“The geographer, like the historian, can pursue his interests in either direction: toward generalization or particularity.”
—D.W. Meinig

Gardener | “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Bascom Lamar Lunsford, 1928

1.36. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Our breath, it seems, is not our own. That’s because up here, Eden isn’t even a place. It’s a semi-annual moment. A split-second, really, making a low, unearthly music, mapped by no one but myself. Like a crease slicing across a ye olde USGS topographic quad, that longed-for split’ll strike when I feel my inert body cross, again, the boundary cleaving Massanutten in two. (Riding shotgun in our Mazda CX-9: the appeal of the purely passive.) Zoom... Soon... Power broods and lights... Gale force of the spirit... Watershed cominnnnnng... NOW! 96...

2.35. Anybody else do this? Anybody else regularly imagine some Ur-Mapper slicing our boundary-breaching bodies via vast invisible incisive cleavers? (This go-round through New Market Pass, mine resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees...) There must be others. There must be folks whose forms receive unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, who experience every valley-vista as a pre-v.-post overlay, palimpsested upon autobiographical grids. “I am an explorer,” each of us sings. “My life mole-trails a descending series. Fisher, crofter, rainbow-archer: all can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads.” ...192...

3.34. Like most powerful sociotechnical Bs (boundaries), this one’s breathtakingly innocuous. One moment-frame you’re onerously ascending those dying-gasp hairpins of Page County, proud perch of Dan’s Steakhouse and the Berry Patch Inn; the next, you’re cannonballing downhill toward New Market, Shenandoah (the County, the Valley). That E-exact geospatial instant when you’re both, though: that’s the unmappable pleasure; that’s all your vertiginous mass-uh-nuttin’ can bear. Blink. I see something, some event I’d otherwise have utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clear wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. ...288...

4.33. Think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. Of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time. Think about Geddes, great Scot in his Outlook Tower. Think about Olson “in gloom on Watch-House Point” (“where I could be most easterly-westerly”). Davenport: “To think of [Olson’s] ‘E cut so rudely on the oldest stone’ is to contemplate a sign of central importance we have lost the meaning of wholly.” Do our silently cleaved feet-in-automotive-cages crave markers of energies, boards of light, solemn stones demarcating direction? ...384...

5.32. “Illness is the night-side of life,” Sontag sings, “a more onerous citizenship.” I am no scientist, but I believe she’s twinning sickness with the dark side of the moon. Who’s been up there to view its “whole” landscape, to discover at l[E]ast where it is that we have been so startlingly set down? Think? Feel. Fall. The astronaut finally glimpsing that unwonted place, gazing about him in bewilderment, queasiness in vertiginous waves. Or, that moment-frame’s geo-historical twin: Jeffersonian explorers and citizen-squatters surmounting Massanutten to gaze upon two valleys: cocksure air, shock-stirred pairs, wave upon landed wave. ...480...

6.31. SIX. Squared plan: in ’36, GDH surveyed TVA. Madison square garden: in ’36, HLG slugged .696. Both Ur-Twins – Geddes’s Valley Section and that E-less essay whose bolded words mine mine to contrive prose palimpsests – comprise six regions. And six seems devilishly right for telling some tales of portentously blurry Bs – those surrounding “mental illness,” say; “musical power”; “cartographic memory” – for describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley – within which “Shenandoah” and “Page” lie parallel, gem-’n-eyed – and for exploring unmapped dim reaches and unwholey fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. ...576

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Peasant | “Poor Boy Blues,” Ramblin’ Thomas, 1929

7.30. Hold the art-y-fact in your hands. Survey sentimental sentiments, earnest craftsmanship, unreal (color-penciled) blue. Folk art, no? Behold the thing romantically, like Patrick Geddes. It’s palpably olde, a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scrutinize it systematically, like G. Donald Hudson. New shows roll in from over the mountains. Because that’s what you’re [be/hold]-ing: a thriving functional – please? – urbs nestled inside/atop a crater-valley bounded fortuitously by mountains with massive/nuthin’ names. Listen! Illumalt... Cragathor... Reldarid... Bastion. Only a fast-talking worker of wonders who has the act backwards could trace this map’s “whole” origins. 96...

8.29. Origins – the ex nihilo phenom – must possess its own image-’n-airy cartography. “How could that big blackness be,” I w[a/o]nder whenever I caress the map itself (which is still laminated; thanks, Mom!). Art-y-fact: the Spanish Y. Was that it? Was that the seedbed/river-source? That one fortuitous encounter with a photograph of Bogotá, city of peasants teeming atop/within a volcanic crater... Everything is half in shadow; only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant lighted “facts.” Should I trace an artificially bright line back to some “American” – Spanish – past? One more hairpin: suddenly opaque— ...192...

