not only by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s grand plan of radiating avenues but by the grandeur of the federal city—the Capitol, the Mall, the White House, and the mammoth classical temples that house government agencies. Though the industrial age may have retreated into history, it remains reflected in the organization of the government, especially the bureaucracies, as is eerily, yet concretely reflected in the physical federal city. To all this the surrounding metro area, however extensive, seems symbolically subordinate to the District, though in fact, over the decades, it has developed an economic life of its own—those edge cities—that may not have superseded but at least competes with the center of gravity created by the government. Meanwhile, the alternative presence of Baltimore, albeit so drastically abandoned by its population that vast sections of it have been razed, more and more, as the connective metro area thickens and spreads, throws the impression of the singularity and dominance of the District just a little more off-center.
Sometimes I experienced Washington as a traditional city, moments still vividly accessible to me in memory. Late one afternoon just before Christmas, I picked up my son Julian, who had come by train, at Union Station. Snow was falling. Washingtonians go right home at the slightest sign of snow. In a dusk fast turning to night, Pennsylvania Avenue was empty and soundless but for the crunch of our wheels. Around us the Parthenons of government disappeared upward. Enormous but perfectly proportioned wreaths of small lights had been placed on the gargantuan columns just at the point where snow merged with darkness. A warm, comfortable quiet enveloped us in the car. I felt myself to be in an intact society which was contained, knowable, endowed with all the qualities, good and bad, that comprise a civilized human nature, stabilized by institutions manifested in its architecture: a nation of modest size but deep culture, quietly living its life. The phrase came to my mind: “Washington in a time of peace.” It was the year 2000. We have never been a quiet modest nation of deep culture but, as I look back, in a way I had it right. The moment on the threshold of 9/11 was close to the last in which we could experience ourselves, however retrogressively in fact, as, simply, a nation.
A few years before I arrived in Balt–Wash, there had been a battle that had also brought the metropolitan area into focus as a place for its citizenry—indeed, eventually, for citizens of the nation as well. Still lingering in the air when I settled in Georgetown was an attempt by Disney in the early 1990s to create a historical theme park to the south of Washington but within its gravitational range. The theme of this Disney creation was to be American history—right in the region in which so much of that history had actually played out. The prospective site was the village of Haymarket, in Prince William County, Virginia, an area thought of by many as “country.” But I-66 went right by Haymarket, connecting it to Dulles Airport and points north, including the two beltways of Baltimore and Washington. At that time much of the county was indeed still rural and also poor. To the extent it had burgeoned on metro energy, it had done so unwisely, allowing a lot of cheap housing development without also attracting revenue-producing commercial enterprises to pay for schools, services, and roads. As a result, the local government was short of money—badly in need of a big fish, as the county supervisor put it. From Disney’s point of view, this made the likelihood of getting local consent strong.
Prince William businessmen liked the idea, of course, as did local politicians. To rural people there, many struggling, the Disney prospect was a gift from heaven. It would bring much needed jobs and property values would soar. But while Prince William itself was in part hardscrabble, right next door was the luxuriant “hunt country” of Fauquier County. This was a land of dukes, of grand estates and riding to hounds. The prospect that appalled the denizens of Fauquier was not the theme park itself, which would be safely over in Prince William—though that was hardly a pleasant prospect. But a much more direct threat was the rings of claptrap that would grow up fast around the new Disney encampment. This was projected to extend to a radius of twenty miles, well into Fauquier’s utopia: a nightmare that had to be stopped.
Disney was probably lulled by the Republican cast of Fauquier, forgetting that free marketeers will forget their antiregulation principles in a trice in order to protect the nice places where they live. Indeed, as soon as the Disney plan was announced, Fauquier County residents mounted a formidable opposition. Wags reveled in the bald-faced turnabout of piratical capitalists clamoring for government intervention. Disney turned the uprising to its advantage, using Fauquier’s opposition as an opportunity to pose as the champion of the common man—who tends to enjoy Disney—against rich snobs. This worked for a while. Disney also took the position that it wasn’t responsible for offshoots of the theme park anyway. That hardly appeased the nobles of Fauquier. Perhaps the factor that most favored Disney was the apathy of the general public. After decades of pell-mell development, residents of metro areas can have outrage fatigue.
