A Field Guide to Getting Lost (12 page)

The world from which the blues came is largely vanished. Not half a century after slavery it came out of severely limited choices and limited movement, and to read the early biographies is to collect pictures of share-croppers in small shacks surrounded by cotton; of prisoners, children, everyone at hard labor; of dust; of the floods of the Mississippi and the vagaries of the law; of a society in which people who had once been slaves were still far from free. Some of the people who came from that world settled in the neighborhood I’ve lived in most of my adult life and told me about it, but they are dying out, one by one, and their great-grandchildren are listening to something else entirely, though the local churches still sing gospel. The blues are a kind of captivity narrative, but the white captivity narratives often told of people whose capture was either temporary or became full acceptance into a new society. The blues defined a kind of perpetual internal exile of people who couldn’t go back, though leaving the South is a subject of a lot of blues songs, without white country music’s hankering for the places left behind. In these terms, even nostalgia and homesickness are privileges not granted to everyone.

Poverty and racism aren’t vanished but the self-containment of the rural black community was broken up by emigration, by a degree of desegregation, and most of all by the transformation of the world by cheap transportation and pervasive mass media, by the deterioration of the local almost everywhere. It’s as though a sort of specific gravity dissipated, but before it did, it pressed together these disparate forces into an intensity of expression the way that tremendous weight and pressure turn soil and mineral into gemstone. The blues proper, the blues as the species existed in 1933, is frail and precious, a style that often seems anachronistic or nostalgic itself (with a largely white audience nowadays), but it spread to become the ancestor of most modern popular music, one way or another.

In some ways the blues took over the world, and the melancholy specific to the post-slavery South became something universal, or a universal melancholy found a specific channel for its expression. The country songs about place I collected were in some ways the blues—I think of how many songs Hank Williams wrote that were explicitly framed as the blues—but it was as though you could take that color literally, imagine the original blues as a deep color, passionate and defiant, indigo, azure, sapphire, diluted into the brooding melancholy of these white songs of loss and backward glances, into the blue of distance.

There is a story within a story by Isak Dinesen about the color blue that seemed like another one of these songs, this one without the voice and music that make them so visceral, but with their sense of looking across great distances of time, space, and self. I remembered it and looked all through her books again and again for it in vain, this lost story about the color blue, and then one day did a Web search for Isak Dinesen and blue and found that it was the story the writer tells the sailors inside “The Young Man with the Carnation,” a tale about a writer’s crisis of despair for the duration of one night, a crisis that ends in the morning with him making a pact with God. God makes a covenant that “I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books. Do you want any less than that?” The story only lasts a page and a half, so that it has the sketchiness of the songs—“Long Black Veil” in the version I looked up has the same number of lines as a sonnet but the skeleton of a novel within those lines.

Dinesen was herself an emigrant to Africa, and something of the hybridity of the blues might be in the influence African storytelling had on her talent for tales that are more luminous and unexpected than ordinary short stories, more elaborate and credible than fables and fairy tales. In the story within a story I rediscovered, an old English aristocrat who had served his country no longer cared for anything but collecting blue china, and so he traveled the world with his young daughter to do so. It’s a telling detail, for that china was already part of the export market, so that the Dutch and Chinese both made ware that approximated what Europeans thought Chinese ceramics should look like, that blue-and-white stuff whose most familiar imagery is also a small tale of tragedy, the blue willow pattern of birds, trees, water, and separated lovers, like the items of a song you could drink from, teacups that would always be a cup of sorrow. Their ship was wrecked, the daughter was left behind in the evacuation, and at the last minute a sailor took her into an overlooked lifeboat and for nine days the two were alone together on the sea.

After they were rescued, Dinesen through her fictional young writer continues, her father banished the sailor beyond reach, to the other side of the world, and all the rescued castaway wanted to do was collect blue china. “In her search she told the people with whom she dealt that she was looking for a particular blue colour and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.’ Her father, when they had sailed for many years, suggested to her that perhaps the colour which she sought did not exist. ‘O God, Papa,’ said she, ‘how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from the time when all the world was blue.’” Years passed, decades, her father died, and finally, a merchant brought her an old blue jar looted from the Chinese emperor’s summer palace. When she saw it she said that now she could die, and when she died, her heart would be cut out and put in the blue jar. “And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently . . .”

O
nce I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as its harsh conditions—the vast distances between water, the many dangers, the extremes of heat and cold—keep you in mind of your mortality. But the desert is made first and foremost out of light, at least to the eye and the heart, and you quickly learn that the mountain range twenty miles away is pink at dawn, a scrubby green at midday, blue in evening and under clouds. The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which the eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that comes like passion and leaves like redemption, rain that delivers itself with thunder, with lightning, with a rise of scents in this place so pure that moisture, dust, and the various bushes all have their own smell in the sudden humidity. Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts. It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous. And the man?