9.28. —so let’s mine the boundless landscape of words (> images). Tolkien’s most beautiful day: while Gondolin unfurls like a table cloth, its bastioning mountains are flashing on and off like neon signs, purple shadows racing east, devouring ground. Or, yes, let’s breach the apex: Annie Dillard herself. Her casual [re/land]-mark in “Total Eclipse”: the Yakima Valley “is justly famous for its beauty, like every planted valley.” Hmm. That line illuminates... what? A photographer’s negative of sarcasm? Ennui? Thrill-a-minute vitality? (DWM: “literally every place” – every square foot – “is of some interest.”) So the feel: dizzied and drawn— ...288...

10.27. —So overlook those Luna-tics. Return to Earth. Return, I sing, to Invinciville. (Soft c.) For that is this city’s name. Judging by the titles of its mighty rivers – Industrial (bisecting the crater); Empire (draining the western slope) – our draftsman must’ve been American. See: the crater’s square-y dimensions conform eggzactly to six 8”x11” sheets! So our L’Enfant must’ve been young, too. And how old are you, daughter? Six? 6.96...? Thirteen?? Suddenly the light runs across the land like a great comber, and up the trees, only to go again in a wink. I’ve gone blind or died. ...384...

11.26. You can tell which sheet he drafted first. It’s the most diligently drawn, the most dizzingly hoped. You can even pinpoint the split-second spot, that one watershed suburban-Jersey-room’d moment-frame, where he “broke ground.” Mary Ruefle, “Poetry and the Moon”: “When I look back... now and read... passages my nineteen-year-old hand underlined, I sometimes laugh out loud.” So I know that boy-self is utterly gone. Nevertheless, focusing (upon some) past, eyes seek. Surface seems to stretch before my eyes...
I come up to the grassy island late in the day... Zoom... Soon... There!—
Enter again—
...480 Twin Falls.  ...480

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Shepherd | “Country Blues,” Dock Boggs, 1928

12.25. If landscape reveals one certainty, it’s “the extravagant gesture must be the very stuff of creation.” What else would compel Jeffersonian B-expansion at the time of those mercantile twins, Lewis and Clark? I’m referring to that pastoral consumerist slope drained by the Amazon. K. Swanson, September 6, 2007, “Ghosts aplenty inside these tunes,” 3 Helpfuls: “This stuff is so far deeper and weirder and spookier than any folk I've ever heard.” A typical specimen, that; one tree in Amazon’s panoply canopy. Okay: Add to Cart. Await Shipment, the flinging of intricacies and colossi down through eons. 96...

13.24. But the genuine gem, in my eyes, is Karen Newcombe’s (August 21, 2002, “Mysterious, beautiful, and a kick inside,” 423 Helpfuls). Our life, her review intimates, is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. To appreciate the music encapsulated within this boxset, we must somehow take a wider view, look at the “whole” landscape. Newcombe: “I once knew a fellow who...’d collected a box full of those stone tools that humans made and used for something like three million years.” Upon actually holding “one of these slips of chipped obsidian or shale... for a moment...” ...192...

14.23. “... it settled naturally into my hand.... [A] spot for my thumb, another... for my forefinger, and”— wonder! —“my hand was making a scraping or digging motion with the thing. The tool and my hand still remembered their ancient partnership, without any volition from me. This sensation was simultaneously disturbing and satisfying and made the hair stand up on my neck.” Power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. Sharks off the Atlantic Coast... A triangular wedge against the sky... Different. “This sensation is very close to what I feel listening to this anthology.” ...288...

15.22. That, indeed, is the promise of this archive, the greatest “compendium of important information ever published,” the Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways 6CD, 1952 [various labels, 1920s-30s]). Awed listeners, returning from the mountaintop, sing that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do? Try to be there. Listen, these phobia-free explorers urge. Straddle Bs – one foot in the hectic plastic present, one in the immense immemorious past. You will hear the sonic equivalent of that E scraped upon the oldest stone. You will be – twinned. ...384...

16.21. But Newcombe: “These recordings were, of course, made only 75 years ago in the 1920’s, surely part of the modern era.” Murder ballads, topical blues, Scottish trads transplanted to Virginia’s highlands... So if we describe a quotidian world to encompass – bound – these things, we bump against another mystery: what else to map. Baseball! Henry Louis Gehrig’s Iron Horse prime. Geography! Hudson’s confrères devouring the inrush of power and light, diligently implementing Geddes’s regional-survey model (“Augusta County, Virginia – A Study of Patterns”; “Agricultural Patterns of East Lothian, Scotland”). All should be manna for a lapsed – fallen – historian. ...480...

