The Unincorporated Bridge

By mapping  our way back to unincorporated places, we map out a small part of the larger fabric of unincorporated pasts.

 
Driving north along I-77 and crossing the Ohio River, as one does, from West Virginia into Ohio, the landscape begins to suddenly, unexpectedly, roll. It isn’t hypnosis, exhaustion, or boredom that thrusts a driver into the drone of southern Ohio. It is, instead, a rolling amnesia. The land opens up as the river valley gives way to farmsteads and pastures; the patchwork quilts of agricultural sprawls. Barns advertise the next exit’s attractions and the next hill helps me forget the quick twists and the violent cuts of the mountains, the ones behind me, now, which I’ve come through. Over the years, I’ve memorized the character and intricacies of I-77 that run between Columbia, South Carolina and Zanesville, Ohio. Every summer I pass through North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia to emerge into the unincorporated community of Duncan Falls, Ohio, where my Aunt Lu Anne lives. The community I drive into every summer is nearly structurally indiscernible from the same community that stood in its place in the 1940s. The socioeconomic stasis the small community experienced during the latter half of the 20th century—and the disinterest in commercial development it produced—incidentally allowed for the people there to preserve their past. As the stasis has continued, it’s allowed the community to keep much of its past structurally intact.
 

 
When I visit my aunt, I’m in proximity to a past that no book, document, or artifact can recreate or represent. In this specific unincorporated community, the past is tangible and traceable—owed, as it is, to the subversive nature underlying its preservation. In the unincorporated realm, there are antagonistically anti-commercialist concepts of community that can be traced, most notably, through the structural preservation of communal landmarks. In the case of Duncan Falls, its bridge (MUS-CR32-0.00), in use from 1953 to 2020, served as a literal communal link and, simultaneously, as a sub-structural metaphor for an underlying philosophy of conserving continuity to place.

The bridge was one of the most notable, historic structures of Duncan Falls. From 1953 until 2020, the five-span, steel-truss bridge built over the Muskingum River connected the Duncan Falls and Philo communities. In early 2016, at the behest of an inspection conducted by the Muskingum County Engineers Office, which found “that the existing bridge… [was] structurally deficient and functionally obsolete,” that its “existing superstructure and substructure [were] in critical and poor condition,” and that it could no longer “carry the legal loads that similar bridges [were] being designed and constructed for” at the time, the county initiated a feasibility study to consider potential alternatives to its crossing. From that study came four alternatives:   

• Existing Alignment Alternative: Replacement of the structure on the existing Bridge Street alignment.
• Alternative A: Replacement of the structure on a new alignment crossing the Muskingum River 2,400 feet upstream of the existing structure.
• Alternative B: Replacement of the structure on a new alignment crossing the Muskingum River 3,500 feet upstream of the existing structure.
• Alternative C: Replacement of the structure on a new alignment crossing the Muskingum River 96 feet downstream of the existing structure.

Of these four proposed alternatives, the county preferred Alternative C, because it would maintain the vital link between the two communities, their school districts, and their intertwined economy. While citizens in the Feasibility’s Public Involvement Plan cited predictable concerns, they also referenced their concern about the bridge’s history, about what that history meant to the community. Historic public works projects without utility, though, cease being communally relevant, at least from the view of outside agencies. In December of 2020, after settling on Alternative C, as explosives dropped the bridge into the river below it, its replacement, the new bridge 96 feet downriver from its predecessor, forced the community of Duncan Falls to reflect on and consider new iterations of an old identity.    

The emphasis on the bridge’s history, from community members, especially in public meetings of the Feasibility Study, cannot be overstated in its suggestion of community value. This emphasis, too, suggests a larger, pervasive fear found in unincorporated places. A fear, I think, that America, in its conceptualization of the past, has a highway history, a breeze-by form of memory; that that which isn’t by the roadside, that that which isn’t closest to the main plotlines of a popular national narrative, will be blown by; or, in the case of the bridge, blown up. In the mythical momentum of progress and the false promises of expansion, a true conceptualization of place is passed up in a pursuit, which, in the end, will only ever amount to wind. There is a fear that people in the places passed by will become, in the historical record, parts of the setting, the backdrop, the landscape over which the monoliths of memory will walk. In America, there are places and there are the paths to places. There are roads and there are the routes the roads grow famous for. There are many All-American highways, known for the scenes they pass and the cities they connect. And, then, there is the Belle Valley exit off of I-77, in Ohio, which, if it’s taken—through Cumberland, Chandlersville, and finally down into Duncan Falls—may, as a route, represent an enterable past, an inhabitable alternative to a space long relegated to the imagination. If the past is, as it feels it is in the unincorporated realm, an adjacency rather than a precedent, we might begin to perceive it as accessibly as any other.

Unlike the large cities that wield the power to write their own histories, to frame their narratives behind museum glass, to broadcast it to the public, Duncan Falls’s past is archived, instead, in the architecture and within the minds of the people who inhabit it. There is no museum. There is, however, a display case of “historical” relics at the funeral home in town, though the funeral director is needed to interpret the meaning and significance of its contents. He once showed me a softball trophy, his family photographs, and an election pin, for example.

The origins of Duncan Falls aren’t entirely known. It’s rumored to have taken its name from a trapper, a Major Duncan, who was killed by members of the Shawnee tribe somewhere near the falls in the late 1700s. As for written history, there’s not much to track down. The local cemetery offers up only dates—the town began to bury its dead, on its hill, in the early 1800s. That being said, there’s a particularly boastful bit of oral history that is passed around in diners and living rooms—that the town served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, that tunnels used to run from the river to an old, white house on a hill where fugitive slaves would rest before resuming their journeys farther north. It’s an enticing lead, but one I couldn’t find rooted in fact. It’s most likely a conflation of the history of Duncan Falls and Putnam, Ohio, an easy explanation considering the slim distance between them of nine miles.

As for my own personal connection to the place—and its past—my mother and her three siblings were all born in Duncan Falls. They lived there until their father, my grandfather, passed away in 1966 and my grandmother packed them up and headed to Michigan. Their second-oldest child, my Aunt Lu Anne, in what I’ve long assumed to be a repatriation to place, bought the house she and her siblings grew up in and moved home, back to the falls, in the late 1990s.

Her move home is a testament to the pull of place, of lineage, to a present sense of continuity to one’s past. Her repatriation to place had larger familial repercussions, too. For example, through her decision, we (the rest of her family) were all repatriated in the process.                

