My father, Franz Kohout, turns eighty-six tomorrow. He is, I believe, a world-class eccentric—an opinion, I should add, shared by many. He still lives on Nob Hill in San Francisco, a half block down California Street from Grace Cathedral, in the same apartment he’s inhabited for almost forty years, since my parents divorced. That apartment is a shrine to his stubbornly anachronistic personality, and his by-now-legendary miserliness.

Here are some things you’ll find in his apartment:

1. Several hundred kitchen knives, of varying sizes and intended uses but all of them razor sharp (“Don’t touch anything!” we used to tell the kids when we visited);
2. Closets full of virtually identical tweed sport coats, all of them several decades old;
3. Hundreds of vinyl LPs, most of them classical but also big band, Dixieland, Latin, easy listening, and pop;
4. Thousands of books, which have long since overflowed their designated shelves and are stacked up on any available flat surface—the hallway, the bedroom floor, etc.

The books in particular are hard to ignore. For many years, his chief means of expanding his library was to buy paperbacks in bulk, for a dollar a bag, at the Goodwill. This has led inevitably to an eclectic collection, in which an acknowledged classic like, say, À la recherche du temps perdu can inhabit the same shelf as, say, a biography of Le Pétomane.

Here are some things you won’t find in his apartment:

1. A television;
2. A computer;
3. A compact-disk player;
4. A microwave;
5. A bottle of wine costing more than eight dollars.

Seriously, it’s like the last forty or fifty years never happened.

Along with his eccentricities, however, he was (and is) a passionate outdoorsman. He was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, to a Scottish mother (the source of his cheapskatitude?) and an Austrian father. He and his younger brother Willi grew up speaking three languages: German, Portuguese, and, at home, English, because his father decided, in the midst of Depression-era Brazil, that English was the language of opportunity.

My father’s stories make growing up in that time and place sound like a tropical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, consisting mostly of sailing on Guanabara Bay, camping on as-yet-uninhabited islands, encountering sloths and other exotic fauna, and the like. But somewhere along the way, with what I suspect was not always gentle encouragement from his father, he found time to crack the books, for he decided to become a doctor, and when he was twenty-five, with his father’s blessing, he came to the U.S. to complete his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania (and, incidentally, justified his father’s insistence on speaking English at home).

He met my mother, also an immigrant (from Italy) medical student, in Philadelphia, and they decided to marry, ending his plans to return to Brazil. Eventually they made their way to the San Francisco Bay Area, in some ways the American equivalent (albeit foggier and colder) of Rio, where they settled in idyllic Mill Valley; I was their only child.

In retrospect, I think my father tried to recapture some of the adventurous flavor of his own boyhood in California; we spent many weekends camping at Samuel P. Taylor State Park, and every summer we spent a couple of weeks at a rented cabin at Packer Lake, in the Sierra Nevadas. He was an early and enthusiastic cyclist long before Lance Armstrong made cycling trendy; he went on bicycle camping trips all over the country, and tried without much success to get me interested in cycling too, though I did complete at least one 100-mile ride with the Marin Cyclists.

More enjoyable for me were our excursions to Muir Beach, where the two of us (my mother, prone to carsickness, usually opted to skip the tortuous drive over Mount Tamalpais and back) went to harvest the abundant purplish-black, bearded mussels. Clambering over the sharp rocks, peering into tidepools, staring at starfish and sea urchins, prying the stubborn mussels loose with a crowbar… I loved everything about these expeditions except the end product, which was a dinner featuring steamed mussels—a disgusting thing to eat, I thought at the time. (I have since changed my mind.)

While he gave up the cycling several years ago, he and my stepmother Nancy (or, as we refer to her in the family, “St. Nancy”) still go hiking on Mount Tam almost every week with a group of friends, and spend several weeks a year at Nancy’s family’s beachfront cabin in Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay. All in all, it’s not a bad way to live.

But when I was a kid, I’m sorry to say, my father sort of embarrassed me; he was too exotic, too foreign. I desperately wanted our family to be normal, like one of those bland WASPy sitcom families, and it wasn’t. (It took me years to realize that no family is actually like those families on TV.) And with his penchant for filling up any brief silence or lull in conversation by sighing, groaning, interjecting exclamations in Portuguese (“muito bem!” or “isso não!”), humming or whistling repeated brief musical phrases, making strange little popping or clicking noises, he was (and is) virtually a grown-up version of Gerald McBoing-Boing, the cartoon boy who could speak only in sound effects.

