Country of Exiles (12 page)

But Jackson emphasized the landscape of the temporary for reasons that went well beyond the purely personal. From the early 1950s, when he started
Landscape
, into the 1990s, he believed that the United States was creating the modern version of this landscape,
was
a new landscape, on the threshhold of becoming what he went so far as to call “a new heaven on earth.” Other landscapes had reigned before. In Europe the landscape had been made out of “stone,” which expressed a “stable and well-ordered society respectful of the past.” In America, in the early nineteenth century, there had been the “Jeffersonian agrarian landscape” (articulated as coherent independent farms), followed by the Thoreauvian landscape (with religious respect for Nature). But all these landscapes, Jackson argued, had been displaced by a new “fluid” landscape “devoted to change and mobility and the free confrontation of men.” This landscape reflected an America “where land and buildings are increasingly thought of in speculative terms, where families move on the average of once every five years, where whatever is old is obsolete, and whatever is obsolete is discarded.”
⁸¹

Jackson created an intellectual tapestry that would for the most part fit the modern world of temporariness—with its myriad expatriates, its migrants, its temp agencies and hotels—
like a hand fits a glove. He believed that roads and highways functioned at the heart of American society. “What seems to bring us together in the new landscape,” he said in 1994, two years before his death, “is not the sharing of space in the traditional sense but a kind of sodality based on shared uses of the street or road, and on shared routines.”
⁸²

Jackson wrote repeatedly about adaptable structures invented by Americans, from the balloon frames of the nineteenth century to modern prefabricated housing. He first wrote about trailer parks around 1960, after visiting a mining encampment in New Mexico, where skilled artisans of all kinds lived in trailers, their “aluminum roofs gleaming in the sun.”
⁸³
He idealized these men as “wanderers in a landscape always inhabited by wanderers. They never settled down. The way they came out of nowhere, stayed awhile and then moved on without leaving more than a few half-hidden traces behind, makes them forever part of this lonely and beautiful country.”
⁸⁴

Jackson never quit writing lyrically about such provisional groupings, even as the occupants changed to mostly poor working people. In 1979, in
The Necessity for Ruins
, he insisted that “the contemporary dwelling for all its impoverishment, for all its temporary mobile, rootless qualities” is “a transformer of spiritual energy” and “promises to capture and utilize more and more of this invisible, inexhaustible store of strength.”
⁸⁵
Five years later, in an essay titled “The Movable Dwelling,” he remarked that the “real significance” of the trailers lay in “a kind of freedom we often undervalue: the freedom from burdensome emotional ties with the environment, freedom from communal responsibilities, freedom from the tyranny of the traditional home and its possessions; the freedom from belonging to a tight-knit social order; and above all, the freedom to move on to somewhere else.”
⁸⁶
And again, in 1994, in
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time
, he came back to the
same message (a little tempered by the facts, perhaps, but no less lyrical), seeing his blue-collar “villagers” as superb examples of America’s displaced wanderers.

Jackson returned to these parks and camps because they confirmed something basic about his view of landscapes—that vernacular landscapes (those inhabited by ordinary people) were always transitory. He saw in mobile homes, in other words, the latest type of those vernacular communities he had found to exist throughout history, from the peasant villages of feudal Europe to the open adobe homes of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians. He set these dwellings against what he called “the political” and “aristocratic” structures created by “Established Power” (Jackson’s term for the state), which strove to impress and control the people, anchor place, and enforce continuity. The vernacular landscapes, on the other hand, had an unenforced quality, flowering spontaneously, as need dictated, to serve ordinary people. In this context, then, not only were trailer parks American or Jacksonian, but they were inside the very nature of men and women.

There was a power to this analysis, but it tended to impart an almost genetic inevitability to various kinds of landscapes. It also obscured how Established Power imposed the landscape of the temporary on others. Jackson argued that the vernacular often equaled mobility; but just the reverse could be claimed: that ordinary people have longed for stability and permanence (as much as for their opposite), while Established Power, in its commitment to expanding markets, has preferred change. In the 1990s, the thrust of business, reinforced by the state, has been toward flexibility and dissolution of place, a fact that, for whatever reason, Jackson missed or ignored. He viewed capitalism as benign. He chose not to see the degree to which Established Power—the palace highways of the state—had impinged on the vernacular.

