like me, I assumed everyone did. I had the vague sense that my queerness was a mark, but it was mine and I wore it well. It took the shapes I formed it in, filling the empty spaces of fields, dancing in the shadows between forests, falling freely down rolling hills deep into the sandstone valleys below.
I was a shy girl whose mind was shaped by the geography as much as the geography was irreparably being shaped around me. As trees were removed for roads, fields for houses, barns for garages, so too was my own imagination replaced by an overgrowth of new information. I encountered stereotypes of the rural women I idolized that portrayed them reductively as strong, fierce preservers of rural culture, matriarchs with otherworldly attachments to the land, or as poor victims, battered, subservient wives struggling to raise children. The best of them were the beautiful but dumb, available girls with strong sexual appetites. I inherited a new way of seeing from these negative portrayals. I began seeing the women around me differently. I began seeing myself differently, too.
When I came out as transgender and searched for a community, I struggled, wishing to be a country woman, of the land, that place of undefined gender, to not leave the landscape behind for my new-found identity. But I did not want to be a victim, battered, subservient. I didn’t want to endure more than I had endured. The small queer community I found told me I had to leave the suffocating myopia of the countryside to experience true freedom, and deaths of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard—the first and only visible manifestations of queerness I had encountered—only reinforced in my mind that the only good queer in the country was a dead one. Rural life and queer life were simply incompatible. With nothing to hold onto, no strength to reference, I gave up trying to affirm myself, burying my feelings in the soil deep beneath sedimentary layers of red clay and limestone. I felt trapped, as though the mountains were threatening to collapse and bury me beneath them. I had to get away, to put enough distance between me and this town, as if my problems were tied up in the landscape, the sacred forests of my memory, as if the geography that shaped me was suddenly my undoing.
I moved to the city where I found not the expected freedom but constraint; not the promised anonymity that would allow fluidity in my expressions, but constant surveillance. I inherited a new queerness, on that was now a mark I was told how to wear, shaping me into contours I didn’t recognize. I was what was restraining my transformation, and in order to grow into the shared vision of metropolitanism that would lead to my salvation, I had rid myself of all that marked me a bumpkin. The knowledge of myself absent of a referent to reflect back all that I wasn’t. That seeing stars was a part of being, that horizons were literal, that backwards was a direction that most often lead to family, that sunsets couldn’t be blocked by anything but mountains and only if one decided not to climb them. These things I could not bring into the dusty confines of the city, the brick and wire and concrete hardened any permeable part of my mind, kept out the climate that shaped me, the person I had been amongst the fields and trees and valleys of my childhood.
Walking through this landscape now, my memory map morphs as landmarks I encounter remind me not of a place in stasis—mythically free or myopically restrictive—but of an ecosystem in constant flux.
In each ecosystem fire behaves differently, and organisms within them have to adapt accordingly. The characteristics of how fire interacts with a given ecosystem is called a fire regime. Fires burn at three levels: ground, surface, and crown. Ground fires burn through the soil that is rich in organic matter. Surface fires burn through dead plant material on the ground. Crown fires burn in the tops of the shrubs and trees. Organisms that live within these regimes are either resistant, tolerant, or intolerant to these types of fires. The places within an ecosystem ravaged by fire range from freshly burned spaces to those fire left untouched for years. Sites burned by fire progress through continuous and directional phases of colonization, which are characterized by the vegetation that arise. After a fire, the seeds already present in the soil, or seeds that can travel quickly to the soil will be the first to regrow in the burned space. Different species of plants are capable of exploiting different stages in the colonization process, creating in the landscape patches of multiple species. The unique makeup of these patches is determined by the characteristics—soil, climate, and topography—of a place, characteristics in constant flux
There are spaces in town where fire has burned enough for me to inhabit. The antique store, the catacomb of consumerism’s past, where beauty and embarrassment fetch equally dubious prices atop their unflattering, dust-drenched, wood-paneled crypts. I fit in here, somewhere between the state spoon collections, the mid-century furniture, the mannequins who, like me, stand strangely over-dressed, catching double glances by passerby’s knowing the proportions aren’t quite right. I can hide here amongst these queer items queerly out of time.
The coffee shop in the old hardware store on Broad Street with the décor more out of place than me, demanding more attention than I can garner. Giant paintings of Santa Claus praying in sanctuaries hang from the exposed brick, distracting gazes away from the tables in the back corner where I sit with coffee reading, unnoticed for hours.
The alley behind the old record store where I first kissed the boy with the blondest hair wearing orange parachute pants and candy bracelets who waited for me holding sushi. Shaded for over a century, thick moss meets brick street where few cars pass, and few feet bother to tread the uneven facade. I sit alone daydreaming, unburdened from the necessity of constant attention to my surroundings.
There are spaces where the fire has barely touched, where I can inhabit only fleetingly. Fountain square at night, where I can sit at and look up at the clock tower through the tree branches. The silence expands the city to be able to include me. I can’t stay long, for daytime brings families, children, businesspeople, relational categories of existence that, when present, erase my own. But for a while, the water is all mine; the cherub faces gaze only at me.
In Rising Park, the green surrounding Standing Stone, where nature offers refuge, but also a seclusion that allows for violence. I hide off the regular paths, my feet finding comfort in uncertain terrain. The view from the mountaintop shrinks the city so that I’m able to include it within me. I savor what I can before moving on, careful to notice those around me.
The west side by the factories, in the “neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town where was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled.” The gaps in the railroad tracks and power lines, the holes in the fences, the cracks in crumbling foundation gives me room to breathe, to think, to create. The isolation leaves me unprotected. I keep moving, never stopping long enough to be seen.
There are spaces where the fire has not touched, where I find little or no space. The grocery store, under the unforgiving incandescence. I go at night and park close to avoid the jaundice light of the parking lot, the groups of men and their cars gathered at the edges, the aggressive machismo brewing trouble. I hit the needed aisles with precision, never strolling with Ginsburg or Whitman, feet always moving, head always down.
Independence Day at the fairgrounds where the throng of bodies moving in close quarters squeeze out that which doesn’t fit the mold. The combination of feverish nationalism and alcohol becomes a potent mix that never fails to combust. I watch from afar, reminiscing a youth spent sprawled on quilts staring past the red-chipped barn roofs into a coarse July sky.
The mall, the microcosm of the consumerism’s worst traits illuminated by piercing fluorescence and hard, unwelcoming floors. The building contains my body, hyper-visible, unable to escape the gazes of others or the memories amassed in a decade of working here. I won’t risk going.
I circle back through town breathing in the smoke from so many fires. The smoke has seeped into my hair, my pores, the fabric of me. The thick scent conjures faded bodily memories, summons in me the realization that no matter how I’ve tried to erase the traces of this place, the Ohio country has stuck like pollen to every inch of me. No matter how I’ve changed or tried to wipe the dust of wheat and corn from my being, I can’t. The mountains have opened my senses to a different way
