What holds us together, Part 2

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry López

Bodie, California ghost town, photo credit, with thanks.

Places become events, absorbed as cellular memory, transmuted and brought forth as part of who we are. We may tell of them as stories or live them in ways disconnected from conscious thought.  Barry Lopez's ability to extract meaning from terrain reminded me that many of my childhood hours were spent in the company of siblings, father and mother, and uninhabited land.  I wondered if I could untangle the threads of decades to decode those experiences.  I wondered if there was a reason to do so.

In memory, our family automobile travel occupies a lot of time - days and hours over a number of years.  Through revisiting, it seems it was more the intensity of the experiences than the duration.  We learned, my siblings and I, what our parents may have already known or were discovering along with us - how to be solitary when not alone.  We spent hours in silence as we rode, the landscapes of our separate thoughts widening, further initiating us into the society of world-class escape artists whose only exit door was one that led within.

The Mojave Desert, photo credit here, with thanks.

Reading further Lopez as he extracts essences from trees and feathers, rocks and water and sky, it seems my assignment is not as I first thought.  It is not about the places but about me, and my siblings, in them and the indelible mark not of geography but circumstance.  No wonder I realized after a lengthy illness that I possessed a capacity for stillness, that my own company did not give me the twitching whim-whams but peace, calm.   Without knowing it, I'd begun so many years before to scout and map this interior as a true caver, following the downward slope of the floor, forgetting to chalk messages that would help lead me back out.

If it is true that our stories hold us together,  I suspect mine attached themselves to me on those deep and repeated wanderings.  It wasn't the desert itself that I saw, nor the fields, billboards or fog rolling out like a carpet above Big Sur's plunging cliffs.   It was shadow dancers, lantern slides come to life, vignettes in a camp fire, seeping through like cave damp with its stale air.

From those inner roads, we would always find our way back, loosening the imagination's spell by plunging our hands into the ice and water of a soda cooler on a country store's front porch or hearing the tires crunch on the farm's graveled driveway.  Yet after so many visits, parts of us chose to remain in those other realms, parts of us reside there still, feet in two worlds.

Eric Hines' photo, "Rolling Fog in Big Sur," with thanks.