Geography of Forgetting

Photo By Nicolò Canu on Unsplash

1.

One landmark falls, and then another. For years I would look for the dull gray farmhouse on the hour drive from Denver to Fort Collins, a signal that we were nearing home. I’ve been in that house, I’d think, amazed again. To my suburban eyes it was as exotic as a castle or a miner’s cabin, an outpost of a strict agricultural life I only ever saw from the road. I’d gone there once in the early nineties to collect a friend for a few hours of winter birding, and as I waited I gaped at the broke-back floral couch, the yarn doilies, and the 1960s TV on a wooden stand like they were exhibits in a museum of midcentury rural life, which in a way they were. The friend had rented it furnished, a fact that should have warned me: this was the intaken breath of the tsunami to come. A house, a farm, and the life they once sustained were earning their keep before the bulldozer. I should have known, but to me it was just another drab house pinned to the corner of a wheat field. Common as dirt.

I should have known, but I was focused on the hawks. The house, spitting distance from the interstate and encircled by fields of bare dirt, was cramped and dispiriting. I was impatient to get out of there. I could feel the rumble of the passing semis in my body. How could this even be a house, I’d thought. But in the years to come, part of the traffic, I would check for it, pleased at my minor connection to the place. It was a notch on the endless drive from city to city, until it was torn down to expand the interchange. Now I am not even certain of the exit.
The rest of that day was spent on gravel roads far to the east. We had a white mouse in a mouse-sized shark cage to lure in hawks, and when we would get one—did we get one that day on the treeless plains?—we would clamp a band around its yellow leg as its talons clutched at air.

We may not have gotten a hawk. The day blurs into all the other days I’ve spent on the plains, squinting at dust for dust-colored mountain plovers or burrowing owls. I’ve been half in love with the simplicity and starkness, the way a distant spark upon a field mostly resolves into a horned lark or a mourning dove but once in a while something rare. The way a powder-white barn owl slices the night into sky and land. The noise the silence makes.

At the same time, I’ve been wary. Those tiny prairie towns are so dreary, the land so stricken. Disapproval radiates from behind drawn curtains when I stop to look for birds.
That day, after several hours of birding in the cold, we packed up the banding kit and drove home. I dropped my friend at the farmhouse on the way.
A decade later I stood in that space a second time. This time my feet were on the floor of a state-of-the-art rehab center. It took me a moment to realize where I was because the change was so complete. But this was the same exit. The same view. The same proximity to I-25.

We were there to visit Gigi, my mother-in-law, who was recovering from her second hip replacement. The facility was gorgeous, but I kept prodding the absence of what came before. Once or twice I felt its ghost: in the parking lot beneath the endless sky, in the sound the wind made as it slirruped through the still-crisp pores of the new-cast brick.
Wisdom sits in places, the Apache say. So what happens when we mow it all down?

2.

Every morning, I stretch on my patio in suburban Denver, the sky brightening through limbs of spruce and pine. These are mature trees, planted when the neighborhood was built fifty years ago. Back then this patch of houses was an island in a sea of farms, but now we are in the thick of things, walking distance to the supermarket and the library, a ten-minute drive to Home Depot, closer still to a light-rail station. We have bike paths and parks and dental practices. Our fauna is suburban.

As I stretch, I reach out with my mind, trying to connect, to feel the spruce-ness of the spruce, the chirruping flits of the house finches, the watchful attention of the cottontail rabbits. It steadies me to do this. Still, I sense that this connection is only as deep as the sod. This web of trees and lawns is not the true speech of this place; to echo Thoreau, we have made the earth say suburb instead of shortgrass prairie.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I am standing on. On the oldest maps, it is blank: not mountain, not river, not settlement. Later it was irrigated and farmed. There are aerial survey photos of the area dating back to the 1950s, and what you can see, if you use the looping path of the High Line Canal to orient yourself, is that where my house sits now used to be planted in crops. You can picture it: the barren emptiness of dirt plowed twice a year, stinking of manure treatments, a few lone weeds waving at the edges.

In other words, just a few decades back, this was part of the older Colorado, the cramped-farmhouse-within-an-endless-field part. It would have hopped with antelope, with grasshoppers and moths, with horned larks and mountain plovers. It would have been hot and stultifying; it would have been quiet. Now even in the depth of night, there is the roar of traffic.

