Personal/ Public

Reflecting on the topic of "public space" that has been discussed in class has forced me to look into myself and decide what I find to be the most meaningful characteristics of public space. I think a public space's ability to provide a platform for pedestrians to network and become connected with their surroundings (discussed in the Nato Thompson reading) resonates with me the most.

Additionally, I find it curious that while involved in a social network, public space can also offer moments of solitude. There is a park in southern Indiana that my family visits religiously every three years to celebrate our family reunion. The park is made up of over 400 acres of lakes and rivers, surrounded by lush pine forests, prairies, and meadows.

Through the park are narrow paved roads to guide visitors to the different locations of the park. (Pool, Horse barn, boat launches, tennis courts, camp sites, cabins, DNR office, etc.) During our stay in the park, I enjoy riding my bicycle around the park on these roads. While it used to be a sublime experience for me as a child, I grew to become very familiar with it with age. Now the roads and paths are predictable to me. I know where to speed up to gain momentum for a hill and where to expect dangerous curves. Along with the sense of orientation I've gained while navigating the park roads, I've acquired a favorite place. A part of the road that I travel separates two large lakes. During any time of the day there is a definite beauty in the openness of the space, but my favorite time to linger is after the sun has set and the stars have come out. Because this site is in the center of a huge forest with no light pollution and separating two lakes, there is an unbelievable visibility of the stars. Members of my family like to gather and lay in the road for hours to look at the stars, usually in silence punctuated by outbursts every few minutes when a shooting star passes.

My favorite part of this experience is how mischievous I feel by lying in the middle of the road. If I think deeper about this experience in relation to some of the class readings, I realize how peculiar, yet contrived, the experience really is. Star-gazing while laying on a paved road isn't a very common thing but the park roads were designed to make a platform for this experience, consciously or not. After all I would not have access to the site if it weren't paved, as there are probably thousands of intriguing nooks in the park that I am unaware of simply because I cannot access them.

This experience also exists simultaneously in my mind as a social experience in public, and a moment of solitude in nature. I find them to be inseparable experiences. This is because the point of attraction is nature, but it is also a spectacle. There is a collective pool for the broader experience of stargazing with family, but also an individual experience within that collective. This has always been the case for me at least. I always tend to tune out the people around me as I attempt to mentally place myself (the micro) in the universe (the macro). So I think that there is an undeniable power that nature has in reminding me that I am a single working mechanism of the entire universe, yet a connected part in the greater mechanism that is the universe.

Coordinates: 37 25.818 'N 122 05.36'W