But, as it turned out, the sheer scale of the Disney project shocked even the hardened population of one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. The common man turned out to be a sleeping giant Disney had not seen as it set its sights on obscure Haymarket. The plans stressed Civil War history, including the re-creation of a Civil War–era village, plenty of which could still be found in Virginia, a restaging of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac on a man-made lake (it had taken place on the nearby Chesapeake) and an underground railway on which visitors could “escape.” There would also be a “family Farm,” and a “State Fair,” real ones still existing nearby—with Ellis Island, Indian Villages, and a Lewis and Clark raft trip thrown in. It’s widely agreed that what lifted the anti-Disney crusade was the opposition by well-known historians such as David McCullough. Using their fame to reach a wide audience, they pointed out that many actual historical sites—Monticello, Mount Vernon, Bull Run—were nearby, but, even more important, the landscape in which much of our history had taken place, still fundamentally intact, would be destroyed by the theme park and the rings of development around it. How is one to really understand the Constitution without a grasp of the world in which it was written, a pastoral landscape of small towns and slightly larger cities, through which the fastest travel was by horse? How to sense the tragedy of the Civil War if the context has evaporated? “This part of Northern Virginia has soaked up more of the blood, sweat, and tears of American history than any other area of the country,” said historian C. Vann Woodward. The sheer gall of the proposal to set up a fabricated version of our history right next door to the places where that history had actually occurred while at the same time destroying that history’s context upset not just scholars and aesthetes but all kinds of people. Ordinary Americans, it turned out, felt there was a large difference between history as entertainment and history as something actual that had happened in particular places and they did not want that line blurred. In Edge City, Joel Garreau speculated that the only concern that can rouse Americans against development sufficiently to stop it is the destruction of Civil War sites. Founding Father history evidently had strong meaning to Americans as well.
In this way, not only did Balt–Wash become an entity in the public mind but the Virginia Piedmont in which it is set was revealed, both as the theater of action and as a protagonist in itself. It’s one of the dislocating effects of metropolitan development that the natural landscape, even basic topography, recedes to a secondary level of reality, and even disappears—into the physically incoherent covering of pell-mell development, but also into the geography of personal routes and interests that tends to replace the sense of a common terrain. Cities usually have identities anchored in natural features of the landscape—the Potomac or Baltimore harbor, for example. Cities, in their relative compactness, are also small enough to be imagined in clear relation to these features. City natives always know where they are in relation to other parts of town, and rivers or hills can commonly play a big role in this orientation. Not so in the hundred-mile-plus radius of the prevaricating-proliferating metro areas of our time. But with the Disney fight, Balt–Wash became secondary to the Piedmont landscape in which it was situated. That older landscape—not the “metropolitan area” or any other built-world designation but rather that topographical entity—was now the container of the story, was the theater of life it had once been. With the historical argument gaining popular support, furthermore, the fight went national. The landscape of the Virginia Piedmont, birthplace of the country, became evident again, not only locally but nationwide.
To go ahead, Disney needed only the consent of county officials—that is how land use works in Virginia, as in much of the country. But the corporation was hypersensitive to publicity. An entertainment outfit can’t afford a bad-guy reputation. And now, instead of being the champion of the common people against the snobs, Disney had become a greedy bully destroying an American legacy. To make things worse, Ken Burns’s documentary series The Civil War was just then being rerun on television. Much of the Civil War took place in the Virginia Piedmont. Burns was another public voice opposed to Disney. Though the Prince William County planning board was on track to approve the plan, and an approval would be close to impossible to reverse, shortly before the vote Disney pulled out.
I was glad that Disney had been defeated. The argument for landscape as irreplaceable historical memory is a strong one for me. The Virginian countryside is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful in the world. But in the context of my education, the victory was not so clear-cut. Though unchanged, the pastoral parts of the Piedmont seemed eerily altered in meaning by the very struggle. The theme park had been routed, but somehow the contest in itself had turned the landscape into a theme park. Though the battle had been about preserving a continuum with the agrarian past, and had been won, somehow the continuum had been severed. Fauquier County, to take just one example, emerged from the fight having become “hunt country,” as opposed to country in which people sometimes went foxhunting. That in itself was not really new: county land-use laws had already done that, in a sense. What was totally new for me was that, somehow, the trashy secondary and tertiary development that would have been spawned by a Disney park seemed now more authentic in my mind than fiercely defended Fauquier—as did the projected Disney park itself. The now fiercely curated and defended agrarian parts of the Piedmont had become non-Disney—and, in that, perversely Disney-like.