The past I’ve come to know in Duncan Falls is different than what constitutes a formal history. It’s speculative and compartmentalized and subjected, always, to rumor and myth. The only ascertainable fact, outside of government filings, is that the Sam Hatfield Stadium, the local high school’s football field, is not named for a Hatfield from our lineage, though our Hatfields did, at one time or another, live on the land around it.

In fact, next to the bridge and the river, the land plays a rather unremarkable role in regard to Duncan Falls. It is the falls that are always the focal point of the stories told about the town, they are featured prominently as the locus of drama—a boat tipping over, a dog on a log swiftly approaching them, the river rising and erasing everything, all together. The rushing, powerful force of the falls is juxtaposed to the slow pace of life in town. The corresponding contradiction of the town’s natural and built environments tells a more compelling, accurate story about the human condition, one that a formal “history,” on its own, cannot. The falls, their momentous rush and power—like historically attractive narratives—divert attention away from the subtle, subversive undertones that take place, in plain view, in the unincorporated, adjacent zones. 

I keep a print of a painting on my wall—given to me by my Aunt Lu Anne—that is an 1875 depiction of Duncan Falls by the artist Nancy Holland, painted originally in 1995. Holland enfeebles the falls in her depiction so as to refocus attention on the most often marginalized aspects of town. The painting takes up its perspective from the south side of the river, the Muskingum River Lock and covered bridge in the foreground, the old flourmill on the north side of the river, the town of Duncan Falls behind it, and a shadowy apparition of a white house on a hill in the distance. The detail of the flourmill stands out compared to the blurriness of the buildings in the background—its waterwheel more impressive than the falls themselves.

The flourmill, like the bridge, continues to have a pervasive place in the memory of the town’s collective past. It was built in 1838, burned down twice at the turn of the 20th century, and was torn down shortly after it was acquired by the Ohio Power Company in 1922. One wouldn’t know that, though, considering the contemporary air in which the mill is referenced and discussed today, as if it had been standing there just yesterday. The mill made immediate makes sense—it was, and is, a source of pride for the people of town. The mill was theirs, much like the river and falls were theirs before corporate control took over, before the Ohio Power Company bought the mill as a backdoor loophole to acquire the water rights on the Muskingum River.

History is impractical because it belongs to the specialists. The past is usable because it belongs to the people.

Theoretically, historical narrative is always composed from an angle of power—often about people, events, and institutions of import or, at the very least, written from a perspective of power: the historian’s. History is a discipline, it exists as an academic power structure, and it is apprehended and crafted in the imagination of the specialists of the field. The non-specialist, the citizen, the person, is subjected to the rhetoric of the professional historian, who first apprehends history from an angle—then emplots it—with intent to distribute.

Writing, over a hundred years ago in the infamous-but-now-defunct The Dial, Van Wyck Brooks—in what is a concerned critique of what he sees as the lack of imagination of the professional literary historians of his time—theorizes an idea of a “usable past.” Though his conclusions about what a “usable past” might do amount, potentially, to broad generalizations about future unification and an establishment of a national culture, Brooks’ word choice, his rejection of the opportunity to use the term “usable history” opting, instead, for the term “usable past” is his contribution to the present. It invites an evaluation of the semantic schism between the pair of words, history and past. It encourages us to distinguish between what is history and what is past by considering the usability of the latter in the shadow of the impracticality of the former.       

History is impractical because it belongs to the specialists. The past is usable because it belongs to the people. The disparity between what is history and what is past is on display in Duncan Falls. In fact, its status as a census-designated place—that it is not a town, city, or village—and that its boundaries have no legal status, allows itself to serve as a metaphorical model for the way the historical field has shifted, over the last century, to interpret time before our own. Census-designated places are both a part of and apart from; they exist in the periphery without allegiance to the form or modes of conventional communities. Applying their system of unconventionality to the ascertaining of the time before our own has allowed us to forgo the system of incorporated history for the unincorporated past—the marginal, communal, self-reflective sense of time—which is “useful,” as is exemplified in the case of Duncan Falls, where it allows the people to subvert the power of the historical omnipotence of the Ohio Power Company by conjuring their flourmill into the present.

Brooks’s article serves as the philosophical foundation for the shift in the historical field, for the past’s supplanting of history, though he never quite goes as far as to say so himself. The pitfall in the frame of his text—one that he, too, is cognizant of—is that the “present” in which he composed it, the troubles therein, locked him into that time, leaving him in an ill-fated perpetual search for a usable past that would solve the academic predicaments of his day. The over-professionalization and discplinization of the academy, in 1918, with its resulting lack of imaginative and literary fortitude in those who wrote literary history [and for our sake history in general] led him to surmise that, “The present is a void… because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.” The literary historians of his time, he believed, lacked the intention to make the past they interrogated usable, or interesting. Instead, in his mind, the theoretical approach to apprehending the past to which the literary historians of his time subscribed actually expropriated from the past its power. This led him to ask whether the past, conceived as it is by specialists throughout time, is “the only possible past?” Since the specialists of his own day could be a danger to the subject they studied, Brooks advocated for a form of historical study that would upset the paradigm, evidenced as it is in the way he asks, “If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?”

What Brooks was advocating for, in 1918, reads a lot like an earlier version of what Hayden White would later articulate as, in 1972, a metahistorical relationship with the past. In his essay, “The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History,” White suggests, “that the term metahistorical is really a surrogate for ‘socially innovative historical vision.’” For White, the historical field moved from an earlier belief that “historical investigation consisted of the excavation of buried segments of the cultural past,” elements that were “eternally fixed and immutable,” to a past built and determined by “our reconstruction of [the] socially useful.” White never mentions him, but it’s clear Brooks—or at least the influence of his era—was/were responsible for bringing about that shift in the historical field, the movement away from the fixed and immutable, what he called “a past without living value,” to the rediscovery of the idea that, as White describes it, “history might be a problem and not merely a set of puzzles, each of which [i]s to be solved by the individual researcher.”

The discovery and invention of new pasts, that Brooks hoped “might throw an entirely new face not only over the past but over the present and the future also” is the same discovery White identified as being a “part of a general reassessment of the whole sociocultural process that has been going on in the sciences and humanities since the end of the last [the 19th] century.” While Brooks was advocating for a reassessment of the field, his text was entrapped in time because of where he envisioned that discovery and invention taking place. Brooks’s text is not a model but a manifesto for the changes he hoped to see in the discipline of his own era, which meant he envisioned a paradigmatic shift from within. Disciplines are systems and systemic change happens slowly—by calling for change from within Brooks’s text was perpetually cast to seek a past that was useable, though never attainable in the time it was sought. Though Brooks called for the creation of a “new face” for the past, present, and future, he meant it only insofar as that invention he envisioned would remain a task for specialists.

