The Middle of Somewhere: An Artist Explores the Nature of Virginia - Softcover

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Suzanne Stryk is an artist who finds equal fascination in the natural world and the visual arts. Her conceptual nature paintings and assemblages have appeared in solo exhibitions throughout the United States, and her portfolios and related writings have been featured in Terrain.org, Orion, Ecotone, and the Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of a George Sugarman Foundation grant and a Virginia Commission for the Arts fellowship for the project “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the precursor to The Middle of Somewhere. She lives in southwest Virginia.

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Preface

There’s no such thing as the middle of nowhere. Every place is the middle of somewhere for some living being.

That was my mantra as I journeyed throughout my home state of Virginia. Kayaking pristine swamps in river country, strolling Alexandria’s cobblestone streets, or hiking rocky trails crisscrossing the Appalachians, I encountered frogs, millipedes, ravens, dragonflies, people, sparrows, turtles, and so many others claiming a particular place as home. All of these “somewheres” and their inhabitants are characters in this book.

My fascination with place began when I was a skinny little girl crouched in tall grasses pretending to be Meriwether Lewis exploring the vast prairie. These imaginary expeditions were staged in the weedy honeysuckle-tangled edge of my Chicago-area backyard. The inspiration? A love of being outdoors coupled with my fourth-grade social studies book’s description of Lewis and Clark’s adventures. Orbiting that text were oval portraits of Thomas Jefferson and the duo he dispatched west, over which a cursive Corps of Discovery  printed in sepia created an authentic quill-pen flair. On the opposite page, Lewis’s roughly drawn fish swam in a river of his scrawled observations. This image merged in my mind with a different book, Wonders in Your Own Backyard, a birthday gift from my grandmother when I turned nine. The message kindled by that fish and that book of wonders would resonate all of my life.

In 1991, years after moving from Illinois to Virginia, I read Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. This classic book surveying the state’s natural and cultural history would then collect dust on the shelf for decades until 2010, when it became the springboard for an art project, an exhibition, and ultimately this collection of place-based essays describing my venture. When asked to revise his book decades after writing the original, Jefferson wrote:

I consider . . . the idea of preparing a new copy of . . . [Notes on the State of Virginia] as no more to be entertained. The work itself indeed is nothing more than the measure of a shadow, never stationary, but lengthening as the sun advances, and to be taken anew from hour to hour. It must remain, therefore, for some other hand to sketch its appearance at another epoch.

I took his word “sketch” as a prophecy. So, there I was: a woman, an artist, and a transplant from the Midwest to boot, but I’d give it a shot. I’d try to measure the shadow of a place as my own sun advanced.

In 2011, I received a fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts to pursue my own version of Notes on the State of Virginia. Before embarking on any journey, I dug into Jefferson’s book once again with the fresh eye of someone on a mission. It’s formally written, as you might expect from a natural philosopher and statesman living the late 1700s, and packed with lists and descriptions of topography and geology, flora and fauna, weather and climate. One chapter covers religious freedom, while others detail the Commonwealth’s practical side, its commerce and laws.

Unfortunately, though, amid this impressively wide-ranging catalog of place, one can’t ignore Jefferson’s negative characterizations of the African American. Sure, he was a man of his times—I understand that. And sure, my project taps his Notes as a point of departure. But still I’d hoped to find more insight from the man who’d inserted the abolition of slavery into the Declaration of Independence (a passage sadly removed by his peers). Yes, I expected better from the man who grasped the natural world’s ecological value—wise for any time.

With that conflict in Jefferson’s own nature in mind, I knew I also had to face some present-day conflicts while I explored the nature of Virginia. I could not pass judgment on the past without considering how the future might judge our own age. For instance, when describing those glimmering riffles on the Shenandoah River, I also express my dismay for its mercury contamination. And I acknowledge my own complicity in the use of fossil fuels extracted from mountaintop removal in the chapter titled “Coal Tattoo.”

As I continued to shape my own approach to this Virginia project. I would aim to freely interpret land and life from a contemporary, personal perspective, create a tapestry of place from an artist’s point of view. My ideas about where to go and what to see were sketchy: an endangered species, a Civil War battlefield, a pristine wetland, a mountain peak, along with some of Jefferson’s old haunts to create a historical arc . . . How to begin?

I tacked a huge laminated map of Virginia on my studio wall to study the five geological regions of the state: (1) Coastal Plain (Tidewater), (2) Piedmont, (3) Blue Ridge, (4) Valley and Ridge, and (5) Appalachian Plateau.

After brushing up on how to read topographic maps, I searched for special people with expertise on some aspect of Virginia (many of whom you’ll meet in these pages). They added to the list of places already piquing my interest, and then I winnowed possible sites down to those with particular resonance or locality in the state. I say that like it was easy. It wasn’t. For example, the endangered species: Would it be the giant carrion beetle, the red-cockaded woodpecker, or the bog turtle? All fascinated me. I finally chose the woodpecker, for seeking it would take me to southeastern Virginia, where I’d find fields of cotton and peanuts, a region I’d only seen through the windshield of a car. Another reason was the bird’s curious life cycle, which, if lucky, I might glimpse (you’ll find out in the chapter titled “Gaining Ground”).

I confess that no matter how much planning, I usually strayed off course once at the site. I did—or rather I do—get sidetracked by design. When actually face-to-face with an orange-headed skink (before it dashes off), or after intently listening to an expert guide, I follow the thrall of the moment, which may mean physical wandering or may mean following my internal meditations. In other words, I daydream.

That said, the distinction between ordinary daydreaming and what I call “focused daydreaming” is crucial. I know it’s an oxymoron. But I claim focused daydreaming is the secret to traveling: be present yet also allow associations or imaginative flights to flow. Say I’m rocking in a motorboat off the Eastern Shore, and marine biologist Barry Truitt has just finished describing the island before us when my mind conjures a scene—no, really a whole life—on that little plot of seabound land. Sure, I miss a few particulars, but in the focused daydream I enter my surroundings more viscerally. I knit fact with feeling. And it connects me more intimately with a patch of earth and thus becomes more memorable.

After each expedition, I’d return home with a car chock-full of collections. Once these “treasures” were hauled into the studio, I spread them on two makeshift tables—4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood propped on...