Several times in pieces here at this newsletter, I’ve used a little quote from Rebecca Solnit’s 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking:

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.

I believe I first came across that incisive phrase, “invisible crop of memories,” in a piece on walking and sense of place by Grace Olmstead, a great writer in a similar-ish space to mine who I highly recommend. Check out her Substack here.

Olmstead wrote, back in 2018, of her grandfather’s lifelong habit of taking long walks around his neighborhood in Moscow, Idaho:

“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back,” Solnit writes in Wanderlust. “The more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.”

After my grandmother passed away, I believe my grandfather’s explorations through Moscow were a way to remember her, to forge new associations, and to experience the kindness and warmth of his neighbors. The insulation of the car would not have afforded the same sense of camaraderie and kinship that the open streets did. What’s more, by making me his walking companion, my grandfather let me share in that camaraderie and kinship—and seeded in my mind that same invisible crop of memories. He taught me how to “look and see.”

It’s a beautiful piece, and ever since I read it, I’ve remembered that little phrase. It distilled the feeling I’d always had about ordinary things, how time hallows them, and why losing them can trigger a genuine sense of loss.

I think about, for example, the giant, oversized Adirondack chairs outside a garden center on the way into my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, onto which a few friends and I climbed up and took selfies in high school. Or the Pizza Hut where we used to pile up 30 or 40 plates at the lunch buffet. Or the first motel my wife and I ever stayed at together. Here are those chairs, by the way:

I wrote a long, personal essay here last year, after a visit back to Flemington, which included a detour to my best friend’s house. Here’s an excerpt, where I use that quote again, which captures so well the feelings I had on that trip:

For almost as long as I can remember, my friend and I had this idea of likening our parents’ houses and our old childhood main street to the starting screen of a video game. Think of the screen where you begin a game of Harvest Moon, or the Pokémon Gameboy games, or really most adventure games or RPGs. They have massive worlds you can explore, and various ways to grow or “level up” your character, but you can usually wander back to that beginning screen. In Pokémon, for example, it’s the town and the house where you were given your first pocket monster. In a game you really like and have invested hours and hours of gameplay in, it can be comforting to go back to the beginning, and think about where you started. No matter how far you progress, it’s always still there.

It was kind of meta, talking about and remembering all of this, while floating in my friend’s outdoor pool, thinking about all the childhood gatherings and barbecues we spent here, the time a family of raccoons approached us one evening at the patio, the pizza and Chinese takeout nights when we worked a daytime visit into dinner and a sleepover. All in that house, altered here and there but very much the same place throughout the last 20 years. A place that changed and grew and matured and aged with us but was still there and still itself, just like our timeworn main street. An exceedingly brief moment in time, all things considered, but our whole lives.

Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her 2001 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, wrote: 

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.

Of all the arguments or sentiments that might lead to “NIMBYism,” (“not in my backyard,” or the tendency to oppose new development) this is probably the one that appeals to me the most, and which I find most valid and most personally moving. Perhaps I just have a ritualistic, sentimental personality. But I’ve always felt there’s something valuable about physical continuity, and the interplay of human relationships, growing up, and physical surroundings. That’s what led me to write fondly of an old roadside motel, the sole surviving such establishment along a highway stretch just outside Flemington once dense with them. My friend and I mulled over the fact that because so much of our childhood surroundings are still intact, we can reap that invisible crop of memories, every time we visit home. Time can enliven and elevate places, even those which are ordinary by any objective standard. I’ve got to think this contributes, maybe not in a way most people can quite express, to trepidation about redevelopment or new buildings, in places which don’t really, from the outside, look or seem very special, or worth preserving as they currently are.

I went on to argue that this is not, exactly, NIMBYism, and that in order for a place to grow and mature, it also needs a sense of place. I see change and continuity as things that go together and need each other, especially in a context like this: a small town that is never going to “Manhattanize” or become “unrecognizable,” and whose problem is more that nothing is allowed to change.

All of this is a very long way to introduce an unfortunate fact I recently learned: namely, that Rebecca Solnit, whose 22-year-old line distilled a lot of my thinking about place, is in fact a standard-issue San Francisco NIMBY.

She was interviewed in this piece for The Nation, following the Chesa Boudin recall in San Francisco. It features this unfortunate bit:

The YIMBY (“Yes in My Back Yard”) movements pushing a maximal growth agenda that includes “streamlining” environmental reviews to spur more building, principally of market-rate housing. This agenda is part of what the writer Rebecca Solnit calls the “free-market fundamentalism” that has become a local religion. “The constant narrative going on for decades is that if we just build enough buildings, housing will become affordable,” Solnit told me. “But we have more than 40,000 vacant units here,” she notes, citing a city report. “We have a distribution problem, not a supply problem.”

I guess The Nation is so far left that they don’t even have to characterize any of this as right-wing; even centrist is a dirty word! What Solnit says here is typical “left-NIMBY” stuff, and it’s not the only place she’s said stuff like this.

It’s disappointing, because it makes me wonder if 1) the beautiful sentiment in Wanderlust is a sort of post hoc glorification of places never changing that I fell for, or 2) if it really is difficult-to-impossible to be in favor of growth and also have a genuine attachment to and appreciation of what already exists.

Come to think of it, I suppose I would be sad if those oversized chairs were taken away, and if that garden center on the edge of town became a cookie-cutter subdivision. Am I just a NIMBY?

What I try to do here is find the balance between the twin errors of encasing everything in amber, and treating everything that already exists as a blank slate for the new and improved future. I had assumed, based on that single line, that Solnit was someone who had balanced these poles, but apparently not. (Here’s a response from someone in the San Francisco tech industry to one of Solnit’s critical pieces. Both are worth a read if all of this interests you.)

Well, what do you think? How do you actually balance these opposite impulses? Is it silly, or deeply human, or both, to mourn, say, an old sign or a couple of fake chairs along a highway? Does the fact that ordinary bits and pieces of the built landscape take on real meaning say anything about what we should build? How do you grow and enhance places so that they come to feel, as writer Josh Delk once perfectly put it, “more like themselves”?

Take it away—and have a happy Independence Day! Thank you, really, for signing up and reading along. Many of you have just recently signed up, and this piece touches on themes I’ve written about heavily, so I’ve included extra related reading links today. Check them out!

Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

NIMBYism and Existence Value

NIMBYism, Cassette Tapes, Nostalgia, and the Future

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

Funerals for Buildings

Signs of Change

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