A Field Guide To Getting Lost. Rebecca Solnit
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pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” Lost, these people I talked to helped me understand, was mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Along with his own words, Sachs sent me a chunk of Thoreau, for whom navigating life and wilderness and meaning are the same art, and who slips subtly from one to the other in the course of a sentence. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods any time,” he wrote in Walden. “Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I carried Meno’s question around with me for years and then, when everything was going wrong, friends came bearing stories, one after another, and they seemed to provide, if not answers, at least milestones and signposts. Out of the blue, May sent me a long passage by Virginia Woolf she’d copied in round black letters on thick unlined paper. It was about a mother and wife alone at the end of the day: “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless …. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.”
That passage from To the Lighthouse echoed something of Woolf ’s I already knew, her essay about walking that declared, “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room …. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give one the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastnesses, but Woolf, with her acute perception of the nuances of consciousness, could find it in a stroll down the street, a moment’s solitude in an armchair. Woolf was not a romantic, not a celebrant of that getting lost that is erotic love, in which the beloved becomes an invitation to become who you secretly, dormantly, like a locust underground waiting for the seventeen-year call, already are in hiding, that love for the other that is also a desire to reside in your own mystery in the mystery of others. Her getting lost was solitary, like Thoreau’s.
Malcolm, apropos of nothing at all, brought up the Wintu in north-central California, who don’t use the words left and right to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions. I was enraptured by this description of a language and behind it a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without mountains, without sun, without sky. As Dorothy Lee wrote, “When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm.” In that language, the self is never lost the way so many contemporary people who get lost in the wild are lost, without knowing the directions, without tracking their relationship not just to the trail but to the horizon and the light and the stars, but such a speaker would be lost without a world to connect to, lost in the modern limbos of subways and department stores. In Wintu, it’s the world that’s stable, yourself that’s contingent, that’s nothing apart from its surroundings.
I never heard of a stronger sense of place and direction, but that directional consciousness is embedded in a language almost lost. A decade ago there were six to ten speakers of Wintu, six people fluent in a language in which the self was not the autonomous entity we think we are when we carry our rights and lefts with us. The last fluent speaker of northern Wintu, Flora Jones, died in 2003, but the man who e-mailed me that information, Matt Root, mentioned that three Wintu people and one Pit River neighbor “retain fractions of the old Wintu slang and pronunciation system.” He himself studied the language and hoped that it would be revived, so that his people would “begin to make connections with their past through our language. The Wintu world view is indeed unique, it is our intimacy with our habitat that complements this uniqueness, and it is thru the eventual reintroduction of people, place, culture, and history that will begin to heal the long held scars of removal and outright genocide. The precursors to the loss of language today.” Or as a recent article about the hundred rapidly vanishing indigenous languages of California put it, “Such language differentiation may be tied to ecological differentiation. In this view, people adapted their words to the ecological niches they occupied, and California’s highly varied ecology encouraged its lingustic diversity. The theory is supported by maps indicating that areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species also have greater numbers of languages.”
It would be nice to imagine that the Wintu were once so perfectly situated in a world of known boundaries that they had no experience of being lost, but their neighbors to the north, the Pit River or Achumawi people, suggest that this was probably not so. One day I went to meet friends at a performance in a city park, but when I could not find them in the crowd, I wandered into a used bookstore and found an old book. In it, Jaime de Angulo, the wild Spanish storyteller- anthropologist who eighty years ago spent considerable time among these people, wrote, “I want to speak now of a certain curious phenomenon found among the Pit River Indians. The Indians refer to it in English as ‘wandering.’ They say of a certain man, ‘He is wandering,’ or ‘He has started to wander.’ It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry …. The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of canyons.” This wanderer isn’t so far from Woolf, and she too knew despair and the desire for what Buddhists call unbeing, the desire that finally led her to walk into a river with pockets full of rocks. It’s not about being lost but about trying to lose yourself.
De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.” You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found, De Angulo’s editor notes, “All white men are wanderers, the old people say.”
During this long spell when stories rained down, I gave a reading at a bar on a street that faced water before the shoreline was filled in to squeeze a few