Extrospection: Globe, Google Maps, and the Wound of Geography

I have studied with depth, breadth, and passion not only the literature, but also the history–both political and intellectual–of the American South. During the most impressionable years of my intellectual formation, I was reading Wilbur J. Cash on The Mind of the South  and Ulrich B. Phillips on “The Central Theme of Southern History”–and H. L. Mencken on “The Sahara of the Bozart.” And I can still experience a frisson of recognition when I read anew the exchange between Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom:

“Tell me about the South. What do they do there? How do they live there? Why do they live at all? . . . Tell me one more thing. Why do you hate the South?”

“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. “I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

Pat Conroy’s opening sentence in The Prince of Tides thus exposed layer upon layer of significance for this student of the South: “My wound is geography.” The South–specifically, South Carolina’s Lowcountry–was not just the setting, but a main character, in Conroy’s thinly veiled version of the Southern gothic. I understood the wound, but, to be fair, I also understood the refuge described in the following line: “It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Because I have studied, written about, and lived vicariously in the South–and because I have for forty years lived actually  in the South (but never called it home)–it is easy for me to understand how mere geography could have such evocative power.

However, despite my penchant for introspection, I have seldom spent much thought on the formative geography of my own beginnings. I have understood the importance of growing up in a small town, with people of similar history and lives mutually transparent. I shared with Thomas Wolfe an understanding that being sheltered by mountains on all sides provided an insularity to our childhoods that made us both interdependent and independent. And my undergraduate mentor tried to analyze me based on the tagline of an old radio show: “Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the small mining town in the West, who found true happiness with one of England’s most handsome Lords, Lord Henry Brinthrope.”

Somehow, though, it was only yesterday, looking at Google Maps, that I understood how thoroughly I am a girl from a small mining town in the West. So now is the time for some extrospection.

As I often do, I typed in the search block, “428 North Street, Globe, Arizona.” And here is what I saw:

northstreet

Marked with the distinctive Google Maps pin is the home where I spent the first sixteen years of my life–practiced penmanship and the cornet and words for the spelling bee, sent a photograph of myself with my hair in bobby pins to President Kennedy, read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries before I finished the third grade. Next door to the left is the home of my aunt and uncle and their two daughters, Nancy and Kathy. Behind them, down the hill on Devereaux Street, is my grandmother’s house, where I learned to embroider to the background noise of the fifteen-minute soap operas she called “my stories.”  Between the two houses is the vacant lot where Johnny Vazetti’s house burned down; I once disrobed on that lot, hung my dress and panties on the mulberry tree, and pranced down the hill to Grandma’s house, where she greeted my arrival with shrieks of horror. I spent most of my childhood playing, walking, roller skating, and bicycling on the streets and sidewalks circumscribed in this photo. I attended kindergarten through sixth grade at Noftsger Hill School, the large building across the street from our house. There, I gave the first clues of being a big fish; of course, the metaphor doesn’t hold because there are no ponds in small mining towns in the West. Summer evenings, I ate candy cigarettes and wax lips and slurped on snow cones while watching the local boys play baseball at the Little League park just past the school on the right. I played jacks with Susie Billingsley on the school steps because golf balls bounced straight and high on their smooth paint of battleship gray.

In retrospect, other than the school steps, vivid colors painted my childhood. However, I must acknowledge that then, as now–a fact starkly revealed by the Google satellite–the palette was mostly limited to shades of dusty brown, and sizes were limited to small.  The elementary school attended by my father and his four brothers, my sister and me, and the first female governor of Arizona is now a bed and breakfast. The barrenness of the baseball diamond leads me to believe that children slurp no more snow cones and play no more six-inning ballgames there. Otherwise, the neighborhood seems essentially the same from this vantage point.

Let’s zoom out for a little perspective. The previous view was primarily of Noftsger Hill, a neighborhood on the northwestern edge of Globe. Here is most of the town:

globe

And here is an even broader view, including the sheltering mountains and what remains of the copper mines that provided a living for our families and the smell of sulfur that pervades my childhood memories:

largeview

I have seen these views countless times since they became available in cyberspace. But it was only yesterday that I began to locate my own wound in these arid and barren vistas. So I haven’t figured out quite what they have meant for my social, psychological, and intellectual development.

However, zooming in for the Google street view, I begin to feel a slight itch from that unacknowledged and unhealed wound of geography and history:

428

This is 428 North Street, my childhood home. Zillow tells me that our house was built in 1910; standing on a lot of 5,227 square feet, the house is 769 square feet, but the website doesn’t reveal whether that measurement includes the half-unfinished, half-underground basement. White plastic chairs have replaced the green metal ones of the 1950s. The cedar tree is missing from the space to the right of the porch, and the planters and the dog house are new.

The fence, however, is the same one kicked by Delton Gillespie from the bicycle on which he delivered the weekly newspaper; our dog, Curly, bit him in response to repeated harassment and was subsequently sent to that farm in the sky where he could run free; as I recall, Delton, whom we called a juvenile delinquent, was subsequently sent to Fort Grant, the State Industrial School for Wayward Boys and Girls. The porch rails are the same ones in front of which I made mud pies and between which my sister as a toddler stuck her head and learned the valuable lesson that ears compress in only one direction. The square box affixed to the right side of the house is the same swamp cooler that made summers tolerable in the higher regions on the verge of the Sonoran Desert–but sticky and intolerable during the monsoons. In the room where that cooler blew its cool, damp air stood my first piano. The house barely visible on the left is the same one where Andy Rogers lived. I had my first quasi-sexual experience with him in one of the finished rooms of our basement, where Andy took off his pants, told me to do the same, and lay on top of me, rubbing me with his tiny penis until we heard my mother coming down the stairs and scrambled to get dressed. We were four and six, and neither of us suffered psychological scars; significantly, neither of us was sent to the State Industrial School for Wayward Boys and Girls.

