Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (26 page)

A Puttenham resident, Ms. Perkins, wearily describes the scene near her home to a visiting reporter: “There were two blokes sitting side by side, watching a man and a woman having sex. Nearby, there were two men sunbathing together, wearing nothing but tight little white underpants.” Ms. Perkins was unimpressed by the response of the local police. When she handed them a pink vibrator she had retrieved from the shrubbery, “They said, ‘What should we do with it?’ I said, ‘Put it in Lost Property.’”

There are hundreds of PSEs throughout the UK, but I doubt this reflects a uniquely British inclination for outdoor sex with strangers. It’s more likely to indicate a uniquely British inclination to create bureaucracy. For a place to be awarded the title does not mean public sex is officially tolerated but that “PSE-trained” police know about it and will manage it and discourage its use. Although dissuasion is claimed to be the ultimate goal, the police have a duel responsibility toward PSEs. They are aware of the need not to drive those who frequent the Hog’s Back, especially gay men, into more secluded and potentially dangerous meeting spots. So they can send rather mixed signals. Between May and July 2010 the Surrey police spent £124.93 on tea, coffee, and biscuits as part of a liaison exercise with Hog’s Back doggers. However, recent efforts to make the area less attractive for sex visitors—which center on the Puttenham Parish Council’s attempts to turn the lay-by into a wildlife haven—may have had some success. Councilor Richard Griggs claims there are now only “a couple of pockets of activity in the shrubbery.”

I wanted to put such claims to the test, so I went to have a look myself in April 2013. The bright yellow gorse was out, the day was bright, and like Jane Austen, I thought I’d never seen the Hog’s Back “so advantageously.” It didn’t take me long to find clumps of condoms in the woodland and an alarming number of surgical gloves. Moreover, individual police officers appear to feel that, like it or not, this particular PSE is here to stay. One dogging chatroom has posted a number of recent comments on how amiable the local police appear to be:

A friend and I whilst returning from a failed meet had reached that point where we could wait no longer and had pulled over fairly near the Hogs Back layby . . . it was dark and late and whilst cars whizzed past I was busy er . . . hmmm . . . anyway the next thing I notice a Policeman was shining his torch in through the window . . . we stopped and wound down the window a little red faced and he just asked was I ok and reminded us we shouldn’t be doing it there but he actually DIRECTED us to the Hogs Back a mile or so up the road if we needed to continue!

My own perverse persistence is to keep trying to find the link between sexual desire and place—more precisely to understand what it is that excites us about having sex outdoors. The doggers at the Hog’s Back don’t make it easy to work this out, since they appear to think of it as little more than an outdoor orgasmatron. But their thin and sometimes brutal narratives aren’t going to dissuade me, for they are clearly taking sensual delight in the open air and bucolic woodland. Geographers still seem unwilling to acknowledge this powerful form of seduction. In a discussion paper pondering his impact on the discipline, Professor Bell concluded with a resigned sigh, “The question, therefore, remains: was geography fucked? I’m not sure it was.” But the Hog’s Back turns the naughty rhetoric around. It’s not what we do to place, it’s what place does to us.

33° 56′ 14″ N, 118° 22′ 15″ W

Once upon a time, transportation and destination were very different things, the former merely being a way to get to the latter. But we fell in love with mobility, and today it is often not clear if the traffic is serving the place or the other way around. J. G. Ballard’s 1997 prediction that “the airport will be the true city of the 21st century” is already coming true. It is increasingly accurate to talk of transportation networks being fed by places, the classic instance being roadside sprawl, those non-place urban realms that provide a complete support system for, yet are subsidiary to, the demands of travel.

As we forget what we once intuitively understood, the point of real places, it becomes ever easier to be convinced that mobility—ceaseless, on-the-go motion—has intrinsic value: that going
to
places is more important than being
in
places. You could object that this geographical version of the “man versus machine” argument is a nostalgic reaction from someone who can’t cope with the fast pace of modern life. Maybe so, but the counterargument is itself now of considerable age, a throwback to modernity’s glory days. It hasn’t caught up with the fact that where once such worries were based on speculation and dystopian fantasy, they are now evidenced by looking out of the window. What you see is that places are atrophying as routes and roads swell. Parking Lot E at Los Angeles International Airport, commonly referred to by its acronym LAX, takes our window view just a little bit further. A few thousand feet from the end of runway 25L resides a new kind of community.

