Guardian of the Garden

This chapter describes what the author saw while watching the birdhouse outside her bedroom window. She enjoyed watching the domesticity of western bluebirds. The author then contrasts the beauty of the bluebird and the menace of the coachwhip. An ancient battle fraught with symbolism was being fought in the author's high desert garden. In Navajo culture, a bluebird is an allegory of creativity and creation, but a snake communicates with the supernatural. In Christian religions, the snake is blamed for the mess we've inherited, all because of a woman's desire for more. The author maintains a healthy respect for snakes and finds them fascinating, beautiful, and maligned. On the other hand, the author is an active advocate for bluebirds.

On Half-Built Assemblages: Waiting for a Data Center in Prineville, Oregon

In 2010 the mega-corporation Facebook finalized an agreement to build a massive data center in Prineville, a small town in central Oregon previously known for logging, cattle ranching, and as the headquarters of the Les Schwab tire company. This was a largely unanticipated event that local leaders nonetheless prepared for several decades before when they designated a rural economic zone on the outskirts of town. However, the enterprise zone sat mostly unused, an empty and dusty piece of high desert land dotted with sagebrush and juniper trees. I describe the preparatory efforts that laid the groundwork for the data center as effecting a “half-built assemblage.” Through such anticipatory reconfigurations, local leaders recognized the limits of regional government to overcome the challenges of their peripherality. In the controversy surrounding such data center deals, critics have often cast rural leaders as naive or as pandering to voters. However, I argue that the alliance with Facebook was one of the few courses of action available to local leaders that had any chance of realizing regional economic development goals. In seeking to understand the data center deal from a local perspective, I contribute an alternative notion of temporality to materialist theorizing by looking across much longer durations of time in relation to the political economy, the natural world, and other elements as a way to temper exaggerations of anthropocentric agency and the narrow attribution of blame.

Sound Is Round

Can we expand our awareness of remote environments by connecting them to our own bodily experience? “Sound Is Round” takes a winding journey through the superimposed environments of ocean and desert, bringing sounds from the deep ocean of Monterey Bay in California to the high desert of Northern Arizona. In doing so, it brings together experiences of material sensory space expanded by a sonic sense, an amplified listening. The intertwining of these environments and experiences comes together in a notion of roundness, through the form of the Möbius strip. By approaching land-based spaces through a different orientation, thinking through a lens of fluid sounds and listening, a sense of “oceanic consciousness” is explored. A simultaneous experience of relationship to others, to site, and to distant place is reflected through personal stories of participants. The writing reflects the author’s own artistic practice, using the headphones and soundscape from a recent project Melt Me Into the Ocean, which explored connectedness to the deep ocean from land through sound walks. It also discusses the current project From a Whale’s Back, which works with video, sound, and data from the latest scientific research on tagged whales. Our connection to, and understanding of, the deep ocean environments are considered through these displaced remote experiences of place. Colliding sounds from these underwater environments with a research project around Roden Crater—artist James Turrell’s ongoing land-art work inside an extinct volcano—it emphasizes the importance of physical material sensory experience of place.

Go West Young Mensch! The Rise and Decline of the Jewish Community of Carbon County, Wyoming (U.S.A.)

Carbon County is a remote, sparsely-populated region of high desert located in south-central Wyoming, U.S.A. Bifurcated by the Union Pacific railway, the county’s economy has long relied upon attracting a labor force from near and far in order to prosper. For a brief period from about 1880-1980, a small yet significant part of that population was comprised of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe.This study discusses the unique history of the Jewish migration to the Wyoming Territory that occurred just prior to and following statehood (1890). Using primary documentation including census logs, military records, and genealogical data, several case studies are presented of individual Jewish immigrants as well as entire families that left their homes in Europe only to eventually make their homes in Rawlins and neighboring communities of Carbon County. It is seen that, by and large, the randomly-chosen life experiences discussed largely parallel those of the county at large, both shaping and being shaped by broader communal developments. The study concludes by addressing the question of why, after 100 years of successful participation in the life of the county’s economic growth, the Jews departed wholesale, leaving barely a trace behind.