Vineta Gailite

Travels to the Big Apple and then some….

I could not fall asleep for hours, listening to traffic’s relentless noise coming from the open window in a tiny apartment of Manhattan (yeah many will think that I am rich to afford two month stay, but reality is quite the opposite… I just got lucky). I thought of how sirens of ambulances, police or firefighter trucks are much quieter compared to ones in England, maybe because here is so much action at night!? Come 3am and rubbish men came to collect piles of rubbish bags left on the curb, and I remembered my insomniac friend who paise big city life. I wondered if it’s because in a city one never feels quite alone, not late at night there is always another human being nearby. Try having sleepless night deep in a forest, when every little rodent scratch seams as if bear is walking around! Why we feel like aliens in the wild and safe in the city even thou this is where we are the most vulnerable?

True wild does not exist anymore. Human hand has touch everything. Even thou it feels like an individual carry personal responsibility, in fact there is very little an individual can do to change the course of an Anthropocene.

We, tourists, exploring red desert in Arizona, came across a valley we walked with a frozen forest at the feel of mountains. Forest looked just like any pine forest near baltic sea in Latvia. It was odd to walk over frozen leaves because just a minute ago we were waking on desert sand, avoiding cacti needles. I could tell sun never shines here during winter that’s why nice didn’t melt from last night’s frost. A local walker was placing logs over some trodden side track. He was a real walker, maybe local with an attitude; when we asked if it was a public foot path, he was short: “No!” About ten minutes walk keeping to the main track, we came met some lost city-looking tourists, not real wakers like man we just passed; one had bleached blond hair… to my disappointment, you could tell 90ties are back in fashion. They were lost. When I looked at their navigation app, it was clear they are looking for that pathway man tried to barricade with logs. We asked them where does it lead? All they said that there are Native American sacred place and “a bunch of cool stuff like caves”.

We too did succumb to the temptation and went to see the sacred place, despite the walkers attempts to keep it a secret. After a short walk up through the forest we came to the warmer place and sun lit up a beautiful valley among mighty red clay walls in which native Americans had carved shallow caves with a red brick wall. There were many trying to get up there to see those caves up close and look down into the valley to feel like it felt long time ago be up high and safe from the enemies. Some one said that English turn to say that America has no history but it has, hundreds of thousand year long, but not much has left because people used to build from natural materials and most of it has rotted away.

We could hear a voice from above instructing everybody how to get up the cliff wall. We joined many touristy, city types and got up to the sacred place. Voice belong to the man dressed in full soldier uniform, even with a gun and speaker blasting techno music, echoed all around the valley. He said he is a volunteer helping people to get up here, not on duty, just something he like to do, been up here since 3am. Then he showed us safest way to walk on the cliff edge to get to the caves and walked off to take a photo for a couple posing on the edge.

Off-duty-soldier was asian and I let loose my stream of consciousness. I thought of Vietnam… How I recently I heard a podcast about Agent Orange and how Americans are cleaning up it. Tons of soil needs to be dug up and placed in large incinerators to burn off Agent Orange chemicals before returning soil back on to the ground so plants can grow again there. How it’s all done with American tax-payers money and Monsanto, chemical company which sold it to the troops, has no responsibility in cleaning up the contamination…

Views were beautiful. For some reason I could not capture this breathtaking beauty in pictures. In photos surroundings just look small nothing like true grandiosity of what I was seeing with my eyes. On the other hand everything human-made and people themselves turns to look more appealing in photos for most part. For instance: pictures of New York streets once will not describe the feeling for you of rats running around, rattling of subway-trains under your feet or dog pee everywhere. (By the way since my last visit to NYC, just before Covid panic set in, there are much more dogs and all the trimmings: dog hairdressers, dog clothe shops, buggies… maybe some more jobs like dog walkers, at least you get to be outdoors more!)

Among mandatory feminist and self-help displays in souvenir and bookshops, I did manage to find few discounted old-fashioned sexist cards. To my amusement one of them had Mark Rothko’s grave stone painting Statue of Liberty. This is a connection between my home town Daugavpils where he was born and New York where he killed himself, misunderstood…

And here it was, in the pages of $39 Architecture Review November 2021 issue “Where do we go from here”, the inspiration … the revelation! what I would like to do for the rest of my life. I just want to live on my plot of land and be self-sufficient. But for now I want to write Phd proposal: “Soil to Soil. Textiles and regenerative farming: Creating a practical manual how to design a self-sufficient homesteading for a textile artist”