Most of those who live in the RVs that occupy the eastern end of Lot E aren’t there permanently or even all week. They form a commuting settlement made up of pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants, many of whom hitch lifts from airlines to get to work, often bunking down again for some extra sleep at their destination. Airline safety regulations insist that crew turn up well rested, but for employees that is not as easy as it sounds. Most airlines have moved to a business model that sends their staff all over the country and farther afield. The old system of offering people transfers, and paying for them and their families to relocate, to settle down in a new place, has been replaced by something much less expensive and much lonelier.

The lot, which is limited to one hundred vehicles, has been formally recognized by the airport authority since 2005. Residents pay $120 a month to park their RVs there, with an additional $30 fee for their cars. It’s cheap if not very cheerful. And the few newly planted rose bushes can’t the hide the fact that this is a place of last resort for an industry that has squeezed wages and working conditions. One resident interviewed for National Public Radio reported that he hadn’t had a pay raise in twenty years: “It’s always ‘you need to take a pay cut,’ ‘you need to take a pay cut,’ ‘you need to take a pay cut.’” A neighbor makes the same point: “It’s been a devastated industry. Things are not what we thought they were going to be.”

The NPR story annoyed residents because it named the interviewees. Most would prefer to keep their anonymity, since Lot E is not a place they are proud of. One pilot explained to a visiting reporter, “I never thought I would be here, but pay cuts force us to be frugal.” In another interview, a neighbor vents understandable bitterness: “Pretty glamorous, isn’t it? I, for one, never thought I’d end up at a parking lot at LAX.” Many residents cling to the idea that they are not really living at Lot E but merely using it like a glorified locker room. One pilot with a house in Texas says it is just “a place to come and get ready for work.” Yet like so many others, he is geographically trapped, a long way from work and a long way from home. What might at first seem like something temporary and convenient can easily turn into something semi- or completely permanent.

Considering they are employees who provide a vital service for US airlines, the Lot E villagers are treated pretty shabbily. The airport does not provide electricity, propane, or water. The residents have to be canny in order to acquire basic services. They rely on solar panels, small generators, and showers taken at the local gym. It is a Spartan existence and its challenges are added to by the roar and lights from the planes that are landing almost on top of them. Some airline employees take a stoic delight in all the noise. “I love to see what’s coming in,” one worker told NPR. “It doesn’t worry me—I love it. I get a thrill.” Noting that flights start at exactly 6:30 a.m., his neighbor dryly offered another plus: “You don’t need an alarm clock.” But no amount of chipper dedication can disguise that the noise is almost unendurable. Other residents have taken to covering their windows with foil and paper to muffle the sound, or playing recorded white noise in their RVs, a static rumble that takes the edge off the shriek of the planes.

Not everyone dislikes the idea of airport living, and some are even willing it on. Professor John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina travels the globe extolling the pleasures as well as the inevitability of the “aerotropolis.” For him LAX is the center of town: Kasarda regards the essence of a modern place as the availability of a flight to somewhere else. There are good reasons to resist this twenty-first-century rekindling of the Corbusian dreamscape of speeding machines swarming through geometric space. The motorized landscapes created in the twentieth century taught us that this vision doesn’t meet human needs, nor does it create real places, which comes to the same thing. We want places that are worth journeying to rather than non-places that are byproducts of a ceaseless need to keep moving. In the face of the flow of modern history, real places—places with diverse and complex human histories, places where people come first—have taken on an oppositional character. They are engaged in, or poised for conflict with, the engorged but ever greedy traffic. It’s a stark choice. The need to tilt the balance of power back away from travel and toward place is plain.

