Exit 103

1-84 East

Morgan

1 Mile

I see the familiar sign and begin my unconscious routine. The speed limit on the freeway is 75 but as always, I am going five over. I wait about ten seconds then I put the car in neutral and let my momentum take me to exit 103. I’m on my way home from what people in my hometown would consider the big city, Salt Lake City. Getting off the freeway, I roll down my window. The wind rushes by but eventually slows as I brake at the stop sign. I don’t even see the stop sign; I just know it is there. I stay at the stop sign while I change my music. I scroll through my mental list of acceptable songs and pick a classic; “Country Roads, Take Me Home” by John Denver. The familiar rolling guitar melody comes on, giving me permission to continue my course. Putting the car back in gear, I make a right turn underneath the railroad tracks. With the windows down I breath in the cool air, practically smelling the mountains as I do. There is also a slight scent of manure that is less than novel. Passing the gas station, there is a speed limit sign, but I already know the speed limit is 30 mph. I glace down at my speedometer and match it to the speed limit and engage the cruise control. It comes to my attention that I have broken my normal procedure in so strictly obeying the speed limit. I begin to ponder what has brought on such a drastic change in my behavior. What makes this road any different than all the others I drive? I notice that upon rolling into town, time has seemed to slow down. The normal agitation that I feel while driving, caused by my desire to be doing other things with my precious time, has vanished. Though I am still a close three minutes away from my parent’s house, I already feel as though I am home.

“Country Roads take me home. To the place I belong”

The concepts of space and place are often used in conjunction in such fields as geography, anthropology and sociology. (Tuan et al., 2018) While apparently simple, both space and place can and have been used by intellectuals of many different disciplines and perspectives which has led to an incomplete coherence of definition and application of space and place. (Space and Place. 2017) While similar and related, both concepts contain the key to very different qualitative and quantitative information. As one article describes it, space corresponds to the “physical part” or aspect of a geographical location while place is signified as the “social”, and I will add cultural, facet that is attributed to the geography by those that have experienced it. (Grantham, 2017). Another article frames place as the “geographical context” where “physical, social, and economic processes” take place. (Agnew & Livingstone, 2011) Even the common phrase “take place” denotes some sort of happening or experience, almost as if to bestow possession of spatial meaning through occurrence. In words more specific to this piece, space is the geographical locales that I enter and experience that are not part of my identity. Places, on the other hand, are regions that are a part of who I am. They are the terrains that I understand and derive meaning from based on my own lived experience. It is the addition of a lived culture, be it communal, familial, personal, etc, that changes a space into a place and allows a connection to develop. In this work I hope to explore the difference between space and place and how the former can become the later within the context of a morphing individual culture.

This changed when I made the move to Salt Lake City and suddenly, I was the one at the helm. I had to know when my desired turn was coming up. I needed to be aware of the cars around me and their drivers’ behaviors. I even had to keep my eye on the stoplights!

Stoplights were not completely foreign to me; I grew up in a small town, not outer space. I had interacted with stoplights hundreds if not thousands of times but not on a daily basis. In Morgan, I never had to stop at a stoplight simply because we didn’t have any. Of course, there were stop signs, yield signs, and every other type of road sign you can think of; we just did not have any stoplights.

Stoplights are used to control traffic, to tell each direction of travelers when to stop and when to go. They serve to prevent any accidents that may potentially be caused by two drivers’ intersecting courses. They help organize the movements of large amounts of people going in many different directions. In Morgan, there were neither lots of people nor many directions in which to go, and so there was no need for a stoplight. Before coming to college, going home meant leaving the stoplights behind. When I moved to Salt Lake however, that directionality was inverted. Suddenly home, or at least the place I took my shoes off at night, was surrounded by stoplights. Though not entirely uncomfortable or out of place, I was in a space, not a place. I was a stranger to the culture with just as many transferable experiences as I had decorations to put on my cement dorm walls. But just as I put up those few decorations, I began applying what little experience I had in common with the culture I knew corresponded to the space, though this was more an effort to mitigate contrast than to reconcile my personal culture.