White, reevaluating concepts of invention and discovery decades later, believed the shift in thought that happened at the turn of the 20th century, had “special implications for the professional historian, for it brings with it a specific suggestion that the way we look at history and the uses we make of it are potentially too dangerous to leave to the cultivation of academic historians alone.” Though he was blind to it himself, it can be inferred that Brooks never found what he sought because he refused to acknowledge that creative control—and narrative potential—could be shared with a non-academic public. The failure that prevented him from finding the usable past, though, is also what has made his essay perpetually relevant: it’s caught ever-passing the baton to whatever present is present, even one in which the past may be framed as a supplantation to history.

A usable past cannot be found, solely, within the formalism of disciplines. Brooks’s mistake was that he waited around with the hope to find it there. The usable past did not need to be created or discovered by specialists, it was—and has been—tended and maintained, just outside the realm of Historical studies. The past, today, is encountered both through interdisciplinary and outerdisciplinary lenses, allowing for alter-narrative investigations, braided hybridizations that have allowed for not only new stories, but for new formations of stories. A usable past is the people’s past and one of those pasts can be found in the unincorporated peripheries of the national landscape. One usable past, in particular, can be traced along the roads connecting Belle Valley, Cumberland, Chandlersville, and Duncan Falls in southeastern Ohio. It’s a 25-mile drive across the landscape, through a trail of communities whose continuity to their pasts can be traced tangibly.

Coming off of I-77 at the Belle Valley exit, turning right onto OH 821—which becomes Main Street through town—the car takes me past the Belle Valley Fire and Rescue, whose letter-board sign out front wishes passersby, like me, a safe summer. A ridge lines the right side of the road and a few private homes, across from it, stand in its shadow. Their shingles and siding are coated in film, the kind brought on by the wind and the runoff. The Miller Lite sign never turns off in the window of the Golden Plaza and I nod to the couple that wave, as they cross in front of me, and continue on their way up Walnut Street. The steeple of the first incarnation of the Faith Baptist Church peeks through the trees like a specter. Its newer model, the modern one that can cater to a larger congregation, sits farther up the ridge overlooking the rush along I-77, below.

 

The unincorporated pasts of communities like Duncan Falls and Belle Valley do not exist in narrative-driven documents. They can’t be traced in narrative-driven texts because of the proclivity to overlook their non-historicness. The events enacted by these communities do not attract the traditional type of historical interest and are, therefore, left out of the narrative record. In 1920, two years after Brooks published his article, the population of Belle Valley was 1,050. Now, a hundred years later, it has a population of 217. “The past that survives in the common mind of the present,” Brooks said, “is a past without living value.” If historians are endowed with the power of choosing what survives, they are also responsible for assigning value. If something is selected to survive, to be preserved, it should have value. Intrinsically, what is not selected to survive should mean it is without value. The people of Belle Valley, non-selected as they are for survival, recognize that the specialist, the professional historian, though they might have the power to preserve, are never—at the same time—always accurate arbiters of worth.

Like in Duncan Falls, the people of Belle Valley usurp narratives of power by relying on communal structures to support memory. Though Duncan Falls has to conjure its flourmill and bridge into the present, Belle Valley’s Faith Baptist Church, the first incarnation of it, the specter, stands hauntingly among the trees not because the people can’t tear it down, but because if the people tear it down they sever their continuity to the past. Built by the hands of their forebears, the church building is the fingerprint of the community. As the population of the village dwindles, as economic plight remains ever-encroaching, the structure stands resistant to outside erasure while serving as a testament to self-preservation. The people of Belle Valley understand that their story isn’t going to be selected for survival by historians so they, themselves, turn their back on formal history to embrace the past, to ensure the unincorporated type of survival that they know.

The “usability” of the unincorporated past manifests itself within the architectural structures found along the route from I-77 to Duncan Falls. It’s in the abandoned churches, the collapsing barns, and the covered bridges. Whether dilapidated or reinforced, these structures populate the landscape as monuments to memory, yes, but also as bulwarks against the grab of corporate and special interests. Because it took a community to raise those structures, the community finds a purpose in letting them stand. As the commercialized world desensitizes its population, homogenizes culture, and gentrifies our sense of place, rural architecture stands out strikingly as an opposing symbol of continuity and locality.  

When the Ohio Power Company bought the Duncan Falls flourmill in 1922, America was entering the modern era of industrialism—aviation, automobile, and consumer goods manufacturing was booming, banks were lending like never before, and the government invested, deeply, in infrastructure: in highways and bridges that would connect places to places, and would, supposedly, connect people to people, too. Economic prosperity and the promise of progress must have been enticing, then, in that era of unbridled potential, which might explain the ease with which Ohio Power slipped in and bought up the rights along the Muskingum River. The flourmill, at that time, must have appeared folksy and backward, as a symbol of what stood in the way of Duncan Falls attaining its own piece of prosperity. Duncan Falls did, eventually, experience brief economic prosperity because of two developments in the 1920s: the opening of the power plant in 1924 and the opening of the Ohio Ferro Alloys Corporation factory in 1927, in Philo, just across the river.

The economic lifelines these developments would provide the people of Duncan Falls would be short-lived, gone by the end of the 1970s. The power plant, with its steam-generated turbines, would be outmoded by newer technologies and closed completely in 1975 and the EPA would eventually designate the Ferro Alloys factory as a Superfund site because it “posed a potential risk to human health or the environment due to contamination by one or more hazardous wastes.” In 1980, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health conducted a survey on the site that found that 567 employees, mostly furnacemen and crusher operators, were expected to have been exposed to manganese, a chemical element most prominent in the production of aluminum alloys. The study argued that the levels of exposure to workers were minimal and the authors concluded “that this workforce should not be included in the… manganese hazard study because of the low concentrations of airborne manganese and the small number of exposed workers.”

