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Published on 1 Comment on Reweaving the Atlantic’s Edge

David Gange's The Frayed Atlantic Edge is subtitled A Historian's Journey from Shetland to the Channel. Both title and subtitle bear plain-language meanings and metaphor.

The Atlantic edge orients the reader not to the edge of the British and Irish archipelago from the land, but from the point of view of the ocean.

Frayed carries both the sense of "things come apart," but unraveling of societies and misconceptions, and suggests Gange's desire: to re-conceptualize, to knit up the liminal littoral —in a sense to extend the ancient intention to repair the world (תיקון עולם)(tikkun olam) to repair the coast (תיקון חוֹף)(tikkun khofe) and all who live there, both human and other.

The journey is not only the ten voyages by kayak and one mountain hike (no "only" there!), but also Gange's evolving understanding of history and memory, of understanding interwoven (or frayed) interactions of environment, social history, ecological devastation, and historical ideologies.

Above all, Gange is a highly effective narrator and interlocutor, with a certain audacious charm that makes me want to join him for month of evenings in a quiet pub with pint, and just listen to him. From this American's perspective, he is one of those extraordinary British characters who accomplish something truly remarkable (in this case, a lot of kayaking under very challenging conditions) with equally remarkable equanimity, even nonchalance. All this from a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge, so no slouch.

"The significance of coasts is consistently underestimated," Gange writes, and "this book sets out to put some of that imbalance right." (p. ix) Structured by region and course of 13 months, Gange's narrates both the consistent factors in the regions from Shetland to Land's End in wind, waves, and rocks, and divergence, how differently the various island and coastal cultures that have adapted to these consistent factors. The first half of the book focuses upon kayaking, and the physicality of coasts and waves, smells, sounds, sights.

Gange is distant intellectual heir to G. M. Trevelyan, who believed strongly in history informed by muddy boots, and who composed an essay Walking and called his legs his two "doctors" (meaning physicians or teachers or both?). After Trevelyan, Gange traces a line of thinking through Archibald Haldane (The Drove Roads of Scotland, etc.), although both his and Trevelyan's brands of romanticism were implicated in varying degrees in the imperialism and centralizing cultural mindset of the Anglo-Scottish aristocracy (and which sponsored the devastating enclosures across Scotland). A different set of forebears, a generation or three removed, are Alastair and Ninian Dunnett, who wrote the kayaking classic The Canoe Boys in 1934, sending serial reports to The Daily Record (newspaper) of their progress and discoveries—among which were that the vigorous communities on western coast of Scotland were not so remote and backward as the imperializing rhetoric of progress had claimed. A later, similar, intellectual and athletic example is Brian Wilson's Blazing Paddles (1988). Make no mistake: what the Dunnetts, Wilson, and Gange (and others) have done qualifies as an athletic feat: one has to be in superb physical shape to withstand the rigors of the maritime conditions. (The galleries of photographs in the book's related website bear abundant witness to the challenges.)

Photo by David Gange; linked only (not reproduced) from his website The Frayed Atlantic Edge

Gange writes more immediately in the aftermath of Barry Cunliffe's Facing the ocean : the Atlantic and its peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 (2001 and later). Cunliffe's book occasioned some debate among historians (earning an appraisal as "outlined more in romantic phrases . . . rather than in the measured language of science reporting the rigorous testing of hypotheses" from Malcolm Wagstaff, EHR 117:301). Cunliffe's work remains a "clear exposition" of the continuities in ancient seacoast cultures, as well as their differences, and Gange does him one better: rather than facing the ocean, Gange is on it, facing the shore.

Gange's book is neither under- nor over-theorized, and as he promises on page x, the balance shifts from kayaking, and the smells, sounds, waves, and winds of the coast to "historical research, literary criticism, and argument." Never tendentious, Gange bravely and critically reads poetry, feminist and post-imperialist theory, and socio-political argument in a fashion that might be called post-modern were it not so readable (unlike so much post-modern writing). He writes a personal journey as a historian, neglecting neither his discipline nor the personal memories and hopes, and hospitality of those he meets. (Arriving in a small community on a kayak is a great way to spark conversation at a far deeper level than any ordinary tourist or visiting scholar.)

