History adventuring and the sense of place


If you've ever gone history adventuring with me IRL (In Real Life) you've seen me do something a little weird. I'll find a particular place, and just stand there, and look out into nothing. The place will have an historical significance, but will rarely look like anything except a bit of a parking lot, or a sidewalk. I call this a sense of place, and it's really not that strange once you see what I'm seeing.

The best example that I can give of that sense of place that people feel is visitors to the site of the battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania. If you've studied the Civil War, you know how important this was. And people go there just to stand where it happened.

A sense of place can be a profound moment. A friend of mine told me today that he had just visited the room at the Arizona State Capitol where the Miranda decision was made. It's just an ordinary room, and you have to bring a knowledge of what happened there. If you don't have that knowledge, it's just an ordinary room, the way that the battlefield at Gettysburg is just an open field, and the way that so many places in the Phoenix area are a place where something happened.

There are, of course, some signs that indicate that "On this spot...", but really most of them would seem too trivial, and too obtuse, to interest most people. I've been to where the first canal was dug by Jack Swilling's group, and as a sense of place it's wonderful, but as a place all by itself, it's just somewhere down by the Salt River.

Speaking for myself, my favorite sense of place can be conjured up anytime I think of the Hohokam people, who lived all over the Salt River Valley. When I walk to McDonalds for my coffee in the morning, I walk in their footsteps. And since I live on the northwestern edge of what was once the 640-acre Sahuaro Ranch, I stop and look out at the White Tank Mountains, and it's 1899. Of course, other than the mountains, and the sky, everything has changed. There's a Starbucks there now. But I still get a sense of place, and a pleasant shiver.

That's the best I can do to explain. If you've felt it, you know what I mean. And if you haven't felt it, stay with me, you will.

Image at the top of this post: Looking west towards the White Tank Mountains in the 1930s, Litchfield Park, Arizona.
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