The Removal of Hands
Did you hear? Hatchquarters is in the works. Right now, the location just northwest of downtown Bellaire looks like fifty-two acres of rolling hills, meadows, and beech-maple forest. In time, it’ll also look like “an ecological farmstead, maker space, artist residency, and community space.”
In the depths of this past December, I walked the hills soon to be home to the earthen model. Hatchquarters felt more like something about to take root than something hovering aloft. It was the first time I’d tried to consider the Hatchquarters project in place, and I wanted to visit the spot and ask some questions.
I had been in those meadows before.
In the late summer of 2021, the first event I helped with after being hired by Crosshatch took place there — string instruments sang, the claps of feet on stage sounded, and the sun sunk behind trees, just behind the ballet performance. It was an early glimpse into the power of connecting to a place in a new way. I hadn’t experienced anything like it before and was thankful for the first-hand encounter with the art.
And before that, I had met with Brad and Amanda one sunny morning in those same grasses. They had proposed the location as the site of the final interview for a position with Crosshatch. As I made my way to meet them, a van pulled out just in front of me as I rounded the curves. With each turn that the van made, with me following just after, it became clearer that, yes, Brad and Amanda had been in a hurry, just as I was. They are human, just as I am.
After the interview, while walking back to the cars, Brad lifted some remnant of fieldwork; I don’t remember what exactly. He looked for a spot where there’d soon be a monarch emerging. Sure enough, there hung the chrysalis. I said something about it being a proper metaphor, and he brushed the comment aside. There was enough significance in the thing itself, at-hand, as it was.
I’d also worked up a sweat on that land a handful of times, gathering firewood with Doug Bedell. I’m not sure how old Doug is, but judging by his lack of fatigue, he must be in his twenties. Judging by his stories of the land, he’s ancient. (Ask him for an actual number if you like — I’m confident he’s somewhere in between the two.) Doug and Linda live next door to the Hatchquarters parcel, which once was part of a larger property that belonged to the Bedell family. Their living room window overlooks the fields that Doug and I had parked in, walked through, and disappeared into the woods from, chainsaws in tow.
I bring up these instances to say: I’ve already known that land. Even if just a small bit. And I’ve already known it to be useful. It might appear empty or underutilized to some, but I’ve known it as home to art and handwork and the gathering of provisions, and host to conversations of vocation, future vision, and natural beauty.
That fullness led me to question, with the trace of my footsteps disappearing as I walked through the bluster: How will things shift? As time passes, how will this land be known? And will it be an improvement?
One might answer the last question: “Of course it will. How could it not — there’s nothing there now.”
This idea of vacancy lives at one end of the spectrum. Land which is undeveloped, which is untouched, is meaningless and without yield. It’s waiting to be transformed into something of value. Until then, it’s nothing.
And residing on the other end of that spectrum is the opposite — land that has been developed and bears the mark of human intervention has been desecrated. It once was everything, and now it is nothing.
I pine for a third way. And this third way doesn’t require a reinvention of the wheel. It asks simply for remembering.
If you were at the dance event in the meadow years ago, you likely were handed a folded paper program. Along with details on the evening, the dance project, dancers, and musicians, it included a short recollection of the story of the grounds where we gathered. Included in that:
“This land, like the lands and water around it, has long been inhabited by two of the three Anishinaabe nations known as the People of the Three Fires — the Ojibwe and Odawa (the Potawatami resided to the south, and along the west shore of Lake Michigan). These lands were ceded in 1836 under the Treaty of Washington, which was secretly revised after, and much more needs to be told about that, and about the other many abuses of colonial settlement, than can be said here.”
That excerpt hints at the bleak realities of the thirteen million acre land transfer from Native Americans, while the rest of the write-up points to pivotal Hatchquarters site history in 1872, 1899, and 2012. Each of those deserves their own essays, but here I want to focus on a brief phrase: “This land…has been long inhabited by…the People of the Three Fires.”
Aeonic work in land management and care made that long habitation possible. Those who tended the land understood human livelihood to be a single part of a complex cycle of actual regeneration and actual conservation of ecological cycles. Again, First Nations peoples lived on and cared for that land immemorially. The only way that longevity is possible, the only way those ties between people and place are sustained, is through wisdom, time-wrought knowledge, and hand-hewn care. The Hatchquarters location had been shaped by human hands with care, just like every place with a long memory, and that care was returned from the land in the form of food, shelter, tools, medicine, teaching, and belonging.
Recently, as we spoke while looking afield through the large window offering sight of the Hatchquarters property, I sensed anticipation in Doug and Linda’s voices. They want to see that land again shaped with care by human hands. Doug noted the autumn olive and spotted knapweed that are taking hold. I remembered seeing both, bare and blowing in the wind, on my winter snow walk months earlier. He also mentioned multi-flora rose, honeysuckle, ground hemlock, and garlic mustard, all threats to the land and soil.
“Threat” is probably not the best word. While those plants might make the brush impenetrable and crowd out other desirable shrubs, trees and leafy greens, they aren’t permanent additions aiming for permanent destruction. They’re fulfilling their role in reshaping the landscape with consideration of the soil conditions and current circumstances. Viewed through a long enough timeframe, the land would continue to shift like those hardy stems in the snow — a slow-moving dance of perpetual motion and balance — and these plants make that happen. In the short term, though, these plants do make things difficult.
That’s where the work of the hands comes in. While the art and ecology in Crosshatch’s name can refer to the aesthetics of the natural world and the intricacies of more-than-human ecological cycles, Crosshatch also values human involvement.
We’re biased.
We’re a bunch of bipeds who find ourselves here.
Again, we’re a bunch of bipeds. And we find ourselves here.
Those are the circumstances. So, how do we partner in building cultures of equilibrium like those who were here before us? How do we labor in service of loamy soil and diverse forests that offer verdant growth while asking for care? And how can we fill our days with work that’s worth doing?
That’s three ways of asking the same thing — just what are our hands for?
Like most big questions, that’s not satisfied by any pat answer. Fitting responses look and function more like lived trajectories. I hope that Hatchquarters hosts and launches a multitude of these trajectories. I see no problem with starting small. That’s the first step in developing over time into a living forum for learning together what people are for*, which is to say, building a home for the work of art and the work of ecology without the removal of hands.
*I’d be in the wrong if I used this derivative without nodding towards Wendell Berry’s essay collection What Are People For, 1990.
