Pele’s Space

Jay E. Caldwell
3 April 2009



I am fascinated by the title of Kathleen Stewart’s ethnography of “the hard-core Appalachian coal-mining region of southwestern West Virginia.” In a discussion relevant to the subject of the everyday, the idea of a space on the side of the road offers several possibilities for meaning. First, the “road” is the everyday and what is on the side of that road is “accidental,” to use her own term. It is not mainstream, and its relevance comes simply from that very antimony. We can better envision, better understand the run-of-the-mill, by seeing it in the context of what it isn’t. Stewart writes that this space “draws attention to differences and borders and to moments of boundary/passage between inside/outside, wildness/civilization, animal/human, life/death, revival/decay” (205).

On the other hand, the space on the side of the road is a diverticulum and within it may be what matters most. It is as if one can climb down a rabbit hole into an alternative existence. For Lewis Carroll and Alice, that detour was into nonsense. But for Stewart, it is only in that space that truly meaningful relationships develop and it is only those affairs that have meaning. She writes,

[Picture h]ow the space of the story situates meaning and event in a dense discursive landscape of encounter as the narrator encounters the accidental event and finds herself roaming in a graphic scene in which objects speak to her and meaning, memory, and motive seem to adhere to storied things to become a force encountered. (32)

Last week I turned off into a space on the side of my own road when Pele came to visit Alaska and closed off most access to and from the state for several days, four in my own case. This caesura, this apostrophe in my life brought with it not just an interruption of my anticipated routine, my everyday life, but inserted an entirely new “dense discursive landscape of encounter” as I came to grips with this new everyday life. For four days I dropped into a holding pattern of new associations: people, food, place, weather, activity soon became as mundane as my former world. Antimonies formed: strangers/friends, restaurant/kitchen, hotel/home, cold/warm, cloister/freedom, dependant/active. And yet, quite soon that space became as meaningful to me as my other world. It evolved its own pleasures; I suspect I experienced a form of the Patty Hearst Syndrome. My behavior became as goal-directed as it usually is. I struggled to maintain control of my own course. I traded in interpersonal relationships for hedonism. I could go where I pleased, when I pleased, and do what I would without asking permission or having to invite or encourage sociality. There were new people with whom to speak, new foods to sample, new places to go, and yet the structure of my day soon took form, different, of course, from the other/former world, but no less mundane: scraping ice from the windshield of my rental car; pulling on heavy coat, muffler, and hat while still inside; searching out food; checking the internet for updates from the Alaska Volcano Observatory [http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Redoubt.php] and the (Ted Stevens International) airport [http://aia-mufids.dot.state.ak.us/]; calling Alaska Airlines regularly to check on flight and seat availability; and following the weekend of college basketball on my hotel television.
Almost every conversation was bound to validate that “meaning, memory, and motive seem to adhere to storied things to become a force encountered” because in Alaska such caesuras are not the accidental, but the usual. Alaskans, with a certain aplomb, have learned to cope with natural events that interrupt their lives. All this supports Stewart’s thesis that the space of culture blooms beside the road, and that ethnography “grows unrelentingly discursive in the effort to lead with the ‘Other’s’ stories, to clear a space in which they might have not the last word but an Other word pointing to an Other world” (39).

And upon my return to the “Real” World, I was greeted with a kind of bemused acceptance and compassion. My people, too, had come to evolve a slightly altered everyday life that no longer included or needed me. In a way I found that I was interrupting them when I assumed that the old ways would simply resume, as if the apostrophe could be removed, expunged. But just as “can’t” subtly alters a sentence that once had in its place “cannot,” so too a return from a space on the side of the road alters the texture of that ongoing road.