An American Provence

PROVENCE

PROLOGUE

WHEN I WENT OFF AFTER HIGH SCHOOL to get a college degree, it was pretty clear that my father wanted me to be a professional of some sort—a medical doctor would have been best, but a dentist (like my dad) or even an engineer would have been acceptable as long as I could make a good living and people would respect the profession I had chosen. I liked to solve problems and was pretty good at math, so I signed up as an engineering major my first semester at school. The school’s curriculum was formulaic, to say the least. All the courses I took were part of the core except for those in my major and any overload elective courses I was willing to add on. In my second semester I signed up for one of the required core courses, called Introduction to Geography. I had always loved maps and dreamt about exotic places, but I had never given a thought to becoming a geographer—in fact, I had no idea anyone could be such a thing. Americans, unlike our European friends, do not have a tradition of geography as a basic discipline in universities and colleges. In Europe, geography is one of the most popular majors—this is especially true in England, Ireland, Germany, and France. But here in the United States, geographers are at best confused with geologists and at worst acknowledged with a perplexed look and a quick change of topic or, at cocktail parties, being asked to name the capitals of the fifty states.

Much to my amazement and my parents’ deep chagrin, from my first moments in the class I was pleasantly stunned by my visceral connection with this topic. That was the end of my engineering career and the start of my much more exciting and often misunderstood career as a professional geographer. Of course there was much more schooling and degree taking and job hunting to undertake before I could be considered a professional, but in the end that is what I ended up being—a geographer.

My initial fascination with geography was hard to explain, even to myself. But as I learned more, I realized I was being shown the complex ways in which the world works and the intricate dance of causes and effects choreographed by place and space. The complex processes of the physical earth that set the stage for all life, including the human realm, were what I wanted to study and try to understand. I am still working on the understanding part.

This book is about that need to sense and understand this intriguing, quirky, and challenging world. As William Least Heat-Moon writes in his book Roads to Quoz, Human genesis arises from the land—from a place. The physical expression of place or of how we see a place can be summed up in the word landscape. In this book I will discuss two specific landscapes and, in a way, share my small gifts as a geographer with people who would like to understand a little more about land, place, and how we as humans live in and relate to landscape. Because of serendipity, discussed more in the first part of the book, I decided to look at two relatively small places that are seemingly from different worlds. But they both have the requisite human and natural elements that create a special place, and, to be honest, are two areas I have grown to love and wish to share.

One of these places is a small farming and ranching area along the valley of the North Fork of the Gunnison River in western Colorado. I first came to Colorado in the mid-1960s and adopted it as my home, or perhaps I was adopted by it—I am not sure I had a choice because we cannot really choose who or what we love. I have lived in, and worked extensively along, the Front Range and in the high mountains of the state for years, but only relatively recently have I spent large amounts of time in, and devoted study to, the state’s far western regions. I discovered I was missing a lot. For example, the North Fork of the Gunnison in western Colorado has a physical environment and a human landscape that are at least as interesting as those of other areas I had been studying; in addition, the region is rapidly changing and developing into a cultural and economic magnet. The rest of the state may not see this transformation, but it is happening and it is happening quickly.

The second place is inspired by my wife’s mother and her family. My mother-in-law was born and grew up in Marseille, France. All of her family members still live in southern France. While visiting them, my wife, Carole, and I would travel through the almost mystical landscapes of Provence. Carole and I visited these places many times over a period of several years. Whenever I mention in the book that we did this or that, she was the one putting up with my geographical whims. These landscapes captured me much as Colorado did many decades ago. When I am in Hotchkiss or Paonia, I cannot help thinking about Provence; when in Provence I repay the compliment by using these places in western Colorado as my comparative landscape. Why is that? What are the factors that keep these images popping into my head? How can two sets of peoples separated by thousands of miles and different languages be so much alike and not know it? These questions are the basis for what follows.

