Rod’s Notebook

Encountering Nature

In popular culture, fewer and fewer of us have direct contact with what we might call wild nature. We don’t make our livings by hunting, clearing fields, or pasturing livestock in the mountains. Rather, mass media, particularly television and film documentaries, shape our understanding of nature and wild places. Wild nature has been transformed into a spectacle in popular culture, something for our amusement and entertainment.

I was conducting research in the historical records of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park when these observations were driven home to me in a very powerful way. Serengeti, like the Amazon, is one of those iconic wild places in popular culture. Who hasn’t seen a Serengeti cheetah blazing across the television screen in pursuit of a panicked wildebeest?

I spent my days looking through archived files at the park’s research headquarters and my evenings at the Seronera Wildlife Lodge, a luxury hotel in the heart of the African “wilds.” I would watch vanloads of American and European (but no African) tourists return to the lodge from their daily wildlife safaris. We would all perch on the balcony with beers or cocktails, watching the elephants, gazelles, and baboons gather at the artificial watering hole just meters away. Drawn to water in the arid landscape, these beasts daily provided us with an entertaining spectacle of wild African nature without our having to leave the bar!

After dark, people would move inside and gather around a television in the lounge and watch—wait for it!—television documentaries about wildlife in Serengeti. I was witnessing an almost surreal feedback loop in which urbanized tourists, drawn to East Africa by the television documentaries they’d viewed in their living rooms in the United States, now sat in front of a television set in the middle of Serengeti watching the wildlife they’d seen that day or hoped to see tomorrow. It seemed as if the television in the lounge was needed to reinforce the reality of the actual experience of viewing African wildlife firsthand. Such is the power of mass media in shaping human encounters with wild nature in popular culture.

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In the United States and Canada, folk architecture today is a relic. Traces can still be found here and there and provide both a sense of past cultural landscapes and enduring symbols of cultural identity. One needs to know what to be on the lookout for in folk houses, however, in order to properly "read" the landscape. Yankee folk houses, for example, are of wooden frame construction, and shingle siding often covers the exterior walls. They are built with a variety of floor plans, including the New England "large" house, a huge two-and-a-half-story house built around a central chimney and two rooms deep. As the Yankee folk migrated westward, they developed he upright-and-wing dwelling. These particular Yankee houses are frequently massive, in part because the cold winters of the region forced most work to be done indoors.

By contrast, Upland Southern folk houses are smaller and built of notched logs. Many houses in this folk tradition consist of two log rooms, with either a double fireplace between, forming the saddlebag house, or an open, roofed breezeway separating the two rooms, a plan known as the dogtrot house (Figure 2.47). An example of an African American folk dwelling is the shotgun house, a narrow structure only one room in width but two, three, or even four rooms in depth. Acadiana, a French-derived folk region in Louisiana, is characterized by the half-timbered Creole cottage, which has a central chimney and built-in porch. Scores of other folk house types survive in the American landscape, although most such dwellings are now abandoned.

Canada also offers a variety of traditional folk houses (see Figure 2.46). In French-speaking Québec, one of the common types consists of a main story atop a cellar, with attic rooms beneath a curved, bell-shaped (or bell-cast) roof. A balcony-porch with railing extends across the front, sheltered by the overhanging eaves. Attached to one side of this type of French-Canadian folk house is a summer kitchen that is sealed off during the long, cold winter. Often the folk houses of Québec are built of stone. To the west, in the Upper Canadian folk region, one type of folk house occurs so frequently that it is known as the Ontario farmhouse. One-and-a-half stories in height, the Ontario farmhouse is usually built of brick and has a distinctive gabled front dormer window. Now that we have reviewed a few of the common styles of North American folk architecture, you can test your ability to identify them in the landscape (Figure 2.48).

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