Not Up, Not Down, Just "Here"

You Are Here

A poem by Jonathan Harrington

It happened on the Sunshine State Parkway in Florida

somewhere between Orlando and West Palm Beach.

A young woman, well dressed, attractive

but obviously unbalanced,

wandered around the rest stop food court

where travelers fumbled their snacks and soft drinks.

I overheard her mumbling

as she stopped the elderly, sunburned gentleman

in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses

his finger poised on the button for M&M's.

I was buying Doritos from the vending machine beside them

as she asked the man, confused, babbling…

"Why are we here?"

The elderly gentleman cleared his throat

but did not back away,

looked at her oddly but without disdain…nodding.

"Where am I going?" She pleaded, nearly in tears.

"Where am I?"

The gentleman pointed to the map on the wall,

touched his finger, almost lovingly,

to the bright red arrow showing our position on the highway

and in a soft and kindly Southern drawl

read her the bold, black print beneath:

"Ma'am," he said gently, "You Are Here."

When in Alaska, I've always listened with interest to people who, when talking about the place, keep referring to "up here." As in, "Up here, it's really cold," or "We eat a lot of salmon up here." Statements like that.

This is often a sign to me that the speaker has moved from somewhere else, and in spite of perhaps having lived in Alaska for quite some time, their "center" still exists on an important level somewhere "down" south where they came from.

When someone says, "up here," I figure that the person is either new to the state, has never really become Alaskan at heart, or is living in the area to take advantage of an opportunity but will one day be heading back "down" to the center of civilized life somewhere in the lower forty-eight states.

What makes them feel that where they live is "up?" Why aren't they just "here?" It's as if they haven't fully taken to the place where they live; they have failed to put down life-sustaining roots. They still are deeply, and probably permanently, centered somewhere else.

The same phenomenon happens in Mexico, among the foreigners, at least among expats of U.S. and Canadian origins. Except, of course, in Mexico we are all "down here." Folks live somewhere away from the psychological center of their lives, or where they came from --"home"-- and have left enough of themselves behind that they forever feel the separateness, and don't feel completely "here" anywhere else.

A well-known geographer named J. B. Jackson offers this explanation:

It is place, permanent position in both the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity.*

This certainly makes sense and explains a few things. People unwittingly signal with their choice of words something about their identity and sense of place in the world. Given the conventions of how we look at a globe, with north up on the top and south down on the bottom, it's not surprising that people use these terms to describe where they are on earth, using the position of "home" as a point of reference.

An interesting thing is that some people never talk in this way, and I am a member of that group. When I am in Mexico, as I am at the moment, I don't feel like I am down here. I just feel here. When I am in my birthplace and longtime home in Alaska I don't feel like I am up there. I am just there.

Which beings me back to a favorite poem by my friend Jonathan Harrington, You Are Here. It poses three questions. The first is, "Why are we here?" Well, I am not going to attempt to tackle perhaps the biggest philosophical question in all of human history in the space of this post. But I can easily answer the other two questions.

"Where am I going?"
Where is not nearly as important as the quality of the journey.

"Where am I?"
I'm not up. I'm not down. I'm just here.

You Are Here reproduced with permission of Jonathan Harrington

*Jackson, J. B. (1984). Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press: 152.