Below is a personal essay I wrote about a lingering feeling that I’ve only recently found a name for—the feeling of being misplaced. While I write about a few particular and special places, this might be more about the inner landscape, its own kind of moody place.
I’d love to hear your thoughts - Caleb
Misplaced
I don’t know exactly when I became misplaced. There is no anniversary or event to reflect upon—no inciting incident. My temporal sense of place is closer to that of climate than to a single storm or sunny day. There are, however, moments I can recall, thoughts and feelings I now know how to name, when I knew something had changed, and the places I once felt rooted in—felt were a part of me—somehow felt apart, myself uprooted, untethered.
I miss the days when I didn’t know how to analyze a place, when I was far less judgmental of a landscape and its people, when I simply existed and felt.
As an undergraduate, I studied environmental design and focused my rational mind on the concept of place and how we as humans interact with it. This of course allowed me to pull place apart and put it back together, intentionally. Humans are good at this sort of thing. We find something so powerful, so elegant, so raw and indescribable to our irrational feeling selves and we turn our rational, organizing brains on it only to strip it of all its magic. Like love, art, or god. What is love? What is art? What is God? What do we gain from defining these things? I believe, just like when we define how a place gets its sense, we may lose more than we gain.
A friend recently shared some thoughts from the Swedish visual artist, Ingemar Bergman, that relate to this feeling I speak of.
"He tells an old story about the cathedral of Chartres being burned to the ground and being rebuilt by thousands of anonymous people—artist, laborers, clowns, priests, and others. No one knows the identity of these workers. Bergman confesses that regardless of his beliefs or doubts he believes that art lost its basic creative drive when it was separated from worship, that art is now sterile but in former days the artist's work was to the glory of God.” (Robert E Lauder, 1992)
I have sterilized place. Therefore, I feel misplaced.
I think about early humans all the time and feel nostalgic. I’m not naive to the fact that if I had been born 150-thousand years ago, I would have most likely had a very hard and short life. My nostalgia is rooted in the very different relationship I would have had with the landscape, to the seasons and the stars. Consider all that would have been sacred. Now consider how you take those things for granted. What I crave is the absolute wonder I imagine I would have felt from looking at the stars long before our skies were polluted with light. I want the weightlessness of a world in which there are no millennia-old constructs that preach our separateness from the landscape and the other forms of life it supports. I miss the mystery of it all. I long for unquestionable interconnectedness.
I recently drove out to the place I grew up from the time I was ten years old. Shelburne, Massachusetts is a small town located on the western slope of the Pioneer Valley. The land I grew up on is situated at twelve-hundred-feet above sea level. The land, once a dairy farm and apple orchard, then a one-hundred-site campground, is now managed but unworked. Long before the old growth forests were cleared for pasture and the stone walls built during the time referred to as "sheep fever,” these hills were lived on, hunted, and foraged by the Mohican and Algonquin peoples, whom I’ve thought quite a bit about recently; more than I ever had before.
The atrocities happening in the world are so clear and so present that I believe many of us have been forced to reconcile our place in it. For me, among many things, this means the stories I’ve told myself about the places I feel connected to and have called home. It means understanding how my ancestors and I have benefited from the displacement of people who called these places home before us. And this is where I want to make a very clear and important distinction.
I have not been displaced; I feel misplaced.
My plan was to camp and be alone for a night, but I ended up sleeping on my parents’ floor because I couldn’t calm myself enough to relax. Have you heard the vixen’s scream? I hadn’t before that night and it sent chills down my spine and my imagination spiraling into a darkness that was mine alone and had nothing to do with the fox protecting her kits in the woods to the west of where my tent was pitched—the woods where she lived and where I was only a visitor.
The writer and artist Tove Jansson lived with her partner on a small island in the Gulf of Finland for all but the coldest months each year. A tiny place in a vast landscape. She must have walked every inch of the island. According to her family, she knew it was time to give away the cottage when she began to fear the sea. (BBC, Moomin Tales)
There are many reasons, conditions, nested contexts for why I couldn’t calm my mind that night. I could over-explain all of them, but I won’t. I do however think it’s important to consider the vast circumstances we find ourselves in to understand the way we feel on any given day. Not to blame them, but to acknowledge them and name them. And then, at some point, I believe it’s important to forget them from time to time; when I think of our early ancestors another thing I feel nostalgic for is immediacy. Simply put, we knew what we knew. We dreamed, we imagined, but when it came to existing in place, we had only what we could sense around us.
I have recurring dreams in which I jump up off the ground and then continue to float weightless, out of control, up into the sky. My misplacement feels like this, like a satellite falling out of orbit, its gravitational tether gone, drifting in the vastness of space.
