Trusting in Ambitious Hybridity: America, Nature, and Relationships

Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, editors of State by State: a Panoramic Portrait of America, were caught up in the beauty of the cultures of each state and the “simple American virtues: the essential looseness of American lives, the vitality and variety of American vistas, the cut and jib of American talk”. In preparation for putting this book together, the more they talked about the states, the more they wondered about each state‘s “particularities and idiosyncrasies, their prejudices and biases” and even their “beauty marks, moles, . . . cadences [and] jokes”. The project had been done before as well; they wanted to replicate the State Guides from the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression which “documented the forty-eight states of the time in unprecedented detail and with great charm,” featuring literary figures from the Harlem Renaissance such as Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright (Native Son); and other notable figures including Jack Conroy (a Leftist writer known for his literature about American workers), Conrad Aiken (Pulitzer prize winning poet), and Wallace Stegner (a Pulitzer prize and U.S. National Book Award novelist). The State Guides Series is a magnificent collection of writings from the 1940s about different topics and stories about the essayists’ respective states that only the denizens know. 

In searching for the best state to review in State by State, I was intrigued by Kevin Brockmeier’s essay about Arkansas, and how fractious people can be within a state. Brockmeier recounts his days as an eighteen-year old senior at Parkview High School in Little Rock – a school that was “a haven for dancers, actors, painters, misfits, hipsters, skaters, straight edgers, band geeks, boys with makeup and girls without” – which to put it simply, was a high school with a variety of unique individuals. The most stand-out object which seemed to mentally colonize the state of Arkansas, at Brockmeier’s point of entry in his essay, were “thousands of green bumper stickers with white letters reading ‘Speak Up for Decency’”… and no one was sure of its origin. This was 1991. Not long after, a response to the green bumper stickers that were popping up everywhere emerged: yellow bumper stickers with the same template, “but this time reading ‘Speak Up for Liberty’”. A battle erupted between the two bumper stickers, and it seemed as though more cars sported the green ‘Speak Up for Decency’ stickers, cars with the ‘Speak Up for Liberty’ stickers would typically sport more than one.

As one delves into the origins of the two groups, one finds that the ‘Speak Up for Decency’ stickers originated from the Fellowship Bible Church, while ‘Speak up for Liberty’ originated from the newspaper Spectrum Weekly. By comparing the two groups, one would find that they were exactly on opposite sides of the conflict – Decencies were religious while Liberties were secular; Decencies were concentrated in the western new-growth regions of Little Rock while Liberties were concentrated on the eastern, older neighborhood; “Decencies were bothered by profanity, homosexuality, and the building immodesty of American Culture” while “The Liberties were bothered by repression, censorship, and the bullying sanctimony of American culture”. The two groups were also different in their confidences and distrusts. Eventually, the conflict between the two groups got so out of hand that even the letters in the editorial pages of the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette became a heated battleground between the two contrasting factions. By the time Brockmeier left the city of Little Rock for college, the two factions were ubiquitous in Little Rock, but “by 1997, when I [Brockmeier] returned home, they had begun to vanish from the automotive landscape”. Brockmeier wonders: “Could it be, I wondered, that all our disagreements are destined to end this way, blanching out and wearing away at the edges?”

Years later (apparently when he was on assignment from Weiland and Wilsey), Brockmeier has not seen any signs of the old dispute, so gets excited when seeing a new sticker: “it read, ‘Speak Up for Puberty.’ Here, finally, was a cause we could all support”. Isn’t it decent for the boy to put away boyish things, and is it not a liberation to leave home finally?Brockmeier is trying to express that Arkansas and maybe even the United States as a whole, is a state and country of many disagreeing opinions, but eventually everything fades away, and it’s important to realize that there are things that could bring the people together.

Another state that interested me was West Virginia where Jayne Anne Phillips wrote about nature and “the land, so mountainous and intransigent, so verdant and densely forested as to be nearly uninhabitable”. The land is beautiful, with “the Appalachian Mountains isolat[ing] a thousand years of paradise for animals, flora, fauna, all fed by interlacing rivers and countless clear streams that ran from the highest elevations to the deepest valleys”. Yet, because the land is a “paradise” there will always be conflict in defining it as such. European settlers started arriving like bears attracted to honey, and countries from all around Western Europe ran for a share of the pie: “the land was territory”, the why and wherefore of conflict. Later on, conflict ensued in West Virginia once again. South Carolina’s Fort Sumter being fired upon started the war, and Virginia seceded from the Union while, in 1863, western Virginians declared independence from Virginia, wrote a State Constitution, and joined the Union; families were split, sons against fathers, brothers against brothers, and conflict arose once again. West Viriginians regard this epic struggle as a part of their identity. To Phillips, West Virginia is a state about mountaintop mining, immobility (denizens don’t move around much), and the exotic: “the primeval, virgin expanse of the mountains was once unknown, unimaginable, [until] Western eyes cast into its depth and majesty and threat”. If born and raised in West Virginia, it’s a place you can never forget, and one can always reminisce about “the feel and smell and mind’s eye image of a narrow road in summer, a dirt road or a paved one, boarded by woods and fragrant weeds, overhung with trees, twisting deeper”. All of the events that have happened to West Virginia over time have made it different and unique. Likewise, all of the events that have happened in the United States as a whole, and during its formation, have established our collective identity. 

