I have to admit to a fondness for Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” as performed in a variety of ways.  Sam’s work, of course, but I also like the slow, elegant version done by Art Garfunkel with Paul Simon and James Taylor.  In rather stark contrast, I also like the R&B Revue sound of the Otis Redding version (you should check that one out).  I’m not going to claim that I am any great authority on either history or geography, but I will tell you that I have had a life-long love affair with both, and both are tied to a life-long fascination with the concept of “Place”.

No less a luminary than Wallace Stegner has noted that “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered…”.  History and Geography.  Both are necessary to understand “Place”.  Given a love of both subjects, this works for me. 

Another important piece of this particular puzzle is that a “space” cannot be a “place” until it has been named.  For this we can turn to George Stewart’s singular work, Names on the Land – A historical account of place-naming in the United States.  It’s a read that is best digested in small bites, but a wonderful history and a unique piece of work.  The entire book is a treasure, but I’ll leave you with one small story.  Steamboat Springs, Colorado is a lovely place situated in the northern Yampa Valley.  It is also home to hot springs that gurgle with a particular “chug-chug” sound reminiscent of a steamboat.  So there you go, Steamboat Springs, miles away from navigable waters on the backbone of the continent.

In developing an understanding of place, we can also turn to the long and fascinating history of English travelers abroad.  The English, of course, are inveterate travelers, and as a people of long history, seem possessed of an innate sense of place.  When reading their travel works we are presented with a seemingly endless smorgasbord, for example:  Hester Stanhope’s travels through the Near East; Richard Burton’s travels to….well, is there any place he didn’t travel?; Freya Stark in the Middle East and Afghanistan; Eric Newby taking a short walk on a tall mountain; Rebecca West in the Balkans; William Dalrymple’s quixotic journey to Xanadu.  Different travelers, different locations, different times; yet, their writings leave us with a feeling for the place.

Another important context:  the nature of Myth.  In American English and in American cultural context, the word has taken on something of a pejorative meaning, which is unfortunate because it deprives the word and the concept of power. The Oxford Dictionary provides the primary definition as “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon…”.  The secondary definition is: “a widely held but false belief or idea”.

In a consideration of place we need to put ourselves fully into the primary definition of the word, for the historical/traditional stories told about a place have meaning for the place and for the people there.  Marion Robert Morrison, born in Iowa in 1907, better known to us by his stage name – John Wayne – starred as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit”.  Ol’ Rooster, a character in a fictional story, is nevertheless real and powerful as an iconic symbol in the mythology of the American West.

There is obviously a geographic context to place. A place needs a name.  The history of a place, and especially the mythology associated with a place are perhaps a little less obvious, but every bit as important.

Place:  the starting point is literally a point on a map.  Name it. Live it. Listen for its story.

Adapted from lecture notes (2014) on Wallace Stegner: “The Sense of Place”