Yet for all his tendency to look for beauty and strength in the ephemeral, even in trailer courts and mobile homes, there was another side to Jackson: he did recognize the need for permanence and centeredness, for individuals as well as societies. “The permanent aspects of our environment are those which matter most,” he argued in 1966. “A landscape allowed to expand to suit the temporary needs leaves a great deal to be desired. Each of us feels the need for something permanent in the world surrounding us, just as we feel the need for a permanent identity for ourselves.”
⁸⁷
He also saw the critical roles boundaries played in holding societies together. “It is well to remember that [boundary] means
that which binds together,”
he argued in the same essay; “[it] is what makes it possible for a society to have its own individuality. And this is true of the individual holding also.”
⁸⁸
“Boundaries stabilize relationships,” he said later. “They make residents out of the homeless, neighbors out of strangers, strangers out of enemies. They give a permanent human quality to what would otherwise be an amorphous stretch of land.”
⁸⁹

Most significant of all, he understood the historical role of place in sustaining peoples. He urged Americans to fashion a public landscape with monuments and public gathering places (courthouses, post offices, etc.), “where we are particularly aware of our identity as citizens.”
⁹⁰
Of monuments, he said that they “serve as reminders of the past, symbols of another community to which we belong: the community of those who have died. If the public square is a reminder of the present, the monument is a reminder of promises made, or origins we are inclined to forget.” A culture or country without “a sense of history,” Jackson argued, is threatened by a splintering into subcultures, and by submergence in a world of legends and superstitions.
⁹¹

Jackson also wrote eloquently of the lasting sense of
place that ordinary people made together, and nowhere more poignantly than in a 1984 essay dealing partly with his World War II experience when, as a second lieutenant in army intelligence, he joined the G-2 section of the 9th Infantry Division and took part in the invasion of Normandy. After the invasion, he spent a long, cold winter in the Huertgen Forest, sharing with “the men in companies and platoons” the same “military landscape.”
⁹²
As he recalled, he felt a profound bonding with the other men—all under the same threat of death, all as alive to the world around them as any men could have been; he also learned how landscape itself, broadly considered, might act as a critical medium for bringing “about a closer relationship between man and environment and between men.”
⁹³

The “military landscape,” he wrote, in an earlier essay invoking the same experience, “was the ugly caricature of a landscape.” “Nevertheless, it … instructed us in what a good landscape, and a good society, should be.” For here was a sense of place so thick, so dense and intense, that it could not fail to remind us of “spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them.”
⁹⁴

“This is how we should think of landscapes,” he insisted, as ways to “satisfy … the need for sharing some of those sensory experiences in a familiar place: popular songs, popular dishes, a special kind of weather supposedly found nowhere else, a special kind of sport and game, played only here in this spot. These things remind us that we belong—or used to belong—to a specific place: a country, a town, a neighborhood. A landscape should establish bonds between people.”
⁹⁵

Still, for all his understanding of the power of place, the lure of the temporary always returned to take precedence in his thinking, and always prevented him, finally (as I have said), from seeing how far the temporary had intruded into the lives of Americans. Again and again Jackson wrote with eloquence
about the loss or destruction of old ways—the decline of self-sufficient and family-owned farms; the disappearance, in many parts of the country, of Sunday walks and of the “front yard.” But he did not spend much time or thought on the “old ways”; his laments were often devices to prepare the reader for his central arguments: that (first) these things had died because they no longer performed useful functions, and (second) new landscapes were emerging that did perform useful functions. Underlying this approach, moreover, was Jackson’s own addiction to the technologies of mobility, his refusal to consider the capitalist market system critically, and his distaste—which he shared with many other Americans—for being identified with the losing side.

