NAture ANd Nurture
Gender imprints on the land
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY
RACHEL BARRETT
About five yeArs Ago, my friend Josiah, a young man
raised by a Mennonite minister, along with his best friend Ezekiel
and other childhood friends, started cultivating land and their own
versions of masculinity on a large property in the rural Catskill
Mountains of upstate New York. This place quickly became their
domain, as Josiah and his friends began reconciling themselves
with manhood.
Two years later, a close childhood friend of mine started sharing a home with seven other women in Bolinas, a reclusive and
unconventional beachside community in northern California.
Their desire was to live an intrinsically shared existence with one
another and the land. There are no longer any true communes in
Bolinas, but that same mentality, with its gentle and near-religious
connection to the landscape, persists.
There were clear di=erences between these two groups—one
on the East Coast, one on the West; one an old farmhouse of young
men who came together to work the land, the other a bungalow of
young women who came together inspired by one another and the
beauty of the earth. But I was interested in the similarities, the
myths manifested, the way reality and fantasy converged in both
these places, the fictions these young men and women created for
themselves. As these two groups connected to the land and matured
in their own ways, I found that the landscapes themselves began
to take on a gender-specific appearance. A