One of the first times I can remember feeling the gravitational pull of place was when I felt it being stretched and torn away.
Halfway is a small town nestled in the southern edge of the Wallowa Mountains in Eastern Oregon. The town apparently got its name because it was the half-way point between two towns that today no longer exist, which feels fitting for what it means to me.
My first trip to Halfway was when I was seven years old. My aunt Louise had found herself in Halfway on a blind date with a man named Raz and his forty-something llamas a few years earlier. He asked her if she’d like to stay the summer. As you may have guessed, they’re both still there and run a llama packing outfitting business that takes hikers into the mountains. That first visit with my parents was magical and I hid in the bathroom and cried when it was time to leave. I did the same thing when it was time to leave a few years later on my second visit. It felt like being torn away from a force I couldn’t yet name.
It’s a beautiful place, a lush llama ranch nestled between the vast sage of the high desert and alpine Wallowas. The willow by the pond weeps elegantly, the plums in the orchard drop when they’re perfectly ripe and are nestled by the tall green grass in the garden, and the light somehow always feels like golden hour. What I remember most from those early trips is how I felt—absolutely present— as if time was mine to bend and shape and I had unknowingly slowed it to my most natural rhythm and pace, as if I and this place were in synchronous orbit.
I’ve felt this other times too—when I landed in Copenhagen to study abroad, wandering the streets feeling absolutely free; summer weeks on Prudence Island in the Narragansett Bay where the rhythm of days was defined by the tides; on a very cold and sunny ferry boat ride across Puget Sound the day my grandmother died engulfed by the richest color blue; in Ireland watching the sun set over Donegal Bay with my wife Emily.
Halfway has become an important place of transition for me. When I was ten years old, my mom, grandmother, and I visited for Louise and Raz’s wedding. When I left for the trip, my parents and I lived in Westerly Rhode Island, when I returned, my dad had moved us to Shelburne. Fourteen years later, I was on a llama trip when I made the decision to move to Portland, Oregon. A few years after that, at our campsite high in the mountains, Emily and I first talked about moving back to Massachusetts to get involved in her family’s business. Three years later, we spent a few nights in Halfway so our friends and family in Oregon could act as a booster rocket on our road trip back to Massachusetts where we got married on the land in Shelburne and then began what feels like an entirely new life. Perhaps we needed that extra push, that time spent in Halfway with loved ones, to give us the courage to break the orbit from a place we’d grown to love. Perhaps I’ve been drifting ever since.
Emily and I now live in a lovely home surrounded by old New England sprawl in a town scarred by the construction of the highway and we’ve made the best of it. A large forested area called The Fells is just a block or so away and we are fortunate to be able to walk right in with our dog, Milly. We’ve turned the back yard in to a garden that I’ve fallen in love with. When I studied Environmental Design, I was mostly interested in large-scale dynamics, but I now find myself in awe of each and every plant that grows within our borders. As I write this, the clematis I planted to grow up the dead dogwood is blooming, the goldenrod is so vibrant it glows, the switchgrass is full and sways with the slightest breeze and the Joe Pye Weed has faded to a subtle silver. We have friends and family nearby, some within walking distance, and during the pandemic our back garden has become a refuge for distance visits with loved ones. It’s fully fenced in so Milly can run free within its confines.
Yet, I feel misplaced.
And I wonder if it has to do with scale. The architect Richard Neutra designed his dwelling to ensure, if possible, that the inhabitants had a view of the horizon and with strong vertical and horizontal lines because he believed that we have an innate sense of level and plumb. He believed that because our earliest ancestors evolved on the wide-open savannas of east Africa that that specific landscape is rooted in our cognitive DNA. I believe the horizon allows for a sense of wonder, a sense of scale, and allows us to orient ourselves in the landscape. My chiropractor recently told me that our body corrects itself so that our eyes remain level with the horizon. Perhaps, my feelings of misplacement are a result of disorientation.
Our new life in the Boston area is not where my feeling of misplacement began but it is where it has felt most pronounced. There are other factors of course. The past six years have been marked with challenges I couldn’t have imagined when I was younger—the stress and weight of running a beloved 46-year-old retail business through a generational transition and pandemic, ugly, inhumane, and divisive politics, the inexplicable sadness of infertility and the heart-wrenching grief of miscarriage.
I do not know what Emily and I would have experienced had we stayed in Oregon or moved to an entirely different place. I do know how I feel and what I feel is the disorientation of a horizonless landscape, the weightlessness of space, drifting untethered through time, yearning to feel that tug, that gravitational pull toward a place in which I feel part of.