The change was quick. A time-lapse camera pinned to the Front Range would mark the bloom of towns, spreading from scattered inkblots of ten to twenty thousand in the 1950s to a solid corridor of city by 2020. Farmland and grassland in Colorado was for a while being covered at a rate of 460 acres a day. Weld County, one of the most rural of the Front Range counties in the 1980s, has converted over 600 square miles of open country to urbanscape since then. This is the tsunami: since 1998, the start of my homeowning life—a time at which sprawl already seemed terrible—global urban cover has more than doubled. In the past two decades, more new land has been made into city than in the entire ten-thousand-year history of cities that preceded it.

I can feel the change in my blood like a tiny blur of panic.

There is a name for my panic: solastalgia, or the misery of homesickness while still at home. Australian researcher Glenn Albrecht coined the word to describe the disorientation and grief felt by people living near opencut coal mines in New South Wales, Australia, where in a few decades the land has changed beyond recognition. It has since been reported in people affected by wildfires, drought, mountaintop-removal mining, and overtourism, in locations as far-flung as California, Ghana, the Arctic, and Amsterdam.

I once defined myself against those dinky inkblot towns, assuming they were a stable state. Their loss unmoors me, like the ground itself is disappearing.

3.

Not everyone laments the changing landscape. My mother-in-law, for instance, welcomed change of every stripe—and if she could shop there, even better. Gigi was the first to report on the free samples at Whole Foods, the outlet malls at Centerra, the brand-new arts complex in Lone Tree. She waited two hours at the Krispy Kreme grand opening for a box of donuts.

When she moved to Fort Collins in 1969, toting her oldest child in a wire car seat, the house that would make Fort Collins hers had not been built yet. Instead, she and her professor husband bought a little frame house near the university, in what was then a modest town, semiagricultural, surrounded by fields and reservoirs and bordered by a river that swept down unimpeded from the mountains. She and my father-in-law were part of a wave of postwar prosperity that was disrupting Colorado from top to bottom.

They bought their next house as a mud lot in 1976; Gigi kept a scrapbook of the frame emerging from the ground. By the time I met her, she was divorced and living in the house alone. Every morning she cranked open the warped wooden windows before sitting down with the sports page. In the winter she watched the busy birdfeeder as she drank her coffee, and in the summer she enjoyed the view of the mountains from a second-floor deck. The house was filled with books, sun, and plants, and she and her neighbors thought nothing of making the five-mile drive into town for a cup of coffee. This life was built on cheap land, cheap oil, and abundant education. It replaced a swath of an older Colorado—one based on hard work, abstemiousness, and a dour preference for simplicity—in a matter of decades. It was just so much more fun.

It isn’t just the lifestyle that changes: the sounds, the smells, even the microbes are almost entirely replaced at each iteration of the landscape. It’s the shifting baseline syndrome: we forget what we’re missing, so we stop missing it. Or so we think.

4.

One of the early settlers on the Colorado prairie found the undulating shortgrass so hard to navigate that he burned the crest of the nearest ridge so he could figure out where he was. Those days—after the bison slaughter—there wasn’t much to reap but horses, so he made a living rounding up wild horses and shipping them east.

The First Nations of the high plains were experts in the subtleties of grass. The horses likely belonged to them; they had measured their wealth in horses, which were scattered after the massacres at Sand Creek, Washita River, Wounded Knee, and elsewhere. They knew and tended the streams of bison and pronghorn, prairie elk and mule deer, and the vast, studded sweeps of prairie dog towns. Their skill at this was dismissed for years, but slowly science has accepted what oral history has been telling it all along: the abundance found by settlers was the product of millennia of deliberate care. In some places it was destroyed within months.

That thriving world was converted into a grid of roads and telephone poles and fence lines, of modest houses scattered in nests of imported elm. Aldo Leopold noted that shift for its “unprecedented . . . violence, rapidity, and scope”—but even so, pockets of the old ways lingered. The cattle ranches and dryland wheat fields sheltered nighthawks, mountain plovers, and Woodhouse’s toads.

The recent change is just as violent and much more comprehensive. I used to joke that even though I’d driven i-25 from Fort Collins to Denver hundreds of times, every drive felt new because it changed so fast. Sometimes this was true if I’d made the drive only a few months before. It became disorienting: where even are we?

And so I would look for the landmark of the rented farmhouse. Until it was swept away.

5.

The first sign that Gigi’s dementia was irrevocable was when she informed us, with some excitement, that she lived in California now. Even through the muffling of the n95 mask we could hear her delight: finally some good news!

She said this in the visitors’ lobby of the tony rehab we’d found for her in Golden, Colorado, the one we’d picked after her latest hip procedure because she had stayed there once before. Evidently she did not remember it.

