Cultural & Symbolic Systems: An Eco-History Reflection of my Grandmother
Linda Elmer
M.A. Candidate in Culture, Ecology & Sustainable Community
New College of California
E-mail: linda@lindaelmerdesigns.com
Although she lost her mother at a young age, I believe my grandmother found “mother” while fishing in the 1960s. This mothering via nature fostered a growth in her that her actual foster parents were never able to do. I liken this growth to that of a teenager; and as is the hope for many teenage culminations, hers ended in the creation of a fulfilling life for herself. In effect, she grew into her “happily ever after.” Offering a richer sense of an adolescents’ transformation into adulthood, professor and environmental philosopher Paul Shepard suggests that an adolescent who has shared a profound connection with nature “will graduate not out of that world but into its significance” (30).
The phenomenon of people finding significance through their experiences with nature is not new. Shepard’s work in analyzing tribal cultures who were in harmony with their environment led him to believe that they had a healthier course of development. He felt this was in part due to their “study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in the natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter” (26). Concurring with this idea, psychologist Deborah DuNann Winter notes that the well-being of people in tribal societies is directly related to their experience in the natural world. She also points out that “In the vast majority of these societies, nature is seen as a living organism, most often as a mother, which is nurturing, beneficent, and ordered, but also at times wild, violent, and chaotic” (DuNann Winter 26). In Western society, however, this relationship to the natural world seems to be a more recent discovery.
The field of ecopsychology has been striving to make the connection between individuals and nature visible since the 1980s. In his 2002 book on ecological identities, which included observations of fifteen years of his work with people and nature, Mitchell Thomashow states: “the direct experience of wild places has a transformational quality” (15). And eleven years ago, renowned social critic Theodore Roszak offered the description of ecopsychology being ultimately aware that the human psyche and mother Earth are deeply connected (Roszak 5).
I don’t know many details of my grandmother’s early life. I know she was born and grew up near the Mississippi River. Her mother died when she was young, and she was raised by foster parents until she was of legal age. Although she married and began having children shortly after adolescence, I believe her true growth into adulthood happened when she began fishing by herself. My mother related the following narrative about this time in my grandmother’s life:
My mom used to go fishing by herself. I mean she also used to go with friends, kids, or her husband but really she preferred to go alone. She would go with Tiger, her little dog, and would get sunburn on her face and knees. She used a bamboo rod, not a rod with a reel. You know the kind with the long pole, a really long piece of bamboo and just a line with a bobber. We always ate the fish—if she didn’t catch and release—or she put them in the freezer, or she gave them away to people she knew who would eat them. But nothing went to waste. She liked perch. Later she told me that she liked to be by herself because it was her time to just enjoy or reflect on what was happening.
Tiger got to know that fish would be coming, so she would watch the bobber and get excited when it dipped because she knew that Mom would be pulling in a fish.
We lived by Mill Lake and it was a 15-20 minute walk for her, although at some point, she got a driver’s license. She used friends’ boats at first, and eventually got a rowboat. I think it was Barb, her friend, who always let her use her boat.
Grandpa fished other lakes, and sometimes she would go—but it was a different kind of activity. It was more social, or a husband/wife thing. I think that’s why they got the double-wide and put it on the lake, because they liked to fish. I was about 5 years old when we moved to Mill Lake, and she started fishing once us kids were big enough to take care of ourselves more—when she didn’t always need to be there for us. She would go for hours. And in the summer, she would go, oh, as often as she could.
Knowing that my grandmother went on from this period of living at Mill Lake to divorcing my grandfather, owning her own business, and marrying someone she shared a more equal partnership with, I cannot help but think that these times of solitude at the lake helped her grow in some fundamental way. Following the thinking of psychologist James Hillman, I am left pondering whether my grandmother’s physically catching and eating her perch was any different than her fishing for the currants of her feelings and gaining nourishment from ingesting them (7).
My grandmothers’ path of growth started when my grandparents moved to Mill Lake. At that time, they had three children and soon added one more. As the kids aged and needed less constant attention, my grandmother began her solo fishing trips. Over the years that she took these solo journeys, she added a driver’s license and a night job at the cookie factory. Married to a man who came from a German authoritarian background, these actions pushed the edge of acceptability at home. But my grandmother had just begun to sprout, and aided by the confidence I believe she was cultivating on her fishing trips, the realness of her nature was determined to surface whether others deemed it acceptable or not.
