The place, Sperry Peninsula, has been the site of a children's summer camp for the last 50 years. Now, Jodie Allen Patton, sister of Microsoft Billionare Paul Allen, is handing me a divorce from my home. With no visiting rites. Jodie Patton is holding our own artifacts as a ransom for our silence. A ransom to avoid being told how she is accountable for her actions. The experience is teaching me more than I cared to know about rage. And I will not be silenced. This is the chopping of my last Truffala Tree. It's an attack on my bear cub. It's the bulldozing of my burrowing owl's mound.
What is invading the land is much worse than just childish ownership. What is infecting the land is a virtual reality. This is a hard pill to swallow when this is the landscape that is the Receiver of my Memory. When I walk down the paths, I am both an old man and the child I was when I first tripped on the now memorized roots of the Cedar, Fir and Madronna Trees. Madronna Trees. Those trees. All my life I'd been admiring trees such as these. Trees that grow grey hairs. Trees that crack and curl and dance with time. The year my mother spent a summer as a child eating in the lodge that looks out on the Olympic Mountains siloutted on a burning sky, you could have seen the Kwakult longhouse from my favorite Madronna tree. It's the same tree that the man who built the longhouse, Bill Holm, first slept under when he visited Sperry Peninsula for the first time. The very tree I hung from as an adult, while I listened to him tell the story of the hunt for Old Man Sperry's treasure. It won't be enough that I can go visit other Madronna Trees. These are the Madronnas I have watched grow. That I have listened to. They are my Giving Trees. They are my elders.
The there's the paths. The paths worn by the memory of thousands of footsteps. Thousands of my footsteps. Generations of growing feet leaving the stories of their passing. A parcipatory sculpture of motion on the landscape. I have walked down the trails to have them evaporate around me as I realize I am coasting through a memory. Floating on timelessness. Down these paths have skipped and danced four generations of humans listending to the trees, finding the songs of the landscape, continuing the rituals of the season, and practicing a culture of place.
What is invading this place is a different reality. A virtual reality. And the problem with virtual realities is that they are not connected to a place.
The best way to understand how this is so is to think about the memory of the type we keep on a computer. The words that one types into a word processor are no more than a pattern of 0s and 1s when you get right down to it. It doesn't really matter whether the thought that resides in them are held by RAM, the floppy disk, and optical drive or some other storage media yet to be concieved. One may experience them differently via the "display technology." But the IDEA is that the idea can be transferred from place to place. Media to media.
But, now, think about a place. The media IS the message. But it's the memory as well. One can't just imagine it and so experience it. The glacier cut bassalt groves that roll out of the water and form Sperry Peninsula can't just be recreated somewhere else. One can't just manufacture the moss that incubates the pinecones of the tres that now block the view to the long house from that favorite Madronna of mine.
30 September 1996