“I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison, a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering?” Thoreau wrote in his journal on Nov. 12, 1853.
The passage, and something that R— said to me the night he and M— had dinner with us, have been resonating in my mind. R— was talking about buying and fixing up property “as an investment.” I said I couldn't imagine doing that. He said that when you do, you don't become “emotionally involved.”
It's not that I think this is a dishonorable thing to do. Quite the contrary. I can't think of anything that disturbs me more than to see a trailer pulled in and deposited in front of an old homeplace. The original house is, like as not, disappearing behind a wall of boxwood, arborvitae and other landscape species common to these mountains, plants that attest to the pride someone once took in it. It crouches in the background, in need of a coat of paint, roof sagging and rusting, like an ancient relative consigned to a rest home, while growing up in front of it is the unlovely homeplace of today: a simulated wood trailer outfitted with a satellite dish.
So I like what R— and M— have done: buying old houses, and fixing them up, and then selling them for a profit, or renting them. I know that R— has done me a huge favor in replacing my front porch. But I don't have what it takes, I don’t think, to buy a place and not become emotionally involved with it.
But to get back to the Thoreau quote. I love it so: “those who have the steering of me,” “by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this,” “made to study and love this spot of earth more and more,” and finally, “a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering.”
The only difference between my situation and that of Thoreau is that this is not my native region, though it is very like it in so much that grows here, that my whole life is encapsulated in plants I encounter here: bracken, interrupted and cinnamon fern, blueberries, trailing arbutus, partridge berry and wintergreen. When I encounter them in the woods, I feel that I am “home,” in the home that has always been my home. Last week, walking through the maple grove on the AT, I was overcome with the strongest possible feeling of being in a place I knew, although I had never been in that particular spot before in my life.
What would it signify if, instead of settling here for 20 years, I had moved from place to place? What would it signify if my life had not been marked by “the want of pecuniary wealth?” I know the answers to those two questions, and it is that my life would have been completely different. What I know and hold most dear, I would not know. I know where to go to find the first trout lilies in bloom, and when; where the hepatica grows, and where the trailing arbutus. In short, I know where and when to make the pilgrimages I need to make to proceed with any kind of reverence and humility and joy through the year. They are my stations of the cross.
There are places that speak strongly to me, speak directly, as though someone you had never met before sat down next to you at a party and, when you started in on the chit chat, laid a hand on your arm and said, “No, let’s dispense with the preliminaries.” Joseph Wood Krutch talks about this phenomenon in The Desert Year, describing the effect the desert had on him.
Ocracoke was one of those places for me, and so I went and lived on Harkers Island for six months, to give myself a long drink of it. I felt the same thing in Patagonia, the Huachucas and Madera Canyon, an almost overpowering need to come there and stay, that there was a message, indispensable to my life, that I would miss if I did not. Or perhaps a mystery I needed to plumb, and could, in no other way. The conviction of that concentrated itself in a single image of an agave I encountered along the trail from Carr Peak to the Ramsey Canyon. That’s a very strange phenomenon, how that happens. I was aware that it was happening as I looked at the plant, aware, but not directly aware. It’s not something you can will to happen; though I am always willing this image or that to stay with me, and they don’t. Instead, it’s like fishing, feeling your line drop unexpectedly into a very deep hole, into a whole other ocean beneath the ocean floor they’ve got on the maps. I suppose that one of the reasons those Indian creation stories about the people emerging into the Second World, Third World, etc., have had a special kind of authenticity for me, is because they suggest an arrangement that the experiences of my life have also suggested.
At any rate, when one of those message/images is burning itself into you, it is almost as though you are asleep, and something brushes against your eyelashes, partly rouses you. So you know something is happening, and then sometime later, maybe weeks later, you find that image remains, when all the surrounding images have left you, and you remember that brushing of your eyelashes, and you say, “so that was it. That was why that moment felt like that, because it was putting this here.” You can’t make this happen, but now and again it does.
I do not know whether, if I did more traveling, it would happen to me more (or whether it would stop happening altogether). I do not know whether I would want it to happen to me more, because it comes across as something that requires action, like a definite signpost at a crossroads. What if you were getting these signals all the time? It would drive you crazy. And what if you never got any at all? I feel as though I am living my life tuned to a very distinct but subtle frequency, as though I am feeling my way in the dark along a very slender, silvery silken cord. It's not easy to follow.
When you start out, you don't even know you are following it, until suddenly 20 years have passed, and you realize suddenly you are quite a way along, that doors have closed behind you. So then you write a book to explain yourself to yourself, and also to let other people know what it is you have discovered. There are lots of these books out now. I keep seeing new ones in the stores. I think they're all written by people in their early fifties who have marched to slightly different drummers, or tunneled through other passageways, and suddenly become aware of the rest of the world, like a prairie dog whose passageway breaks unexpectedly into the light. They blink and look around at what has been going on up here on the surface, and they suddenly realize their experience of the world has been very different, and they want to communicate it.
Hey, what have you found? Here's what I've found. The goal isn't conversion, or fame, or justification, though it has a bit of each in it. I don't know exactly what it is, this urge that comes over you at this age, to tell your secrets.
But to get back to Thoreau’s journal entry. My lack of pecuniary wealth has limited my traveling, which has limited the number of places that have had the opportunity to whisper in my ear, to beguile me. I think that is to the good, because I have come to appreciate the thick and undiffused love of place that has been forced upon me here. Thoreau is right to use the words he does—hard words—nailed down to this place, carries almost the sense of crucifixion, made to study and love implies he would not have done it voluntarily, or perhaps only that he wouldn't otherwise have had the sense to choose what has become his life.
You can’t take a crash course in sense-of-place. It is hard won, only through time, and through paying attention, and probably through suffering. Could this place, my own backyard, knock me off my feet, take my breath away, during those times when I can look at it and see, not what I need to do, but what is there, if I hadn't had to toil and toil in offices I hated being in, writing things I hated writing, lashed by the meagreness of the conventional vision? Would it mean what it means to me if it had been bestowed upon me without my having to lift a finger?
I’m sure not. It might appear beautiful to me, but it would be part of the passing scene, not something set apart. I wouldn’t know how to distinguish it. I would see it two dimensionally, the image, the love, would indeed be diffused.
So I am grateful, after all, for the poverty I have railed against. Perhaps I will even one day be thankful for the hours I've wasted writing garbage. I haven't reached that point yet, but anything's possible, I suppose.
May I just say, I love reading my sister’s writing, and I love that others can do so, as well! What a wonderful mini-essay today.
I hope she knew she had this gift of writing on a brilliant level.