I glanced at the bit of ridge visible across the parking lot and tried to be diplomatic. “It does kind of look like California,” I said. “But you’re only about twenty minutes from our house.”
She blinked. Then agreed. Then told us how she and Sandy were planning a joint eightieth birthday party. It was the first time in years they’d be together for their birthdays.
Sandy was her best friend, her college roommate, her partner in adventure. Also, Sandy lived in a facility in California.

6.

Gigi was often impatient with my solastalgia; she had no tolerance for people who resisted progress. She was indignant when 42 percent of the Denver Metro area voted against funding a new stadium for the Denver Broncos in 1998, even though the measure passed. It reminded her of the bitter loss of the 1976 Olympics, when Colorado residents declined to accept the Olympic committee’s award of the winter games to Vail. “I don’t understand—do these people not like sports?” she asked with real injury.

No, I thought. They’re just trying to hold off the tsunami.

7.

No matter how much Gigi loved to see things change, geographical shifts contributed to her decline. When, to everyone’s relief, she finally sold the aging burden of the family house and moved to a duplex in Highlands Ranch, she embraced the change with wide-eyed delight. But the move was discombobulating. The new place wasn’t home, and she couldn’t quite articulate why. “The people here don’t get my sense of humor,” she said first. Then the rabbits ate her flowers down to the ground. The HOA wouldn’t let her hang her birdfeeder out front, where she could watch it while she drank her coffee. She tried to forge ahead: she went on a cruise, visited her friends in the mountains, drove to the Easter sunrise service and local chamber music concerts. But ignoring what was happening couldn’t go on forever.

Just over the ridge, the city was screaming south at a feverish pitch; one week I’d drive past a field full of elk, and the next week bulldozers would be clearing it for condos. Her new neighbors were renovating their houses, or selling them and moving into Wind Crest, the massive new senior-living facility sprouting up a few miles away. Meanwhile, Gigi started to fall in the night, waking up with black eyes and no memory of what had happened. She got pulled over for weaving, and the police brought her to our house.

8.

There is an intimate connection between geography, memory, and the body.

Our brain actually enlarges as it takes on new spatial memories. The hippocampi of London cab drivers—who have some of the most elaborate mental maps in the urban world—are larger than those of other people, and they get bigger the longer a person is employed as a cabbie. I like to think that this is the world deliberately inscribing itself on us, each physical location converting E=mc2-like into knowledge and that knowledge manifesting as a new neural connection.

We also use our mental image of a place to access memory. Cicero was one of the first to write about this technique in De Oratore. Medieval monks developed Cicero’s method by devising elaborate mental palaces, the rooms of which were stocked with chants and other texts they wanted to commit to memory.

The monks cultivated imaginary mental landscapes, but the practice has been integral to the way indigenous people interact with actual landscapes all over the world. Gary Snyder writes of accompanying a Pintubi elder in a truck ride across the Australian outback and getting a sped-up version of the tales embedded in the hills around them:

He was talking about that mountain over there, telling me a story about some wallabies that came to that mountain in the dreamtime and got into some kind of mischief with some lizard girls. He had hardly finished that and he started in on another story about another hill over here and another story over there. I couldn’t keep up. I realized after about half an hour of this that these were tales to be told while walking. . . .

Keith Basso, in his study of the Western Apache, realized—belatedly, he admits, as anthropology traditionally ignored the meaningfulness of place—that their construction of landscape was vital not just to their sense of the world but to their sense of themselves. Their stories, their traditions, and morality itself are “invested” in the land. Landmarks hold cultural memory. This is one reason why an indigenous landscape is a sacred landscape and why any change to it is met with opposition, much to the bafflement of the modern capitalist. Wherever we have a project, that’s where they decide their sacred place is, a mining engineer told me once. I suppose it felt that way.

On what sacred place has my own house landed?

Basso describes how the features of a landscape are named after stories and events so that the name for a feature is a path to a specific story. The expression X ’ágodzaa yú (“It happened at X, this very place!”) is

a call to memory and imagination. . . . Imagine standing there, as if in the tracks of your ancestors, and recall stories of events that occurred at that place long ago. Picture these events in your mind and appreciate, as if the ancestors themselves were speaking, the wisdom the stories contain.

I cannot pretend to have such a restorative connection to North American places. To put myself in an ancestor’s tracks would mean imagining steaming across the ocean, or riding a wagon through a sea of grass, or marching down into a creek bed to claim it, one predatory eye always on the horizon. But even my own people, with our extractive instincts, desire to connect. And when we can’t, or when a place has been ripped apart or destroyed or converted to something else, something in us is set adrift.

9.

Gigi’s next move, to a place that provided meals and housekeeping, destabilized her further. She lost her glasses and her phone and stopped opening her mail. She used up all her ink printing out endless copies of internet jokes and WebMD help pages—for who? we asked. Who is this all for?

