Snow lies thick on the ground here in Philadelphia. It’s been two years since we had a snowfall this significant, and it’s been a real joy to troop through the fresh powder blanketing my neighborhood.
It’s been said that the Inuit understand people in terms of the tracks they leave in the snow. An individual resting in one place is altogether different from a body in motion, and the trail left in the wake of that person is one format of their identity.1 The path you draw across the surface you traverse is unique to you, reflecting your desires and aversions, offering an archaeological mirror into your history. From one perspective, your track in the snow is your self-portrait.
An oft-overlooked aspect of what the smartphone has given/forced upon us is track-ability. More commonly discussed are developments like online anonymity, short form video, phone addiction, etc… But let’s consider GPS and geotracking for a moment. Google Maps, for instance, knows more about your location and the tracks you leave than perhaps anyone. What might that track say about you? For the sake of discussion, let’s name that trail of movement specific to you your “place-line.”
Hideo Kojima, famed video game auteur, created an entire video game based upon this idea. Death Stranding, his first game after his success with the Metal Gear Solid franchise, is a so-called “walking simulator.” As the protagonist, you trudge across vast wilderness landscapes as a delivery man, tasked with reconnecting disconnected nodes of human activity in a post-society re-wilded landscape. It’s high concept and vastly more complicated than I’m articulating here, but this idea of trails and path-making as constitutive to what it means to be human is not an exclusively academic concept. This big-budget PlayStation game is a 30+ hour meditation on place-lines, why you choose the paths you do, and what those paths mean. (It’s equally about mortality… thus the "Death” in the title) Do I recommend the game? If you’re reading this far, then yes, you should probably try the game. If I’ve already lost you, then there’s probably something better you can do with 30 hours of your life.
One of the concepts that Ingold and Kojima both orbit is the idea of trails as threads that are “knotted” around centers of interest. Cities, homes, food sources, etc. All of these attractive places can be thought of as knots of all the trails that lead to and from them. So long as they maintain their value to their visitors/inhabitants, these “knots” will continue to attract more and more overlapping paths and trails.
EO Wilson famously recognized that ants followed each other to food sources by aligning their movement along pheromone trails that had been laid by other ants that were successful in locating food sources. There was no radio network of language guiding their behavior, no common intelligence shaping their movements. Ants simply follow their noses. When a trail leading to a source of food returns, then it’s twice as strong as a trail that hoped to find food but never returned. And so another ant would follow that trail, and reinforce it that much more with their own success. Soon enough, a broad bundle of trails will all direct further traffic in a common direction, effectively communicating an intelligent course of action in a surprisingly humble manner.
If this idea of path dependency and reinforcement is scratching an itch for you, then I recommend checking out Robert Moor’s On Trails (clever title, eh?). It’s a beautifully written meditation on the significance of trails — their making and their use. In common with all the creators who I’ve already cited, Moor is interested in flattening his anthropology to the level of all mobile creatures, assessing human identity from the perspective of the walking foot.
Why does this matter to me, a realtor? Well, I routinely help people not only change their place-lines, but rip up the “knots” of their lives and re-plant them elsewhere. I sometimes have my clients map out a heatmap of their activities, drawing out on a paper map the lines that cross back and forth between their most-visited locales. As we evaluate the appropriateness of any other potential new home, we similarly do an audit of what the place-lines of that home would be. Pretty much everyone maps out their commute, and this is merely an extension of that:
What do these place-lines imply about your relationship to your car? to public transit? to walking vs. driving vs. biking through your neighborhood? What will that mean about how commonly you’ll interact with people near you? If you grow tired of driving everywhere in the future, will biking, walking, or busing even be an option available to you?
Who might share place-lines with you in this environment, and would you ever have the chance to befriend them (if that’s even of interest to you)?
As your kids age, what will their place-lines look like? What will that mean for your role as their parent? (i.e. will they be able to drive/transport themselves, or are you the chauffeur? Do you want to be the chauffeur?)
Are there places and communities along the place-lines in this new home that you will be drawn to merely by repetitive proximity? If you’re struggling with recovery, for instance, might we need to pay attention to what bars and breweries you’ll constantly be surrounded with? If you’re an avowed weightlifter but your new neighborhood is full of soccer fields, perhaps soccer might be in your future?
How tightly knotted do you want your place-lines to be? Beyond just commute, how broad will your network of paths be? For your gym, grocery shopping, church, school, friends, family? Do you need that space? Do you prefer a 15-minute radius?
Mapping your place-lines is a jumping-off point for reflection. As with any portrait, they are a means by which you can converse with yourself. If you have a few minutes, why not try sketching out what your place-lines might look like? After you’re finished, think back on the process: which lines were easy to remember and draw? Which lines are thicker/more important than you realized? Are there some lines you’re especially ashamed or proud of? Who do you share your lines with? If Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, who might the neighbor of these place-lines be? Are the knots along your place-lines where you want them to be? Are they even changeable?
Vine Deloria Jr once wrote that for Native folks, history is where things take place before when.2 Where matters more than when. Do you agree? Is when you do anything irrelevant to where you do it? Is your place-line more reflective of your identity than your calendar?
Tim Ingold wrote about this, and I first encountered the idea from folks who were studying with Willie James Jennings.
I don’t have the book with me at the moment, but let me know if you want a specific citation. It’s in God is Red.