This book's combination of history, literature, theory, environmental sciences, and physical achievement may not earn kudos from those historians focused exclusively upon documents and the "rigorous testing of hypotheses," nor those administrators and politicians who bludgeon creative academics with required impact evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework. (One might take all those ratings and throw them overboard, along with their administrators and politicians, somewhere north of the Shetlands.) Gange's graceful combination, nevertheless, achieves an uncommon synthesis and evokes in this reader a strong desire to learn more.

There is too much in Gange's book to summarize easily, and his chapters bear re-reading (or an experiment: reading the chapters in reverse order). His epilogue, "The View from the Sea," both looks forward to further study, and expresses how this journey changed him personally after a year of writing and teaching back in Birmingham.

"What I missed most was immersion in constant movement: the world view from the low of the wave. I missed the sense of being part of a vast, coherent dynamism. Indoors I was sometimes unsettled (a condition I could only refer to as 'the bends,' since it was caused by coming up from the sea) and sometimes resort to a sleeping bag in the garden among the foxes and green woodpeckers. Never before had I so welcome rain: a good cold soaking was the best medicine of all." (339)
. . . . "I wondered how much the journey had changed me otherwise and thought again of the ragged map of Britain whose every western indentation now conjured a story, an emotion or a physical sensation. I realised that immersion in these worlds had not, as I'd expected, cured me of my romanticism. . . . It isn't romanticism that needs to be cleared from perspectives on these places, but the assumption that these communities somehow below to the past, not the future, and are merely hazy places to escape to."
. . . "The journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naive after all." (346-347)

I look forward to reading Gange's future work.

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Recently I've have read in succession Philip Marsden's The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination, and Patrick Laurie's Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape. The first narrates the writer's challenging voyage by sail northwards through the western coastal islands of Ireland and Scotland, from Dingle to Ullapool. The second narrates a year in the life of a young farmer determined to bring back older, ecologically respectful, sustainable farming methods to a small plot in Galloway, an often-neglected southwest corner of Scotland. Each in his way narrates a point of view from a chosen periphery to the urban, digital culture that pervades our times, and each questions not only the cultural sustainability of such centers (or centres!)

The tension between center/periphery is a theme in scholarship about the Late Antique period in the scholarship of Peter Brown. In that era, urban elites sought to define Christianity formally at the same time that locations and individuals on the Roman periphery —the Holy Man in the desert, the missioner in Ireland, the so-called Monophysite Christians who took Christian with them on the Silk Road towards the East; the relative seclusion of the Ethiopian Churches—that these "peripheral" figures and communities possessed the imaginative power that characterized the passing of the ancient heritages to later centuries. The rhetorical power of the elites at the centers—Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem—had to compete with the powerful figure in isolation, and the sense that at the periphery the future was taking shape and would come back to characterize the center.

One portion of that geographical periphery were islands past which Philip Marsden sailed; another portion was the Galloway where St. Ninian founded Whithorn before his death in ca. 432 CE. Though connected to mainland Great Britain, Galloway may have figured as Pen Rhionydd in the Arthurian tradition of the three thrones of Britain. According to A. P. Jennings in the Oxford Companion to Scottish History, the name Galloway may derive from a Gaelic phrase for "stranger-Gaidheil," a people with Gaelic and Scandinavian ancestry. Its peninsular location meant it remained removed from much of the turmoil of the Scottish Borderlands, but the people are brutally treated after the 1603 Union in the Covenanter rebellion and subsequent wars.