The contrast between country and city has been around since civilization began, when goods and services began to gravitate towards one another and the humans that offered them followed. In The Country and the City by Raymond Williams, we are reminded that these two words represent two powerful ideas lived by similar but distinct portions of the population. The city represents an “achieved centre” where existence is concentrated, and resources are conquered. (Williams, 1975, p. 1) It is characterized by learning, abundance, and action. It is characterized by noise, filth, and the masses. The country, in the sense of an antagonist to “the city”, is the branch of civilization that extends far enough away from the center as to be considered a separate space. The country is clean, simple, and innocent. It is also ignorant, slow, and sparce. Each space contributes to a way of life, a culture that is often antithetical to the other. Individuals tend to associate themselves with one of these identities, or some hybrid of the two (i.e., suburbanite), as a way of providing a foundation or springboard for their experiences and/or identity. Identifying with a region and the way of life that is typically associated with it brings a “sense of belonging, based on ties of sentiment, interest, value, or knowledge”. (Hummon, 1986) Each geography provides unique opportunity for experience that differs from the other and leads to identity being developed in juxtaposing spaces.

You mean like what they do in truck commercials?

I was speaking to one of my peers in what was turning out to be a surface level, introductory conversation. The usual “where are you from?” and “what are you studying?” was asked. I told her I was from Morgan, Utah, but this was only responded to by a clueless glance. I wondered aloud if she was from out of state.

No. I am from here in Salt Lake.

Morgan is only an hour’s drive from Salt Lake and she still didn’t know where it was. And I thought I lived in a bubble! I went on to explain where my hometown was and what it was like.

Yep. Just like those truck commercials. You just pick it up and heave it up onto the trailer.

I was talking about hauling hay. A large portion of the square milage of my little valley is used for farming which means a lot of hay is grown. In order to harvest it properly you have to cut it, bale it, and store it somewhere dry. This means that someone has to pick it up out of the field and haul it to where it will be stored. That niche is where some of my friends and I found ourselves during the summer. It was hard work, but we had fun with it, and we learned from it.

Didn’t that get your hands dirty?

Did she really just ask that? I chose to ignore the question and simply move the conversation along.

Just like Williams, I came “from a village to a city: to be taught, to learn”. This move has achieved the manifest function of increasing my knowledge through participation in the institution of academia, but it has also latently affected my individual identity. As described in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I experienced a “paradigm shift” which opened the world to me. (Covey, 1989).

Before attending school in Salt Lake my world view was unconsciously Morgan-centric. The totality of my lived experience found its roots in the same fertile mountain valley. However, upon venturing out of from the “country” to the “city”, I was able to explore and add to my identity. In writing this piece, I have been able to reflect on how this frame shift has altered my sense of self in relation to place. This shift has not decreased my ability or even desire to “get my hands dirty”; the experiences, skills and memories derived from growing up in the country have not been lost in this new world of books and PhDs. Instead, I have learned many new skills and developed new schemas based on the world that I have observed outside of my previous world. I have learned how to navigate the public transit system, what to wear to a black-tie event, and how to interact with people that have completely different cultures than mine. I have even come to appreciate the colorful predictability of stoplights as part of my environment. Simply put, I have added variety to the somewhat drab “cultural mosaic” that, up until my move, consisted of very few colors and themes.

Mosaics are created by using many small bits of color, usually ceramic tiles, to create a stylistic pattern or to depict some sort of imagery. The idea of a “cultural mosaic” takes into account the piecewise nature of identity and culture by recognizing that just as a mosaic will utilize many colors to tell a story so too will an individual cultural identity consist of many unique characteristics and experiences. Each individual has a unique cultural mosaic even if they come from the same region, community or even family as someone else. Even a brief search in Google Scholar will demonstrate the wealth of characteristics that can contribute to make an individual’s cultural mosaic; among them, ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, familial background, and disability status. An individual’s intersectionality plays an enormous role in their identity but minor characteristics such as experiences and interpretation can also play a significant part in a person’s identity. As stated by one author, contributions such as “demographic” and “geographic” are among the many “tiles” that can make up a cultural mosaic. (Chao & Moon, 2005) My move was not characterized by any sort of demographic change, but the geographic newness brought about by my move contributed to my mosaic in a very meaningful way.