All this was a bit elusive, and yet a powerful example for me of the eerie burglary of the world as we have known it. I still believed that any intentional intervention into “anything goes” American development was positive as a foray in the direction of responsibility for our surroundings. I certainly was still glad that the pastoral Piedmont still existed. But the loss in the process also seemed defining. It suggested that something much bigger than development issues was at work in the metropolitan landscape. Perhaps both because the battle had been national and because the Capitol was in the picture, I began to see the Disney aftermath as extending outward, edgelessly, maybe to everything—to all our landscapes. This was the invasively penetrating collapsed space of the enclosure I had already seen in a piecemeal way in my travels but now, because I actually lived in Balt–Wash, was experiencing firsthand. In the form of the Disney aftermath especially, the pervasiveness of the place-change in our time seemed to come up around me as if out of the ground.
I began to see why it was that all efforts to name the new landscape emerging from the change, by myself and by others, were in the end futile. For to name the new landscape as manifested in Balt–Wash, or the other dithering areas, would suggest that it was just one type of landscape among many, as different types of places have always laid themselves out in past times. But what I had been exploring was not just one kind of landscape. I had been studying the overt form of a new landscape that has subverted all places, whether visibly or not. It was the landscape of the collapsed global space in which we had encased ourselves sometimes, visibly manifesting as in spreawlian but often not. In this, it was fundamentally different in character from places as we have known them. For that reason I decided on the word “atopia” for the landscape that was really all-enveloping, though obvious only in areas where contemporary development, directly expressing contemporary times, was unrestrained. This change, this subversive opposite of place as we had known it, was everywhere, whether visibly or invisibly, whether brashly or in disguise—as in Georgetown, for example, which I was less and less able to maintain in my mind and heart as a sanctuary, or the Kentucky Bluegrass or, for that matter, Patagonia or the Arctic. Wherever I might go, I would deeply misunderstand my surroundings—would be choosing fantasy over reality—if I did not see them as belonging to the sphere of atopia.
A part of the Piedmont had been preserved, true, and its landscape freshly treasured, and all this was good. But the seemingly successful fight against Disney was showing me that we cannot escape this change. It was teaching me that even the most grounded-seeming landscapes were actually in the grips of an invisible ungroundedness, which separated them from their history, untied them from old layers of significance, stole their comforts. This aftershock affected my perception even of Washington itself, intact though it was. By no measure could the Disney venture be compared with Washington, and yet just the prospect of Disney out on the “edge” of what one still thought of as the skirts of the city was such a distortion of the landscape as we imagined it to be that even the gravitas of the capital was weakened by just the conception.
My entire journey, to this point and beyond, was a process of moving toward acceptance of the atopian landscape in which we now live wherever we are—and then recoiling. I could see it intellectually, but then I would go into emotional denial. When I did accept atopia emotionally, the most banal aspects of the world would light up with living significance. So, too, would those places seemingly most intact, though in a way entirely different from my previous experience of them. This was thrilling, but also unnerving. I would backslide, choosing the familiarity of a traditional sensibility—choosing calendar art. It’s no mystery why I vacillated so. The losses in going from the world as we have imagined it for centuries into this emergent one are steep. So much of our sense of humanity is bound up in our older conception of landscape, from our creatureliness to our aspirational nature. Atopia in its overt form negates both our sense of dependence and of transcendence. It seems very hard to find a footing in it. It doesn’t seem to be a context in the old sense, even for death. Above all it leaves us bereft of one of the most long-lasting armatures of our collective interior life. We will not have another until our new landscape, atopia, has been deeply, cumulatively imagined.
