THE LOCALIST PLACE I KNOW, MYSELF

Super 8 Film
Telecine, HD Video, NTSC, No Sound
03:27sec
2013

The Localist Place I Know, Myself, is the performed oral history recounting of how my father fell in love with trees. At eight years old he was taken out for an afternoon of scrambling around in the brush with his older brother Ernie. On this particularly windy day, they climbed a wing row of birch in the field that backed on to the house they were living in, climbing higher and higher in the trees until they reached the point where the trunk began to bend with ease, back and forth, to and fro, in the wind. That was the day my father fell in love with trees. He spent much of his youth climbing, perched in a tree, yearning for a new perspective. He has spent the rest of his life dedicated to the care and preservation of “the scrubbers of our atmosphere.”

Here I don his overalls and work gloves and free climb a 15ft sapling with reckless abandon, proceeding to ride the tree as if it were swaying in the wind. Free from rules or form, this action is a single attempt to tap into the metaphysical energy of my ancestry, to connect with my history, and to better understand the habits and actions that come as second nature to me, such as climbing trees.