Despite the findings of the NIOSH study, it’s clear Duncan Falls traded away its flourmill for the chance of economic prosperity, a chance that had completely dissipated by the end of the 1970s and left a generation of its workers with aluminum-lungs, emphysema, and breathing problems—issues some workers would struggle with for the rest of their lives. In 2015, in consideration of Duncan Falls / Philo Bridge Alternatives A and B, soil borings were collected as part of environmental site assessments conducted out of concern for the construction sites of those two proposed locations’ proximities to the defunct Ohio Ferro Alloys Plant. The results would eventually be referenced by the feasibility plan in 2016. According to that plan, the ESAs found:

Through extensive coordination, research, and testing…, elevated levels of inorganic metals were detected in all of the soil borings, and slightly elevated levels of metals were detected in all five ground water samples. Lead, arsenic, and benzo(a)pyrene concentrations were found to exceed regulatory standards in one sample each. Chromium exceeded standards in all ten borings. As a result, it was recommended that site-specific health and safety plans should be in place during construction of Alternative A and B. Excavated material should be stockpiled prior to offsite disposal for sampling to confirm the material is manageable as non-hazardous waste under RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act).

Today, the people of Duncan Falls conjure the flourmill into the present because it allows them to travel back to a time before they were duped by the promises those commercial and corporate entities made to them. Re-centering the mill allows for the community to supplant that destructive history—both the corporation’s and their own—while providing a lesson for the younger generations about how prosperity, the seductiveness of it, often leaves communities with less than what they had.

Writing, as he was in 1918, Brooks was anticipating the exploitative future the coming industrialism—the kind that would roar through the following decade—might bring about. He was concerned about our reflective consciousness, how meaning-making might be hijacked by economic systems, how narrative would be based on the emplotment of occurrences of upwardness and prosperity—overriding a past previously prefigured, in his mind, around human elements and replacing it, instead, on economic success. Though he’s writing about the corruption of the academic intelligence of his time, Brooks’ criticism is applicable to the common intelligence of our own, because, if we “accommodate [it] without effort to a… world based like ours upon the exigencies of the commercial mind [we] cannot see anything in the past that conflicts with a commercial philosophy.” “Instead of reflecting the creative impulse in American history,” he argues, it would perpetually reaffirm “the values established by the commercial tradition;” crowning, as he says, “everything that has passed the censorship of the commercial and moralistic mind.” In this way the past can only be unusable, as it can only proselytize for the system in which it was conceived.

 

At the far end of Belle Valley, just around the bend beyond the village limits, I take a left off of 821 onto OH 340 heading now in a northwesterly direction. Across the road from the lot of semi trailers and shipping containers, on the right, is a gate, the rungs of which have rusted through time. It announces ownership in a landscape that otherwise appears unowned. The first hill inclines slowly. I’m unaware of it until the peak announces itself and the car emerges, bursts I should say, into the open landscape—green rolling fields on both sides, rolls of baled grasses and power lines drawing out the distances as I drive into them. In the first dip beyond there is a pond, on the left, the kind that kids dare each other to catch tadpoles in. On the right, at a small family farm, the horses are at their hay. Along the stretch of the next plateau, a ramshackle barn stands behind the man chopping wood, stacking logs while his chickens peck around the piles. For a few miles the land rolls green and open, the residences few and far between, bales and barns—some of which stand in spite of themselves—garnish the summer grasses. There are stretches of unfenced land and there are stretches stranded with barbed wire; there are gates and there are spaces where gates had been. There are tractors and horse trailers in the front yard of the blue house just entering Haremsburg. There is a mausoleum and a hillside of tombstones behind its one-room, white country church. There are cars on blocks and truck toppers in the yards of houses; there are fifth-wheels grown over in the weeds. Headed down the decline on the other side of Haremsburg, the tree lines look like shelves beside the agriculturally cleared land. A white fence runs the length of the farm, the one with the twin red barns, whose family sits on the porch while the sun tips off the silo beyond. Tractor attachments crowd the weeds beneath the tree at the next house—the light playing on the hay in the barn-loft out back. The blossoms of dame’s rocket flowers line the ditches, with their purple hues, while the haze from the heat blurs the road ahead.  

Description is usable insofar as it allows us to imagine a place. In this case, it provides us with a visual sense of the land upon which lives are lived in this specific, unincorporated realm. But description, on its own, must be cautious of its proclivity for romanticizing, for imaging things seen as the idyllic. The barns and fence posts cannot be used to frame the picturesque. Instead, they should be continually regarded as tangible structures that connect the people to their pasts. Brooks exhibits a general disdain for local colorists. Because of them, he believed, “the American people accounted for artistic righteousness their own provincial quaintnesses,” and so, in turn, sought not creative but reflective representations of themselves in the American experience. However,  he thought that a critical examination of why the literature of local color developed in the first place might place upon it the value which he believed that, by itself, it lacked. If a literature of local color developed because local communities placed upon it “a scandalous premium,” then it is incumbent upon the critic to determine why a premium was placed upon it at all. This is an early expression of what would later be called the metahistorical vision. Brooks had grown disenchanted by mainstream historical philosophy and desired for the field to both take up a new line of inquiry and interrogate the past with new methods. In the early 20th century, modalities of historical study diverged into what would later be called the ordinary historians and the metahistorians. The major difference between them, as White would later argue, was that:

the latter, although presumably conversant with the conventions of ordinary historical discourse, has found them inefficient or inadequate to his purposes, has decided to try and forge new tools that have to be expressed in new language, and embarks upon the task of selling them to the audience as a better, more precise, or more responsible way of looking at the historical process. 

Though Brooks disdained the reflective impulses within the literature of local color, he acknowledged that a study upon those reflective impulses might, someday, prove useful. Today, a contemporary literature that incorporates elements of local color can be used for preservation purposes, photographical in its design, as it tactically confronts the corporate branding and bulldozing of American communities and in this case, the countryside along with it.

There are some questions that should not be answered out loud and there are some questions that should never be asked.

Like the distance between past and history, another semantic schism rises to the surface of Brooks’s text: the personal as opposed to the individual. In his article, Brooks asks readers to ask themselves what it is we should elect to remember. Before readers can contemplate what they might elect, he suggests, “The more personally we answer this question, it seems to me, the more likely we are to get a vital order out of the anarchy of the present.” The anarchy that personal answer is meant to remedy, though, is caused, Brooks believed, by what he calls a “hectic individualism,” which is the preventing factor holding up the development of national unity and culture, as he sees it. By suggesting that a non-uniting individualism might be solved by personal reflection, his text embraces paradox. How might pursuing the past personally counterbalance individualism? How might broad unity maintain uniqueness? How can a national culture not come at the cost of the local? If the perpetual human predicament is that we are always caught, as Tocqueville asserts, between two abysses—the time before and after one’s having been—then Brooks is encouraging us to model, for ourselves at least, how the apprehension of the past from any level is always an apprehension of the past from the individual level. We can only apprehend the past through the window of the time we get to apprehend it. If we are to establish any order in the present, it may prove to be an order for ourselves alone. If, on the other hand, the past and future are not abysses, but adjacencies in time, then Tocqueville’s closed “predicament” becomes an open field for opportunity and utility, as Brooks believes.