This sense of periphery figures in both books, but in different ways. In Marsden's book, every Irish geographical feature has a story in the ancient sagas and annals, sometimes remembered by the locals, sometimes forgotten. The Scottish ancient annals figured poorly through subsequent violent wars, and some of the "invented tradition" (in the phrase of Eric Hobsbawm, 1963), or more accurately re-invented traditions. Hobsbawm's distinction between "invented" and "genuine" traditions founders upon the fact that all traditions, genuine or not, are humanly created, unlike some kind of natural deposit, and that "reinventions" may seek to express a long-standing point of view even in the phrases of a later invention, such as a "nation." Galloway has surely felt itself on the periphery of Scotland (and England) as have the western Irish counties. Nevertheless, Laurie roots his narrative in the geographical features that have long characterized Gallovidian lives, a felt geography as vivid as that of Ireland.

The sense of periphery has a literary function similar in each book: it serves to invert a sense of value, a sense of historical perspective, the sense of what's important. Both authors are lament of the trends of depopulation and marginalization, as though Galloway or the Western Isles were to become merely some kind of touristic theme-park for wealthy urbanites who seek a rest from the stresses of London, Dublin, Brussels, Edinburgh, or elsewhere. The dignity of the people who continue, dwindle as their numbers do, to inhabit these areas—dignitas properly understood as distinctive rank and traditional claim rooted in place—give ample reason to resist the arrogance of the social planners and politicians who are utterly alienated from any sense of place at all. Indeed the kosmos is not the polis—cosmopolitan does not in fact absorb and co-opt all before it in a newly imperial manner. (Perhaps cosmopolitan national planners, central bankers, and craven politicians are the re-invented tradition of 19th-century global imperialists, with all the self-righteousness of the self-possessed.)

Like the ancient sagas and traditions, the ultimate force of both books simply says, I was here. This was here. This world was here, and this world could be again a home for dolphins, curlews, and saints. In the face of catastrophic climate change, can this land, this sea, these people endure?

In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?
Published on
Audra Melton for The New York Times

Monica Potts' beautiful In the Land of Self-Defeat in today's New York Times (October 6, 2019) accurately portrays the fragile realities of community in a very small place: Clinton, Arkansas. Self-defeated is a way of describing the lives and attitudes of many people there: just about anything a governmental body can do is a sad waste of money. Potts describes a fight over library financing and the salary of a librarian (that would have paid her $25 per hour or about $42,000 per year) as a step too far for the residents, whose median household income is often not more than $25,000. Self-defeated is about much more than finances, but about an entire attitude and expectation of individual lives and community life that the word describes.

Particularly telling is one resident's dismissal of the value of the librarian's degree or the work of the library. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.” That remark is not about Dewey. It is a willful dismissal of what the library there does: provide a portal to so much of the world beyond Clinton for those who cannot afford it or even imagine it. The evocation of Dewey itself is a telling dismissal: a nineteenth century system of relative shelf location is taken as the be-all and end-all of what can be known --not just a library, but what a library can point to.

In Potts' telling, the politics and mind-set of scarcity defines Van Buren County, Arkansas, and "people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use." The Chair of the library board points to a conversation, "They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” (The Chair pointed out that he doesn't have children and never uses the public school.) Social discourse becomes even more impoverished than community finances. In Potts' words:

A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families. . . . They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library.

I was left thinking, "what about the children? What about the young people? Is there any hope here for the future? How is the next generation to live?

One of the premises of all education is that somehow things might become better, smarter, wiser, more effective, from theory to very practical results. When education is seen as strictly a private good, that benefits only the person enrolled, and strictly as job training, to do work that is done right now, then any sense of hope for betterment has vanished. And a school or university becomes simply a credential mill, properly certifying new workers to do what is done now. This is wildly dissonant with ideas about innovation (disruptive or incremental) or any kind of increased efficiencies or synergies. "Self-defeated" portrays those withdraw, pull back, turn aside from any hope that things could be better than they are in any way whatsoever.