Vermont’s motto can be seen on its license plate: Green Mountain State. Alison Bechdel had lived in a variety of places, central Pennsylvania, the Twin Cities, New York City… and she finally arrived in Vermont. The first thing she did immediately after arriving from the airport was to visit the summit of Camel’s Hump, where one can see the verdant trees and silvery lakes at peak season. In her graphic essay (one of two in State by State – the other is by the cartoonist Joe Sacco on Oregon) Bechdel asks what makes Vermont so compelling to her. Is it “the supramundane perspective afforded by a summit” or is it because “[her] grandfather herded goats as a boy in the Austrian Alps?” Bechdel can relate Vermont to an early childhood memory of hers when she first watched The Sound Of Music; when watching the classic film, she was amazed by the “vertiginous mountainscapes [that] are forever fused with [a] strange feeling that the androgynous ex-nun induced in [one]” (she is a lesbian). Vermont’s rolling green hills are reminiscent of those high peaks – in addition to… no Nazis.

Vermont can be characterized by its founding hero, the legendary Ethan Allen. He was a man who had the tireless courage to defend his home state and the United States as a soldier fighting against the British. Now, Vermont can be tiring as well, since “winters in Vermont are long”. Bechdel’s neighbors even continue to live in “stone walls and cellar holes of old hill farms” while she herself despises having to shovel the inches of snow every year. She can’t imagine living among those green hills if she was the one farming within them and suffering long hard winters every year. Despite the hardships in Vermont “it’s the place, of course, that binds [Bechdel] to these people”. 

I enjoyed reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay about Kentucky. Sullivan writes about a lesser-known polymath: the legendary Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. Rafinesque was born in Constantinople, Turkey (now known as Istanbul), which was the influence for his name. He was a self-educated genius, an autodidact who wrote extensively on the topics of anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics, but was not honored by any of these subjects during his time. He was “curiously named by Darwin in On the Origin of Species as a forerunner in the study of evolution”, as the closest thinker to grasp the ideas of natural selection decades before the book was published; he is hailed as “the father of American myriapodology (the study of many-legged bugs)” and he “invented the word ‘malcology’ (the study of mollusks)”.  He even “[wrote] an open letter to the Cherokee warning them that they would soon be forcefully moved to the West, a full decade before it happened”. 

Today, Rafinesque’s legacy is recognizable through his identification and naming of many many animals, and even the genus Rafinesquia (a genus of flowering plants in the dandelion family) was named in his honor. Rafinesque had the true heart of an explorer. He desired to trek the vast wilderness of early 19th-century United States, and in 1802, declined Dr. Benjamin Rush’s invitation to study medicine under him, so that he could be free. Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first great American physician, but Rafinesque wanted to explore like Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery.

To Rafinesque, the earth was “an organized animal rolling in space” which “had been arranged for him to be present and correctly positioned at this moment, just as a continent of taxonomically pristine vastnesses offered itself to science”. He was simply infatuated with the land. “I pant to explore,” said Rafinesque. He was sent to Philadelphia to be tutored by savants under President Jefferson’s command. It’s hard to imagine what could have happened if Jefferson had agreed to let him join Lewis and Clark; if Rafinesque was able to document all of what he desired from the tall Appalachians to the roaring Pacific Ocean, he could have discovered new landmarks, animals, and languages, and he could have proposed new ideas way past his time in botany, geology and other scientific topics. If Rafinesque had made this journey, perhaps he would be more of a household name. 

Broke, Rafinesque had no choice but to sail to Sicily, and even when he was given another opportunity by Jefferson to map the Red River in the Northwest. By the time he got the invitation, his ship had already set sail, and he could only reply with ‘sorry’. America missed him, and his betrayal was heartbreaking to America: “by America, I mean the land. It had called to him. He had not come”.  

Rafinesque spent a decade in Sicily, starting a family there and trying to accomplish as much as he could on this small island. Eventually, Rafinesque was pulled back to America as its beautiful nature called out to his eager spirit, and he went to find the great John James Audubon, the man notable for documenting and drawing all of the birds of America. Rafinesque longed to see Audubon’s paintings, already well known among the learned.