In an effort to more personally take up Brooks’s question in the present, the more I find myself wanting to interrogate an anarchic specter from the past. The occasion that took my mother and her siblings from Duncan Falls was the same occasion that drew my Aunt Lu Anne back to it. My mother and my Aunt Lu Anne’s memories of their father are limited to childhood, the only time in which they had to have him. My grandfather died in 1966, shortly after his 50th birthday. My mother was 11 and my Aunt Lu Anne was nine. His sudden absence anarchically altered the trajectory of their lives. It severed their ties to place and time. Because he died prior to their development of questions about the past, the answers he might have had disappeared into the absence with him. In death he became a perpetual specter to their conceptualization of their own pasts, which continues to reverberate—seeing how he haunts the ungraspable realm of time just beyond the perimeter of my having been born.

Along OH 340, it’s hard not to see ghosts, to not imagine the ramshackle barns as they were when they were just piles of lumber, before the bodies buried in the cemetery were bodies in the cemetery and were, instead, specialists at transforming piles of lumber into barns. It’s hard to pass the fields and not imagine someone from the past among them, a pup at their ankles while the older dogs chase rabbits in the distance, their howling hanging on—for what seems like forever—to the wind.

Over the course of my life, in her answers to my questions about her father, my mother often references the display of affection he showed for his hunting dogs. She remembers him as reserved, quiet, and standoffish at times toward his own children because, as she says, “In that time that’s just the way some fathers were.” In her recollection of him, she describes him as “not very involved,” concerned it seemed to her more about the raising of his pups than his children. She recalls occasionally crawling up in his chair to sit with him in the living room. My Aunt Lu Anne remembers those images of my mom on his lap, along with her own reluctance to follow suit, electing instead to stand in her uncomfortableness from a distance across the room.

In my mother’s recollections of her father there are many images of him barbering, smoking, walking down the alley toward the river with a tackle box, or disappearing into the fields with his dogs. But more than anything she remembers his silence, the way he was in rooms, the way he watched his kids more than he spoke to them.  

My grandfather and grandmother were married in 1950, five years after he was honorably discharged from the Army. Growing up, my mother knew that her father fought in World War II. It wasn’t from him that she knew that, though. She recalls that he was relatively silent about his war years. In fact, she’s surprised, looking back, that he shared a story of that time with her at all. Having spent his war years in the Pacific, he told her once that, while approaching one of the islands, he was assigned to the line just behind the down-folding ramp of the landing craft—the one that would fall when it reached the shallows—and he and his fellow soldiers would be expected to stumble down it and storm the beaches. Instead, though, on that day as the landing craft bobbed on the waves they could see, along what should have been the enemy-entrenched redoubts of the island, white flags whipping the wind. He looked down at the water sloshing his boots and the boots of the men next to him and gave thanks, knowing if that down-folding ramp had fallen he would have fallen, too.

My mom, after hearing his story, made the common mistake curious kids make: she queried about whether or not he had killed a man. His response, out of character for the man she had known, became a memory of one of his kindnesses. For a man who was often uninvolved and distant, he became a father in the way he responded, not with an answer, but with a lesson for his daughter: that there are some questions that should not be answered out loud and there are some questions that should never be asked.

After he eventually died of a heart attack and my grandmother moved her children to Michigan, his memory was confined to a trunk of belongings. That trunk made it into my mother’s basement where it stayed, until she eventually introduced it to me. The introduction of the tangible past, one especially without much context, evokes curiosity in its handlers. An absent understanding of a tangible past becomes useful, too, because it pushes us to pass the absence on.

Without sufficient material to apprehend a past completely, we are left perpetually in search of it. If the past is not an abyss, but an adjacency, one might repatriate to a place to be in proximity to it. My Aunt Lu Anne bought her childhood home and moved back to the falls not because she believed she would find answers there, but because in being there she could be in the presence of the absence.

An unincorporated past, like the unincorporated community, is bound together by its particularities. To optimally synthesize a sense of place, to make that sense usable, there must be established an effective drift between the communal and the particular narrative. The unincorporated past is useful because it’s pursuable, at times seeable, and always makeable. Brooks asked if the creation of new pasts was inconceivable; we can only answer that by the ways in which we look for them and make them. The past on a grand scale is useless to the non-specialist. It withholds meaning from the peripheries and places emphasis instead on what is broadly graspable, which in turn places the past that exists within the unincorporated realm in historical disregard. Having evolved over the last century, turning toward the margins and the underdiscussed, the historical field now allows us to find new forms of empowerment. The unincorporated past traces human agency in the peripheries and exhibits how commercial dismantlement similarly takes place in the margins. At times Brooks’s theory that historical significance need not be relegated to the “great” nor should it be pursued in an emplotment of the “grand,” feels influenced by Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. “I need not traverse the earth and sky,” Tocqueville wrote, “to discover wondrous objects woven of contrasts, of infinite greatness and littleness, of interne gloom and amazing brightness, capable at once of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. I have only to look at myself.” Apprehending the past through the perspective of Tocqueville’s “self,” which is also what Brooks seems to advocate for when he suggests we more “personally” seek the import of memory, allows for the individual to trace his or her place in the community and, in so doing, provides a pathway for the community to trace its way back to individuals. Only this type of knowledge can be usable. A historically “grand” narrative limits the periphery to a perpetual form of stasis. But to know an unincorporated past is to know its proclivity for making and its intention to preserve the structural evidence of that making; to know it is to know it is anything but static. In another essay, Hayden White writes, “Historical knowledge, in short, is human self-knowledge and specifically knowledge of how human beings make themselves through knowing themselves and come to know themselves in the process of making themselves.”

 

The particularity of my grandfather’s absence is important to the narrative of this unincorporated past because of his ever-elusiveness in it. Over the course of writing this essay, I returned to the trunk my mother introduced me to in childhood and, among his other belongings, I found my grandfather’s letters and discharge papers. One letter, in particular, was written to his first wife, the woman who saw him through the war, and the child they had together—my mother’s half-sister Donna. In it, he says he:

went down to a park on Sunday where they had kangaroos and ostrich and lots of different animals, took some pictures but am afraid I ruined the filter. Will have to try and get another roll and try it again. I took one for Donna that had an ostrich and a kangaroo in it, but I suppose it won’t turn out. I’m still working on your souvenir and will try to send those in a few days. 