At her new job she befriended a divorced woman who was also a mother—and a lesbian. If divorce was still not quite acceptable at that time, being a mother and divorcing because you were gay was even less acceptable. My grandmother did not care—or perhaps she cared more deeply than some—and was willing to fight when my grandfather questioned her disregard for his preference in the matter. My mom said my grandmother “just started making her own decisions.” She found that her nature included a love of diversity and a willingness to hold her ground.
When her youngest child was 16, and she realized she could support herself, my grandmother answered my grandfather’s demand that she either do her independence thing or be his wife with seven letters: D-I-V-O-R-C-E. By then she had quit her night-shift cookie packing work and took a job in a restaurant. When the owner wanted to sell it, she had developed enough self-confidence to buy it. My mother commented that although my grandmother had been a relatively happy during her time at Mill Lake, it was when she became a small business owner and married my step-grandfather that she began to blossom. The one constant that had remained throughout these life-altering times, though, was her fishing. Only she no longer fished with just her little dog and her thoughts—she shared her once solo-pleasure with her new life partner. I believe she found Shepard’s graduation from adolescence via a profound connection with nature into the significance of her world (30).
In my experience of contemporary teenage life, I see parallels with this period of my grandmother’s growth from cookie factory worker/dutiful wife to business owner/life partner. It is during our teenage years that many of us begin to individuate in a way that questions authority, make friends our families may not approve of, take first jobs, begin to drive cars and make our own decisions. At the end of this stage, it is common to begin a career and a long-term relationship. Because she grew up in a poor rural area that demanded a reduction on household size when her mother died, my grandmother found herself in a foster family that did hard farm labor for its survival. She then found marriage as her only exit from that way of life. There was no period of individuation, no first job, no independent decision making leading to a self-determined career and the cultivation of a long-term nurturing relationship. Rather than happening under the tutelage of parents, my grandmother’s individuation seemed to happen in the cradle of a rowboat at the nurturing bosom of a lake.
It’s startling to hear a piece of your family history and realize how present it is today. My ability to live away from water is almost ’nil. Since living on a lake in my teenage years, I have moved more than fifteen times, with each location no less than 10 minutes from some body of water. Additionally, water plays an important part in my processing ability. While in a relationship four years ago, I discovered that I simply cannot process my own sense of things in the presence of other people. Perhaps my empathic tendencies are too great to filter out the other person’s slant, or my nurturing tendencies override my ability to truly look within. I was alone washing dishes when I had this flash and have noticed that most of my self-reflective times come when alone with water—in the house or engaged out in nature. Indeed, when upset, I am inexplicably drawn to the water. Either to sit at its edge and contemplate, walk around its perimeter, or just soak in it in the privacy of my bathroom.
I also had a difficult teenage era and am only beginning to blossom as my own child gets older, and I begin to “just start making decisions.” This process of decision making, in combination with a deepening relationship to nature and a solid practice of solitude and reflection, has been paramount to my own growing sense of confidence. This growth has also allowed me to run a small business in a more successful manner than ever before. I wholeheartedly agree with Hillman that: “Treatment of the inner requires attention to the outer” (9).
My reflection linking my grandmother’s growth to her time in nature does not come at the expense of other influencing factors. I do not intend to downplay the cultural impact of the 1960s in changing women’s lives, nor the splendid possibility for growth that comes as one’s children gain independence. I do feel, however, that as these influences were felt in her life, my grandmother used her time alone at the lake to cast her ideas, pull up what seemed to bite, and decide what to release or what to take home.
References
DuNann Winter, Deborah. “The ‘Nature’ of Western Thought.” Ecological Psychology: Healing the Split Between Planet & Self. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Hillman, James. “A Psyche the Size of the Earth.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995.
Roszak, Theodore. “Where Psyche Meets Gaia.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995.
Shepard, Paul. “Nature and Madness.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995.
Thomashow, Mitchell. “Voices of Ecological Identity.” Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist. Cambridge: MIT, 1995.
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