The color of the Catskill’s mountains is what I remember from the Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. I remember the upper riches of the Hudson River. The Hudson River is present in the story, glimpsed from ridge tops and in Van Winkle’s return to his village and in reading the story I cannot escape the palette of the Hudson River School. “Panting and fatigued, he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage that crowned the brow of a precipice. From an opening between the trees he could overlook the lower country for many a mile of rich woodland.” The novelist, critic, and publisher, Matthew Stadler wrote in his essay published in the Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art exhibition catalog, “The Regime of the Picturesque:”

Painters [in America] had no society, only the picturesque conventions they had brought with them. Lacking cities, they painted dispatches from Eden. The problem wasn’t broadly American; during these same middle decades of the nineteenth century, the painters of the Hudson River school, including Sanford Gifford, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Church, pioneered what came to be known as American luminism. The advantages that helped catalyze their innovations expose, by contrast, the unique shape taken by the regime of picturesque out West. […] Embedded in a robust dialogue of city and country, deeply informed by contemporary European discussions, the society these men enjoyed helped to shape the landscapes they painted.”

There is in one hand in the Hudson River School a narrative of settlement and containment of the wild. Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm is a view from the wilderness to a settled countryside. The painting is framed by a bundle of wilderness, and in the distance a slough curls through a cultivated landscape. The contrast of wilderness to farmland is picturesque. The wilderness is contained or even encapsulated by an urban point of view. But at the same time in almost all of these paintings, despite their luminous browns and greens, there is the physical and physic space of the wilderness that is outside settlement.

Matthew Stadler has been thinking about the breakdown of the old city vs. country metaphor for a couple of years now. In particular, Stadler doesn’t see the metaphor as being a particularly useful way of understanding cities on the West Coast of America. Nor does he see it as a particularly useful metaphor for understanding the contemporary urban environment globally where old city cores may signify “centers” but economic or cultural vitality is suffused into former satellites regions called suburbs, strips, or just the boonies. He published a book, Where We Live Now, a year or so ago that contains an anthology of related writing to some of the ideas he began to explore in his essay from the Baja to Vancouver exhibition catalog. His book upends the notion of the “city” as thoroughly as Jane Jacob’s The Economy of Cities upends the idea of “the country.” In Jacob’s book she makes a persuasive argument that cities probably developed before the domestication of animals (and therefore the rural landscape of pasture and farmland). She portrays rural areas as an outgrowth of the urban fabric. Stadler also makes some startling observations about density and economic activity in the contemporary city. For instance in Seattle, suburban areas such as Federal Way and Des Moines contain denser and more diverse populations than the creamy white center, the City of Seattle. A similar effect can be found in Portland, where the suburban area of Beaverton contains much of the features we associate with the cosmopolitan: diversity of population, diversity of economic activity, and density.

The city can be seen as the suburb; the suburb can be seen as the city. But there is another space that permeates both of these spaces: the wilderness.

Rip Van Winkle encounters the possibility of a transformation in the wilderness. He does nothing in particular to have this event happen to him except to enter it. He somehow wanders into a place in the wilderness populated by men who have slipped out of time. And in this space, Winkle gets drunk, falls asleep, and when he wakes it is not clear to him that twenty years have passed. Time and progress do not exist in the wilderness. He returns to his village to find that American Progress has continued. Where a twenty-year difference was hardly noticeable in the wilderness, the village is hardly recognizable. The American Revolution has come and gone, and now there is a new social order. Winkle doesn’t recognize the American Flag.

My own experience in the wilderness is like this. There is a space in America outside, or under, or beyond the city and country. And this space, whatever you want to call, it permeates the West. Anchorage is overrun with bears. Mountain lions wander suburban yards in the outskirts of Seattle. I found an Auburn High School towel hanging from a branch on a ridge miles from the nearest trail and dozens of miles from the nearest road. The neat division of town and country does not apply anymore. They do not exist as nearly demarcated zones on a topographical map any longer. In the Wizard of Oz, the edge of the city is bound by a vast medieval style wall; but in Seattle a driver passes over the Snoqualmie Pass on Interstate-90 and at the base of the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River subdivisions begin to appear among the Douglas Fir and gradually they become apartment buildings, strip malls, and valleys filled with warehouses and at points rise into skyscrapers in Bellevue, Factoria, and Seattle. At no point does a driver come to a gate. Never does a drive have to ask for passage. The city has been imposed over a wilderness that remains in greenbelts and freeway medians.

Whatever happened to Rip Van Winkle can happen anywhere. The wilderness in America is the inverse of the city. Ecological proponents may believe that the wilderness means, “no people.” But even so, the wilderness cannot help but permeate the city, just as the city in this day and age permeates the wilderness. But, the two spaces are opposites. Seattle writer Charles Mudede in writing about Seattle’s South End, the home of Washington State’s infamous serial killer, The Green River Killer, calls this a negative land. His description applies, I think, to the wilderness that permeates West Coast cities rather than just the urban drainage of the Green River (Duwamish River).

The doomed cows, the dead tractors, the fishing shacks, the low clouds, the bad land, the bloody brambles, the lonely farmhouse (which seems to have been placed here by some act of sorcery instead of by the hard work of a farmer)—all of it convinces you that Satan does exist, and operates in places like this. — Negative Land by Charles Mudede, The Stranger

The same inhabited emptiness can be found in Monroe, Everett, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, LA. A frequent phrase used in describing the victims of the Green River Killer was, “an abandoned strip of highway.” The highway described (Pacific Highway) is in constant use. But at the same time that is in use, if you stand on the shoulder a car comes and leaves and there is just the rusting of crows in the blackberries and the close-by groan of Alaska Airways jets falling to Sea-Tac Airport. It is the overlap of the urban the wild that strikes me as a particular feature of American landscape, and specifically the West Coast landscape.

Rip Van Winkle’s story strikes me as a key articulation of the energy resulting from the overlap of the wilderness and the city. There is at the heart of Rip Van Winkle a sense that progress in America is a dream. Progress may provide a new flag, more people, technology, but progress will never be able to truly settle or conquer the New World. The New World will always be unsettled.