This lure of the temporary prevented him, by and large, from appreciating fully the plight of those who lived in modern trailer parks. Jackson, of course, may have just refused to give up his original notion of these communities, a notion he formed in the sixties when he first spotted those gleaming homes in New Mexico and the skilled workers living in them. More important, he misconstrued the way in which such communities resembled the vernacular villages of the past.
⁹⁶
Most modern trailer parks resemble such villages only in their poverty. They are extremely vulnerable, more so than Jackson was willing to admit. Often badly built, they can be wiped away by storms or tornadoes; greedy landlords can evict “undesirable” tenants easily by regularly raising their rents; and, most of all, trailer parks as a whole can be crushed by the shifting demands of commercial developers.

Like H-1B foreign skilled workers or adjunct university instructors, the unskilled workers in mobile homes seem perfectly suited to the demands of the flexible labor market: they often move on a moment’s notice and with little protest. Yet, unlike many skilled H-1B workers or academic adjuncts, who
ultimately—for the most part—have more freedom to dictate their own fates, these workers have little power to shape fate on their own terms (although many would deny that anyone should help them, least of all the federal government). In the winter of 1994, in Fairfax, Virginia, two hundred residents of a trailer park on land owned by Wal-Mart were displaced to make way for a new Wal-Mart store. A year later, in Everett, Washington, the managers of a planned strip mall forced the closing of the Olivia Mobile Home Park. By the decade’s end, developers in Vail, Colorado, had leveled six trailer parks to make room for vacation homes. Hundreds of parks are in similar jeopardy, and only the owners’ ingenuity, coupled with protection from the states, seems capable of slowing the removal of even more people.
⁹⁷

J. B. Jackson often missed much of this (although not always) because, on some critical level, he believed that everything that really mattered in life had a fugitive character, flaring up sometimes in a kind of brilliance only to vanish in the next moment. He himself was an urbane wanderer, a transient who managed to stamp the mark of the transient on a discourse that has shaped the way Americans think about landscape. His voice belonged to a significant chorus of voices made up of other temporaries, other singular singles of all kinds who have succeeded in redeeming the loner’s wandering style as the most attractive style in modern America. But the need to instill a sense of permanence and stability, without which there can be no decent social order, is greater now than ever in our history; for the landscape of the temporary has more troubling features, more pitfalls, than Jackson ever imagined or chose to see—hundreds of thousands of detached managers with their remembering machines, millions of flexible workers, women as well as men on the stranger’s path, drawn away from their homes, and the encroaching highways and roads, intermodal
and otherwise, a global economy crashing into the traditional hearts of local cultures.

But this was not all: other changes were going on, too, just as subversive to place. They included the spread of a new service economy, at the core of which were tourism and gambling, each a challenge and an affront to place, each an attempt to rebuild place on a new foundation.

I
n the fall of 1995 I attended the White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, the first event of its kind ever held under the auspices of the federal government. It lasted two days, and the opening events had the feel of a revival, a political convention, and rock-and-roll concert all rolled into one.

On stage was a giant replica of the White House, bathed in blue and purple light, symbol of the institution that sponsored the two-day affair, and an image used as a logo on conference T-shirts and jackets. A Navy band played rousing patriotic tunes. Four gigantic video screens dispersed around the ballroom showed scenic views of America—beach shots, lake views with speedboats, neon-lighted nightspots, canyons, and deserts. John F. Kennedy’s theme of “the New Frontier” was invoked again and again in speeches on video screens, a reminder to delegates that their goal—to win the tourist and travel war—was as crucial to America in the nineties as was Kennedy’s aim in the sixties to beat the Russians in space. Seventeen hundred delegates from every state and five territories filled the ballroom, representing
the gamut of the travel and tourist industry, from travel agents and hotel desk clerks to the CEOs of Hilton Hotels, Delta Airlines, and Alamo Rent a Car. Mayors, governors, and senators attended, as did Vice President Al Gore and President Bill Clinton.