I have a lot to ponder before I can say with confidence whether geography is my wound or my harbor. Of course, the metaphor doesn’t hold; there are no harbors in the desert. But there are oases, and there are mirages of oases in the distance.

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9 Responses to Extrospection: Globe, Google Maps, and the Wound of Geography

  1. Pingback: Extrospection: Globe, Google Maps, and the Wound of Geography | Just(e) Words

  2. Jim Chambers says:

    I think Ft. Grant did for Delton exactly was the state pen at Florence did for Butch Stroud – they installed a revolving door and a ‘reserved’ sign on their favorite cell. (This is the best I can do for sarcastic and sartorial humor at this hour of the day.)

  3. Susan Folkner Pollard says:

    I grew up in that house too. My parents bought it and got married in the front yard. I went to Noftsger Hill from 1st grade to 5th. 6th was Jr. High. My parents closed off the porch. The door leading to the room with the swamp cool was also closed off. Of the 3 “living rooms” upstairs they took down a wall to make a large living room and a bedroom. The bedroom being by the bathroom. Then later switched the wall to make the living room the opposite was and their bedroom now by the porch. The porch than becoming a closet. ( I think they got tired of all us kids always having to come into their room to use the restroom) but then we also took out the floor to that little closet and put inside stairs in. We closed off the door in the kitchen that went to the outside stairs which then become a pantry. Downstairs had 4 rooms. From the back door was a room we used as the laundry room and storage. Than the next room was were I spent most my life. It had two windows one under the porch and one by the driveway. The driveway going from the street all the way down into what I think was someone’s garage. We used it as storage only. A steep driveway. So the window when opened you could crawl out and we did. We would go out late at night and ride our bike on the school play ground. We would just dance in the wind ( when it was cool out). The other two rooms didn’t have floors. Just dirt with carpet down. The room under the swamp cooler was my two older sisters room. That was the best room because no o e had to go into it to get to another room. Later when our grandma Julia Folk etymology had to move in with us my parents had a floor put in and that became their bedroom. Our brother had the room where the stairs come down. So than you come down stairs through his room. Into mine and our baby sisters room to get to the other two rooms. Before the floor was put in and the two rooms with dirt floor, the one where the stairs are in I was doing laundry very early one morning. I was putting my brother hanging clothes away (in the dark) when I hit his basketball which hit an old alarm clock he always tinkered with. I went over and turned his light on went back over to move the basketball to get to the click and there was a snake. I screamed so loud, ran up the stairs to tell dad there was a snake down there. He said what kind and I said “I do t know but it rattles” . That’s how scared I was. They never found the snake it went into a hole in the concrete wall. I’m not sure how much long it was but one day after school my sister Roberta having a bad day was not in a very good mood came home and went right to her room not wanting to talk to any one. I remember following her and when she plopped on her bed I heard leaves being smashed. (She left her window open and it had a small hole in the screen so the wind blew leaves on her floor. Mom had come down to see what was wrong. What I thought was leaves being crashed was another rattle snake. We went and got the janitor from Noftsger Hill and he killed it with his shovel. How I never got bitten twice now is a miracle. As for the big tree missing it was cut down due to it interfering with power lines. We left a stump there that is now missing. Yes same old fence around the front yard. Our dogs never got kicked by a paperboy but then the paperboy was our brother. Lol. All of us kids graduated from Globe High in that house. As for the school. Boy the stories we can tell. There were tall trees on each side of the Noftsger Hill sign. We would climb them and hid behind the sign. Once our brother and his friends where up there throwing eggs at the passing cars. The last one being a police officer. They hid until it was safe to do so then come home. The officer never found out who did it or from where. He did walk all over the grounds but never found them. One favorite pass time was watching little league up there. Our dad coached our brothers team. Looking back I have good but a lot of bad memories in that home. We weren’t treated very nice as kids. A lot of beatings, not soankings beatings. I once asked some school mates if they knew and they said they didn’t. In my mi d how did they not know. But then we were raised in fear to not tell. I can tell you we all survived and are all healthy in marriages with a lot of kids of our own and with lots of grand babies.

  4. Triss says:

    I loved this. You had me laughing so hard in a couple of spots.
    You are very correct about the baseball field being gone. Many years ago it was turned in to a dog park. Somewhere within the last 10 years they built and another a baseball field behind it right about where chalkeye, the horse, used to live. I can honestly say I have never seen a baseball game played there though. A few years ago I took the path that we used to go for walks with daddy on to go to the Old Dominion mine, and it was sad to see how eroded the path, that I have such fond memories of , has become. I couldn’t even locate the big rock with the fossils in it that I used to refer to as “Vicki’s fossils”. It appears to have been buried under the dirt they scraped away to make the baseball field.

    • Boz says:

      I’m glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the update on the area where the ballpark was–and the fossils that now exist only in our memories.

  5. Melva Magee says:

    It’s fun to recall our childhood memories even though not all are great. But, life moves on and we should move on with it. However, it is good to be able to look back with fondness or fear now knowing that we survive our childhoods, miss our parents long gone and in hopes of seeing our old friends perhaps on face book or class reunions. It always brings me to a place of wonder and often surprise. Thanks for your posts Vicki.

    • Boz says:

      Thanks you, Melva. Your comments reminded me of the wonderful group of old friends with whom you travelled to North Carolina a few years ago (and I seem to remember that you have done other trips as well). Recently being able to reunite with friends from the past is one of the greatest joys in my life.

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