I would like to think that everyone is as interested in the world’s myriad landscapes as I am, but that is probably not the case. I am not writing this book for those who specialize in any particular discipline, even geography. I hope those who pick up this book and enjoy its contents will be people who are, most of all, curious—curious about a lot of things and eager to find out how different places became different and perhaps to learn that they are not so different if one looks at them with the right questions in mind. The people I would like to have read this book are the kind of people I would like to have long conversations with over dinner and maybe a little wine. This book is my surrogate invitation to you to a Provençal–North Fork landscape soirée.

Seeing, sensing, and understanding a landscape have common factors for everyone. The way the land lies and how the rock and soil create the foundation of a place, the patterns the vegetation takes as it responds to this foundation below and the climate above, and the way the land and vegetation mildly coerce humans into the ways they use that space are all inherent in one’s sense of place. A New York Times article celebrating Wallace Stegner’s 100th birthday put it well: It’s worth remembering another lesson of [Stegner’s] life to choose authenticity over artifice. If you don’t know where you are, he said . . . you don’t know who you are. There is also a kind of phenomenological aspect for each of us in our response to a landscape. One person’s bucolic scene is another’s smelly, dirty farm. Each of us reacts to a landscape at least slightly differently. We all have our favorites; the ones in this book are some of mine that I wish to share with you.

Woven throughout this book is an underlying acknowledgment of the practical, yet natural, way many of the people in the two valleys live and work. I talk about organic farms and the food lovingly grown on them; I emphasize the role of nature in the ways viticulturalists decide where their vineyards will be placed on the earth. In a more academic work, I would probably write extensively about how these practices are all a part of sustainability and how it is inextricably linked to place—but the word sustainability is often overused and more often misunderstood, and I will keep the use of it to a minimum. So I simply report in the vernacular language the people of the two valleys use. Many inhabitants of both valleys are immersed in the organic farming movement, but they seldom talk about being leaders or in the forefront of a movement, even though they are the tacit leaders in their own communities. This connection to the land is simply how they view their place(s).

PLACES

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking

new landscapes but in having new eyes.

—MARCEL PROUST

Colorado men are we, from the peaks granite, from the

great sierras and the plateaus, from the mine and from the

gully, from the hunting trail we come. Pioneers! O Pioneers!

—WALT WHITMAN

BECAUSE I AM A GEOGRAPHER, I cannot stop looking at, thinking about, or visiting places. Perhaps some kind of genetic disorder compels me to go to places, to study places, to compare places. Other geographers appear to share my malady, and they tend to use the word place with a whole collection of meanings non-geographers might not appreciate. We geographers see place as the interaction of all of a location’s physical characteristics, including soils, vegetation, climate, and geology—much like an ecosystem except broader and of a much larger scale. We also think about place as the nexus of human occupation of and habitation on the land. In this context, as characterized by National Geographic and others, place is space endowed with human meaning. Place may even be mythical or spiritual or psychological. I, like my geographic colleagues, see place in all these ways in our attempt to make sense of the world.

Even though I understand place through a trained geographer’s eyes, what follows is not a scholarly treatise on the subject. Rather, I offer in these pages a personal exploration of place, my attempt to endow meaning on two simultaneously diverse and yet, to my eyes, similar landscapes. Although this is not an academic study, I still see place and all its meanings and revelations as a geographer might—in this I am powerless to intervene.

The French use the word milieu to speak of place in the more inclusive way we geographers sometimes use. I like using milieu for at least two reasons. First, it is such a rich term in its complexity and its appropriateness as a geographic word. Second, because one of the places central to this book is in southern France, it just feels right to use this lyrical French term, which incorporates the physical setting of place with how people connect and sense a place.

The two places, or different milieux, in this book are perhaps what could be called vernacular or common landscapes and at the same time unique and special landscapes, depending on the viewer’s mind-set. I have chosen to reflect on these two spots on Earth for idiosyncratic reasons. My professional and personal lives are intertwined in these places and their landscapes. These two seemingly disparate dots on the world map are similar in so many ways (and dissimilar in a few). Some of these ways are subtle, some not, but the personal and professional convergence drew me in with an intriguing intensity. It was almost as if I was urged on by some internal voice to look more intimately at these places. I literally put aside all of my scholarly projects and dove in with head and heart to see where this would