Storming the Gates of Paradise (3 page)

Storming the Gates of Paradise
gathers together nearly forty essays whose common ground is a concern with place, geography, land, environment, and an interest in reading them politically—and in understanding politics through place. Often the most and least tangible join forces: inchoate anxieties about the Other
are manifest as an actual fence on the border; the cheap excuses of the war on terror turn into concrete repression on the streets of New York in “Jailbirds I Have Loved”; the Playboy Channel and nature calendars inform each other in “Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples.”

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives. Even the American Civil Liberties Union often overlooks that part of the First Amendment guaranteeing “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” since peaceable assembly has been not only assaulted in some places (New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention, for example) but designed out of the landscape in others. Or has it? I have long believed that San Francisco’s vibrant political culture comes in part from its very terrain: a pedestrian density, considerable street life, parks and plazas serving as focal points for public gatherings. Nonetheless, in the spring of 2006, Latinos turned what seemed to be the democracy-proof, automobile-dominated terrain of Los Angeles into the site of an exuberant, enormous gathering—perhaps a million or more—in defense of immigrant rights, making a city out of sprawl by acting as a functioning civil society within it (a core subject of “Nonconforming Uses: Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border”). Which is only to say that the way we inhabit places also matters, and that comes from experience, imagination, belief, and desire as much as or more than from architecture and design. In other words, the mind and the terrain shape each other: every landscape is a landscape of desire to some degree, if not always for its inhabitants.

The fundamental desire could be described as the desire for paradise, or perhaps the demand for it—for the city on a hill; for a more perfect union; for getting to the mountaintop, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sense as well as Thoreau’s and Muir’s; for the peaceable kingdom that devolves into the gated noncommunity but is also this country’s rich history of utopian communities and social experiments. In this country, we immigrants have, since the seventeenth-century Puritans invaded the Northeast and the sixteenth-century conquistador Coronado clumped through the Southwest looking for Cibola’s Seven Cities of Gold, believed
in paradise, sometimes as a birthright, sometimes as a goal, sometimes as something recently lost (for conservatives, that loss may be the patriarchal family that they imagine existed, like some primordial forest, uninterrupted from one coast to the other; for radicals, it’s too often some simplified or entirely imagined version of society before technology or some other form of alienation intruded).

Paradises from the past are seldom useful as anything but rulers by which to measure the failures of the present, the failures that paradises of the future seek to fix—abolition, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the civil rights struggle, the modern women’s movement, environmentalism, and human rights movements, including those taking on the global economy. There’s the paradise of the semi-fictitious pure place seen in nature photography and heard in environmental exhortations, the paradise of solidarity in political action, the paradise of memory and recognition transfigured. And then there are the ruins, the prisons, the radioactive lands, the endless battles between this country’s myriad factions, each of whom is in one way or another storming the gates of paradise, trying to get inside their vision of a better world. The belief in an attainable paradise fuels the restless idealism that keeps this country agitated. This book tries to map a few of the infinite versions.

Neither definitions of paradise nor modes of attempted entry remain stable over time; this book may be in a roundabout way a chronicle of a rapidly evolving world. The earliest essay in the book, “The Garden of Merging Paths,” was written as the World Wide Web was first becoming available to the most technologically advanced; by the time of an essay such as “Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami,” the Web had become a nearly ubiquitous and broadly accessible tool for organizing on behalf of global justice, for tracking issues, for finding alternative news. When the latter piece was published, in 2003, the World Trade Organization’s future was still up in the air. As I write now, in late 2006, the organization seems largely defunct if not quite absolutely stone-cold dead, killed off by activists and by resistant nations in the global South, after the watershed moment when the WTO met in Seattle in November 1999.

These are the most concrete shifts. Rereading the essays that deal with representations of Native Americans, I can see that much has changed since I plunged into that arena in the early 1990s; rereading those that deal with U.S.-Mexico border
politics and the demonization of immigrants, I can see that not enough has. Some of these pieces are more retrospective or concerned with phenomena—gardens, skies—that are more about the sea floor of culture than the shifting tides of politics; others deal with urgent issues—nuclear waste and other environmental disasters in the making—that remain unresolved. I changed, too: an earlier anthology of mine,
As Eve Said to the Serpent
, was subtitled
On Landscape, Gender, and Art;
in collecting these essays, I first measured the extent to which my writing had taken up urban life and contemporary politics, drawn in by the crises as well as the possibilities of both. One thing that decades of reading histories and occasionally participating in or witnessing the making of history has taught me is that the future is up for grabs. Nothing is certain except that we can, sometimes, with enough will and enough skill, shape it and steer it. Some of that skill comes from remembering the past and understanding the present, goals I have tried to serve here.

The West began at the pay phone at the gas station in Lee Vining, the little town next to Mono Lake on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, too remote for cell phones. I was standing around in the harsh golden light at seven thousand feet waiting to make a call when I realized that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. “You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?” he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the phone line.

