Note to all: I missed the last new moon deadline I set for myself; I was really, really sick that whole week. Now it’s the full moon and a month since I last sent out a newsletter. I’m still figuring out the best timeline for me to send out essays and art, and I like the every-two-weeks-with-moon-phases plan, as long as I stay relatively well. We will see how the rest of December goes— it’s usually a busy month of crafting Christmas presents. Thanks as always for being my friend and reading.
Climbing along the River
by William Stafford
Willows never forget how it feels
to be young.
Do you remember where you came from?
Gravel remembers.
Even the upper end of the river
believes in the ocean.
Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away.
What I believe is,
all animals have one soul.
Over the land they love
they crisscross forever.
The gate was never ajar. In fact, it was always closed and locked on purpose, only opening at the touch of a keypad whose code would remain forever unknown to me. Before I began going to school, my mother and I would go for walks to the end of our suburban road, where the gate divided our neighborhood from the one beyond. I grew up in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, with potholes along our road and lots of meandering dogs. As we walked farther from our house and closer to the gate, the houses along the road became larger and farther apart. There was a horse named Clover behind a fence with a sign that said “Do not feed” right before the closed gate. The homes on the other side of the gate were unlike any houses I knew— solitary monoliths with winding driveways and darkened windows, heavily landscaped. Through the bars of the gate, I could see two or three big homes but I knew the neighborhood extended far beyond, up into the hills. Sometimes a car would approach from our side, roll down its window, and the driver would enter a code into the key pad. The gate would whir and shift and slowly open, swallowing the shiny vehicle and closing tightly again afterward.
When one is young and free to more or less to roam in and out of neighbors’ houses and along country roads, the out-of-bounds places are the most intensely intriguing. And a private gated community is definitively out-of-bounds for most. Growing up, I would occasionally imagine finding myself in an emergency situation at the end of the road, such as discovering Clover ill, or with a broken leg. In these fantasies I had no choice but to jump the gate and ask for help. I wondered who would come out of those colossal mansions on the hill. What kinds of food did they eat? Did they have large, extravagant parties? All the things that a child can imagine, I wondered about the houses behind the gate.
Wondering what lies beyond a threshold is a particularly human experience. When thinking about this essay, I remembered a woodcut drawing that fascinated me as a kid. The Flammarion engraving, depicted above, first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”), and depicts a man peeking through the firmament, or physical barrier that was thought to separate the atmosphere from the heavens. The sense of urgent wonder that this image stirred in me as a child was the same one I felt about the electric gate at the end of the road. What lay beyond that impassable threshold? What mysteries might I glimpse if I could just reach through to see them?
Looking back now, I have very little intrigue as what lay beyond the gate at the end of my childhood street. I have lived in the world long enough, and on this side of the gate for long enough, to know that it was a mildly uninteresting brand of wealth that lay beyond. These were giant homes with TV dens, multi-car garages and pools. They had expensive furniture and lots of processed foods from our industrial food system, big closets inside master suites and maybe a tennis court. They were idyllic, American dream homes complete with the isolation that so often accompanies that much privacy. I think that’s what turns me off now from dreaming of living beyond the gate. From my limited experience inside homes and private properties like this, I can guess that most of these living spaces were empty. Nobody was swimming in those pools or playing on those lawns, and they definitely were not traversing on worn footpaths through communal orchards and vegetable gardens from house to house in their scenic neighborhood. According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, most of the time people spend at home is spent around the kitchen and TV, though nowadays our laptops have probably replaced the TV. As well, the average home size in the US has increased over the past 60 years to nearly 2,500 feet— much, much bigger than the average 900 square foot house of the 1950s. Strange to think how most of this space does not get used by the inhabitants.
We often call neighborhoods like the one next to where I grew up “gated communities,” whether or not they actually fulfill the role of a community. Gated communities have existed for centuries, as long as the wealthy have desired to be kept away from public spaces. The writers of Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States set out to study them. They wrote about the kinds of neighborhoods that create a private physical space, oftentimes complete with tennis courts, community pools, movie theaters, and in the case of one southern California gated community, a shopping center. Gated communities are on the rise globally, with high security cul-de-sacs popping up in many countries outside the United States. According to the writers, unlike a commune or an eco village, gated suburbs have always intended to separate their residents, “first from the city and later even from each other.” It is this factor of isolation that dampens my intrigue into what might be happening beyond the wrought iron gate. It seems to directly counter my own value of belonging somewhere and being enmeshed inside a community.
