CLASSIFIEDS: Integrating the fantasy

Creating a driveway into Another Place and naming it after my mom

Friday Classifieds are my shorter posts. These posts are organized into three loose sections: what I’m thinking about and don’t have answers to, updates on the property, and links. 

You can find Part 1 of the longer form story on how Another Place came to be here (Returning to a place after 20 years). Look for Part 2, which covers the property search in-depth and the importance of fantasy, next week.

And as always, share with a friend or five.

Welcome back to Another Place Times. To all of you who read, shared, and reached out to me after my previous (and first) post, thank you <3 I’ll say this now and many times hereafter, but sharing takes effort and hearing from you gives me an affirming echo. I’m turning comments on for Friday Classifieds, so go ahead and talk if you feel it.

There’s been an important development at Another Place over the past week… the land now has a two-track driveway!

Walking down the driveway for the first time (Photo by Ellen Rutt)

This is an entry, and in many figurative and literal ways, this is the beginning of everything. A driveway means someone can now walk, move, or drive onto the property. Before, a small ditch between the road and the land made it difficult to access. A driveway means that I can invite a friend. A driveway means privacy. A driveway means I can send someone the coordinates and they can go there on their own, solo, a retreat. It means the first mark I’m making on the land which carries weight and requires intentionality. A driveway means a place to go. A driveway is called that because you drive over it, but really, it’s an entry. It’s a doorway. To put in a driveway is to remove a barrier.

This project has given me yet another opportunity to practice integrating my fantasies into my life. One challenge of this property is taking visions I’ve been nursing for years and letting them become reality. This can be tough, I find, in part because the reality degrades into work. The work becomes an experience, and at the end of it, I have something similar to what I imagined but inevitably different, not worse, but always with less glimmer than it held in my head. 

I want to descend into poetry for a moment… I’m speaking about this liminal space between the fantasy and the reality. People have written about this extensively and beautifully. T.S. Eliot explores this idea in his epic poem, “The Hollow Men”¹ when he says,

“Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.”

Recently, when reading Ben Lerner’s “The Hatred of Poetry”² I encountered it again. To oversimplify Lerner’s articulation, he’s talking about how people rag on poetry, especially poets themselves, because the poem is always better right before it’s written. Once the words leave the mind, they begin the harrowing and impossible journey of “launching the experience of an individual into a communal existence across time.” He asks, “What if the closest we can come to hearing the ‘planet-like music of poetry’ is to hear the ugliest earthly music and experience the distance between them?” What if something only feels perfect because of the space we create in our heads for the idea to exist? As soon as the ideas leave our head, they enter the realm of imperfect possibility, the shadow, the reality. Still, we keep trying.

The graduate level of this idea is Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” one example of which is the fantasy of a life rid of pain if only you can get every element of "the good life": a home, a loving partner, a car, a big yard, children, a successful job. Berlant asks, instead, what else we need to flourish. What other spaces of pleasure and relationality can we imagine, and how can we build on those attachments and patterns in order to create a world of curiosity and play that is more meaningful than the one we are living in now?³ There's certainly a lot of space between the ideas Berlant wrote about and the cohabitation of fantasy/reality that I'm describing in my own life, and I’m grossly oversimplifying these concepts, and yet —

I’m calling attention to the fact that complexity exists as ideas turn into reality: my strong imagination helps make all of this possible and at the same time my strong imagination can hurt me. In my fantasy, the driveway was made of gravel that crunched under car tires, announcing the visit, a la Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. In reality, the driveway is a two-track and cars roll over it almost silently, curving their way back into the refuge within the trees where I’ll eventually build a cabin. It’s beautiful, it’s winding, it’s an opening, and I’m taking it. The trees won’t be tall enough to make a canopy over the road for another 20 years. And yet, and yet. This example is simple, but I’m finding that the experience of walking down the driveway of my own design usurps any fantasy I had.

Still by Ellen Rutt

In an effort to shed light on these logistical, municipal tasks, I’ll outline the major steps of how I made a two-track driveway:

• I mentioned to local friends in the area that I’d need a driveway. They offered to bring their large machinery to help “sometime in the spring” — we picked a date, and I worked backwards from there.

• I researched, starting broad, probably with searches like, “how to make driveway in rural gravel” and “how much gravel driveway rural cost”

• I learned that I need to talk to the local county road commission, so I went to their website and then called them. I made sure to tell them I’ve never done this before.