At Lee Vining, named after a miner and Indian killer, the rain shadow begins: the Sierra, which are just a hair shorter than the Alps, scrape off the Pacific clouds and keep everything east of them arid. There are few real boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you face the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before, and look at a terrain where only a few inches of moisture a year arrive. In most of California, all water flows west to the Pacific, including that of the western slope of the Sierra; but on the Sierra’s other side, it goes east, into salty bodies of water like Mono and Pyramid lakes, into sinks and subterranean spaces, into thin air. The Great Basin, so-called because its scanty water doesn’t drain to any sea, is mostly a terrain of north-south-running ranges, sharp-edged raw geology, separated by flat expanses of sagebrush.

In the desert, plants grow farther apart to accommodate the huge root systems
they need to collect enough water to live, and so do communities and ranches. Few but the desert’s original inhabitants found it beautiful before cars. The extremes of heat and cold, the vast scale, and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to those traversing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be; but this aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. What feeds the soul starves the skin. Now, with air conditioning and interstates and the option of going several hundred miles a day with ease, desert austerity is a welcome respite from the overdeveloped world. The aridity and the altitude—the lowlands are mostly more than four thousand feet high—make the light strong, clear, and powerful; and the sky in these wide places seems to start at your ankles.

Because wild creatures too are spread far apart and often operate at night, because the colors and changes of the plant life can be subtle, it often seems as though the real drama is in the sky—not exactly life, but life-giving, the light and the rain. Summer thunderstorms in the arid lands are an operatic drama, particularly in New Mexico, where the plot normally unfolds pretty much the same way every day during the summer monsoon season: clear morning skies are gradually overtaken by cumulus clouds as scattered and innocuous as a flock of grazing sheep, until they gather and turn dark; then the afternoon storm breaks, with lightning, with thunder, with crashing rain that can turn a dusty road into a necklace of puddles reflecting the turbulent sky. New Mexico is besieged now by a horrendous multiyear drought, and, watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I felt for the first time something of that beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky.

Every summer I go to live in the sky, I drive into this vastness whose luminousness, whose emptiness, whose violence seem to give this country its identity, even though few of us live there. It’s hard to convey the scale of the empty quarter. The Nevada Test Site, where the United States and the United Kingdom have detonated more than a thousand nuclear bombs over the past half century, is inside a virtually unpopulated airbase the size of Wales. Nevada is about the size
of Germany and has a population of a million and a half, which wouldn’t sound so stark if it weren’t that more than a million of them live in Las Vegas and most of the rest in the Reno area, leaving the remainder of the state remarkably unpopulated. At one point, the state decided to capitalize on this and named Highway 50, which traverses the center of Nevada, “the loneliest highway in America.”

From Mono Lake, I drove about forty miles on 120, crossing from California to Nevada at some point along the way; then a stretch along the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Route 6, over to the small town of Basalt; and another hundred or so miles up to 50. At first, the country was high enough that it was green, beautiful, stark, and treeless. Then the altitude climbed a little into piñon pine and juniper country, before dropping down into the drabness of most of the Great Basin, the color of sagebrush and the dirt in between. A grove of trees is a sure sign of a ranch house and irrigation, though there are entire valleys—and a valley means a place five or ten miles wide and several times as long—in which no such ranch is to be seen. Highway 50 traverses a dozen of these valleys and passes; driven in a day, they pass like musical variations, with their subtle differences of color and form. One range looked like mountains, another more like cliffs, with tilted layers of strata clearly visible. One valley was full of dust devils, those knots of swirling wind that pick up debris and move it across the land, funnels that are the visible sign of the wind’s entanglement in itself.

Most of California is west of the West: the vast arid expanses come to an end at the Sierra Nevada, the long wall of mountains on the state’s eastern edge. West of the Sierra, a dramatic change in scale takes place, and the infolding, the lushness, the variety of the terrain seem to invite the social density and complexity of California, with its thirty-something million residents from all over the world. The two coasts often seem to me to be a pair of parentheses enclosing the inarticulate, unspoken, inchoate American outback, this part of the country colored red for Republican in the voting map for the last presidential election, when the coasts were Democratic blue.

The red lands are an outback, a steppe, a Siberia, far removed from the cosmopolitanism
of the coasts. When I live out here, as I have for a week or so now and again over the past dozen years, it seems hard to believe in cities, let alone in nations, in anything but the sublimity of this emptiness. The Great Basin is wide open topographically but introspective in spirit, turned in on itself; and news from outside seems like mythology, rumor, entertainment, like anything but part of what goes on here, or doesn’t, out here where the sparse population is interspersed with sites for rehearsing America’s wars. A lot of people became preoccupied with Area 51, an off-limits part of the eastern periphery of the Nevada Test Site where aliens were supposed to have landed, or been captured, or had their flying saucers tested, and the logic behind the beliefs seemed to be equal parts creative interpretation of military secrecy and a sense that everything from outside was alien. But the absences resonate as much as the presences.