Out of Place in the American West

This essay explores a personal reckoning with impending ecological crisis brought on by global warming. It places my sense of being out of place in my home environment in the context of larger cultural dynamics by unpacking the inherent mobility embedded in the national psyche of an immigrant nation such as the United States of America with a specific focus on the tendency of abstract mental constructs formed in one place, through one set of experiences, to predetermine the lived experience of people transitioning to a new, unknown place. It takes as its focus the expansion of US nation state from its original foothold along the eastern seaboard into the arid territories of the west and examines the embedded cultural attitudes that came to define the immigrant experience. To ground the article in personal experience, the discussion is placed within the context of a performative art practice involving two series of walks. The first, entitled For John Wesley Powell: Attempts to Walk the Grid, explores the cartographic grid as the device used for developing the West through walks conducted in various eco-niches in the western environment. The second series, entitled Celestial/Terrestrial Navigations, is based in walking constellations from the night sky onto the land in the West in the effort to mend the current divide in urban culture between earth and sky. Taken together they articulate a personal effort to build connections to the environment of the American West.