by Hilton Als
“You don’t have to have existence to exist,” Smithson said.
If there were a sun, it would have been setting. As the sky grew subtly pinker and purpler, other cars appeared: two families, a lone woman and a couple. Some walked the jetty, but others struck out directly for the invisible horizon and soon became tiny black marks floating in the middle of the same-color distance. The young couple stood on the flats and hugged and kissed. The lone woman neatened the jetty; she found errant rocks and threw them back within the boundaries, redarkening its outline.
Back in the parking lot, as the rain finally started (it had been threatening), we talked to some of these people. All of them were longtime residents in the area. The jetty-neatener said: “I’ve never been here before. Today just felt like the day.”
A man told us that in the summer the lake looked like the Arctic, because the sun hardened the salt flats into a pink “ice” crust. Another man told us about the speed races over the salt flats, the time records that had recently been broken because, as already established, time worked differently out here; objects could exist in relation to time differently.
The rain grew heavier. Everyone wished everyone else luck getting home. “Last week there was snow on all these peaks,” one man said, gesturing to the many mountains in the near and far distance. His implication: that snow was water now, and it was heading our way.
At dusk the cows were frisky. By the time we reached the river, its flow had more than doubled in width and intensity. Should we get stuck, no one would have been able to exit the car. A person would have been swept away. In Maine I’d learned to wait: wait until the wind dies or the tide recedes. Hang out until the situation improves. But I had no idea if this situation would improve. Maybe this, right now, was the best the situation would ever be. We took our chances. We entered the water and sank above the bottom of the doors. The current rocked the car. We pushed steadily through the churn and up the eroding bank on the other side.
We quite easily survived.
It got envelopingly dark. We passed the shuttered Golden Spike National Historic Site. In Corinne, we were stopped at a railroad crossing by a train that moved at a constant, slow speed, as if unmanned and responding to dumb instinct. We all felt dozy yet alert and so pricklingly full of well-being. One crow, back at the jetty, had said, very happily and with evident pride, that they had finally, of this formerly scary place, established a point of common connection, “This is just like Maine.” And the jetty was like Maine, minus the tides. Also unlike the flats in Maine, the land revealed by the receding water did not stink primordially, even though there were dead things in it. A bird, for example. It was preserved—brined—and had been artfully abstracted into pieces, all of which were level with the ground that contained them, like fossils in the making. We had traveled all this way to see something we’d never seen, and what we found was what we always saw.
Or maybe the site’s forsakenness had softened. The rocks of the jetty were scattering into the lake; like the dead bird, it was nearly level with its surroundings. Now that the jetty was visible (and was designated, just after we visited, as an “official state work of art” by Utah), more people would travel to see it and walk on it and erode it further. Already a fuss had erupted about what Smithson would have wanted to happen to the jetty: Would he want it restored? Would his championing of entropic thinking deem the opposite? Like the Bible, his writings aid the interpretive bias of the person reading them. I personally feel this quote contains all that need be said on the matter: “The world is slowly destroying itself,” Smithson said. “The catastrophe comes suddenly, but slowly.”
Back on the highway, we listened to radio news, and the world in general seemed to be in a state much like the jetty road, pretty bad. And yet the collective familial state of equilibrium—our state of “all-encompassing uniform sameness”—endured. We passed a drowsy drivers next exit sign, and as if on cue, one crow fell asleep. The other, littler crow stared out the window, and this time, in a much more chipper tone, and as if he were voicing a pleasant dream experienced by the sleeping crow, sang his same song to the darkness:
No people.
No people.
No people.
No people.
Jennifer Kabat
Rain Like Cotton
from BOMB Magazine
Part I: Sand
Architecture, fashion—yes, even the weather—are in the interior of the collective . . . They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges.
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Picture an area the size of Manhattan covered in sand. It rises and falls and disappears.
It begins twenty thousand years ago in an age beyond imagination. To talk of it is to speak in approximations. Ice two miles thick licks down in lobes across New York State. “Lick” is too gentle a verb for its progress. The earth’s mantle bows and breaks under the burden. Lakebeds are carved; layers of rock sheered off, ground down into sand and debris. Then a few thousand years of warming. The debris, boulders, and gravel held by the ice are picked up and moved hundreds of miles. The ice leaves a chain of frozen lakes—glacial lakes Iroquois, Vermont, and Albany—their names a bit of hubris, as if to help us picture these places. The largest, Lake Iroquois, melts; its far end rebounds as the ice lifts and tilts the lake east. Near present-day Rome, New York, one hundred miles from the Canadian border, an ice dam contains the water. Two hundred seventy miles south, glacial debris forms another dam at the base of what will one day be Staten Island. The weight of water is overbearing, and it rushes out at twenty-four million gallons a second, almost forty times the pressure of Niagara’s greatest falls. Fresh water spills into the ocean. Desalinization. The currents shut down; the Gulf Stream stops circulating; another ice age begins. Lake Iroquois becomes Lake Ontario; Lake Vermont disappears into Lake Champlain, and Lake Albany drains entirely, leaving sand where its shores had been.
