Lost

Last week I walked with a friend along a route that I have traversed many times in the past, and I somehow managed to get us lost. We were on the right path, but it suddenly looked unfamiliar to me, and I abruptly suggested that we go a different direction. We turned and climbed steadily up a long, steep road, and we soon realized this was not the way back, but we figured we might as well go to the top where we would have a view and reorient ourselves. Maybe there would even be cell service.

We were tired, but we saw where we had gone wrong, and it was easy to correct. I started thinking, though, about my propensity for getting lost, even in places that I have been to many times and should know intimately. It’s a lack of spatial intelligence, a form of myopia, a curious quirk in perspective. I zoom in and notice details, but I don’t think in terms of maps or overviews, or how places connect, and I’m easily confused. I don’t consciously observe what side the mountains are on, or where I last glimpsed the ocean, which could be key directional anchors, nor do I perceive which way the creek is flowing or the significance of that. And I often fail to note locations of the distinctive, immutable landmarks: a unique rock outcropping, a solitary grandfather tree, a place where trails intersect. “Whenever you come to a junction,” Monte always says, “take note!” That’s very wise advice; I should listen to my husband more often.

Anyway, it all becomes a blur, and before you know it, I am lost. There are no street signs or grids out here.

So I end up wandering around more than was needed, or depending on others and looking foolish to those who expect me to be an old pro here in this territory where I have been walking or riding my bicycle for decades. I do, however, notice a lot, gathering a bounty of odd little elements on every expedition, and this is not a bad way to experience a walk.

I recently came across a lovely old poem called Memory, by Thomas Bailey Adrich, which, in its 19th century language, beautifully expresses this mode of being in the world:

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour—
’Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May—
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

Yes, my mind lets go of a thousand things. But in the course of our disoriented hike, I noticed lime green lichen on the black bark of trees, I saw the creek water spilling over smooth white rocks and heard its sing-song murmur, I watched my friend running after her wind-borne hat. Beyond the crest of that hill that we had climbed needlessly, a narrow road curved and gleamed in the sunlight like a white ribbon, and the landscape opened out to a grassy stretch of pale russet tinged with yellow mustard. Haven’t we all watched petals falling and been entranced? That is the joy that arises in the present, the quiet, tactile wonder that for a moment eclipses all else. And memory holds onto it.

You could like being lost/once you’ve come this far/ said the late poet Sekou Sundiata. What you dream up is deeper/than what you know.

I don’t know if I’m lost or found, but I intend to keep wandering. There are many portals in the not-knowing, and places to pause and regroup and refuel. Even now, in my living room, there is a slant of sunlight on the rug that tugs me back to childhood, and I recognize myself before I lost the key, and that ancient sense of wonder and witness envelops me, and I am here.

In my last blog post, I wrote about being angry. I subsequently realized that at the bottom of my anger there is fear, and it is fear with good reason, but anger if not channeled in constructive ways and tempered by a sense of hope is not only useless but toxic to my own well-being, and it undermines real effort. It is hard to contain, and all I have to do is turn on the news or read a quick dispatch to feel the upset rising in my gut, but I know I need to find better ways to navigate.

In the meantime, what a journey it has been! I have an inventory of images in my head, an infinite vault that opens at random and releases memories without rhyme or reason, imbuing small moments with a kind of immortality. My brother Eddie sat on the cellar steps and told me not to let anyone see us cry. Our laundry hung from a clothesline overlooking an alley, and when a squirrel scampered on the fire escape, we were thrilled to have glimpsed wildlife, and the white stars I saw in the sky outside my grandfather’s pizza place on McDonald Avenue are the same ones I see more clearly now from here in Gaviota. The commuters on the train to downtown Chicago in 1971 were all reading their newspapers, except for one man snoring, his head tipped to the side, cheeks round as apples, and I hoped he didn’t miss his stop. A lady I worked with named Esther Brewer had been president of the local chapter of the Frank Sinatra fan club when she was a teenager; she gave me a pair of gold earrings that I still have. The Wrigley Building was illuminated like a white palace when we stepped out of the office on winter nights. My little girl went from pink skirts to horseback riding and suddenly walked into a dorm room in Boston and is now a mother living on the other side of the world.

I could go on and on, of course, but what difference does it make? “Yes. They’ll forget us,” said Chekhov. “Such is our fate, there is no help for it.” And maybe one day far in the future, we will appear in the memories of a grandchild, but eventually, in the words of Annie Ernaux, all will be erased and “…we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”

Perhaps, but I will use this mysterious power of language to write down what I can, to add to the motley register of details. Maybe this is vanishing even as I write, and maybe––in fact probably––it means nothing at all, but I feel compelled to notice and record. It is a form of honoring existence, a manifestation of gratitude, wonder, astonishment, defiance, and, dare I say, hope?

I am lost, I’m always lost, but I’m trying to find my way, and if I wander enough, perhaps I’ll discover a pattern or a path. Maybe the beauty and the weirdness and the evanescence was the point. Maybe I’ll see something from the crest of a hill I did not have to climb, and maybe the leaves that are trembling outside my window right now are trying to contain their excitement at simply being alive.  

I keep stumbling onto poems that give voice to what I am feeling, and there is this, by Lisel Mueller: Something secret is going on/So marvelous and dangerous/That if you crawled through and saw,/You would die, or be happy forever.

I am crawling through. I feel certain I am on the right track.