Geography From a Puppy's Point of View

I.

I've been teaching the introductory Human Geographies course this spring and spending a lot of time trying to give other ways of understanding geography. "It's not just facts on maps," I tell them. There is, of course, a long history of debate within the discipline about the metaphors we use to talk about the world -- some make use of the grid, a measured and measurable space within which our social lives can be located; but others say, no, it's not enough to simply think of space -- and thus the world -- as the only way to imagine the geographies of our lives. They point to connection as an alternative metaphor or analytical lens.

This is, as one might imagine, a bit abstract for an opening lecture.

II.

At the same time that I have been teaching this course, I have also been encountering the world at the other end of a puppy's leash. Few things more humbling than a puppy to remind us of the limits of adult human reason. (Perhaps children, too, but that's another conversation.)

But there has been a pleasure to watch the puppy begin to link together the world in a way that makes sense to him. He lacks -- I assume -- any picture of the world as a whole, much less any awareness of this vast vast world as a selection of objects existing within space. Instead, he smells. First the back deck. Then the patch of snow in the corner of our lawn where he pees. Then the stone wall that lines our backyard, the curve at the corner where the deer left their droppings. And so on, out into the world.

III.

Imagining geography from a puppy's point of view.

IV.

Last night I took him outside to pee -- he, focused on that business, ignoring me and the world beyond. I looked to my right, peeking around the edge of our neighbor's small garage, a young doe, all round flanks and open ear. Two more behind her. I know them, I think, a small group who malinger in our neighborhood. Sometimes we see their paths traced out on fresh snow or catch them ducking through winter-sparse hedges to raid the bird feeder of a neighbor. But for the puppy -- when he suddenly saw them -- they were knew. These strange foreign shapes, their shadows lined out against clapboard sheds by the neighbor's security light, staring back at the puppy.

How strange this world is, or could be.