Coming Home: Interlude

Fiestas 2012. Photo by Author.

This Main Street crowd, and that is actually Main Street, was photographed during fiestas. The date on the camera is a day short, because the camera was new and purchased specifically for the trip. The first "official" town visit for my dissertation about Truth or Consequences, place and place making in the last one hundred years or so, was illicit. Yes, illegal. Forbidden. Under the table. The Institutional Review Board had not granted approval for ethnographic research in the town. Owning up to this may or may not get me in trouble, given this public forum. I talked to no one, so it could be characterized as a visit. The whole family came, and after the parade and park festivities we headed to the lake for a pre-rodeo swim. But in my mind I was an observer, not only watching, but looking for patterns and relationships between things.

This is what scholars do, they seek to uncover the often obscure and minute threads that weave the world together, untangle the silken spider strands of history, unravel the big ball of yarn. A great scholar will create whole new tapestries out of those threads, and they are incredible. I am constantly amazed at the really cool accounts of the relationships in the world that get churned out incessantly by really bright people. We do this in the humanities, but the science "ontology map" below is a powerful illustration for this work. 

A map of science from Ontology Explorer: www.science-metrix.com.
Ontologies can be thought of as maps describing relationships.

Late October and all of November found me down with pneumonia. It was rough. I planned on posting critically adorable shots of Emagen in her sheep suit and pink cape as I recorded the Halloween MainStreet (the organization, which promotes the historic preservation and economic revitalization of "Main Street," not the actual Main Street, although the two did cross at this event). And then there was my dinner date at Bella Luca. And the Trash Bash took place in the middle of the month. Trash Bash had one component at its core, the recycling and re-purposing of material for building and art, that will be a whole section in the dissertation. I missed GIS day, " worldwide celebration saluting geospatial technology and its power to better our lives," which is also deeply tied to theories of place in our technological age of google maps and other cool ways that the interweb re-configures place.  All crushing losses. I do not jest.

I can hardly get a post out weekly. Other people, like Wendy and Mikey, of "Holy Scrap: Creating a Post Consumer Life & Homestead Truth or Consequences, New Mexico," post by the thousands. They post about real living breathing ways to live without killing the planet. How to ferment, for example. I got lost for three hours on my first visit.  Daunting. Brilliant. Super fun-loving-genius kind of good. Check out their great blog at http://blog.holyscraphotsprings.com/ for some serious action. Wendy will be out elfing at the annual Old Fashioned Christmas. This means handing out stuff that they find about the house and gift out--every plastic Christmas toy is just another nail in the planet's coffin when you think about it, and which few of us really do). place making people and events are very powerful, but how? How do place making patterns and activities inform us about us? Shape us? 

Back during that first visit, I might have been engaged in illegal ethnography, although I was not talking to people  so it might have been a wash. A few months later, when I was officially sanctioned, I found myself talking to everyone. That is how I came to talk to a guy at the Passion Pie. I feel a poem coming on! Not really. But this really interesting guy could NOT believe I was talking to people without there being a little something something going on that I was after. Nope, I said. I am just interested in your thoughts about place. And your place memories and all kinds of other things that you think. Time is valuable, this is a gift you give me. Like an elf with a flute. It is magic that people will give so much to me when I have nothing to give back. I try to give back, but really, I will ultimately have a few hundred pages in the UNM library vault. There are thousands upon thousands of dissertations there. But people are kind, and funny, and generous. I realized how much I love my work, the ethnographic work I am doing, while I was sick. I got homesick. For the place, but for the people. The people in Truth or Consequences are really %#$*ing fantastic. Seriously. Amazing. I realized when I was sick that I have been somewhat haphazard in my interviewing and need a little more structure. But I also realized that  the random in-place requests have netted me some incredible 'data,' and my meanderings and wanderings have not meant that I was lost. I am just trying to find this place.

A place for everything, everything in its place. 

Benjamin Franklin