And when it’s not sound effects issuing from his mouth, it’s apt to be speech well-peppered with a certain four-letter Anglo-Saxonism commonly known as the F-bomb. How, I’ve often wondered, can such a sophisticated, cultured man, a man who speaks half a dozen languages, who’s had season tickets for the symphony and opera for decades, who’s read most of the classics of world literature—how can such a man swear like a longshoreman? It used to drive Heather to distraction when our kids were young; at one point she actually asked him if he could dial down the cursing, but it did little good. “In-f*ck-credible” is one of his highest and most frequently dispensed compliments, and he merely added to his own legend at our older daughter Elizabeth’s college graduation several years ago. The whole family had had a fine and bibulous dinner at Mezze, one of Williamstown’s finest restaurants, the night before the graduation ceremony. As we said goodnight out on the sidewalk, my father said to Tito, “Well, see you tomorrow, old man,” to which Tito replied, “Yes, sir.” Whereupon my father immediately responded, “Don’t ‘sir’ me, you f*cker, I’m your grandfather!”

He could (and can) be maddening in other respects as well. I believe he is a sentimentalist at heart, an easy weeper like me—he wept like a baby all through our wedding and reception—but he likes to disguise that perceived vulnerability with a veneer of callousness. He is much given to harsh, dismissive, and politically incorrect pronouncements (“Brazilians are savages” is one of his favorites), but while he is misanthropic in general he is actually quite generous in specific cases—though I imagine he’ll be furious with me for writing that.

Another apparent contradiction: for many years, he spent every summer backpacking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He always got his credencial stamped at each official refugio along the way so he could receive the special compostela reserved for completists, though he insisted that he couldn’t care less about the spiritual or religious implications of the trip, and only did it because he read an article in Gourmet that raved about the food along the way.

And make no mistake: food is a Very Big Deal for him. He walks or rides San Francisco’s abundant public transportation everywhere (ah, to live in a civilized city!), and does most of his grocery shopping down the hill in Chinatown, where he strolls up and down Grant Street, stopping in one shop for vegetables, another for fish, a third for poultry, and so on; sometimes he wanders over to North Beach to buy a dry salame at Molinari on Columbus. For a special treat, he walks down the hill in the other direction, to Polk Street for lunch at the fabulous Swan Oyster Depot (see above) and, when we come to visit, for breakfast at Bob’s Donuts. (He has a raging sweet tooth, another vestige of his Brazilian youth; his idea of a cup of coffee is a large mound of sugar with a little liquid floated on top.) No matter where or what he eats, though, you can bet that he will relish every scrap and ort with an agonizing thoughtfulness; beards will grow longer, faces wrinkle, seasons change, and rivers carve new canyons while waiting for him to finish what’s on his plate. And then he’ll order dessert.

He is, in other words, a man who truly knows how to savor life, a man who has taught me much about the beauties and pleasures of this world. So, dad, here’s wishing you an in-f*ck-credible birthday!

What we’re reading
Heather: Alexander McCall Smith, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
Martin: H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Recently we and our three kids went to Martin’s native San Francisco to help celebrate his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. The five of us spent an afternoon walking along the cliffs of Point Reyes National Seashore, where the ground was springy, the wind was fierce, and in some spots along the trail we pushed through wildflowers up to our shoulders. Hawks wheeled through the cloudless sky, elk sunned in the lees of the cliffs, and the ocean’s shining hide swelled and stretched like the flanks of a well-groomed, self-satisfied, and very large cat. At one point, our son Tito turned to us and said incredulously, “You mean we had a choice between this and Texas?”

Yes, well. Despite Martin’s entertaining recent post on how he has come to terms with living in Texas, he has spent much of his time in the Lone Star State not entirely convinced that civilized life is possible here—certainly not from May to October, and frequently not after elections. I grew up spending summers in Colorado, where despising Texans is a competitive sport, and as a teenager and young adult I also got to spend time in places of unsurpassed beauty such as the highlands of Guatemala, the Swiss Alps, the Masai Mara, Paris, and the Canadian Rockies. And yet I love Texas and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Time for that apologia, son.

