There’s an article in the book review section of the current New Yorker that caught my eye. It’s about the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The article, titled “What Going Off The Grid Really Looks Like,” is about a book by Ted Conover, called “Cheap Land Colorado.” It caught my eye not only because I’ve been to the San Luis Valley many times, but also…. Well, there’s no sense beating around the bush: Truth to tell, I myself have a bit of an anti-social streak. There, yeah, I said it. So sue me. It’s still a free country after all.
The San Luis Valley, about the size of New Jersey, is home to only about 50,000 people – and also home to Great Sand Dunes National Park.
Not mentioned in the article, but still true, the San Luis Valley is also home to one of the largest Amish enclaves outside of the Midwest / Mid Atlantic region. That’s probably because land here is cheap and arable (as long as you’re willing to irrigate), and there are very few neighbors around to spoil the solitude. And if there are two things the Amish like, it’s farming, and being left alone to live as they please. You know, kind of like a lot of people – including me.
I won’t bore you with details of the New Yorker article. You can, after all, read it here for yourself if you like. And I haven’t yet read Conover’s book either, of course. But I will tease just an excerpt which really tickled my fancy. It also has pricked my interest to read other books by this author.
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“In the United States,” Gertrude Stein once observed, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” That was true in 1936, when she wrote “The Geographical History of America,” and it remains so today. The numbers are startling. And not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states — the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat fields and soybeans and sorghum — and it will amount to a fifth of our nation. What is all the rest? Forests, wetlands, range land, tundra, glaciers, barrens, bodies of water of one kind or another. If you don a blindfold, throw a dart at a map of the country, and commit to living where it lands, you will most likely end up alone, in the middle of nowhere.
All that open space has an enduring hold on the American imagination. There’s a reason it serves as the backdrop for so many political ads and pickup-truck commercials: It represents the ill-defined notion of liberty that we claim as our founding ideal. And it functions as a kind of collective backup plan should some crucial opportunity or exigency arise — a place to prove our mettle, a place to start over, a place to which, if push came to shove, we might flee and never be found. Most of us do not put this proposition to the test. But, by choice or chance or lack of any other option, a handful of people really do wind up trying to make a life somewhere in the almost eighty per cent of America that is essentially undeveloped land.
Those people are the subject of Ted Conover’s “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge” (Knopf). Conover, who was raised in Denver and is now a professor of journalism at New York University, might be thought of as a reporter in the George Plimpton mold. To write about his subjects, he prefers to spar in their rings and scrimmage on their fields. Unlike Plimpton, however, he sticks around for months or years, often under distinctly uncomfortable circumstances. For a book about modern-day hoboes (“Rolling Nowhere”), he learned to hop freight trains and spent months riding the rails. For a book about undocumented immigrants (“Coyotes”), he lived with Mexicans on both sides of the border, picking fruit in citrus orchards and traveling across the Sonoran Desert and the Rio Grande. For a book about the New York State prison system (“Newjack”), he got a job as a corrections officer and worked for a year inside Sing Sing.
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Bottom line, and for a number of reasons, the reviewer ended up not much liking Conover’s book. Or at least, not much liking his conclusion – or maybe I should say, his lack thereof. Conover practices something called “immersion journalism.” I first encountered this style of “thick description” reading anthropologist Clifford Geertz in college, and it has stuck with me ever since. The idea is, you immerse yourself in a foreign culture, learn their idioms and practices, and essentially become one with the landscape, one with them. In so doing, you avoid drawing broad conclusions or making the kind of generalizations that outsiders tend to bring with them, like so many Northern carpetbaggers looking down their noses while stepping off a steam train to the deep South during Reconstruction, with all biases intact and all preconceptions unruffled.
With immersion journalism, by contrast, what you might lose in external analytical leverage, you gain in faithfulness to the lives and the landscapes of your subjects’ world. And for my money, that’s where the best anthropological and journalistic stories “really” originate.
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Disagree, or don’t like it? Well, you can always sue somebody, I guess. After all, nobody’s got a gun to your head. Now, will you please make sure to shut the door on your way out? Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.