For our first hike, we had 30 people head down to Pågat. After that we had 40 people hike down to Cetti and Sella Bay. All in all, the past three weeks of hiking have been very exciting and inspiring. So many of the people who attended had never been hiking before and never realized that there could be such historical richness to places which when driving by on the road just look like a mountain, a jungle, or a beach. Apart from all the specific historical value which people learned over the past three weeks, there was one aspect of these trips which was for me the most important, and that was how the places we went to and the landscapes we experienced challenged the way we tend to think about Guam as a place.
For example, my cognitive map of Guam, the network of images, symbols, ideas, sights, smells, and so on which I use to imagine what Guam is on a daily basis is dominated by my classrooms where I teach in, the apartment complex where I live in, and the things I pass by the side of the roads as I travel. I spend most of my time in the central part of the island bouncing between Chålan Pågo, Hagåtña, Tamuning, Barrigåda and Mangilao. As such, Guam is a pleasant concrete jungle, dotted every once in a while with random clusters of green life and views of the ocean, wired together by sometimes crowded roads and power poles.
I am used to this image and although I know there are exceptions to it, I know that don’t stray too far from what I imagine Guam to be. I think most people live in the same assumptions, since it makes life easier to live, and you can go about your day not fearing that something radically different is out there, lurking somewhere, waiting to surprise you, shock you and make you re-evaluate your place in the world. For example, places with regular and dependable power and water service, go into shock when that service was interrupted. It is not a mere matter of being inconvenienced or not being able to do the things you normally do with such ease, but it is because of the way that image of the world gets torn in half. Things which you accepted that funneled life and meaning into you, become lifeless and blights. Power poles, computers, cars, buildings, when stripped of electricity become scars, sores, on the land, prisons of pointlessness. They mock you because of the way you once relied so much on them, believed in their invulnerability and attributed to them an eternal quality.
In most ways, having your cognitive map challenged is something which people work throughout their lives to never experience. But one of the reasons why I love hiking to Mount Låmlam is precisely because it challenges my map of Guam, it forces me to see Guam in a whole new way and walk through it. From the peak you can see bays around the Southern part of Guam, and see a ridgeline which extends miles south. When you look northeast you can see Fena Lake. As you hike the hill through oceans of sword grass, you eventually come to the top, and within the crater of Mount Låmlam you find limestone forests with plenty of pugua’, and deer and pig tracks everywhere.
At different points you become lost in fields of foxtails, and whenever that happens, it usually dawns on me that my map of Guam has just slipped through my fingers and floated away. There are no buildings around me, no roads, no internet, no cell phone service, no electricity.
Some of the value of these hiking experiences and seeing other versions of Guam is that feeling of visiting a place which has yet to be destroyed and has not been paved over. That is part of the reason why so many people feel that Pågat should not be used as a buffer zone for a firing range and cut off from the public. This is a sort of primal pull, but it is not the real reason why those fields of foxtails near the top of Mount Låmlam enchant me so much.
Speaking from the perspective of my own cognitive map, it is refreshing to see my limits challenged. It is beautiful to be reminded that what I know, what I want, what I think, is hardly the limits to the world around me. It goes far beyond, endlessly beyond what I can manage or handle. Man has destroyed and contained much in an effort to deny this, but even so, the world continues on.
When I stand at the edge of that field of foxtails, I feel as if I am standing at the edge of my own imagination.
We place a map over the world in hopes of dominating it, of managing it and making it ours, but the universe always awaits at the edges of our fences and our walls, waiting to rush in and wash away all that semblance of control and order. But at that edge, where we end and the world begins, that is where human creativity, progress (in good or bad forms), imagination stem from. When I look out over that field, I am reminded of something so obvious yet so powerful. That the world is far beyond what I can imagine, and more importantly that it can be made completely different than what I imagine it to be now. A field of flowers can be bulldozed into a parking lot, and a parking lot can be returned to a field of flowers. But when one stands at the border between the human and the natural, the question becomes one of willingness to take that risk, to seek to harness that power to change the world, or simply leave it as it is.
MICHAEL LUJAN BEVACQUA
Mangilao, Guam
