By Deer Roberts
Artist/writer, worked in publishing as a managing editor for several years. She inched her way to a BA in Art from Siena Heights University, Adrian, MI, in 2002 while raising 5 wonderful adults as a single mother. She currently contributes from the Ramah, NM area.
Photo by Deer Roberts © 2010
Continental Assessment
B
eing a bit of an undeveloped mystic, I am sensitive to vibrations, especially emotional ones. In El Paso, I felt the grief of a land no longer in resonance with its caretakers. Besides, it had seen too much violence and was in the midst of more across the river in Juarez. Those who people the Mexican border are sweet and hospitable, though at risk of losing it as they try to crawl out of white oppression, get educated, and join the ranks of big time civilization. The Midwest feels pampered and suffocating; too much
water, too little sky (except across the big lakes), and too much existence tied into comfort and corporate living. The East Coast is an autopsied cadaver of landscaped vistas, concrete, and frenetic bipolar, cancerous land development; too much grid dependence. Going south, get to Austin and everything east of it and the humidity is overwhelming. Wilding growth follows all the way to Florida and extreme emotional prejudice and political jaundice to match. Mid-Texas, while boasting Big Bend National Park to the south, is a grind of flat dust and pumping oil wells. Bush country. Got some interesting old craters there. The Northwest is a beautiful rain forest (great for those that like that sort of thing) over-run with old yuppies trying to do the environmental thing while inversely staying couched in comfortable pensions and fancy homes. While I haven’t been there, I hear Montana is a wrecked beauty, still gorgeous, but used as an old whore, innocence long
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ago fully spent in mining; sledge and tailings, toxic as pre-penicillin syphilis, having been left all over the place. Oregon, Colorado are gorgeous, but it’s got a suspect edge of teeth grinding spiritual pride in its leaders, out to make a lot of money out of the “scattered sheep” of the educated; ‘cutting edge spirituality’ tent preachers of the upper middle class. Of course the brain addling soul heights of the Rockies might have over affected them. I’ve never been to Southern California, but where those folks go, the local economics seem to get beyond the grasp of the locals. Folks get taxed out of their land. Seems that land is choked on money. I hear the ocean beyond is strangled in garbage, great flotillas of it. And then there is the hard-bitten, honest grandeur of El Morro Valley and its surrounding enclaves . . . . . . more later.