Stop signs to stop lights

Slow lane to fast.

First names to last names

Or maybe none at all.

Canyon Creek to City Creek

Fairgrounds to mall.

Mountains seem the same

But not so pretty in the fall.

Everyone knows me

To another in the crowd.

Driving with the windows down

To the world is just too loud.

I’m like you and you’re like me

To where is that? Tell me more.

Same Friday nights

To different lives.

Small and slow

To big and fast.

From same ol’ same ol’

To a place to grow

“Country Roads take me home. To the place I belong”

I have made many trips back to Morgan. Every time I ritualistically exit the freeway, turn right under the railroad tracks, and set my speedometer at 30 I feel like I am coming home. But now I do not always perform that ritual. Sometimes I am listening to a podcast or I am on the phone with a friend. Sometimes I forget to set my speedometer and then find my foot pressing a little too heavy on the gas pedal. Occasionally I will even drive through town in silence, simply thinking. Looking back, I can begin to understand my own unconscious thinking.

Morgan was the only place that I knew to call home and as such it was a central aspect of who I considered myself to be. It was the “place I belong[ed]” when life required my constant interaction with regions I considered mere spaces. Matching my behavior and mindset with those characteristics previously associated with the place (Morgan) was a way for me to interact with past memories and to maintain a connection to my place identity. I consider it a form of “clearing the cupboard” or interacting with and unearthing memories whether deeply or shallowly buried. (Jones & Garde- Hansen, 2014). Clearing the cupboard is all about transitionary phases in which old artifacts and memories are interacted with usually for the purpose of cleaning out old belongings. It provides the owner the chance to remember and interact with memories and can lead to a deeper understanding of identity as well as changes to identity. For me this was not done with physical artifacts but more so with feelings, habits and roads.

Exit 103

1-84 East

Morgan

1 Mile

The same familiar exit sign signals my entrance into town. I take my car out of cruise control and open the sunroof as I start decelerating down the exit ramp. Turning on my right turn signal, I tell Siri to turn on some John Denver. Familiar sights, sounds and smells stimulate my senses while I set my speedometer to 30 mph. Everything as it should be. Now that I do all of these little steps consciously, I feel almost performative. In a way it is a performance, a farmer’s hat tip to a constant but abated part of my identity that will always be associated with this place. Briefly in my mind I image two different versions of myself both the same but somehow different, maybe in just the way that the city and the country are different. One busy, one calm. One simple the other being governed by stoplights. Different but somehow so similar, like two unique and integral parts of a symbiotic whole. Each being representative of a geography that has provided a space where I could create my personal mosaic. Each one representing a place in my life. My life in each of these places is so different. One of them is in the past the other in the present. One represents childhood and the other the beginnings of adulthood. One is the roots the other is the trunk and young branches. Both a part of one individual, a part of me. The places in my life, namely Morgan and Salt Lake, serve as “loc[i] of the self”, as a geographic location when I center my memories, fantasies and realities. (Sampson, 2009) The process of developing a place from a space takes time and only occurs as you expand your mosaic through exposure to the world around you. However, once a place has been incorporated into your identity it stays there. I have learned this over the many trips from space to place and eventually from place to place. Identity is expanded and enriched when we as individuals add to it through the transformation of spaces by the creation of memories, communities and realities.

“Country Roads take me home. To the place I belong”

Bibliography

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Chao, G. T., & Moon, H. (2005). The cultural mosaic: A metatheory for understanding the complexity of culture. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(6), 1128–1140. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.6.1128

Chow, K., & Healey, M. (2008, March 4). Place attachment and place identity: First-year undergraduates making the transition from home to university. Journal of Environmental Psychology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494408000236.

Covey, S. (1989) 7 habits of highly effecive people. Free Press

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