It blows from west to east and settles in dunes. They stabilize, held in place by pitch pine and scrub oak. Animals move in. Blueberries grow. It is 8,000 years ago, 6,000, then the centuries we call the Common Era, but people don’t live in this inland sand sea. They venture in and out, crisscrossing on footpaths. The trees burn periodically. Species that depend on fire live here. The pines will only release their seeds with heat. The Lenni-Lenape and Iroquois now cross these sandy planes and do the burning. The blueberries need the clearings. Hunting here is easy.
It will come to be called a “barren,” a pine barren, the barrenness itself of this place leading it to be called in geographic descriptions a “waste” and “wasteland,” because nothing seems to grow here, nothing of value, no crops. This is why it will become a dump, a trailer park, sold off in schemes and scams. People who are overlooked, or want to be, settle here. The Shakers in 1776; Loyalists to the crown hide in the dunes during the Revolutionary War. Thieves take cover in the woods, and, later, African Americans arrive running from slavery, then hanging trees and Jim Crow laws. The Shakers first live crowded in a single log cabin. They are led by a woman whose followers believe she is the second coming of Christ, and they hope no one will bother them as they straighten the streams and haul in arable soil to build a new society where men and women are equal. The footpaths become roads. Stagecoaches charge five cents per mile and armed guards accompany travelers.
By 1830 there is a railroad, and not even 150 years later: two interstates, a landfill, six-lane roads called “extensions,” slip roads, on-ramps, and off-ramps. Cars blow by and the steady roar of tandem trailers passes in waves. Now it’s one of the rarest landscapes in the United States, and it’s just on the outskirts of Albany.
Part II: Roads
I also arrive by car, lost, to go to the mall. Next time: it’s driving to the Albany airport off the poetically named “Northway,” as I-87 stretches to Canada. I turn onto a six-lane road of intermittent stoplights, strip malls,
and gas stations. It’s the nowhere of anywhere, no different than the six-lane roads where I grew up outside Washington, DC: the Tile Shop, nail salon, gas stations, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. They will eventually become my Tile Shop, nail salon, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. The first time I visit, neither exist here yet, and now when I’m there I think about what soon won’t exist—the small extinctions of Sears and Regal Cinemas. I pull out from the Colonie Center Whole Foods with an expensive bottle of probiotics, and across the street is an empty beige building. A shadow of its past adorns the front: Barnes & Noble.
This land of strip malls and sand is technically in Colonie, New York, which itself didn’t always exist, at least not in name. The town was first called Niskayuna—“vast corn fields” in a bastardization of the Mohawk word. (“Mohawk” itself is Europeanized and bastardized and not how the Iroquois named themselves. That was Kanienkehaka, meaning the “people of the Flint Place.”) Niskayuna disappeared to become the town of Watervliet (water-flood) in the early nineteenth century, and now it’s Colonie with that strange -ie ending and an etymology stretching back to a Dutch patroon, the land here belonging originally to the Van Rensselaer family. I say “originally,” but you should know that means “originally” for European colonists.
Small splintered scraps are all that is left of the sand. They’re “relics” or a “relict,” and I love the word if not the fragmentation it describes. It means an ecosystem that has been confined, constricted, and cut off, or, where geomorphology is concerned, a place formed by forces no longer active. The sands hint, too, at an earlier era in the word’s broader definition: some lost survivor. Or, there’s its anachronistic meaning: a widow. Separated by death. Meanwhile “relict” first arose in the Scottish Acts of Parliament in the 1580s, where it meant land left by water’s retreat.
Water retreats, husbands die, land is isolated and confined, floods and glaciers disappear. No doubt as James VI ruled Scotland in the late sixteenth century, no one considered glacial retreat, or the idea of what might lie across the seas in a place yet to be called Albany.
In 1895 Colonie superseded the place that had been called water-flood, and Watervliet decided to form a new town. Surveyors collected all the vacant strips of land they could find—less than three acres in total. The town would use them to collect debts. The state supreme court said no; ghosts can’t file cases. Relicts have no protection under the law.
The first time I go to the airport, a decade ago, I know nothing of sand. I see no extinctions, no relicts or fragments. A sign with a silhouette of a plane points left, so does another that says shaker site. I follow the Shakers and the plane. I turn onto Albany Shaker Road. This is before liquids are banned, and people in bold Yves Klein–blue uniforms inspect bags, passports, shoes, and belts. I drop my husband at departures and decide to find the Shakers, thrilled that the celibate socialists could be nearby.
After the airport the Shaker signs disappear. I keep going. I get disoriented. Time and space spread out. Marsh grasses wave at an angry sky hazed with heat. A sign says I am driving to Schenectady. A blue sign implores drivers looking for old albany shaker road businesses to turn right. I turn right. Trash billows on the verge. On all these roads, trash billows.
There are no Shakers here, no history, no sites, nothing picturesque, just Hertz, the Comfort Inn, and rusting chain-link fences. The road dead-ends at the county jail, another fence, and the runway. I have no idea this is all the Shaker site. It will take me years to discover that.