Some of my love of Texas is just an old bad habit. Many fine writers have noted how people stubbornly cling to the smells and sounds of their childhood, sensations that undermine the idea that time moves only into the future. Much of my first decade was spent in the then-unbroken woods just north of the San Antonio airport. The uncanny whinny of the screech owl, the languid moan of the mourning dove, the overpowering sweetness of mountain laurel at Easter, the loneliness of the north wind on a clear winter day: each time I experience these now I’m reminded that the girl who was gripped by them forty years ago is still inside me. She isn’t gone, despite all appearances to the contrary.

There’s more to it than nostalgia, though. Texas tells stories about itself, some of them true. While I know that many find this self-conscious tale-telling irritating—maybe even pathological—I find it sort of comforting. So maybe we actually lost the battle of the Alamo. So maybe the Texas Rangers weren’t a bunch of ethically ripped superheroes. So maybe every cowboy doesn’t have the soul of a poet. But there seems to be a (nearly) conscious yearning for the power of myth to work among us with these stories. Of course, there are stories Texans tell about themselves that I loathe: bigger is better, we should each of us be our own posse, it’s manly to kill animals with automatic weapons and spurn the meat—but this is a place that recognizes the power of stories to shape reality.

One of the stories told over and over in multiple variations is the power and variety of the land itself. One of my favorite signs is on Interstate 10 at the Louisiana-Texas state line. It reads something like this: Beaumont, 20 miles; El Paso, 937 miles. While I have lived only in Central Texas—in some ways the easiest part of the state to love—I’ve learned to respect and admire many of the landscapes between the ends, from east to west and from north to south. I make no claims to anything but the cursory knowledge that comes from road trips involving grumpy children—me and my siblings years ago, and more recently our own children. My parents drove us to Colorado every summer through the Panhandle; Martin and I chose instead to make our annual pilgrimage by way of Fort Stockton and then north through the Pecos wilderness. One hot summer day the gas tank light came on when we were halfway through the hundred inhospitable miles between Pecos and Loving, New Mexico. The prospect of running out of gas here at midday with a dog and several children concentrated the mind wonderfully and caused me to sweat through my clothes despite the car’s air conditioning. (We managed to make it to the next filling station.) We passed by multiple examples of the land’s indifference to human striving: we often threatened to abandon our squabbling children in Orla, an oil ghost town baked into dusty submission, if they didn’t behave. (It didn’t help.)

We always planned our route back to Austin through Balmorhea and Fort Davis and, inevitably, a thrashing summer thunderstorm would force us off the highway—or so we assumed, since we couldn’t even see the highway through the mud on the windshield. But before the storm hit, you could see the Guadalupe Mountains to the west, and when we made it to Marfa and the high grasslands, we—well, some of us—were exhilarated by the wind and the shadows, by the pitilessness and delicacy of the Chinati Mountains.

At the other end of the spectrum, I love the featurelessness of the south Texas brush country, an admittedly perverse passion. In March, the mesquite bloom neon green. At least as many things will sting, bite, or poison you as won’t. As our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison says, there are two seasons in South Texas: January and summer. At the rare watering holes, there are birds of remarkable beauty: green jays and hooded orioles and American widgeons. Once in April, on my way back from Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, I drove through a migration of yellow sulphur butterflies that extended for dozens of miles. When I got back to Austin, probably a dozen people pointed out the grotesque beauty of my Suburban’s grille, which had become an extravagant collage of dead butterflies.

I’m leaving a lot of verses out of my Texas love song, but the last verse here has to be the one about the Hill Country. Loving the Colorado Rockies as much as I love any landscape, I’ve been trained to seek out views, to climb and pant and strain and exult upon reaching the summit. Well, the Hill Country upends that paradigm. Once you make it to the top of the hill—at least at Madroño—the landscape sinks into an unexpected anonymity. The personality of the Hill Country is in its draws and canyons, the intimate interstitial places where oaks and pecans crowd together, and great slabs of limestone create undulating walls and pools, and ferns and cedar sage grow with the demure confidence of cloistered beauty. In February, the draws ring with the slurred chatter of hundreds of intoxicated robins and waxwings. The draws also snarl with the movements of feral hogs, coyotes, and mountain lions, and vibrate with the possibility of rattlesnakes on sunny shelves, the clatter of unseen hooves in caves and cedar brakes, and the songs of maddeningly invisible birds that suddenly move, shine, and disappear again before they can be named. The draws protect and expose, invite and terrify. You want stories? You’ll find them here.

So, son, I’ll be happy to spend time in California, especially in August, even if the locals make fun of how I talk and where I’m from. But I’ll always want to come home.

