III. Understanding Place

No place quite informs who I am like my own bedroom. An undeniable mess at all times, but my mess. The weird stain on the rug, the pile of clothes that didn’t make the outfit, and the shoes thrown into the corner after an especially rough day.

I’ll save everyone’s eyes from the clutter though. Here’s another significant place, more so to my city than to myself:

Heritage State Park Board Walk overlooking Battleship Cove. Fall River, MA.

This is the waterfront in my city. Its a boardwalk that overlooks a river, and one of the main tourist attractions, a large collection of World War II vessel. The boardwalk holds a museum, tennis courts, picnic areas, monuments and leads to a variety of restaurants and bars. I’ve gone on many walks & runs here during *short-lived* “going to get healthy” kicks, or to avoid having to valet at the night-spots we go to there. On a sunny day, you can be certain you’ll see tons of people here – families out for a stroll, people walking their dogs, the determined jogger that is there rain or shine. And on summer nights its still usually pretty busy – people stumbling to and from the bars, lone thinkers on benches, teens in smoky parked cars. Williams equation that PLACE + PEOPLE = POLITICS rings true here, with varying opinions about what other businesses should go around there and how the land should be further developed. It is one of the few places in the city where you can truly see all races and classes of people and provides many recreational opportunities for youth.

Its especially interesting that all of this occurs in such a militarized environment. When considering William’s takes on how we attribute mythology and history to a place, this seems very accurate. There’s many monuments of *war heroes* throughout the city, which seems to cling to its history in hopes that one day it’ll be that glorious again.

While our city now has a pretty bad reputation, it was once the industrial capital of country, and has a pretty prominent, though often forgotten role in our nations early history, particularly our state forest. Formerly home to the Wampanoag, now a hiking/stoner spot, folklore has the forest as known for its pukwudgies that’ll push you to your death, a ledge that looks like a face, and cult activity dating back to the 70s. The mythology attributed to this place makes it pretty terrifying at night, and even quite eery during the day. (Can read more about the forest here if you’re interested)

Freetown State Forest. https://wizzley.com/hauntings-on-the-assonet-ledge-in-freetown-state-forest/

I do think that people who live in the city often have a lesser connection to nature than those who live in more rural areas. For people in rural areas, this connection seems more innate, but in a city it takes something extreme to ignite it. Like a natural disaster, or just extreme weather that reminds us no matter how far removed we seem to be from it, we’re still at nature’s mercy, or on the opposite end of the spectrum – a really beautiful view. I think for a lot of people accustomed to city life, when faced with landscapes that are extremely natural, they oddly become something supernatural (like maybe in the case of the forest). Perhaps this reflects a need to assert dominance and project ourselves, humans, onto it one way or another – so if no physical evidence exists that we were there, we attach spirit forms to it – unable to accept that humans could’ve lived there without leaving some trace of themselves on the land. I particularly liked Kingsolver’s line about the wilderness as a place with “no steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise — no hominid agenda.” I agree there is something especially beautiful about a place with a mind and meaning of its own, or perhaps with no meaning at all, distinctly untainted by humans.