17.20. What’s wrong with me? When I survey the Anthology, why don’t my neck-hairs dance? Because I’ve surveyed peaks – valleys – of post-Cagean fabrics more visceral, odd, subtle, grand, powerful than those perfectly fine songs. I don’t believe: in Human Nature; in Progress. Have we even come that far? I believe in Contingency: its arbitrary decisive hairpins, their geography, their history. So lazy and nostalgic has been my own irreversible unfolding, that I believe Earth’s Ur-Mapper has just been poring over His/Her landscapes – their infinite int[ra/er]-relations – passively, forever. It could be that God has not absconded but spread. ...576...

18.19. —the year deist Jefferson founded my alma mater. Today I dwell with my wife and children upon the Fall Line – Richmond – but we eagerly visit “our” Shenandoah cabin each fall. Vacation entails a double edge, sharp as Reldarid feldspar. It describes the notion of the creator’s once having called forth the universe (i.e., home), turning his back to it: Deus absconditus. Yea, we’re free to Pan-dance our own meanings, trads, legends (i.e., laminated maps’ keys, now utterly lost). But we’re also imprisoned. Jaded. Our vacationing “twins” have become our ideal selves; quotidian living’s never quite Living. ...672...

19.18. 18, 19... endlessly dancing “within” – B-word – life’s palindromic sweet spots... that’s my desire for my daughter. Out front: Twin Infinitives by Royal Trux (textures: Front Royal truck exhaust). Lick My Decals Off Baby by Captain Beefheart; It Is in the Brewing Luminous by Cecil Taylor – twin-percussion mountain passes. Okay, not American, BUT: those two sonic topographies Wagner drafted while vacationing from the Ring – Tristan, lusciously dark; Meistersinger, honeycombed light – each one an architectonic language/form-as-thematic-enactment. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Here, growing girl, hear. ...768...

20.17. My daughter, my dancer (soft c). Wanna buck choreography’s usual method? Imagine a dance, whole or in a series, beginning in the softest decal-laminate music – a river-source – while the people on stage teem: frenetic, grasping, fleeing many animals. Imagine the music grows – progressively – in volume, scope, “power” until, by the end, it’s all-consuming. Imagine, too, that the dancers progressively retard their (E)motions until, by the end, they seem barely alive. How mappable would that palindromic performance’s moderate slope-crossing middle region be? Audiences would have to catch (their own) boundaries of that sweet spot, right? Could they? ...864...

21.16. Our hora Mazda’s climbing, from fishermen’s folk forms – raw, earthy – to the ambitious machinations of miners – abstruse, engineered. I had read about a pair of these enormous earth-movers. One, Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus, re-graphs the myth through criss-crossed patternings of shadows, masques, twinnings. Both hero and time reel backwards – and forwards. Act II’s muscles and bones and organs comprise a series of rigorously descending “arches” – valley sections – delineated via electro-acoustic haloes and grasping Sprechstimme that grates, seizes, paralyzes. Such a construct, hooked ever inward, needs not a libretto, but an atlas. Also (badly): water. ...960...

22.15. Like an incisive cleaver-in-words of some adolescent’s map – like a spiritual twin to Karen Newcombe – Anne Orozio calls Brian Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime “an echo inside a shadow wrapped in cellophane.” The work, “a relatively linear series of takes on the afterlife of ideas,” dramatizes the predicaments – intellectual, corporeal – of the invincible critic Walter Benjamin who, upon a liminal pinnacle separating France from Spain, killed himself in 1940. No passport; no return 🡪 teeming paralysis. Imagine the scholar, grass, lost, dumbstruck, music impotent, opaque. [WB:] “Just as I looked, gaped... spirit vanished, formless as a pricked balloon.” ...1056...