• I completed a permit that allows me to make a new driveway (what’s called an “easement,” or entry into land). Something about local offices is that they usually answer the phone on the second ring. Lisa, who works the front desk, warned me that this “would be the easiest thing I do” for the property, which feels a bit like a challenge. Something else about local offices is that they will still ask you to print something and mail it or bring it in, which happened.

• I went searching for a printer.

• I asked local friends about gravel companies, and called one to order gravel. Kathy, who works at the gravel company, helped me do simple math to understand how much I would need after I gave her the unhelpful answer of “enough for a car to drive over?” 

• We picked a delivery date, and a truck came to drop the gravel off in a spot that I’d marked with some tiny neon flags. 

My farmer friend, another friend who is helping me build the cabin, and Roxy the collie who helps with everything else — what is becoming my gaggle of older male friends with time to help and skills to share — came to the property with a Kubota tractor and pushed the ground around a bit. My partner transplanted pines and documented the work for the documentary (yes…). I walked the property once again to mark the path with a can of orange spray paint, this time visualizing I was a little neighbor kid from the countryside riding my cruiser bicycle down it for the first time. I looked back toward the road every few feet, trying to find the moment when the ground dips just slightly and the road goes behind the horizon line, and at that point I curved my line.

I recognized I was making the path I’d walk to the mailbox in some distant point in the future. The black locust progeny were spread thick, and many of the smaller trees had to go. I kept the pines and we transplanted the rest to a spot up near the road where, eventually, they’ll grow 20-30 feet high, providing privacy from the road. I stopped when I got to the clearing with the two big maples where the tents and dwelling will go. As I went, the tractor churned on behind me, ripping up small black locust trees (a sad but necessary loss) and following my neon line.

Doug and Roxy pulling trees out of the way while James drives the tractor (Photo by Ellen Rutt)

After four hours, a clear, smooth-enough path emerged. It flows through a few acres of the property, the dark brown sandy earth exposed and breathing. I’d been listening to Fred again’s album .. again.. and as I walked the path we’d cut, I heard poet Guante’s voice from his poem “Love in the time of undeath” echoing, I found you beautiful, I found you exploding, I found you. I didn’t expect to feel so emotional about a sandy, two-track driveway, and there I was, holding an empty can of spray paint looking down at my bootprints in the sand, stunned, poetry weaving through my brain (against all odds).

Walking the curve (Photo by Ellen Rutt)

Before last week, I’d never yanked spindly, stubborn black locust roots out of the ground. I’d never made the decision of how to alter land, walking it over and over until I felt a natural path, avoiding the pines, looking out for bird nests, transplanting the baby pines to safer ground. I’d never bought a shovel (those seem to already be in the garage of every house I’ve ever lived in). I’d never directed two older men around and then rewarded them with ginger beer and everything bagels. 

There are so many things I don’t know. Each time I need to do something, I turn to the internet, to friends for advice, and to the people who work in rural front desk offices who hold so much hyperlocal knowledge. At this point, I subsist off of advice and the knowledge of others; with time, I’ll have made enough mistakes to call it knowledge.

I feel so full after this past weekend — I received generous help from friends in the form of tools, labor, and breakfast made entirely from the farm. A friend with their own beautiful property & future flower farm in Cedar hosted us and made a fire in the stove. Another friend tattooed a rainbow trout onto my arm. My partner introduced me to new friends and elders in Empire, who hosted us for dinner. 

This first project marks an entryway to the land, to relationships, to the network that already exists and is growing in nodes throughout the area. And Lisa at the county road commission was likely right: this will be the easiest thing I do.

If you’ve made it this far, here’s a question for you — 

What brings you to Another Place Times? What do you hope to learn, read, connect with here?

By all means, please sound off in the comments.

This is the area where I share what I’m inspired by — and looking for

1. Wearing, cooking, living, breathing LLBean (TASTE, 2023)

2. I like to tune in to small radio stations around the world to learn what it’s like to live there. Radio Garden is one place to do that. Here’s a station in Alaska.

3. Revisiting Michel Gondry’s films and Jon Brion’s soundtracks

4. Got Grief House in Detroit creates space to heal, educate and build community through the common thread of grief. They host regular grief groups for adults, both in-person and on Zoom. More info here.

5. CLASSIFIEDS: I’m looking for a small shed for the property! Under 10x12. If you have leads, please send them my way.

   

   also just wondering

1. Read “The Hollow Men” in its entirety here

2. Find more on that here: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2302/ben-lerner-finds-hope-in-the-dislike-of-poetry-16087

3. Thank you to Hans Demeyer for these particularly well-articulated words.