Potts' writing haunts me (I look forward to her book) because I know these people, and grew up with them in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bridgeport is or was probably a step above Clinton, Arkansas, but only a small one. In the 1950s and 1960s the attitude there was one-dimensional: work in the automobile plants, get 30-and-out, and retire early. Maybe the UAW can help, maybe not. In retrospect many people regard those times as better than they were; in reality the economy there was heavily boom/bust and the busts were not pretty. (See Daniel Clark's Disruption in Detroit, Univ of Illinois Press, 2018) In this decade Bridgeport is a shadow of its former self (which wasn't much to begin with), and the same mindset of withdrawal and going-it-alone is pervasive throughout the township. Saginaw County's population has declined dramatically since 1980 from 228,000 to 190,000 (while the USA grew from 226 million to 327 million). The neighboring school district went bankrupt, was taken over by the state, and dissolved; the local school district was in similar difficulty but seems to have become more stable in the past few years.

Potts quotes a resident of Clinton, Arkansas, "“If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it." Many from Clinton took her advice and left; many from Bridgeport, Michigan have taken similar advice, as did I. The potential for a life at anything more than just above the poverty line are very limited in both places. More than that statistical, financial poverty line is the poverty of spirit, a refusal to see what could be possible, a reluctance to band together to fight for what could be better, and a real willingness to disparage any achievement elsewhere as a sad waste of money and time.

I try to balance Potts' article with the blogs by James and Deborah Fallows that look at places in America that are re-inventing themselves, Our Towns. I try to square the demoralized, self-defeated residents of many rural corners with the attractive idea that needs further research, that some young professionals are intentionally moving away from expensive urban centers to places where life is both more affordable and more relaxed. Potts article warns: those places are not just everywhere or anywhere. For a community to re-invent itself, to fight against the self-defeatism that reigns in Clinton, Arkansas, or Bridgeport, Michigan, such a community needs a core of dedicated people, both leaders and followers, who see what an area could be, what it could offer, how it could be better --in short, a set of people who can hope and then get to work. In too many rural communities, those people simply have left, frustrated with the poverty of mind, imagination and spirit.

Potts does not mention a curious fact about Clinton, Arkansas: it has seen another, useful government intervention (with private assistance). A 1982 flood of the Archery Fork of the Upper Little Red River severely damaged the town and a subsequent channelization project sought to prevent another one. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy and the state Game and Fish Commission supported a cantilevered stream bed, a trail, and habitat restoration. I can't imagine that anyone in Clinton would be in favor of another 1982 flood (but I can imagine, "That project. What a sad waste of government money.") I can definitely imagine a familiar dismissal of the later re-engineering to provide better habitat, so that flood control would divide the community less sharply, even though I imagine few would want the old channel back. It must be an improvement, but will be dismissed as a waste. If my suspicions are correct, this is a prime example of how a community can defeat itself: a refusal to hope, a willing refusal to work together. No wonder anyone who can gets out. How poorly these people are served by the very ideology and individuals they select to preside over their local, state, and national communities.

In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?

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Sam Anderson writes in the New York Times Magazine, Sunday, March 24, 2019:

As the English writer G.K. Chesterton once put it, in a quote I found printed in my corny old travel journal: “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” After looking at a Roman stone wall topped by a Saxon stone wall topped by a medieval English wall next to a modern paved street, I began to see what a thin crust of national history the United States actually stands on. I began to realize how silly and narrow our notion of exceptionalism is — this impulse to consider ourselves somehow immune to the forces that shape the rest of the world. The environment I grew up in, with its malls and freeways, its fantasies of heroic individualism, began to seem unnatural. I started to sense how much reality exists elsewhere in the world — not just in a theoretical sense, in books and movies, but with the full urgent weight of the real. And not just in Europe but on every other continent, all the time, forever. I began to realize how much I still had to learn before I could pretend to understand anything. 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/20/magazine/rick-steves-travel-world.html