We sold her car and her world shrank further. Once, she tried to walk to the grocery store, four blocks away, and got stranded. A Good Samaritan had to drive her home.

A too-small hippocampus is one of the earliest diagnostic markers for Alzheimer’s disease. It’s usually thought of as a symptom: the physical damage inflicted by dementia results in terrifying disorientation and an inability to navigate even the most familiar places. A shrinking world, however, must also have a restrictive effect on the brain.

As her world grew physically smaller, Gigi’s ability to see geography diminished. She had always loved her views—the Fort Collins balcony with the view of Horsetooth Rock, the patio in Highlands Ranch where she could watch foxes playing on the golf course, the Englewood balcony where she spent the early months of the pandemic watching the trees leaf out and the moon move across the sky.

But as the pandemic wore on, her geography got blurry. “They took us to the Amy Coney Barrett swearing-in ceremony,” she reported that October. “It was just across the street!” The doctor adjusted her medications, but something in her brain had shriveled. When we finally were able to join her for dinner in the dining hall of her new place, we exclaimed about the view. “You can see the entire Front Range!” She didn’t glance up. It was like she was surrounded by a wall.

10.

Partway through the pandemic, Gigi called me in a panic: she wanted her cut glass tea set back. She knew where she kept it at the last place—in the cabinet below the TV—but not where she’d put it in her new place. “I hope you didn’t throw it out,” she said to me accusingly.

I know this feeling. I reach into the shadowy recesses of my memory to figure out where to look for the key to the safe deposit box or the needle-nose pliers. I can picture the object’s location so clearly—but the shelf or box or drawer is in the wrong house.

I assured her that while we were storing some of her things for safekeeping, we would never throw them out. “Everything is in boxes in our basement,” I said cheerfully. This was one of the strategic half-truths we were getting used to telling her to avoid pointless wrangling. (The truth was I had no idea where the tea set was. I rushed downstairs when I got off the phone and went through every box. No tea set.) The confident lies felt the same in my mouth as the facts I had to remind her of on an increasingly frequent basis: Yes, the doctor is treating you for that condition. That’s what this cream is for. And No, you don’t need to worry about your car—we sold it last year, remember?

We don’t invest our places with wisdom. We can’t: we’ve decided landscape is a thing. A place to burn, a place to build a house, a place to route a highway. Over and over we take a storied geography, scrape it clean of microbes and meaning, and throw up something new. So much better! we tell one another, dusting off our hands, not yet noticing what we’ve lost.

Indigenous elders suggest that we do so at our peril. A recent editorial by Phillip Whiteman, a Northern Cheyenne chief, argues that by cutting Arapaho and Cheyenne voices out of land management decisions on the plains, Colorado is depriving itself of the knowledge it needs to combat climate change and other environmental problems.

The erasure arrives in waves. We cut ourselves off from indigenous voices and then from the stories of our forebears; we’ve altered landforms, driven off species, and even fractured our own memories. Where was that rented farmhouse again? Did we catch that hawk? Could I really feel the passing semis in my body, or does it just seem like that should be true?

11.

In the last place Gigi lived—the memory-care wing of a sleek new assisted-living facility just a few minutes from our house—she didn’t talk about place anymore. Sometimes she asked about objects—where were the elegant blazers she wore to the symphony? What did we do with her cell phone? She did remember, she said, what had happened to her car—it had been confiscated after she was caught driving naked. But mostly she asked about people. Did her ex-husband really have an affair? Did her son-in-law really die? Was there going to be a wedding?

She spent her days in an elegant common room; there was natural light from French doors opening onto a high-walled patio, but the patio itself was shaded and loud, with noise from the nearby city street making it difficult to hear. Place—meaning anywhere outside of the carefully controlled environment of the facility—was potentially dangerous and treated as such.

In her strange new living arrangement, she had no way to access the physicality of her memories, no location that could trigger connection to the major events of her life. Dementia may have overtaken her anyway, but our casual way of discarding, dismissing, and overwriting our physical environment surely played a role in the disintegration of her mind.

Despite her distaste for any parts of it that seemed old or rundown, Gigi loved Colorado’s natural beauty. Long after she’d lost the ski condo in the divorce, she liked to go to the mountains and bask in the brilliant flowers and clear, crisp nights. She asked that her ashes be scattered in the meadows above Crested Butte, among “the wildflowers and the golden aspen.” Last July we found a spot among the columbine and paintbrush, up in the wilderness where development has been legislatively forbidden. We shook out the pale, sandy ashes in a place that felt distinct enough to find again later. And then we took a GPS reading, just in case.