23.14. What, then, renders these sonic extremes merely “interesting”? Ruefle: “I don’t trust such elaborate and complete systems... methods by which we categorize... humanity.” Ironically, PG’s Valley Section, having learned to recognize difference in texture of the light reflected from mudbank, water, grass, tried to render linear and abstract the earthy, the oikos, the “organically emergent.” WB’s Orpheus Angel of Progress cannonballs future-ward – backwards. Each artwork, sings his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (’36), breathes a unique “aura.” Invinciville, rendered un-ironically in some shadowtime near the Hudson, has remained un-Iron-Horse-factoried – until, ironically, now. ...1152

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Hunter | “Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting,” Rev. J.M. Gates, 1927

24.13. Always breaching the wrong Qs. In grad school, as an aspiring historian of science: How did folks – Native, Spanish, Scottish – know about the Cumberland Gap? Or any gap? As they overlooked valleys, what uncharted species of luscious honeycomb doublings twinned rite thru ’em? My favorite, though – I return to it years later as a man – as an oracle in that suburban room – as an aspiring Macbeth of cities: If you pin-pointed a mighty river’s exact filigree source, and then just STOMP-danced on that spot, damning it, wouldn’t you, like, irreversibly re-choreograph geography and, thus, the Past? 96...

25.12. So, sources – origins – again. I don’t believe in Psychology, but for me the pertinent phobias include heights (though not from vehicles), tarantulas materializing at very close range, other folks’ finding terra firma vistas as inexhaustible as I do – how dare ye squatters infringe upon my niche! – and one more. It’s a silent hunter, never before revealed. I can (sort of) map its E-exact gushing origins. Doing so means crossing the fence of childhood, tightroping along the narrow edge, above water, confronting pure Contingency—that ad. Jaws II – apex predator – ambushed 4 life. I cannot swim alone. ...192...

26.11. Rationality sings, These specific fears? They’re a human product, cultivated like maps; they’re a valley-bottom field of myths. But. You say it’s extremely embarrassing for anybody to fear getting ambushed by a great white shark in his landlocked chlorinated 45’ x 20’ backyard swimming pool – especially if said fear applies ONLY with nobody else nearby, because any other human presence would obviously poof any such beast into non-existence? Well, I say, just imagine how much MORE embarrassing the actual attack would be. HLG: “That failed historian... How did he die, again? He drowned or something, right?” ...288...

27.10. GDH: “Oh. He uh, so he was swimming laps. Just kinda, mentally sketch-drafting sum... Oulipo valley, lining things up. But then his daughter, who was the only other person around, she went inside to go potty... Well, yaknow how the afternoon sun hits the creek just right? All that deepening reflected blue? Yeah, so, he immediately got attacked by this great white shark. You know, like how they breach?” HLG: “OMG, wat??? Furreel?? Man, what an idiot. What an absolute, helpless, idiot! Those sharks are farking huge! Who wouldn’t’ve seen that coming?” GDH: “I know, right?” ...384...

28.9. Barbara Ehrenreich, trying to feel the planet’s roundness, its obdurate realness: “The body has always seemed to me like a retarded Siamese twin dragging along behind me.” Fluids, prey, music, all gushing across that B called skin, “blur the line between selfhood and thing-hood anyway.” Charles Rosenberg, taking huge vicious dispassionate steps: “a bright line between disease and [other stuff:] ‘willed misbehavior’ or ‘culpable self-indulgence’ or ‘idiosyncratic emotional discomfort’ will not be easily agreed upon, WHILE the cultural and bureaucratic need to create such boundaries will hardly disappear.” Yep. That’s it. Our modern predicament. Our neither-nor. ...480...

29.8. The Ur ultimate boundary maker is the Supreme Court. It draws lines. That’s it. That’s all it does. Any walk will do; it all looks good in these highlands where [yea/nay]-ers endlessly dance. Are adult diapers “medically necessary,” i.e., deserving of Medicare coverage? Have uses of the word “epidemic” gone too far? PTSD, obesity, ADHD – which category: “disease,” or “other stuff”? Where dooya draw the Liiiiine?? Zoom. 1927(!), Virginia(!!), eugenics, Buck v. Bell, O.W. Holmes: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is BROAD ENOUGH to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” ...576...

30.7. I caught only a glimpse of something, enough to no longer wonder whether “my phobia” is a “real” – socially actionable – disease. My Qs seem more troubling now. I still love maps. All those clear boundaries. I love the idea of poring over them. I want to soar, endlessly, like Rosenberg. Above – not in – folks’ teeming pools. Anything R-rated – there’s a B! – confined to see-thru laminate plastic cages. Is such a perspective desirable? Is it even possible? If Contingency devours “the hard-wired” for breakfast, what should parental bodies do?? “Whoooa, kids! My FOOT just got sliced off!!!” ...672

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Woodman | “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” Rev. F.W. McGee, 1931

31.6. Essay-as-Map. My valley-floor desire. A prose atlas within whose intra-relations folks could discern some intricacy of beauty endemic to any landscape’s [square] footage – one whose double meanings are inevitably personal; one that’s changing, fresh every minute. Serie/s/ously playful Georges Perec, having architected an architectonic E-less novel, aqueducted our longest palindrome. His confrère Harry Mathews believed rigorous constraints inevitably yield 50-mile vistas. Annie Dillard’s “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley” comprises 36 paragraphs. Virginia reel, backwards-forwards 🡪 my first paragraph mines 36 keywords from AD’s final paragraph; my final paragraph re-da/n/c/t/e/s one eagle-eyed gem from her first. 96...