The meeting of the two was at first awkward, but their ideas and astonishment for each other overshadowed it. Rafinesque’s eyes had shone bright with satisfaction – he perhaps thought, Finally! I have sailed over oceans for this moment. In 1818, Audubon accepted Rafinesque’s help, since he was keen on having the assistance of such a unique individual capable of a multitude of tasks. The two embraced the others’ ideas and identities. However, Rafinesque’s eight-year period in Kentucky is “coincident with the onset of mental degeneration.” And it was: and his genius grew. His genius grew as his errors and embarrassments multiplied. During this period of time, Rafinesque was writing his masterpiece: Ichthylogia Ohiensis or Natural History of the Fishes Inhabiting the Ohio River and its Tributary Streams. Rafinesque saw the Chillicothe Mounds, “earthen monuments raised on the landscape by hundreds of generations of Native American builders,” which astonished him and which he studied extensively. Today, there are few places in Kentucky (mostly family farms) where one can find these raised land sculptures, half in the fields and half in the forest. Rafinesque and Audubon spent three weeks together, which Audubon writes about in his Ornithological Biography, in the chapter covering his time in Hendersonville, KY.

The relationship of the two famous scientists can be compared to the relationship of our two great statesmen: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, or famous painters Gauguin and Van Gogh, or fairy writers J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, or inventors Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Audubon laid before Rafinesque his drawings and was open to comments and criticisms, and both benefited; Audubon was able to improve his understanding of the surroundings beyond the images he saw, and Rafinesque was able to see vegetation and species he had never seen before. Their relationship continued to improve, and Audubon even got the Frenchman to drink brandy and hunt with him, though Audubon recalls “Rafinesque had shot a bird once and never got over the ‘cruelty’”. Audubon and Rafinesque’s relationship can be at times like childhood friends finally enjoying a long talk after being apart for some time, or that of a teacher and student, as Audubon himself remembers listening to Rafinesque’s ideas “with as much delight as Telemachus could have listened to Mentor”. The two would joke in French and English, stare at the massive trees and the stars that hung beyond them, and get flabbergasted at all of the wilderness and animals around them.

The end of their meeting was abrupt as suddenly, one night, Audobon woke up to the sound of incessant banging – it was Rafinesque, bashing at bats, which were eating specimens… with Audubon’s prized Stradivarius (which to a violinist myself is heartbreaking)! It was later revealed that Rafinesque was afraid of the death of the bugs, for he thought they were a new species, but they were only common insects. Rafinesque vanished following this incident, embarrassed by what he had done; he mentions his meeting with Audubon to be consisting of only three days instead of weeks, but Audubon remembers that “we were perfectly reconciled to his oddities”. Sullivan’s Kentucky truly brings out the wilderness of America. America is a beloved country, where people are free to enjoy the stars to their desires and communicate with the land around them. Rafinesque’s story recalls a man’s contagious love for America, for he could never escape her grasp.

Kentucky is a unique state; it shares the industries and factories of the north, and the fields of tobacco and some of the vegetation of the south. Though the modern times have changed Kentucky, the Bluegrass State has a distinct agrarian stamp that endures. The two largest cities alone, Louisville and Lexington, are home to only 20% of Kentucky’s population, making it one of the more rural demographics in the lower 48. Kentucky could even be defined by its numerous contrasts, which make it unique, such as its vibrant, lush fields of the Bluegrass region, or the destitute poverty-stricken Appalachian regions, or the network of caves that riddle the state (Kentucky has the most caves of any state). The state is home to the rich and the poor, advanced modern cities and countryside towns, areas filled with undulating fields and forests as far as the eye can see, and high buildings replacing those vast fields.

Kentucky is a state situated in the middle of the north and the south and was during the Civil War era, a state that was the hotbed for the Abolitionist movement and sadly a chief marketplace for slaves to be used in the south. Kentucky voted to become a Union state and like West Virginia, families, cousins, fathers and sons split in joining the Confederacy and the Union.

To locate modern Kentucky, one only needs to trace a line going from Ashland, through the cities of Lexington and Louisville, along the Western Kentucky Parkway all the way to Paducah. From the northern side of that area lies the Ohio River, an area of concentrated population and industrial growth. This area of Kentucky is so industrialized, it’s hard to remember the classic alluring greenlands. In the city of Ashland, the Ashland oil corporation is the nation’s 35th-largest industrial corporation and is on the Fortune 500 list. However, the most sparkling region of all would be the Bluegrass regions. It’s hard to find better land in the world to nurture livestock. In Kentucky, one can find hundreds of horse farms with the finest racing horses grazing on the quiet grasses surrounded by white fences.

Imagine driving your newly acquired motorcycle crossing the Ohio Bridge from Cincinnati, and upon entering Kentucky, you find yourself situated on a long road stretching ahead through the vast land, and you feel like an explorer starting a long journey; would you find that the undulating countryside was giving you an almost nautical experience of riding up and down great green rolling waves of grass, with the blue sky shining off of the green grass, expertly nibbled to a lawn-look by an elegant thoroughbred horse? 

State by State characterizes the United States through the perspectives of a variety of states. Every state is unique and special and represents a part of America. Sullivan’s Kentucky brings out the wild frontier of the early Americas by profiling an engaging and passionate autodidact who was in an interesting relationship with Audubon – and that the ambitious hybridity of the United States is revealed and expressed through America’s great natural landscapes and regions.