The letter, from 1943, was sent from an island in the Pacific, sorted by the postmaster in San Francisco, and delivered to his family in Duncan Falls. In it, there is a clear indication that my grandfather was a very different father and family man before and after the war. The part of my grandfather’s personality that was missing from his interactions with his second family was present in the letter from the Pacific, to his first. One can almost imagine him laboring to compose the letter, waiting for food, in the rain. “Am writing while waiting on chow. It’s been raining for a couple of days and is raining now, and it isn’t so pleasant eating outside in the rain.” I have to stop myself from coaxing him to stay, when he closes, “My time is about up… [T]ell Donna I wait for your letters as much as she does mine. And a thousand kisses and hugs.”

Contradictorily, it’s the cold, matter-of-factness of his discharge papers that’s closer to the person my mother knew and has since handed down to me. In those papers, for the first time, I was able to date a part of the past I’d heard about. He enlisted with the Army on July 126, 1942 and after seven months and 13 days of training and domestic service he was shipped to the Pacific Theater where he spent two years, eight months, and five days deployed in active combat zones. He took part in campaigns on or in the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the South Philippines. For his service in the Asiatic Pacific Theater he was awarded three bronze stars and an additional one for his role in the Philippine Liberation. In the lower left-hand corner of his discharge document is his right thumbprint, dipped in ink on the day he signed the papers, November 3, 1945, signifying his release from service. It’s not my place to speculate about what he felt, then, in that finality, or what he thought about or what emotional response he had as he pressed his thumb to paper in what formalized his end to fighting. All I can report is how—according to those who knew him—he spent his remaining days: in an obsequious respect for silence.

Along 340, summer bugs saw the air with sound while the road hums humidly and the ditches house a chaos of hues. The clarity I counted on is cut short abruptly, when the road running through the rolling fields funnels into a tight hem of trees and stretches on like that for miles. Trees and ground-foliage snugly hug the roadside while the surrounding blue constricts to just a slice overhead and I continue on this way for a while through the old growth and green.

The tree lines end southeast of Cumberland. The claustrophobia of foliage gives way to the flatness of fields. After having rolled through the hills of 340, the emergent flatness feels euphoric, delivered as I am from the tight twists of the trees behind. Coming into Cumberland, the paint peels away from the clapboard siding of the first few houses. The tin roofs of the cinderblock buildings are rust. The sunflowers look like they’ve sapped the color from the barns they were planted beside. At the first corner I come to, beyond the three-door garage of the fire department—and the deli-esque architecture of the Howell-Craig insurance agency—I can stare down 146 to where it blurs in the distance. No other cars are around so I sit at the corner. It feels like I could choose any direction and wind up arriving anywhere and nowhere all together.

I take a left to continue on 340 past the Cumberland United Methodist Church, a row of houses, and then the abandoned brick building that once housed the Cumberland Savings Bank and the U.S. Post Office. The road slow-rolls perpendicular to the flats that brought me into town. Clark’s Grocery is housed in a brick building—red peeking through the white it was painted long ago—while the ivy grows up the bay doors of the maintenance garage next door. The old Buffalo Presbyterian Church is a block from a gun store called the Gun Shop and as I ease out of town a farmstead lines a hill in the distance, four or five white buildings, the last of which is a three-story barn with eight large windows watching the land roll on below.

I could almost make the mistake of believing I was in the prairie, or a painting—that there were no socioeconomic factors to question or consider, that the little oil wells see-sawing on the landscape were there to legitimize its Americana aesthetic. Down the road, 340 forks with 146 and before I follow the latter to the right, two barns remind me why I’m on this road: to trace the ways in which the past holds a different kind of power in the unincorporated realm.

Like the flourmill and bridge in Duncan Falls, and the church in Belle Valley, the barns in Cumberland serve as structural continuities to the community’s past. While the flourmill is conjured, where the church is preserved, the barns’ structural continuity comes in the process of reinforcement. The barns have been Frankensteined together: the original 19th century wood is combined, in places, with pole barn steel and, in others, with sheet siding. The present owners—whether or not they are direct descendants of those who originally constructed the barn—exhibit a restorative consciousness that lends itself to the maintaining of the structural past. In this part of the country, the barn signifies a communal past. No family could construct a structure like it on their own. They had to rely on neighbors, friends, and family members to raise it. It is a symbol of a local’s collaborative effort to undertake, in common, a project that results in individual benefit because of that individual’s community.

Without sufficient material to apprehend a past completely, we are left perpetually in search of it.

In his essay Brooks states, “The past experience of our people is not so much without elements that might be made to contribute to some common understanding in the present, as that the interpreters of that past experience have put a gloss upon it which renders it sterile for the living mind.” In the pursuit of “grand” narratives, Brooks’s professional literary historian, at all sorts of distances from his subject, cannot effectively entertain a past that emphasizes community over commercialization. Because the imaginations of these historians can’t make that leap, can’t imagine either the grand or an alternative to it, the pages of their texts can only perpetuate stagnancy. Brooks is calling for the end to ordinary historians, to those whose sterile gloss of history renders it useless. Brooks’s “sterile history” is what would later be called “straight history,” defined by White as “the historical vision of political and social accommodationists, whether of those who want to change nothing (conservatives) or those who want to change details while leaving the basic social structure untouched (liberals).” Brooks was calling for a view of literature that innovatively reinterpreted texts (and the past) in a way that it might be applied, usefully, in the construction of a social future. “Objection to using a vision of a desirable future to give the form to one’s account of past and present would bear weight only for those,” White believed, “to whom the present is basically satisfactory as it is. And by the ‘present’,” White emphasized that he meant, “the social status quo.”

While Brooks rightly calls for a reinterpretation of the literature of our past, it’s important for us, too, to consider how the past isn’t confined to literature—that it can be interpreted and conceived outside of texts. Instead, we should consider that semantic schism between history and past. Formal, written history exists at a disciplinized distance from its subject, never within the structural continuities—archaeology not withstanding—that actually exist, and as Brooks writes, it “signifies, among other things, [a past that]… lack[s]… any sense of inherited resources.”

