I landed back in Salmon Nation this week. After six weeks in the desert, the Northwest damp was strange, almost a shock to the system—as anyone who saw my hair my first day here could attest, as locks that were mostly flat in the desert sprang up fuzzy and curly within just a few hours of my return.
I arrived quite late on Wednesday, almost midnight, but found myself delaying going inside, despite my tiredness. What were all these strange smells on the air? Fragrance hung thickly in the cool humidity before an expected spring storm. Everything had a bit of charge—it made you picture the plants feeding off the electric moisture, finding the power to shoot up out of the ground overnight.
Where I had just been in southern Arizona (variously on the lands of the O’odham, the Chiricahua Apache, and the Ópata), spring is sun-centered: the lengthening daylight so clearly leading to higher temperatures, the sparse flowers opening up to receive the light each day and then curling themselves up again at night for warmth. It’s the dry season there, months away from the rains that will come in mid-summer.
Spring in the Northwest is, of course, all about the ongoing rain. That first night back I slept with the window open to listen to the storm as it rolled in, full of early morning thunder. Spring is deeply and constantly wet, the trees here drinking not just through their roots but from all the water nestled on leaves and petals.
Looping back between these two regions in recent years has been an important lesson in such contrasts, a reminder that the constructs we use to group places together (with words like “The United States” or even “Turtle Island”) can help hide differences that matter tremendously to people on the ground. If I told someone here in Oregon, for instance, that I’d already been through the 2023 fire season, they’d probably be mighty confused. But it’s true—summer isn’t fire season in the Southwest; spring is. High winds and distance from the prior year’s heavy rains mean that April can be full of red flag warnings and trace hints of smoke. Last year, after my time in Bisbee—as I was writing about some other more peculiar markers of springtime there—multiple fires in April sprang up and threatened the homes of folks I had just met.
This year, at the overlook to the old Copper Queen Mine on the edge of Old Bisbee, I ran into a hotshot crew from up in the Coconino National Forest (near Flagstaff) who had been temporarily relocated given the high fire risk. I wasn’t surprised to see them: further west, out in Canelo, we’d had multiple days where the smell of fire reached us. Nothing grew so large as to cause concern, but the smoke was heavy enough that—given that I was camping—I slept at least one evening wearing a KN95 to help protect my lungs in case it grew worse overnight. Now, heading into May, the 2023 fire season down in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts is on its way to being over.
This has all led me to reflect on how easy it is to let one’s own regional affinity build up blinders to the material reality that others are living. Take, as an example, the Prepping for Fire Season series we ran here at Unsettling last year, beginning in May then ending in July, when the dominant West Coast fire season really began. My time in recent years has been more concentrated further west, and it didn’t even occur to me that I was presuming a “normal” progression for the seasonal experience of fire, while completely ignoring the patterns on the ground where I had just been.
We do this all the time in our broader society. Major narratives and federal policy initiatives are often shaped around dominant cultural constructs derived from such unrecognized local affinities. Should we really be surprised that our built environment has consistently eroded over time, from regionally variable building forms, to something that looks a lot like a D.C. suburb?
This unwillingness to truly account for the differences in places—of the physical landscapes upon which we build cultural landscapes—causes us a lot of problems. This has been hashed through time and time again in critiques of suburbia and overall patterns of land use; homogenization via mass media paired with the profitability of corporate franchising models and cookie-cutter housing development come together with cultural fear of change and difference to deliver what James Howard Kunstler termed “the geography of nowhere.”
Myself, I’m interested in being somewhere, even if the norms in that place turn out to be completely other than that to which I’ve been accustomed. That period of adjustment can be uncomfortable, as one learns what’s usual around here—deciding what to take on from a new grouping or new place, when to keep old boundaries and habits and when to change them, what contribution is truly helpful and what is an overly strict imposition of norms from an entirely different cultural space.
I’m always on the lookout for people who can do this well. The best examples I tend to find are people who care about plants or farming or food. The real lovers of food are going to try the local delicacy, no matter how strange; think of Anthony Bourdain, who gained a following, not by searching out what looked normal to him, but by being genuinely open to eating the dishes daily enjoyed by people in whatever particular ‘somewhere’ he happened to be.
If you’re a foodie you probably have someone you follow in your own region who excels at making dishes with what grows near you, and is part of the overall movement to push people beyond centralized and industrialized food production, which has been growing for some time now. But there’s a lot further it can go. What might that look like? For a good example, check out this piece by cook and writer Hank Shaw, called “Sierra Spring,” in which he walks through the process, as he puts it, of “how to link time and place on a plate.” (Hank also happens to co-write a Substack publication which I also enjoy, called To The Bone.)
I started reading Hank a few years back while trying to determine what weeds popping up in my backyard were edible, which is an excellent exercise in placing yourself in the particularities of your place and its given plant community, of eating from somewhere. I recommend it.
That first year of foraging from my yard (then up in Seattle, land of the Duwamish) saw a lot of green soup, mass quantities of harvested greens blended with slow-cooked alliums and whatever else might be on hand. My process for making it was loosely based on Anna Thomas’ green soup recipe, itself loosely written.
The weeds-to-soup routine created a simple coherent beauty in my life, the green in my kitchen matching all the damp green budding about the hillsides that rose above the Salish Sea. That type of simultaneous nourishing and aesthetic coherence has become a marker for me of how I’m connecting to the particularities of where I’m at in any given moment. It’s one of the other driving motivations behind this journey of learning natural building I've been on these last few months.1
For natural building is a way of digging, literally, into what is both similar and different in any given place on the planet. One may prioritize the use of bamboo in Costa Rica, or clay in the Southwest, or wood further north, all depending on conditions. There are tools and materials that can be applied across contexts, but there is the opportunity to root into wherever one is by becoming more deeply acquainted with what the earth is offering you in the particular somewhere you are just then.
And just as attending to the local and seasonal or traditional can lead to amazing combinations on a plate, there’s a beauty not readily available from all the mass-manufactured corporate supply chains that can be found by committing to using, and looking, at what is right under your feet.
In the final workshop I took with The Canelo Project, we watched a gorgeous short film made by part of the team there (specifically, Benito and Kalin Steen) documenting their collection and use of local clays, and the vivid palette of clay paints they were able to make and use as a result. What’s it like to work with a set of local materials? The video really captures the experience:
Maybe it all seems like a lot of fuss and bother, this need to pay constant attention to your surroundings, the work of learning just where in the world one really is, both wherever you call home and those places you visit—and of respecting, rather than dismissing, those differences. Of not expecting a Tucson, say, to be a Portland or a Philadelphia or a Paris. But the failure to attend to the particulars of place—to instead import an idealized notion of what a house or a city or even something so small as a dinner plate—is one of the many pillars of colonization, the cultural post upholding the economic structures that took over and destroyed localized, Indigenous ways of being the world over.
This willingness to look, and look again, at where we are and the possibilities for making a home—not in some abstracted idealized sense, but fashioned in relationship to where we are—is essential to decolonizing, to unsettling the larger culture. How do we relocalize without appropriating Indigenous culture, for those of us who cannot claim indigeneity where we live? This action of attending to the difference of place, and letting it reach in and shape our lives, is a good first step in trying to answer that question.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg
Most recently in “Land Learnings.” See also “Houses Without Walls,” and “Raising the World.”