I went to visit him in his home deep in the Mojave one evening in late spring. We had met once, and several months later he called me up claiming that he was looking for the phone number of the friend who’d introduced us, kept me on the phone for an hour or more, and ended by telling me to come by when I was next in the vicinity, and so I did. We talked from the bright light of early evening into the darkness of the first warm night of the season, and the soft breeze itself was a delight to me, playing over arms and legs that no longer needed to be wrapped up against the night. We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.

With other men you get to know their families, with this unhurried man who seemed like a desert hermit, animals seemed to fill that place, and they were always around his home. Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over. I have lived in other deserts, but I have never lived in one so alive with animals. Cottontails and jackrabbits and darting, bobbing desert quail were always nearby, and early in the morning I would see the rabbits dance with each other and jump straight into the air in play. Often a late-afternoon coyote strolled through the yard, a bobcat gave me a cool look there once, the neighbors saw a mountain lion in it, and many mornings a pair of roadrunners chased each other in the driveway.

On our second date he told me that when he’d woken up there was a rattlesnake outside, too cold to move in the early morning chill, so he had picked it up on a shovel and moved it into the garage, hoping it would go after the pack rat eating the wiring there. I was surprised and smitten by this response so counter to what most people hope for from snakes: distance. He had a passion for snakes, and on each of our early rendezvous seemed to have another story to tell. One was about driving from the Mojave to the mountains on summer evenings, going slowly so that he could see the snakes who’d come out to bask on the asphalt that held warmth longer into the night than anything else, see them and pick them up and take them to safety. He had seen a gopher snake sit outside a rabbit hole and eat each of the young as it emerged, seen snakes making love, rising high into the air to twine around each other, and he seemed to run into rattlesnakes regularly. One day he came home and told me in the hushed tone I’d learned was tenderness of seeing a baby rattler no thicker than his finger. After that first rendezvous I continued my journey to my original destination, another desert where I would stay alone and write. A few days later, the longest day of the year, I was walking up a little dirt track when I remembered what I’d dreamed of the night before, a snake, and as I said the word to myself, I looked down and saw my right foot was poised to come down on a fat little rattler with a but-tony tail, flicking its tongue and wriggling along.

What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves—that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination? I remember a day when he was out working and I was alone in his house writing. I heard a raven fly by in air so still that each slow stroke of its wings was distinctly audible. I wondered then and wonder now how I could give all this up for what cities and people have to offer, for it ought to be less terrible to be lonely than to have stepped out of this sense of a symbolic order that the world of animals and celestial light offers, but writing is lonely enough, a confession to which there will be no immediate or commensurate answer, an opening statement in a conversation that falls silent or takes place long afterward without the author. But the best writing appears like those animals, sudden, self-possessed, telling everything and nothing, words approaching wordlessness. Maybe writing is its own desert, its own wilderness.

There are moments of harmony that rise to the level of serendipity, coincidence, and beyond, and certain passages of time that seem dense with such incidents. Summers and deserts seem best for them. I remember lying in the shade of my truck in the Great Basin reading
The Divine Comedy.
As I finished the last lines of the Paradiso, when Dante approaches the light and is turned like a wheel by “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” a car pulled up. The Franciscan father who ministered to Skid Row characters in Las Vegas and to the cause of peace in the desert stepped out, a comic saint with a thick Breton accent who seemed to have driven up straight out of paradise into that desert that resonated so much with Dante’s tale. Or a time walking in another desert when I thought of the obsidian bird-point arrowhead I’d found in that area the year before, then recollected the creamy chert arrowhead a man had given me since then, and with the latter picture in my head looked down to see its twin, another pale arrowhead with a wide base, a perfect match two thousand miles away six months later, so startling a coincidence that my sense of cause and effect was rattled for a day. Countless times when I traveled hundreds of miles to meet a friend who arrived simultaneously at our remote destination, when what we were looking for appeared unexpectedly, when two people spoke the same thought in the same words at once. Such moments seem to mean that you have surrendered to the story being told and are following the story line rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.

One perfect midsummer day three years after that evening I’d arrived in the hermit’s life and he in mine, I had gotten up early in that shack whose back bedroom window opened onto one of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen and whose kitchen window was up against a slope, so that as I filled the kettle I was eye to eye with a young cottontail, unafraid as I remained unseen through the glass, its eye a round black mirror for creosote bush and window frame. The yard was full of cottontails that day, and then I found a huge desert tortoise strolling up to chomp on the prickly pears, as though we had stumbled into the fable of the tortoise and the hare, whose dispositions I often imagined as the hermit’s and mine, he so reserved, deliberate, patient, I so quick and high-strung. I told the neighbor and the hermit, and they came out and, in the manner of men, let on that they had seen tortoises as big. Have you ever seen one bigger, I asked, and they fell silent, watching the creature open a beaky mouth and cut cactus with slow menace. That evening we went to feed the cats of an acquaintance who was away, and inside the house we found the three creatures stalking a mourning dove fluttering bloody around the big room. While I fended off the cats, he caught the creature. It vanished into his hands, and this seemed to calm it until we got outside. He raised his hands up and the dove flew into the last light, more alive than we’d hoped.