What we’re reading
Heather: Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature

]]> http://madronoranch.com/?feed=rss2&p=323 2 http://madronoranch.com/?p=321 http://madronoranch.com/?p=321#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 17:47:00 +0000 http://madronoranch.com/?p=321 Continue reading →]]>

The other day, I stopped my car to chat with neighbors (a frequent occurrence in our chatty neighborhood). We quickly got to the topic of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its spreading devastation. D. told me that he’d heard an interview on National Public Radio with a worker at an oil and gas pipe factory in Youngstown, Ohio, after President Obama had spoken there to promote his economic policies. This worker was notably unimpressed with the president’s moratorium on offshore drilling. (According to the transcript on the NPR website, the worker, Larry Collins, actually said, “I’d like for [President Obama] to say it’s a go and let’s start drilling. The more rigs we have out there drilling, the more demand for our product.”)

To D., I snorted something snarky about Mr. Collins’s self-centeredness and shortsightedness and then realized in the midst of sneering that I had left my car running while we were chatting. Once I got home, I turned off lights that had been left on all day, presumably so our dogs and cats wouldn’t need to use their reading glasses. I remembered my father doing the same thing during the energy crisis of the 1970s, usually while asking, “Do you think your daddy owns the electric company?”

I recount this unremarkable scenario as part of my ongoing musings about violence and our usually invisible participation in and promulgation of it. In light of Martin’s last post, this seems like a precious way to continue the conversation about our individual and collective violence footprints, but after turning off the ignition and the lights, I realized that Mr. Collins and I had more in common than I had initially acknowledged. Am I prepared to examine my energy consumption—from the mechanical pencils in my desk drawer, to the food I eat, to the trash I throw away, to the investments I make—and change my expectations and habits? Am I Just Saying No to habits that keep drilling an attractive option to companies like British Petroleum? Well, no, not really. I keep hoping someone will invent something that will painlessly neutralize my energy cravings, sort of like those diet pills advertised in women’s magazines. But as Bill McKibben points out in an article in the latest issue of The Christian Century, we are addicted to cheap oil: “You think maybe, just maybe, that the needle BP stuck into the bottom of the sea flows straight into our veins?”

To me, one of the most appealing facets of the American character is our buoyant sense of optimism. Our hopefulness attracts hopeful people of all other nationalities, like Saul Griffith, featured in The New Yorker’s May 17 “Innovators Issue.” Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, he came to the United States in 1998 as a doctoral student at MIT, initially to work on electronic ink—the idea which eventually became the Kindle. The author of the New Yorker article, David Owen, describes Griffith thusly: “His hair, which is reddish brown, is usually an omnidirectional mess, and he often looks as though he had dressed from the bottom of the laundry pile.” I love that “omnidirectional,” which apparently describes Griffith’s brain as well as his hair: in 2004, he won the $30,000 prize awarded to the MIT student who shows great promise as an innovator, and in 2007 he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Since then, among other things, he has been thinking about and working on energy efficiency.

My favorite anecdote in the article describes Griffith, who now lives in San Francisco, riding to his lab on the prototype of an electricity-assisted tricycle he had designed. The tricycle included an enclosure for carrying cargo, and on the rainy morning in question the cargo was his infant son Huxley. The rain caused a short circuit in the tricycle’s wiring, resulting in a small fire under Huxley’s seat, which Griffith extinguished after hauling the baby off the trike. Writes Owen, “Huxley had reacted placidly to the crisis, as though, at eight months, he was already accustomed to life as the child of an inventor.” Genetic buoyancy and hopefulness at work here, clearly.

But the article charts Griffith’s growing disenchantment with technology as a means of avoiding the ecological disasters lying ahead. The things that he and his colleagues produce, while ingenious, often aren’t addressing the actual problems, because the problems aren’t fundamentally technological in nature. Griffith believed, for example, that waste from discarded cellphones could be reduced by the production of hand-cranked cellphones, using technology developed in the 1920s. But the problem of discarded cellphones isn’t technological, he realized, it’s cultural; people discard their cellphones because they want the latest model, not because their old phones stop working.

