Frontiers part 2

I am sitting down to write before 11pm. Woo-hoo! C. is in Portland for a-night-and-a-day, and both kids (having spent 2 hours in a kiddie pool in the sun) fell asleep early. So here I am.

To elaborate on the frontier.

Oregon is obviously a frontier in LeGuin's first sense: a great rush of people came here in (as she says) a stormfront, not long ago, and utterly remade it to suit themselves -- killing or displacing the people and most of the animals who had been here, knocking down trees, re-routing streams, damming rivers, building roads and houses and towers...

But then something interesting happened. The people changed. This place changed them; they changed as they adapted to it; and so while at first they were "the people who came here," they transmuted into "the people who live here."

Now they are on the other side of the frontier. They are Oregonians. They live and breathe and raise children here; this is their everyday reality; and though it is not what it was, still they love what it is.

But today – especially in Bend – another great rush of people is coming. These new people have different ideas about what constitutes a good town, and Bend, while a great place, is not precisely what they had in mind; so they want to alter it. Also, they’ve got emotional baggage. They’re scared of certain things and try to protect themselves against them – whether they ought to still be scared, here, or not. (Hence the gated communities. Medians. Etc.) And they behave in a way that seems to be a reaction to a hurried environment – brusque, curt – that just doesn’t exist here.

So the people who live here, the people who consider themselves Bendites, find that their town – as well as the forests and desert -- are being transformed under their feet. And if they want to speak with these newcomers, they have to use words and concepts that the newcomers understand. And risk being changed themselves – or (even worse?) risk learning to see this place as the new people see it, forgetting what they originally valued, until it’s gone.

Frontiers

"On the Frontier" an essay by Ursula LeGuin published in "The Wave in the Mind."

This is what it's like to have grown up in Bend. LeGuin has her own pacing, but I chopped it to be blog length.

"A frontier has two sides. It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site...

"The front side, the yang side, the side that calls itself the frontier, that's where you boldly go where no one has gone before, rushing forward like a stormfront, like a battlefront. Nothing before you is real. It is empty space ... and therefore full of dream and promise. ...And so you go there. Seeking gold, seeking land, annexing all before you, you expand your world.

"The other side of the frontier, the yin side: that's where you live. You always lived there. It's all around you, it's always been. It is the real world, the true and certain world, full of reality.

"And it is where they come...

"Coming from another world, they take yours from you, changing it, draining it, shrinking it into a property, a commodity. And as your world is meaningless to them until they change it into theirs, so as you live among them and adopt their meanings, you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself."

If you have to explain yourself using their words, or define yourself according to terms they understand, and forget your own words for yourself, "you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself."

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The other blogging moms I read are urban -- Toronto, Philly, DC -- and they never write about trees or birds or squirrels or dogs or anything, really, but humans and the environment built by humans. Why is that?