Along the way I have looked to the arts for help in understanding the atopian landscape. Film in particular has, for a long time, seemed to me to pick up what is different about place in our time—not in its plots, which often strike me as off the mark as to what really concerns us, but in its cinematography, which for me sometimes tells the most powerful and relevant story behind the twists and turns of plots. Dubai rising out of the desert; creepily lavish office interiors in which you have no idea, geographically, of the location; the way an Italian hill town, though beautiful, has a dead feeling while a gym full of fitness machines is nonsensically vibrant. In a Southwestern setting, the strange unmooredness of strip malls in the desert, the odd, going-nowhere datedness of motion in cars, the strange smallness of the desert, even when it is vast, captures an essence of how hard it is for a person to find a footing in today’s world—this in No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers. The eye of the cinematographer, it appears to me, has been ahead of us all in searching out the condition of enclosure in which we live—the way it is everywhere, even in seemingly wild places, and is always the same, however different the surroundings. Sometimes the effect is sinister. But in other instances the contemporary landscape is filmed for comedy. One of my all-time favorites in this regard is the Angelina Jolie comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which a husband and wife, unbeknownst to each other, are engaged in opposed derring-do corporate-espionage operations, deceiving each other while living together in a McMansion. The McMansion is a major player in this story, in particular a high-tech kitchen fit for a large hotel, but in which food prepared elsewhere is heated, usually at the last minute, to deceive the other spouse into thinking their mate has been home cooking an elaborate meal instead of out murdering people. The end comes when the McMansion goes up in explosive flames. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith at a tottering drive-in near Rensselaerville, at which some people sat in air-conditioned SUVs while others had tailgate picnics and sat on folding chairs as dogs and children ran around. In the upper-left-hand corner of the screen there was a big hole. I perhaps would not have laughed so hard had I seen it in a state-of-the-art cineplex, in which it might all have seemed a bit too close to reality.
Literature, in my limited reading, lags with respect to plumbing the experience of atopia. I’ve probably missed some, but Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, is the only novel I know of that explicitly probes for the emotional experience of atopian settings in personal life. One of the most vivid scenes is of the protagonist, on the other side of the ocean from his estranged wife and their child, gazing through Google Earth at the dormer of the room in which his child sleeps. Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels are set in elaborately described old suburbs of the latter-day edgeless metro of the Jersey shore. Bascombe is an aging but sensitive real estate agent, no stranger to grief where landscape as well as other life matters are concerned, but clear-eyed about all—especially the physical environment of which he is a knowing native. The books are full of the riddles of metro syntax. The style in which Ford wrote The Lay of the Land is itself a probe into the bewildering form of spreawlian, full of sudden switches in mood, choppy with unexpected juxtapositions, with a through rhythm of stops and starts, just like the traffic he describes. Chang-rae Lee is a younger writer who takes on metro territory with gusto in Aloft, set in overdeveloped Long Island. The novel is akin in hilarity to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but without laugh lines. Lee just lets atopia appear deadpan through the eyes of residents who don’t think anything of it, leaving the second takes to us.
I have long thought dance could be an art especially able to probe atopian reality, because the unchanging measure and expressiveness of the body might reveal what is altered in the meaning of our surroundings and our relation to them. There are certainly instances of explorations of this sort in the work of Trisha Brown, who took dance out of the theater and into the street long ago, and who later used industrial stage settings, and Pina Bausch, who brought mounds of earth and pools of water onto the stage. The widespread use of videos or stills of landscapes on the dance stage, often of nature and often enlarged, seems to me another way of taking the outdoors indoors. Athletes and daredevils can strike me as being dancers in the atopian arena, too—the aerialist Philippe Petit, who walked on a tightrope between the tops of the World Trade Center towers, or Felix Baumgartner, who was lofted by balloon to the edge of the atmosphere in a tiny compartment in which extreme claustrophobia had to be endured, then stepped out into a perspective from which the curve of the Earth was visible, and dove. In this he drew a line with his body from the edge of the atmosphere to Earth, delineating the full dimensions of the enclosure that is the theater of our existence. Fiascoes, too, can have revelatory power. That poor Italian captain who ran a global-scale cruise ship aground in the Mediterranean, because he wanted to get close enough to shore to wave to his girlfriend, was an unwitting artist of our physical world—it’s all in the wave, combined with the spectacle of the toppled behemoth at a sickening angle in shallow waters off Tuscany, and the length of time that it remained there before experts were able to figure out how to remove it: a sculpture mixed with performance art and, one has to say, comedy, but there is something of dance, too, in the wave simultaneous with running aground in the deeply resistant material reality to which our bodies are native.
