R. E. Burrillo - The Backwoods of Everywhere: Words From a Wandering Local

Mixing fighting words and wonder, Burrillo extends the boundaries of backwoods to back yards, city riots, and the depth of the Grand Canyon. He reminds us to be vexed, amused, and serious about the mark we put on the world.

An entertaining wander through some serious topicswhiteness and racism, land use and abuse, and how our pasts shape and follow us. Burrillo is part philosopher, part activist as he explores numerous rabbit trails, but he shines most brightly when he returns to his beloved path of archaeology and Indigenous people, providing original insight, irony, and wit.

An eclectic constellation of essays inspired by the authors deep love of place, The Backwoods of Everywhere leads us into fascinating landscapes while compelling us to reassess both their exploitation and their preservation. By turns bracing and meditative, Burrillos compelling narrative voice illuminates how adventures far afield can inspire us to a vital reimagination of our concept of home.

words from a wandering local

R. E. Burrillo

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

Salt Lake City Torrey

First Torrey House Press Edition, June 2022

Copyright 2022 by R. E. Burrillo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-61-4

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-62-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941409

Cover photo by Jonathan T. Bailey

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Buck-Cockayne

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are on the homelands of Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught.

Baba Dioum, 1968

Make people laugh and they will care a shitload more about everything else you have to say.

Ryan Ryno Brannon, 2020

Few of us live lightly on this world. We interact with our neighborsboth human and nonhumanto varying degrees of interest or intensity. We have friends, colleagues, and foes within calling and occasionally striking distance. We shop for goods and services locally, or order them online using the local cell towers and a prayer they wont be rerouted to Antarctica. We mow or rake our lawns, sweep steps or sidewalks, chase sunbeams around our apartments with desperate houseplants, catch up on local news when nothing better is on, deal with local traffic jams and other local customs, complain about local politics and local weather, throw trash and recycling in local bins, drink at local bars, eat at local restaurants, and in general articulate with the places we live to an extent Im not sure most people fully appreciate.

The lessons these places have to teach us can be as varied as the places themselves. Sometimes we fit where we are like the teeth of a key in a long-sought lock, high points and low points interdigitating like they were made for each other. Other times, its precisely the opposite.

The ways we interact with different places can also vary considerably. In some places, for example, I was a bartender. In others, for better or for worse, an archaeologist. Some places Im the quiet guy, other places the loud one. Sometimes its the land itself that speaks loudest to me. Sometimes its the people. Or the local culture in general. Or local drama.

Sometimes its a deep and deafening silence.

Whatever the case, old Mark Twain was right when he described travel as fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. You cant be a local everywhere, and it can occasionally take a long timea lifetime, evento find ones true home. But the search can be rewarding all on its own.

And, anyway, what does being a local even mean? Ive spent long hours obsessing over this question. Do you have to be born there, wherever there is? Do you have to love the place, to be considered a local there? Does the place have to love you back?

From everything Ive seen, being a local means embodying the culture of the place where you live, for good or for ill, its definition being a definition both of itself and, to a certain extent, of you. When, in other words, the local customs, traditions, practices, and beliefsthe stereotypes, the expectations both good and bad, and the general, overall feelof a given place are a reflection of your own, then you are as much a part of that place as it is a part of you.

Thats home. It doesnt matter how you got there, whether by force or by choice, or at what time in your life. The door is always open to you, if you need it. For better or for worse, everything you want to know about your own self surrounds you like the childhood photos in your parents house, so that all you have to do is look around to see yourself.

Now, local is not the same as indigenous. Not by a long shot. I use that word a lot, sometimes with a lowercase i (as in a physical descriptor) and sometimes with an uppercase I (as in a cultural signifier, usually indicating the precontact inhabitants of postcolonial nations), and its one of those words that gets tossed around quite a bit by people who really dont understand what it means. Since it comes up a lot in the essays that follow, I should probably flesh it out now.

Critics, racists, and others skeptical of the terms very existence are often wont to point out how, given our collective point of evolutionary origin, nobody is technically indigenous to anywhere except Africa. Thus, they smugly conclude, everyone in places like the Americas are all immigrants, including the ones who arrived by paddling boats or chasing caribou or whatever tens of thousands of years ago. In a sense, this is truein the same sense that every plant on earth is an invasive and every animal is really just a complicated amoeba. It is, in other words, an impractical and highly suspect interpretation of the facts.

Human beings as we know them today do appear to have emerged in Africa, although there is some tantalizing evidence that other late-stage hominid species developed separately in other parts of the world before recombining with anatomically modern Homo sapiens to share some of the fun genes theyd innovated on their own. Even so, the point of origin for all those later