Tom M. Wilson

Ironically living in a city is good for the environment. Dense population clusters facilitate the widespread use of public transport and bikes, and mean water and other things don’t require as much energy to be moved about. But some cities are better than others. I arrived in Montreal on Tuesday, and I think this place is one of the better ones.

I really like this city. It has the brownstones familiar from New York’s Greenwich Village, with iron stairs leading up to the second story, and old trees in full green leaf along the street. Unlike Greenwich Village it is affordable to live here. Odd turrets and elaborate gables top the terrace houses here and there. Black iron fire escapes climb down into the back alleys, where squirrels dodge cats and people stroll. The books have the minimalistic jacket designs of the French publishing industry. People switch backwards and forwards between French and English, both with a slight American slant. The windows of the apartment I’m staying in have the old, white sliding bolt design used in old French apartments. The air is warm and lots of people are on the street.

Bikes adorn the railings in front of nearly all the houses in this area, Mile End. Everywhere I go in Montreal the street is wide and full of cyclists. They have installed very wide, two-way cycle lanes – as big as another lane on the road – on a few one-way streets. I saw literally fleets of cyclists shooting down these lanes.

Often people have vegetable gardens in their narrow front yards. There is a funky, community orientated feeling, familiar to me from Brunswick St. in Melbourne.

I’m happy to be here. In some ways this city is the place I can most imagine myself living out of all the places I’ve been so far on this trip. That said, I’m looking at the place in late June when all the windows and doors - like our back door in the above photo - are open and heat is in the streets. In January minus ten celcius is merely average and more snow falls than in a Moscow winter. I don’t know how I’d cope with that. But right now I really like this place. It has a cool, urban feeling, and doesn’t have the cultural arrogance to think it is the centre of the world (I think us Australians and Canadians share this sense of cultural humility).

Sitting on the Metro, reading the program of the soon to come Montreal Jazz Festival. As part of the festival I’m going to see the Cinematic Orchestra on 5 July. If you don’t know them, have a listen. They are sounding quiet and romantic on their latest album Ma Fleur.

Today is the close of my weekend-long trip with the ASLE conference participants to Helena Island, a large fragment of land just off the coast of South Carolina (south-east USA). I’ve enjoyed this trip to the south, but right now it will also be good to have a break from this country’s huge cars, huge portions of food, permissive gun laws, and America-centric view of the world.

There were 18 of us on this field trip, mainly academics, and apart from two of us, all North American. Here a few of us sit on the front ‘porch’ of our story house on St. Helena island, watching the light fade in the ubiquitous Spanish moss hanging from the tree branches. That’s David Ingram in the foreground, Londoner and author of Green Screen, a volume of ecocritical film theory and criticism.

One day we went on a tour of the sounds. This photo was taken as our boat slid along through the waterways of South Carolina’s low country, the area being so named because of its low lying, tide inundated topography. The grasses grow up to the edge of the forest, and then pines and cabbage palms rise up. The climate here is subtropical, and the air is almost as warm and humid as in the tropics. This area was once inhabited by native Americans who made thatch for their shelters from the wide leaves of the cabbage palm. The Spaniards arrived in the early 1600s, but didn’t stay. Pirates used these bays and estuaries as jumping off points to take Incan and Mayan gold-laden ships as they bobbed up the Gulf Stream later in the century. I can’t imagine English pirates careening their galleon on this shore, while armed native Americans flit through the foliage in the background. While we cruised by the marsh grasses and green woods, John Barth’s novel The Sot Weed Factor kept springing to mind. I know it is set further north, in Virginia, but here I was really experiencing the fertility of the eastern seaboard of North America as it appeared to the adventurous and sometimes murderous European flotsam that came here during the 1600 and 1700s.

My sparse knwledge of American history will have to be excused here… The English got over here. Later the revolutionary war ended with the US shaking off the old country. Then there were Africans brought over by rich whites from West Africa and used as slaves. At one point in the early 1800s there were 800 plantations around these immediate islands (6000 whites and 30 thousand black slaves). With such fertile soil and long hours of sunshine the cotton crops shot up and this in combination with the slave labour made the planters so rich that they could fill their estates full of lavish European silver and crystal and extensive libraries. Knowledge and repression side by side… how vile. Then the abolutionist movement arose and the south wanted to be a separate nation… thus the Civil War. We walked through Beaufort, the town which where the cradle of insurgency was located.

When the Union guys (the north) arrived in town in 1862, three days before all the wealthy planter families had high tailed it down the road in their carriages, leaving the Corinthian columns of their white boarded mansions to the company of the Gullah people, the cultural group of African Americans that had formed in this region.

Notice the big windows in this photo. Climate change is causing sea level rise in the lowcountry – dead cabbage palms could be seen on the shore as a result. Also more intense hurricanes are coming to these parts. And still the air conditioned retirees inside houses like this don’t open the floor to ceiling windows on their ‘porches’ to let in the breeze, as they were designed to do a couple of hundred years ago.

We went to a church in which the gravestones had been dug up during the civil war and used as operating beds for soldiers (in the hospital temporarily located inside the church). I can’t think of a worse operating table, symbolically speaking. This gravestone has the cabbage palm on it, the state’s emblematic tree. It is a different species, but it looks like the cabbage palm found on Australia’s east coast.

The Spanish moss on the branches of the Live Oak is my abiding memory of the south. I hope the Gullah people keep ownership of as much of this land as they can, farming it for vegetables as their forefathers have for the last few generations.

Until I arrived here to Wofford College a few days ago I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of rich private colleges with small student numbers that are unique to the US. Walking around this campus is so relaxing. There are only around a thousand students here. The actual town of Spartanburg isn’t very charasmatic, but being here amongst the nineteenth-century red brick buildings and the massive oak trees in full leaf standing over their carpet of thick green grass… well it seems like these college environments constitute a pastoral idyll all of themselves, with gambling ecocritics on the sward. And I hate to sound like Prince Charles, but give me a moulded cornice any day over a sixties concrete bunker.

There are five hundred people here, but the Australian contingent is made up of only two people. Myself and the co-editor of The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (CRANSTON, CA. and Robert ZELLER (Eds.) This book is in the same series as my own book on John Fowles, and is forthcoming. Conferences are always good places to learn of books to put on your ‘to read’ list, and I’ve added Terry Gifford’s Reconnecting with John Muir; Bill Mckibben’s Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth; and Coming Into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Ingram, et. al.) to my list. Hopefully I’ll be having a look around some of northern New England next week, and because of this I also want to read Bill Mckibben’s book about walking through this area: Wandering Home.

Last night I was out in a pavilion on campus where a bunch of the profs were playing guitar and singing and hanging out - I tried to picture this kind of scene going taking place at a British ASLE conference and couldn’t see it. The English would just be too self-conscious. While I was there I met a woman who will be talking about place-based blogs - like this one I suppose - tomorrow morning. In other conference news, I met a young guy here who has a tattoo on his arm of a maple leaf, as originally drawn by Henry David Thoreau.

After the talks tomorrow morning I’ll be heading off for the weekend to St. Helena Island, and the Penn Center, with around twenty other conference participants, to check out that heartland of Gullah (a kind of African-American slave) culture. Monday afternoon I fly to Montreal.

So long Wofford College…