The Erotics of Open Spaces
Paisley Rekdal
People asked me why I moved to southeast Wyoming four years ago, and I tell them it was for the beauty. This is what everyone says. And it’s true: The space; the sky; the treeless, snowy vistas where the Rockies dead-end onto the plains—there are stretches of land so empty of human life as to be like lunar landscapes: that novel, that forbidding. But beyond the obvious fact of its beauty, I moved there because I wanted to experience how a landscape might dominate me. A city child, I grew up believing “nature” to be a distraction from the necessities of urban living, some theme park one drove to whenever traffic or work began to wear. Nature was to be sampled at one’s convenience, forgotten, discarded. It wasn’t where one lived. Now, an adult who has some say in where she moves, I understand that people prefer places with the same immediate connection and attraction that they prefer in other people, especially sexual partners: They fall in love with the geography they’ve adopted and, in turn, let this geography’s mythos, its physicalities, define them, release or explain something deep within them. This is what happened to me: I fell in love with difficulty.
Wyoming was so overwhelming to me that the first time I went hiking by myself I had to fight the urge to drop to my hands and knees and crawl across a mile-long meadow. The emptiness is that oppressive. What human markers exist feel wrong or insubstantial. For instance, I-80 is a stretch of highway built precisely in the wrong part of the state and only to bolster the southeast’s fading economy; its denuded geography makes travel in snow or high winds often impossible. Likewise the altitude—a gasping 7,200 feet—turns many Wyomingites asthmatic, makes childbirth frighteningly precarious, renders deep and restful sleep at best irregular. Crippling droughts, wind shear, throbbing headaches and altitude sickness, snow storms that turn the few roads out of town to ice rinks: Everything about the West dominates, proves you vulnerable.
And I loved it. I responded to the place with the same passion some women have to a rape fantasy: Wyoming was the partner that would overtake me completely, rule me body and heart, make me fulfill desires that I could only long for in secret. But, like any fantasy, its attractions eventually succumbed to the reality of my discomforts. The best sex—certainly, the most mature sexuality—occurs where there is a fluid interchange of power. This would never happen for me. After three years I understood that I, who moved to the West too late after a life spent not studying the outdoors, not paying attention to the natural world, would never get more comfortable in or more equal to this terrain. Likewise the geography itself could never change unless it was populated to the point of submission: More airports, more highways, more business and growth and tourism. I refused to witness this. So if I responded to Wyoming in part sexually, I understood the power of this response was based largely on novelty and my own timid selfishness and inexperience. Wyoming became, for lack of a better analogy, that first, fierce, liberating lover to whom I could never commit because I would always be his subject.
I wanted to return to a place where the human predominated, and I have, living now in Salt Lake City—in the West, but not submersed in it, protected from what I don’t comprehend by that veneer of urbanity, the malls and restaurants and drought-defying, tree-lined avenues. Sometimes I’m ashamed of having left Wyoming, thus proving myself unequal to the task of really living in a landscape. I’m embarrassed I wasn’t tougher. And not embarrassed.
Here is where I disagree with Sallie Tisdale: Sex can certainly be big, but it isn’t always so. To define sex as one type of physicality and response negates its dynamic quality: People need different bodies and loves at different times; it’s the true bugbear of monogamous commitment. Perhaps it was inevitable I left just as it was inevitable that I would, for some period of my life, have moved there. Clearly, I eroticized what I had been raised to find foreign and forbidding. I just don’t understand why it felt so particularly strong for me in my late twenties, why it feels so deeply unnecessary now. But do any of us really understand the bodies of our lovers, the landscapes of our desires?
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000, and Vintage, 2002), and two books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), and Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Sunday Magazine, NPR, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry and Michigan Quarterly Review. She teaches at the University of Utah.
Responses from:
Tim Birkhead | Paisley Rekdal | Bruce Begemihl | Melanie Domenech Rodriguez | Dorianne Laux | David Shields | Gary Paul Nabhan