Yet a sense of inevitability, of submission to the iron will of something bigger than any of us, seems to have been injected into the cultural bloodstream. How else to explain our readiness to believe the endlessly recycled story that “the sector” is in “crisis,” and not just the airline sector but any and all sectors of business. That unless we give way, become more flexible, go to contract work, and move into rental units many miles from home, we soon won’t have any airplanes or cars or jobs. Amid the surrounding din one of the Lot E residents explained on NPR: “It’s an industry in the throes of stagnation and maybe the early throes of death. Maybe in 10 years, the airlines won’t even be here anymore. It’s that bad.” It’s true; things are bad. But it’s also true that we have gotten so used to messages about adapting to “crisis” that the inhuman demand that we live as rootless nomads has become difficult to challenge. The normalization of “crisis” has created the conditions for people to give up on things that matter to them, like real relationships and places worth flying to. The non-places created by this restless movement feed the traffic and keep the wheels turning. Yet they are so subsidiary to mobility that they also resemble parasitic growths, latched onto an indifferent host.

41° 41′ 49″ N, 0° 10′ 12″ W

The Nowhere festival is held every July on a dusty plain in Aragón, in the north of Spain. It’s a temporary utopia; although you need to buy a ticket to get in, once inside, the Nowhere website announces, “you cannot buy or sell anything, except for ice, for just a few hours a day, so you don’t suffer food poisoning or warm beer.” The result is a creative economy of “radical self-expression” and “self-reliance.” It’s organized around a cluster of camps where everything and anything can happen: pageants, Japanese tea ceremonies, erotic life drawing, circuses, as well as lots of music and art. Participants are encouraged to make full use of the site’s Costume Camp: in the words of the site blog, “think of it as a giant dressing up box and release that inner child!”

The idea of festivals as places apart is laden with libertarian messaging and rooted in 1960s counterculture. Over the past two decades this sensibility has come in from the margins and blossomed into a mass phenomenon, and the result has been to open up a new chapter in the idea of place. To see whole communities suddenly take shape out of nothing, in the middle of nowhere, is fascinating for a place-loving species. The thrill is multiplied when that new place is bound together by a shared attachment to novelty and autonomy.

Since places like Nowhere, and its older and much bigger Californian cousin Burning Man, were founded, even remoter and odder events have come along, such as the Traena Festival, which takes place on a Norwegian island inside the Arctic Circle. In fact, some musicians and fans find this island too accessible, and so an offshoot event has formed. This clique all head off to Sanna, a bleak rock slapped by the wind, in order to play and listen to music in a sea cave.

Festivalgoers have developed a taste for geographical extremism, and distant and spectacular spots that are challenging and hard to get to are much sought after. Because of threats by Islamist militants, the event once promoted as the world’s most remote, the Festival au Désert, usually staged near Timbuktu in Mali, went into exile in 2013 and took place in Burkina-Faso instead. But it plans to be back, and an audience will come. Distance is a way of sifting the crowd, making it unlikely you’ll have to share acts of self-expression or a food tent with people who are dissimilar to yourself. But that’s the sort of sly dig you might expect from a self-confessed festival avoider, especially one whose sarcasm is whetted by envy. The creation of Nowhere is actually a charming mixture of the imaginative and the prosaic. A lot of thought and care are clearly given to how to make this small patch of desert into a happy community. Place-making demands attention to the everyday practicalities of living as well as the big picture. Ironically, it is these prosaic details that churn and excite our imagination: by sorting them out we prove that new places are within reach, that we are capable of conjuring up a new world in an empty landscape.

The first thing that gets built at Nowhere is Werkhaus, an operational base of toilets, kitchen, and shade. Then attention turns to the festival’s hub, the Middle of Nowhere. The need for a central meeting area was understood from the first Nowhere, in 2004. It was built of piping and parachute material and sited at one side of the camp. That last detail may seem insignificant, but it turns out that it didn’t quite work: places need centers that are located at the heart of things. So in 2009 the Middle of Nowhere was moved to the physical center of the festival. The energy and mayhem of Nowhere thrives on careful decision-making and clear lines of communication and authority. Without the individuals who take on the responsibility of being a “Nowhere Lead,” the place would become disordered, people would drift away, and the fun would fizzle out. Nowhere deconstructs and overturns the conventions of mainstream places yet relies on a strict division of labor and responsibility in order to fashion a workable alternative. Each Lead coordinates a different function, working with other volunteers leading up to, during, and after the festival. These functions are reassuringly mundane: toilets, tickets, power grid, recycling, safety, medical team, and the like. There is also a communications infrastructure, which centers on the site’s post office and the daily newspaper,
Nowhere Tribune
.