Brooks was, in many ways, a radical predecessor to those who would later subscribe to the metahistorical vision. In fact, Brooks identified the same divide between American and European historians that White would still be discussing 50 years later. The past, according to Brooks, was more accurately apprehended by the European counterparts of the era because, as he says, “they never quite separate themselves from the family tree that nourishes and sustains them and assures their growth.” White, writing about that divide decades later, compared the American historical impulse as being more concerned with analyzing “existing practices [rather] than… bring[ing] about changes” to the impulse of the European mind, that saw “both historical existence and historical consciousness as aspects of the more general problematics of Western cultural development.” As White saw it, the European mind adopted a mode of speculation that debated “the purpose of historical inquiry and the cultural utility of historical consciousness.” Brooks’s advocation for a usable past was an advocation for a new American philosophy of history. 

While Brooks did call for a new historical consciousness and, appropriately, formed a concerned critique of the academic environment of his day, he never could quite separate himself from that which he criticized. By searching for a paradigmatic shift from within his criticism, he never escaped the commercialized field he advocated against. He was never able to totally embrace the kind of family tree he used as an example in the work of his European counterparts. The historical strides made over the last century, however, allow an escape from the discipline of history’s hegemonic control over all that happened prior to the present. It isn’t solely through the language or texts of historians that the past can be interpreted; it can be in the continual occupation of spaces in the adjacencies of time. Physical spaces—and the memories of them—offer a sense of closeness that a text cannot. To occupy those spaces within the unincorporated realm is to inherit those resources, to tap into a system of nourishment and sustainability, to practice, in real time, the mobile antithesis of the historian’s stagnancy, as Brooks saw it.

Upriver from the falls, in the late 1950s, my grandfather and his fishing buddy were casting for catfish sometime after dusk in the fast currents of the Muskingum in an aluminum watercraft. It capsized in the dark and the danger of the quick water was compounded by his buddy’s inability to swim. Unable to get him back in the boat, my grandfather elected to swim the two of them to shore, both of them collapsing in exhaustion as the watercraft went ringing, not long after, over the falls.

The heroic moments of my grandfather’s life tend to define the recollections of those who remember him. That being said, it isn’t hard to locate his contradictions, to consider his heroics beside his less-than-humane behaviors that make him one of those “wondrous objects,” Tocqueville says, “woven of contrasts, of infinite greatness and littleness, of interne gloom and amazing brightness.” The man who taught my mother a lesson about the unanswerableness of certain questions left hard evidence of the question he taught her she shouldn’t have asked. Along with his trunk of belongings, my mother has a Japanese Arisaka Type 99 rifle that her father had shipped home from the Pacific, either as a trophy or as an artifact, but always either way evidence of the deeds he had done.

Though personality, like the past, is built upon a spectrum of contradictions, and though my grandfather almost always lacked it in his interactions with his children (at least those he had with my grandmother) my mother remembers laughter coming from the living room when my grandfather’s nephew by marriage, Jim Martin, would visit and the two of them together would watch episodes of The Flintstones. My grandfather was Fred and Jim was Barney, they’d say, and as they recreated scenes their laughter made its way to the children’s ears upstairs. My grandfather would die 16 days after the final episode of the series, titled “The Story of Rocky’s Raiders,” aired on April 1, 1966. In that episode, Fred’s grandfather comes to visit before which Fred finds and reads his diary, a journal of his grandfather’s time in the Army fighting in the First World War. 

 

Unlike 340, 146 doesn’t roll with the land, but runs flat as the land rolls on around it. The baled grasses of the green hills and the white farm buildings break up the distances. The driveway of the first homestead runs through the arches of a covered bridge, the sides of which are painted with the slogan of an out-of-business tobacco brand: “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco—treat yourself to the best.” It is one of the 20,000 barns or buildings painted by Harley Warrick in the infamous 1960s advertisement campaign of Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company out of Wheeling, West Virginia. The route runs relatively flat until it begins to roll slightly southeast of and then into Chandlersville, past an old brick church, a service station, and a row of residences in the shade of a stretch of pines. There’s an abandoned two-story building, on the far side of town, that looks like an old Western saloon, the kind a weary traveler would wander into to wet his whistle. There’s a bar and grill across from the Chandlersville Community Building and a sign advertising “fairgrounds,” but no fair in the field beyond. The sun starts sinking along the road outside of Chandlersville—a bright blur over which the fields of corn turn orange. The grain silos and the open-sided hay barn mark my turn left off of 146 onto the narrow route of Salt Creek Road.

Deeply critical of the type of literary mind that predominated at the end of the 19th century, Brooks believed that the prevailing literature of America was, at that time, “chiefly a literature of exploitation, the counterpart of our American life.” He believed that the mind that created this type of literature “exploited the legendary and scenic environment of our grandfathers,” and he blamed the local colorists “who dominated [the] fiction during the intermediate age” as those “to whom the American people accounted for artistic righteousness their own provincial quaintnesses.” With this admonishment Brooks exhibited little foresight about where the exploitative sources of the commercialized world might manifest and, more so, how they might be counterbalanced. If the local colorists created literature that uncritically and nostalgically framed the quaint, then it was right to be criticized. If, however, a broad criticism of the “local” is developed in response to a writer’s inability to frame the subversiveness within that quaint, then the view of the “local” must be revisited.

Take for example the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was described in the early 20th century as the prairie troubadour. Brooks believed the poet too quickly relied on sound and color—the vernacular and local peculiarities of his region—and that, by running to those aspects “in excess and for their sake,” he “void[ed] himself within.” Brooks asked whether that self-voiding was “because the life of a Middle Western town sets upon those things [sound and color] an altogether scandalous premium?” Ending there, with the influence the town had upon the artist himself, Brooks’s criticism suggests he never considered that the writer’s preservation of local characteristics might be viewed as a subversive act against a homogenizing commercialism. In fact, for Brooks, we might imagine that the centering of local peculiarities could only ever be synonymous with the individualistic, at odds with his grand ideal for broad unification. The usable past Brooks sought was one with a unifying thread that would dismantle “the hectic individualism that keeps them [the creative forces] from uniting against their common enemies,” which we can assume are, for Brooks, threats of a sterilized past. He believed that this coming together might “bring about, for the first time, that sense of brotherhood in effort and in aspiration which is the best promise of a national culture.” While he railed against the threat of sterility, his advocation for a national culture paradoxically, it might be argued, produced the same result: an indistinguishable sameness. Because Brooks had visions of national unity he could only ever conceive of the local as antagonistically individual. The Middle Western town could only ever threaten the realization of his ideal: mass brotherhood and unity. For this reason, Brooks uses the genre of local color as cover to dismiss the “local” holistically.