But the art that has most helped me make the transition between old ways of seeing place, so deep set that they seem basic to life, and atopian reality is Earth Art, a movement that emerged in the 1970s, just at that moment when we were creating a global economy. Earth Art is literally made out of landscape, in landscape—sometimes delicately as in the case of Andy Goldsworthy, who might carve a riverine shape in a sand flat and then film it as the tide comes in. Sometimes it’s monumental, as in the case of Michael Heizer’s bulldozed earthworks in the American desert. Sometimes it’s in a museum, like Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, literally a room in New York full of dirt, an exhibition sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation, which has subsequently put a wide variety of works of this sort on display in a vast erstwhile factory in Beacon, a town a bit up the Hudson from the city. It is all fundamentally unframed, insofar as I have known it, and this, too, seems to undo the basic orders of the world. The way much of it is made of landscape itself reverses the age-old relationship of art to context—a glowing Han vase standing out in the primeval forest. When landscape itself becomes art, the old composition, in which we and our works were figures in a context, is disturbed in a way that captures the disappearance of the ground under us.
Many Earth Artists are still working—Richard Serra, with his great bronze curving walls inserted into both cityscapes and pastoral scenes; James Turrell, whose Rodenbreter in the Painted Desert is a hollowed-out crater cone volcano with the vent rounded as cleanly as the oculus in the Pantheon, all to reveal light, this artist’s true medium. The Rodenbreter was built to last millennia, like prehistoric sites, to which much of the work of these artists seems akin. We haven’t cracked the code of all these prehistoric works, but we do know that many are in complex relation to the sun and the stars. Earth Art can seem cosmic in its reference, too—though possibly a part of that is from the way it reminds us of prehistoric works, in scale, in landscape engagement. Still, I feel in some Earth Art a warm companionship with these ancestors—a sense that, for all our sophistication, we are still struggling to combine the fact of our embeddedness with our capacity for aspiration.
One enormous difference between prehistoric works and our own Earth Art, however, is that the sheer difficulty of making the prehistoric works, still unexplained in some cases, is part of their expressiveness. We still don’t know how the builders of Stonehenge did it, for example, given the tools available to them. Inherent to the magnificence of such works is the passion behind figuring out how to make them, possibly over generations: the sheer feat. This gives them a heroism that tops anything produced in historical times. Modern-day Earth Art, in contrast, is easy to do—the choice is in restraint. Some of it even seems to address the disconcerting easiness with which it is made, as in itself expressive of our predicament. We can do anything—but still we are embedded and dependent: how are we to understand that? The easiness creates uneasiness.
Sometimes difficulty is intruded, not in the making but in the viewing. An example is De Maria’s The Lightning Field, an array of vertical steel poles set up in a stretch of southwestern desert. Their purpose is to attract lightning. Viewers therefore must not only travel to see the work but also spend the night there, in the slim hope that lightning will strike. These are extravagant requirements for art lovers used to centrally located museums with restaurants and gift stores. But the pilgrimage, and likely disappointment, is, perhaps, a part of the art—making up for too much easiness. You are forced into a humble relationship to the environment: lightning will not strike on order. Then you fly home.
Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, is just what it sounds like: a jetty built out from the shore of the Great Salt Lake in a spiral. Made to be seen from above, the doodlelike jetty expresses an almost cavalier power. To anyone who loves marine landscapes, this inward-turning jetty in an inland lake is jarringly unromantic, telling us that, far from being free in a vast wild world, we are doodlers wound up in ourselves. Yet Spiral Jetty can seem to ask how we are to rise to the ambiguous role of partial custodians of the landscape in which we are also embedded. Embeddedness can also seem to be expressed by prehistoric earthworks like those of the ancient Mound Builders of North America who created lanscape-scaled mounds in grand symmetrical formations in which they buried their dead. Many contemporary works in this genre can seem to strive to assert a galactic range of reference—to somehow talk to the stars, and some are built specifically in relation to the movement of celestial bodies, as Stonehenge was. The work of both eras have, despite their monumentality, a prostrate quality—are both daring and prayerful, engaging, as they do, with the largest and therefore most humbling thing.
Much Earth Art has a reverent quality, but because it is usually the work of one artist, some can have a disturbing egotism lacking in prehistoric works. How dare you impress yourself in this grand way on the landscape we all share! The (comparative) easiness combined with the egotism can, in the large-scale works, seem more wasteful than expressive, more willful than precise—brilliant, yet offhanded. Where prehistoric works are powerful yet supplicant, supremely daring and yet humble, some of our works, in their easy egotism, remind us of a different vulnerability—our thoughtlessness and our endangerment of ourselves, of the gap between our powers and our understanding. In this, these works are the opposite of the works of prehistoric people, who went far beyond their normal powers to create a mode of expression that has to have closely matched what they felt and understood.