32.5. Does the past change? Always. A lot. Because our interests – attentions – story-Bs – change, too. HLG: “Wait—this map doesn’t show my luminous bee-farts... or those socio-cognitive Bs within which my kids are safe from hunters!” GDH: “Think about it—the mapmakers weren’t interested in those things.” Denis Woodman: “E-exactly. So what did they map? What they were interested in. And this is the interest the map embodies... inevitably.” How many “regions” criss-cross America? Name them. (Try breaching those opaque waters...) How many bounded iterations – Geddesian types – hairpin stages – kinda twins – alien/recognizable selves – has your life encompassed? ...192...

33.4. All that still binds me to Invinciville is the strange powerful fact that “my” hands once etched it. I can no longer touch its actual sheets; their clear laminate ironically embodies opaque; utterly lost. As we cannonball down those valley sections called lifetimes, we crescent inexorably away from our waxing-and-waning former selves, our apex twins. What to pay attention to, where and how to draw Bs around the contingencies that matter most, is the very stuff of story-telling. If poems are our deepest truths (i.e., our “creative nonfictions”), then every single map is already an essay. ...288

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Miner | “Mountaineer’s Courtship,” Ernest and Hattie Stoneman, 1926

34.3. It’s the Future. It’s her wedding day! Call me traditional, folkloric; call me sentimental, nostalgic; call me intent, remembering nothing—fine. I’m a father. I desire “only the best” for my girl. Whatever that means. Let’s celebrate. Hilarious fact: Massanutten’s not even in the Roanoke Valley. But whose Bs rule here? Geologists’? Wikipedia’s, which claim that Shenandoah’s “cultural region” encompasses the Roanoke? We’re here now, that’s for sure. Our cabin. I shoulda known she’d pick a place so close to her heart. I shoulda known she’d shun the sharky sea. Fisher’s not even on our map. 96...

35.2. Maybe I didn’t convey everything, my daughter. “Everything.” “Whole.” LOL. There’s no such thing as What Really Happened—did I teach you that? I know I taught some minor history seminars. “The Body in Space.” Which is happening. Right now. Did I ever play for you that mystery union song? Secretly, I hoped it could soundtrack our Father-Daughter Dance. Did I ever acquire the emotional competence to convey to you that desire? Even though I failed – repeatedly, always – to realize any Geddesian livelihood, did I nevertheless earnest enough baseline respect to see my moony dreem redeemed? ...192...

36.1. He’s a lucky man, I’m sure. But not as lucky as I. Brigadoon aye, rite hear’n’now. Foot? F-EE-t! Breeches! You feel it 2? U feelin’ these Waterboys!? So ’80s, so earnest, so willing to try to enact bittersweet joy! I dance it for you, dancing girl. For us. Reel with me defiant upon this palimpsest floor. Let’s forever ensure that “creating Invinciville” topples from its perch atop “my achievements.” Please, within these five fervid minutes, help me finally live. My whole life was a trickle. But yours, my soft daughter—this—this is the pummeling Sea. ...288

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.

A historian of “the body in space” at the University of Richmond, Alex Checkovich discovered nearly too late that his true love is inventing hermit-crab essays and Oulipo nonfictions. So far his work has appeared in Seneca Review, Sycamore Review, PANK, Badlands, Gravel, Crab Fat, and Infinity’s Kitchen.

Trenton's Lower Free Bridge

Born: New Brunswick, NJ. Grad school: Philly. Residence: Richmond, VA. Favorite Poem: Paterson. What unites these cities? The Fall Line. That invisible invincible boundary dividing Piedmont from Coastal Plain. Here’s another Fall Line city: Trenton. Pinpoint me there, pinioned above the Delaware, the Hudson’s Gemini/Mimesis/Nemesis, mythic midnight proving ground of both G.W. and another pioneering George – Antheil – whose deafening 1935 concert atop the Lower Free Bridge, occasioned to christen its motto (brazenly emblazoned on its unforgettable electric sign, TRENTON MAKES   THE WORLD TAKES), still maps us, since the rapids there carry, even today, echoes of that infamous event’s nigh-infinite din.