An alteration in the creative minds of the literary historians of his era would help them, Brooks believed, not only to know the past, but to know that in the past “others have desired the things we desire and have encountered the same obstacles, and that in some degree time has begun to face those obstacles down and make the way straight for us.” That claim implies Brooks subscribes to an underlying belief that the past is full of recurring situations we can learn from, which runs counter to Hegel’s theorization that “each period [of the past] is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.” By romantically pursuing the past, emplotted he hoped with a theme of grand unification, Brooks was unable to see the cultural richness in its peculiar parts. The homogenized mind he was afraid of, produced as it was, he argued, by the commercialized mentality of his era, could only actually be brought about if localities abandoned their individuality to unify against it. His remedy could only ever result in the perpetuation of the sterility he feared. Only the subversive aspects of the local past, the unincorporated past, could counterbalance commercialized power. By advocating for a past of all Brooks undercut the possibility of a past being particularly its own. Having disregarded the peculiarities of the local, because of how he perceived them as a threat to the unity of all, Brooks perpetually blinded himself to the fact that that “local” he disregarded, long held the usability he sought.     

The closer I get to Duncan Falls the more everything steepens.

Unlike 340 or 146, the tight windings of Salt Creek Road make me sit forward, make me grip the steering wheel just a little bit tighter. The momentum in each curve carries the car into the oncoming lane and, if it weren’t for the lack of traffic, I feel certain by now I would have otherwise met it head on. Much of this route proceeds at a slight incline, the fields and the fence posts encroaching closer and closer to the car. This road, in particular, was not built for the traffic, but for the places the traffic passes. Much of the imagery is the same: bales and barns, the latter of which are, here, in more advanced stages of disrepair. The road feels extra tight when I move to its middle, to squeeze, it feels like, through the mid-century steel beams of the bridge over Boggs Creek. The closer I get to Duncan Falls the more everything steepens.

After my grandfather died and my grandmother moved herself and her children to Michigan, she was told that someone was leaving flowers and trinkets on her husband’s grave. Rumors indicated that he may have been running around, that he had had other children, that when he took his dogs to the fields he may have actually been taking them to another family. One summer, on my Aunt Lu Anne’s porch, as a band warmed up on the back patio of the bar across the alley, she lit a cigarette, passed me the lighter, and said, “It was at that bar that I saw a man about my age that looked exactly like my father.” She said the resemblance was so uncanny that she almost asked him whom his father was, but hesitated, and didn’t, and has since regretted it. There are some questions that should never be answered. My grandfather said once, to my mother, there are some questions that should never be asked.

That next morning my Aunt Lu Anne took me over to see Jim Martin, one of the last surviving friends of my grandfather. Jim had worked at the Ohio Ferro Alloys plant up until it closed in the late 1970s. He was no longer the Barney to my grandfather’s Fred. He was winded from having walked from the backdoor to the picnic table in the yard. We weren’t there to burden him with questions about my grandfather, though, or Ohio Ferro or what promises of economic prosperity had done to the town and the places he loved. We just visited and the day was beautiful. The neighbors were mowing and the sun was high and Jim, with his alloy emphysema, sat in the yard that summer and couldn’t believe the birds circling above were eagles. “I can’t believe it’s a group of eagles,” he had said. “Yes,” we’d all nodded, looking up—none of us with the heart to say that they were hawks.

 

I’ve tried to model a method that repurposes disparate elements by intertwining them through a narrative composed from an angle of little power, including a family of no import, in a place whose subversive nature is often misapplied and labeled as apathetic. By mapping my way back to this unincorporated place, I’ve simultaneously tried to map out a small part of the larger fabric of unincorporated pasts, like those contemporary historical thinkers who take up narrative from the bottom, the margins, and the outside. To be an ethical steward of unincorporated content, the role of the author—in the creation of the narrative—has to also be in active evasion of incorporation, category, and genre.  

The unincorporated past contains the reality of the community’s making of itself, of knowing itself. It exists outside the categorical definitions offered up by Brooks’s traditional literary historical specialists and its reality runs counter to “grand” narratives that create abstract portrayals of people. Considerations of unincorporated pasts add to the contemporary historical approach of looking outside for concrete understandings of local cultures and the peculiarities that make up true communities. Unincorporated pasts are not about gaining power but how communities can persevere in the face of power and function without it. The past is only usable insofar as it provides a representation of how communities defined themselves against the skewering potential of the power systems of their present. Like along the route to Duncan Falls, the people living there subvert commercialized power while simultaneously sustaining themselves in the way they choose to frame their pasts. The rural is often dismissed as unchanging and backward, resistant to progress, etc., but what is more accurate—for this particular rural route—is how the landscape and the people living upon it moved forward after having been exploited. The preservation of outdated structures is not to lament the past, but how the past allowed for the development of a subversive economic and commercial disinterest.

By fostering and maintaining the memory of particular pasts, the unincorporated community practices a form of sustainability our larger systems would do well to emulate. Turning attention to the unincorporated communities of our country adds new depth and understanding to the renewed sense of interest we’re seeing in the “local”. When we write about unincorporated pasts we have a responsibility to find and reframe the narrative around subversive elements, focusing on their usability, as models, for the public. Exercising the compositional method used by metahistorians, who White says “tend to use the prophetic voice and permit, when they do not attempt, legislation for the future,” may aid in that endeavor. Practitioners of the metahistorical mode are, White says, “precisely what we mean when we speak of radicals.”

The lessons we need to survive the present exist in the unincorporated realm, in the way that the people who live there continually reimagine and reframe the purpose of their past. Emulating the unincorporated can help us, collectively, prepare for the next age; and the methods therein may help us determine, “more importantly,” as White says it can, the “kind of vision of our past, present, and future… we need to permit us to make transition to a next age.”

As I drive up the last incline of Salt Creek Road, as I near the last peak—after which I’ll begin my descent down into Duncan Falls—I consider how my aunt’s repatriation, all those years ago, still fuels my summer trips today and unfolds my connection to the place. I consider how her closeness to the past, how her maintenance of the space of it, the house, is a reflection of a larger method of perseverance in the unincorporated realm. I think of all the unacknowledged efforts, out there, happening in unincorporated places and what tracing those little continuities to community might accomplish. I think about proximities and people. I think about how we inhabit space and structures. I think about the opening lines of George Oppen’s, “Of Being Numerous,” which begins, “There are things / we live among and to see them / is to know ourselves.” I think place is a lot like the past—it doesn’t move, solely, in one direction, but in all of them; there are as many routes out as there are in. If nothing else, I think, the present and the future are a lot like place—if we’ve been paying attention, by the time we arrive, we already know what it looks like.