Place and Connections

In class we discussed what made one connected to a place or claim a place as our own: "my stream" or "my island" or "my street." And this made me think about where people feel a lack of connection to a place like the difference between calling it your house or your home. I think that it is not dependent on the landscape or the location because there are beautiful or interesting places that do not inspire connections in every person and there are ugly or scary places that people connect with immediately. I think that the people matter and this is why I think that Ed Kanze found connection to the Adirondacks in part because of his familial connection to the park.
I feel no connection to the place of my birth and upbringing. Every time I go home I cannot wait to leave the dry, brown, wildfire scarred landscape that some people adore. But although the landscape to me is off-putting, I think the lack of personal connection to the place is just as important. I know a fair amount about the place I was raised. In Bioregionalism, I knew the places mentioned about Reno and I can answer a good number of the bioregionalism quiz questions but I did not feel the connection that the article mentioned often accompanied such knowledge. Instead, I feel more connection to the Northeast - a place I have inhabited intermittently and narrowly for just over two years. I cannot answer the bioregionalism quiz questions about any place in the Northeast but I feel closer to the landscape and closer personally.
Ed Kanze writes extensively about his familial history in the Adirondack Park and why this is a strong point of connection for him. I agree. I've family who arrived on the Mayflower and never left the Northeast and although I cannot answer Onno's question about why this connection matters, I just know that somehow it does. My family in the small Reno/Carson/Tahoe area is a recent and small transplant and I feel the lack of connection in a lack of areas that could be addressed in terms of personal history. There are only four relatives of mine buried in the area, there is no story of their connections to the place other than job availability, and there is nothing keeping us there. Myself, my aunt, my sister, and my two cousins  have all left. Nothing was keeping us there. I hope that more of the nature writing we read in class covers this familial tie to a landscape, region, or place because the landscape alone, in my experience, is not always enough to elicit a connection like that found in the three articles we read for today.