206 pages
Published 2005
Read February 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Like a signature isotope sprinkled through my geology, I'm perennially homesick for the American West.
Some of my earliest memories were made in Prescott, Arizona, when I was 3 years old: Running laughingly around my father's truck until a dog, magnified and terrifying in childhood, rose up and snapped its jaws in front of my face. Huddled on the floor of the truck while our father visited his junkie friends on a cold Halloween night, my brother told me a red light in the sky was an invasion from Mars; I believed him implicitly, and feared.
My memories became consecutive and less sporadic when I was 6 and 7, living, however intermittently, in Colorado Springs: The weekly motel where we stayed, the Buffalo Lodge on El Paso Boulevard, its bathroom and kitchenette and my father's rising paranoia. The station wagon never emptied of trunks and boxes and suitcases, its sides wood-paneled, always ready for my father to pile us into it and drive restlessly east over the endless plains to the flat pewter clouds of Ohio before slewing the whole weighty load around and coming back again. The scattered weeks of first grade, broken up by my father's peregrinations, the kids who knew on some level that I was Weird and refused to talk to me, all save the dirty hillbilly child who ate ants on the dusty playground on warm days, to whom I confided that my father called me "Rick-tard" and who cheerfully began calling me that too, our shared assertion of power against our large and terrible fathers. The bitter Front Range winds and the ever-fluctuating weather. The brown boots with the red laces, the ones that always got me in trouble with the gym teacher, because I loved those boots and could never remember when I had to wear gym shoes because I was never in one place long enough to conceive of a schedule, much less think to commit it to memory. The occasional pilgrimage up to the Garden of the Gods or up US 24 into the mountains, the mountains, because in some cabinet in his brain not yet broken up and tossed into the fires of his paranoia, our father loved the mountains, loved the blue skies, loved the pines and the solitude and the sweet soft wind that could turn chill and harsh in a moment, and he wanted my brother and I to know that place.
In still later years, the road itself was my home, drawing lines across the wide emptiness of New Mexico and Arizona, Kansas, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon. Once we began sleeping in the car -- at first an exciting lark, an adventure that went sour with years until it became a hateful silent thing, a stunted teenage son and the rapidly degenerating father lost forever in delusion -- I grew intimate with strange lost corners of the Western states, applying names to places that had no names on my map, marking them as familiarly as the decayed carpet of my grandmother's Ohio house or the old empty field beside the Buffalo Lodge where once upon a time we'd played wiffle ball. I watched black crayfish crawl in a lazy plateau stream in New Mexico, and again on the other end of the state I found a hidden waterfall with a cave behind it, and I wanted to be Huck Finn and crawl inside and hide away from the adult world, but my father wouldn't let me nearer and ordered me away. In New Mexico, again, there was a desolate parking area on the side of a lost road, where an old windmill stood silent and still, where one morning in my first winter sleeping in the car I woke in a cocoon of silent white, and felt a chill deep inside when I first realized this was my life now, this was how things would be from now on. On another day, nearby, I touched the footprints of dinosaurs. In the Black Hills on a warm winter day I ventured onto the ice of a granite-bound lake. In Montana I woke to a thick rime of ice where my breath had frozen to the mouth of my sleeping bag. In the Oregon Outback I glimpsed scenery I had never imagined, massive volcanic hills cut and rounded by Ice Age torrents, now brown and inviting with prairie grass.
Some of my happiest adult memories, as well as some of the saddest, were made in New Mexico, Utah, California. Through all of them familiarity was mingled with discovery, the strange dislocation of seeing the scenes of childhood again through older eyes. And underlying everything was a pull, sure as a lodestone, a homing instinct orienting me to my proper terrain. I may have lived eleven years now on the Atlantic coastal plain, but it has never felt like home, not the way the West feels like home, has always felt like home.
All of that is a big bunch of words to introduce this book -- a lot of words to map out why Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share. "I grew up with landscape as recourse," she says, "with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit." The social realm has always been, will always be a land foreign to me, a faded charcoal sketch of monsters and impossible creatures on dry vellum. Landscape, no matter how remote, no matter how exotic, fits a necessary block of my being, a terrane long fused to and forever inseparable from my identity.
Beyond my appreciation for that deep-rooted familiarity, that shared experience and outlook, I loved the beauty and strength of Solnit's prose. My favorite section of the book is probably the first rumination on the motif of "The Blue of Distance." I could quote it in its entirety, but here's just enough to explain why:
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.
My interest wandered a little during Solnit's reflections on urban ruins, '80s punk, and the adolescent love of frayed edges, because the narco-romantic lifestyle and mindset have never appealed to or made sense to me. But even there, Solnit explicates obvious emotions that I, as someone who literally could not imagine being 30 until quite recently, had never been able to articulate: "[T]eenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you." Her punks anticipating nuclear war in their wilderness of ruins fit seamlessly with her earlier themes on growth rising only from decay.
On the whole, Getting Lost, a swift interweaving of memoir, philosophy, history, art history, natural history, dreams, music, and travel essay, functions as an integrated and beautiful objet. I'm just at a loss as to why my library stuffed it so cavalierly into the travel section of all places -- Getting Lost has so little to do with that subject -- but then, my library's Dewey decimal disorder is proverbial.
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