Though it’s been available almost this whole century, I’ve just now had the delight of reading Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Reflecting on being lost in the woods leads her to reflect on the advantages—and for some people and some peoples, the impossibility—of being lost on this Earth. She explores other lostnesses, including abandoned ruins, lost loved ones, lost history.
Alternating chapters are titled “The Blue of Distance.” In one of those chapters, she digs deep into her love of older country and western music.
And if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love, they were also love songs about places, whose names were recited like incantations and caresses. The names or just the facts of bridges, mountains, valleys, towns, states, rivers (lots of rivers), highways were recalled in reverie, and psychic states themselves became places, “Lost Highway” and “Lonely Street.” So though they were overtly love songs, in most of them the landscape was a deeper anchor for being and the object of another, more enduring love. (p. 114-115)
Landscape as an anchor for being—what a revelatory image! When pulled away from a landscape I love, an intense longing for it will settle in. Being a literal sort of thinker, such longings lead me to want to pack a bag and go spend some deep time with the object of my affections.
For example, for many years, I longed for the Appalachian Mountains, for their vistas and cliffs, river gorges and creeksides. The smell and texture of those leaves underfoot. The people and their crafts. Their cooking. Their music. A longing that helped balance the difficulty of pulling up stakes when I moved to North Carolina in 2011.
Two years later, on a trip to those mountains, I met up with a part of myself I didn’t know was left behind when I’d moved west in 1985. From my poem, “Into the Blank”:
… Then I step for the first time in decades onto the Appalachian Trail. From five hundred miles north, my teenage self crashes headlong—the force of her plans, the vacuum of loss. Doors she never saw…
In that moment, I discovered that at least part of my longing for the land had been for a bit of Kelly lost along the way. “The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion,” Solnit writes. “Every love has its landscape.” (Speaking of love and landscape, see below for the full text of “Into the Blank.”)
Solnit’s writing unearthed another, very different memory from my time in North Carolina, one that had filled me with an eerie and overwhelming urge to hurtle into the countryside and get thoroughly lost. I had spent a surreal couple of hours in the grip of two simultaneous experiences of dystopia—one kind I had walked around and eaten lunch in (a particular exurban development) and the other I had visited via a reading by Hillary Jordan from her novel When She Woke, at a bookstore in said development.
The combination was too much and though I didn’t understand the need to get lost, I gave into it, trying desperately for a kind of geographical oblivion. Where I ended up was a wildlife viewing station on a reservoir called Jordan Lake (somehow the name wasn’t at all surprising), watching flocks of ducks splash across the water. And watching the water settle back into a placid mirror after they passed.
Now, reading in Solnit’s field guide her observation that being lost involves loss of control, that dystopic memory surfaces and that urge to get lost finally makes sense: In both dystopias, what felt so dismal can be framed as excesses of control—over nature and natural human inclinations, and over society as a whole. Perhaps I sought to balance those excesses through becoming physically lost. As for my ending up at a reservoir, well, the ducks at least were wild.
In Western Oregon we’ve had a gorgeous autumn. Though conifers dominate our forests and neighborhoods, we also have yellow maples and golden maples and red oaks and scarlet dogwood and each is made more intense by its dark green frame.
Trees lose leaves. We lose daylight (at a faster rate after the autumnal equinox). We pack up patio furniture, uproot spent growth from the garden.
What do these losses make room for?
Amid absence, what may become present?
Solnit again: “Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation.”
Moving into winter, I’m grateful to be provisioned with her reminder that what feels like loss, like absence, may hold a gift in its shadow. The challenge is to train our eyes to see it.
Into the Blank Our words cannot keep up, trip over our teeth. Like kids on a carousel, we circle all we do not know—how fast is too fast, which words hurt. This trip might bring each dream to life. Or worse. So my sister wrote down our motel, your license plate. Our pasts join us in the creaky wooden rockers we dragged from room to riverbank. We tally accounts—divorce, addiction, lives recovered. Questions not answered, but honed to a finer point, sketching life’s terrain. Then I step for the first time in decades on the Appalachian Trail. From five hundred miles north, my teenage self crashes headlong—the force of her plans, the vacuum of loss. Doors she never saw. You catch me in embrace. We stand— your feet in Tennessee, mine in Carolina. By Kelly Lenox. First published in the now-defunct The Halcyone.
It's happened to me. Returning to landscape where I grew up, I encounter parts of myself that I have missed through the years. Thanks for this post.
Characteristically thoughtful and beautiful. I'm curious if you've written about places that are "haunted." Or "haunting." Thank. you, Kelly!