Griffith also notes that the nations with the lowest energy needs and highest standards of living, like Portugal, built their infrastructures long ago, when energy was much more costly than it is today. Houses built before the advent of cheap coal and oil were (and remain) energy efficient because they had to be; they are small, with small windows and thick walls. So here’s the kicker: “Such low-tech ideas are crucial to forming viable environmental strategies, Griffith believes, because implementing more complicated technologies… would consume natural resources and generate greenhouse gasses at unsustainable rates.” Griffith currently lives in what he describes as a “thermodynamic nightmare” of a house in San Francisco’s Mission District. “If I were building a house from scratch,” he says, “I could totally design a thermodynamically amazing, almost zero-energy house—but a huge amount of energy would go into building it, just in the materials, and right now most of that energy would come from burning fossil fuels.” In other words, in trying to use technological innovation to solve the problems of our increasing demand for energy, we’re more often than not acting like Wile E. Coyote, busily sawing off the branch of the tree we’re sitting on.

Assuming that Griffith has a broader perspective on the issues of energy use than I do, I am coming to lose some of my American optimism. I’m thinking that if, like Mr. Collins in Youngstown, I as an individual and we as a nation continue to take a short-sighted, self-centered view of our energy needs, I and we will, in effect, be demanding that BP and its cohorts keep taking the kinds of risks for which the Gulf of Mexico and the countless beings in, around, and over it are now paying in blood. What do we consider acceptable losses? What will make us change before we kill what is most precious to us, including our sense of hope?

I’ll try to write something cheerier next time, I promise.

What we’re reading
Heather: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Martin: Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

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One of the things that we hope will characterize Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment is a strong sense of place. It’s right there, implicitly and explicitly, in our mission and vision statements, just off to your right.

But how does one develop a sense of place? One answer, at least in part, and for those of us of a certain age, has been by reading the local newspaper. But the newspaper as we know it seems to be going the way of the 8-track and the VHS tape. Increasingly, people opt to get their news in a way that doesn’t leave ink smudges on their hands, or require drying in the oven on rainy mornings. In other words, they’re reading the “paper” online.

In “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper,” in the November issue of Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the decline of his (and my) hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the historical importance of the newspaper in American life.

The press, Rodriguez argues, was the indicator and bestower of civic stature: “It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news.” In addition, the rise of the newspaper was a sign of the small-d democratic nature of American culture, “a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence.”

But, for many, the newspaper seems to have outlived its usefulness. The Atlantic Monthly’s Megan McArdle, in an online (of course) column titled “The Media Death Spiral,” writes, “The circulation figures for the top 25 dailies in the U.S. are out, and they’re horrifying. The median decline is well into the teens; only the Wall Street Journal gained (very slightly).”

She adds, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there.”

Those of us who read the Austin American-Statesman have noted the signs already: a shrinking paper, meaning fewer ads and less revenue; the anorexic classifieds (a victim of craigslist) tacked onto the back of the Life and Arts section; the business and metro sections combined.

Why should we care whether or not the Statesman survives? According to Rodriguez, “When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death… it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.”

Does he exaggerate? Maybe. But once the newspapers are gone, he asks, “who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with ‘I.’”

Rodriguez quotes a friend of his, a journalist from India: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

That statement really bothers me, for a couple of reasons. I can understand the appeal of what Philip Meyer, a student of the industry, calls “the demassification of the media”; in the bottom-up model of journalism, each consumer is free to pick and choose the information he or she deems most valuable, rather than being forced to rely on the judgment of a corporate editor. What could be more democratic?

But such a model does come with a cost. As Meyer writes in his book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, “If we’re all attending to different messages, our capacity to understand one another is diminished.”

And what about that speculation from Rodriguez’s friend, “Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore”? Perhaps not. But I don’t want to live in a world where people no longer feel connected to the land and the people around them. In a society that has traditionally viewed “light[ing] out for the territory,” in the words of that old newspaperman Mark Twain, as the solution to every problem, how do we convince folks that they have a stake in, and a responsibility to, their surroundings? As strip malls and chain stores and fast-food outlets and cookie-cutter housing developments and, yes, the internet make every place more like every other place, how are we supposed to know or care where we are?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think we better find one. People who feel strongly connected to their surroundings, urban or rural or in between, feel that the place is theirs; they know it, feel it, eat it, sleep it, and live it. They’re also more likely to take care of it. I certainly hope that the things that make Madroño Ranch special to us—the hills, the water, the rocks, the trees—will outlive us, and our children, and our children’s children, and we intend to do all we can to make sure they do.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Oliver (ed.), The Best American Essays 2009
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America