In 1959 Nabokov says of the sand: “People go there on Sundays to picnic, shedding papers and beer cans.” In a letter he writes, “Nothing else of popular or scientific interest is to be found in that neighborhood.” Except butterflies. That’s why he comes. He discovers a species here and returns to see it each June. The butterfly lives a few days and dies. His novel Pnin describes how they rose from “a damp patch of sand” and, “revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”
The butterfly depends on one specific flower that depends on the sand and fire to survive. The butterfly is the Karner blue; Karner is a place that no longer exists, created by a man, Theodore Karner, who ran a land scheme in the nineteenth century. The village he designed and its train station are gone. All that is left is a road named for him: New Karner Road. The butterflies fluttered around like blue snowflakes. Karner was first called Center. The Center is gone. Karner is gone, the butterfly nearly extinct. It is on the endangered species list.
A few years after Nabokov’s visits, Governor Nelson Rockefeller stands in the sand breaking ground for a state university campus. It is 1962. He heaves a shovel over his shoulder. He dreams of universal education. It will level inequalities and create a meritocracy; all we need is access for all. Nabokov writes Pnin in the late 1950s. Like Nabokov, Pnin fled first the Communists, then the Nazis, to land in America. Despite World War II and the rise of totalitarianism, it’s an era that believes the world is improving, that we control the land, that our possibilities are endless. A cloud of sand rises like smoke as Rockefeller grimaces, and I know this is the sand of history and hope.
I return to the sand, though, for a ghost: a woman whose bones were broken, born on leap year’s day. She was the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith. She called herself “Ann the word”; others called her “mother” though all her children died. She is Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, Christ incarnate as a woman. By now, like Nabokov, I have come countless times to this place. It is a rainy day in January. The weather is wrong, too warm, everything sodden and heavy—puddles, tarmac, and sky. One of the last three surviving Shakers has just died in Maine, and I have finally found the Shaker site. I walk into the Meeting House through one of three doors. Originally, this one was for the ministry; another was for women, and the third for men, but none for me. No outsiders could enter.
Inside, the floor gleams and ladder-back chairs line the walls. The mystic monk Thomas Merton wrote before he died, “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” If you were a true believer, you could see the spirit world clear as day. This is what the Shakers called the “gift,” and even Shaker scholars have talked of experiencing it. I want the spirits to talk to me; I study the room and its chairs, and I don’t see angels.
Instead I find a single car parked by a pond that bears Ann Lee’s name. Rain careens off the gray ice. Overhead, jets take off. Signs warn of Lyme disease. I turn back. I don’t have a gift. I’m cold and wet and worried about what that lone car is doing on an isolated road in the rain.
Here, the Shakers believed they would build the world anew, heaven on Earth. All would be equal, men and women, black and white. They were collective and utopian; their communities were the most successful experiment in socialism, outlasting that of the Soviets. In trying to find these spirits, I’ve combed documents and diaries, even urban planning schemes. One hand-drawn Shaker map includes a note by the cemetery: “Mother Ann Lee was buried but the land did not belong to the believers & she was removed to land belonging to the society in the spring of 1835. C.” She was buried and reburied. Now all that survives her are four torn scraps of fabric.
According to the map, the county jail where I pull up next to a chain-link fence was PASTURE. The airport: FIELD. The letters for each of these places, for FIELD and PASTURE, are elegant capitals with scrolled lines snaking up them. SWAMP swerves across the page in a sidelong S. The map says FIELD was “originally a low muddy swamp, but is now (as Mother Ann prophesied it would be) a light, dry soil.” These notes are included in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Albany County commissioned in 1999 when it wanted to widen the road.
My gift, I realize, is in the roads. This is where I find my spirits: Albany Shaker Road, Watervliet Shaker Road. South Family Drive is all that remains of the Shaker “family” that took in new converts, “family” i
n quotes because the sect didn’t believe in the nuclear family, only a spiritual one. They banned marriage and raised children communally.
A shiver passes over me as I arrive from the west. I cross Sand Creek Road, but there’s no sand, no creek, not anymore. Subdivisions have been built on High Dune Drive and Pitch Pine Road, as if this endangered area will be preserved in name alone, as if after thousands of years these are the relicts.
To reach them, I drive by squat office buildings and Lasting Memories Taxidermy. The EIS reports on “inconsequential” sites. “Stained soil where a post for a hut wall once stood . . . a cluster of fire-reddened rock which was once a fireplace or less than a thumbnail-sized chert flake.” These prehistoric details are so “inconsequential,” they’re hidden in parentheses. Meanwhile, the county needs wider roads.
On that January day too warm for winter, instead of Ann Lee I find two cop cars and three men outside a crumbling building, the Ann Lee Nursing Home. There’s no one left to nurse here. It closed nine years ago.
The Shakers sold off their land to the county in the 1920s for a TB sanatorium, the airport, and a “preventorium” for children at risk of tuberculosis. A handful of Shaker sisters remained. Relicts? Widows? In 1929 Sister Lucy Bowers writes in her diary of the airport:
