American photographer Shane Rocheleau contemplates his home of Lakeside, Virginia in the wake of November 9, 2016. While the election results were shocking at the time, Rocheleau also found a lot of things that made sense, especially considering how many people there were “merely treading water,” unable to separate the American Dream from its oppugnant reality. Rocheleau draws parallels between the Red-bellied Woodpecker (a native species) and the invasive European Starling:
“Under the patchy lawns of Lakeside, there lies a pre-colonial “Oughnum”, or “good hunting land” in the indigenous Algonquian dialect…. In early Spring one year, my family and I watched a pair of Red-bellied Woodpeckers bore a nest for their clutch at the rotting end of a shorn bow. They did their work several paces from where we sat each afternoon. Eventually, the excavating stopped and the female settled in. We joyfully awaited little chirps. One morning, we found two eggs broken beneath the nest and another unbroken at the center of the yard. In an Orwellian nod to Manifest Destiny, European Starlings had raided the nest and made it their own.”
For Rocheleau, Lakeside is representative of countless spaces built to feign American exceptionalism–“a place with 11,000 human beings doing the best they can, ugly and beautiful things alike, while drowning in the reality that dreaming yields far less than its promise.”