What do these single family home dwellers gain by protecting themselves behind a gate? Maybe they gain a certain level of protection over physical belongings. According to a 2012 study by UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, 75% of suburban American homes have so much stuff in their garage that there’s nowhere to store a car. The existence of Costco has made it so that stockpiling canned food, frozen meals, and cleaning supplies to a maddening degree is normalized. In this study, researchers found that “managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers.” That aligns with what I experienced growing up in our culture, even on my side of the gate, and what I have seen in big, isolated surburban home after big, isolated suburban home. Researchers also found that “even in a region with clement year-round weather, the families hardly used their yards.” People own acreage and then never traverse it! They do not roll around in the grasses that surround their huge homes. We are the wealthiest nation in the world, but what that wealth is purchasing and hoarding and keeping locked behind a gate does not seem to be worth much, even to us.
It’s not just homes behind locked gates that are empty of activity and full of crap. Most people I know grew up in a house with lots of stuff, and still we live inside a culture of feelings of scarcity. We want to protect our overcrowded homes, despite the fact that this protection and ownership does not really bring us joy. And in that hoarding, real scarcity outside is exacerbated— so many people do not even live in a home, do not have a savings to spend on a garage full of junk or a pool that nobody swims in. For people living in scarcity in the United States, and more so in countries that are considered ‘underdeveloped,’ envy grows for those behind the gate. Being kept outside the gate and separate from commodity wealth makes that wealth mysterious and desirable, and those living in scarcity to just want to be on the other side of the gate instead of leaning into the mystery of what if we tore it down altogether.
It dawned on me very recently why I even started writing this essay. I could write about anything, at any time and right now I am choosing to pull apart and wrangle with big empty houses. I happen to live near a few rural mansions whose existence is only motioned at by a ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign on a gate along the road. I see the inhabitants of these mansions driving down the road we share, and I am filled with a feeling that is definitely not longing, but more akin to a neutral wonder. Should I want that? I definitely want to live somewhere and feel security! I want to raise a family, maybe even own a home. But not one that is extravagantly locked behind a gate, in isolation from my neighbors. I am longing to figure out what the next thing looks like for me, where I can find security and belonging and safety in housing. Not only do I never want to live in a gated community, I feel bothered by their mere existence. There is a part of me that wants to get a loudspeaker and stand at the gate and shout through the bars: “I'm sorry you’re so far away from everyone! I wish you wanted to belong to the world, or that the world felt more worth belonging to! I am not sure how to fix this! But I think maybe it should start right here with this gate!”
I am probably not going to do the loudspeaker thing, and instead I will just keep writing this essay. I don’t know what my future looks like, but I hope it looks humble with lots of outside time and food from a garden. In doing research for this essay, I found a few key and interesting ideas about creating more public access in our world, and decolonizing ourselves from the culture of gates.
The United Kingdom makes legal the right to roam, or to wander across privately owned land on foot. Nobody can shoot you, or tell you to leave, or prevent you from appreciating and interacting with the trees and mosses and spiders on privately owned land. I guess sometimes you can’t bring your dog with you, but this seems a lot better than what we do in the United States. It’s certainly not the perfect answer to how to create a wandering and more beautiful world of wonder, but I think it would be a start.
Though not necessarily disruptive, I believe it is also important to find ways to somatically experience freedom of movement in a world that is built on a grid. There are some places in this world where our movement is unconstricted, even to those who are members of 21st century America. On a trip to the Alvord desert of southeast Oregon, my friends and I ran and drove and hollered in circles over the cracked ground— no trails, no roads, no designated camping area, just a wide expanse of land on which to sprint and dance. The desert invited it, with its broad flatness. We were not disrupting any political systems with our wild donut-driving and long distance chases on-foot, but we experienced somatically what it was like to be unconfined by roads, paths, gates. And again recently, in a meadow near the UC Santa Cruz campus, a professor with whom I was walking encouraged our group to spread out, to stomp on the yampah and yarrow, to avoid the trails because the plants of this meadow require the disruption of footsteps. This meadow needs our wanderings to thrive; I don’t know how to put the message more elegantly than that. The earth wants us to wander and be free, to participate and crisscross and meander through bogs and valleys, not to own them. Maybe finding our way outside of a gated world begins with welcoming a wander off-trail.
I have a few friends who process animal hides. They take the skin from recently dead animals, and using tannins or brains or chemicals, clean the detached hide and stretch it and make it soft and usable. One friend of mine told me that he has processed many, many roadkill deer hides and never once has he found one without scars and scratches up and down its back and belly from barbed wire fences. This means that the deer don’t even look twice before loping over cattle fences, through vegetable gardens and redwood forests, in and out of gated communities. Over threshold after threshold they crunch and leap.
I think my dream is that we, the curious and hairless hominids of this earth, should agree on enough public spaces and freedoms that we can be like the deer, surmounting gate after gate, making beautiful homes for ourselves that are human-scale and filled with cherished, crafted tools and treasures. And should we arrive at the end of private property laws someday and need to figure out how to really belong on this earth together, may we cross over to that place with wonder and imagination.