Our Earth Art and often our cinematography subliminally invoke the dawn of human time, which is always implicit in landscape, though usually it takes a while to get to that level. Yet where the builders of Stonehenge surely enlarged themselves through their efforts, we strive to find our smallness and vulnerability in the context of our runaway, outsized powers. As of now, we seem separated from one another by our powers, rather than connected through common effort. That is because we haven’t fully imagined our situation on Earth now and so have no collective interior life to give it meaning, no interior footing from which to respond to it profoundly—culturally, but most important, politically: to discover how to govern ourselves under these circumstances. Earth Art can seem to me to begin this process. It tells me that, like our prehistoric ancestors, we see ourselves in a cosmic context even if we are far behind our predecessors in developing a sense of what our relationship to the cosmos is, imaginatively speaking. What other context is there for a species clearly marooned on a planet that stands out against the universe as distinctly as the Han vase in a forest? About Earth in space there is no ambiguity of figure and field, of foreground and background, of subject and context, at all.
The great gift of Earth Art, however, in my struggle to accept atopia was that gradually some features of Balt–Wash spontaneously began to seem like Earth Art to me. The first great breakthrough was the construction site at an intersection of I-495, I-395, and I-95, the Springfield Mixing Bowl, as it had been dubbed. The massively disturbed topography and the transparent incomplete structures in progress often seemed to me more revealing and expressive than completely built-out metropolitan scenes. With its enormous pylons, its soaring road ribbons clipped off in midair, its mountains of raw earth, and its mixture of chaos and intention, not to mention its vast scale, the half-built Springfield Mixing Bowl, at first an eyesore and an inconvenience, became colossally expressive to me. Because I was traveling around Balt–Wash a lot, I came to notice the way light fell across it, casting shadows even more powerfully cryptic than its actual shapes. It was a modern-day quangle-wangle sundial that somehow seemed to know in advance of ourselves what the civilization we would build in response to our new circumstances would be.
Soon much, then all of Balt–Wash appeared to me as Earth Art of a kind—as both illuminating our atopian condition, and pointing the way toward an effective expressive response. All present-day landscapes are atopian, by definition, but it is in our rambunctious contemporary settlement patterns—untethered, profligate, supplicating the galaxies yet also chthonic, helpless, catatonic, too powerful, wantonly incoherent, feckless, oracular, unframed, enigmatic, profound, beyond words—that our new era speaks to us directly.
I will never feel comfortable in it. Because of the time in which I was born, I will always feel stressed in our new era, will always long for and gravitate to our well-known older worlds, steeped in layers of inherited meaning, beloved classics full of old company, old tensions, old narratives, old tragedies almost enticingly unresolved, like a play cut off in the middle of the third act—even while knowing that atopia has engulfed them. I will always try to run away, but that is not because, as I once thought, our current landscape is meaningless: is really not a landscape but a destroyer of landscape. My first impulse will always be to flee the contemporary landscape because it’s hard to engage with the tough new indispensable book of human life on Earth now. I don’t always feel like being a beginner in a foreign language, continuously and mercilessly exposed to that special terror and despair, the deep inadequacy, that the unfamiliar syntax can engender.
In the midst of my Balt–Wash schooling, my father died. I had had a difficult relationship with him. Perhaps that was why at his funeral I was unable to feel grief. Instead, I was critical of everything—that the service took place in a hyperconservative Catholic church although he had been divorced, that the pallbearers were men though he had six daughters. And so on and so on. He was cremated a day or two later and then buried near the conservative church in a too-new cemetery: hardpan contained by chain link, cars whizzing by. But here I became collected, and present to my father’s death. The mercilessly exposed quality of the location brought me close to him. I was sad to my marrow. But I was also impressed that he had had the guts to be buried in a place without any pretense as to the unprotectedness of our time—a place that offered no illusion of providential enchantment, that was undisguisedly atopian, bare to the traffic, a car wash and a shopping mall down the road. I was awed by his unflinching embrace of the ordinariness of his disappearance, the mental and emotional fiber it took to refuse shelter in obsolete comforts. Did I have that courage?