A Field Guide to Getting Lost (19 page)

“How else could we break through the spell that we weave if we didn’t have a little piece of Turtle Man in us? But this is a very dangerous proposition because most of us don’t have the excellent training of Turtle Man. Turtle Man had no option. It was either stay in bed or get up and meet the impassable barrier and cry for help. Those were the options.

“Maybe if I really paid attention to my life I’d notice that I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I’m competent to deal with it. Maybe we’re willing to let in that thought. It has some reasonableness to it, I can’t exactly know, but chances are, possibilities are, it’s not going to be much different than what I’ve usually experienced and I’ll do just fine, so we close up that unsettling possibility with a reasonable response. The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our minds and the feelings that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable. So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don’t become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.

“You hear a sound, and you think, that’s a big truck going around the corner. It all happens in half a second. We see someone and make up a story about who they are, and sometimes we get ourselves into a lot of trouble with the stories we make up as we weave our world. And the practice of awareness doesn’t say don’t weave your world. That’s what we’re hardwired to do, it’s not a volitional thing to think ‘truck’ after hearing that sound. The practice of awareness says don’t grasp it too tightly, don’t be too convinced. And in that simpler way of being, it’s okay to become like the Turtle Man, it’s okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we’re calling out for help. Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place. It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling determined world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation. It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.”

 

 

Several months later, I was camping on the eastern side of the Sierra, in a forest of Jeffrey pines that stood far apart on that pale sand, speaking of vast root systems tapping out what moisture there was in that dry place. The pinecones fell in perfect circles under the trees, and the place seemed almost geometrically pure: the flat plain of volcanic sand, the tall straight trees, the dark circles of cones. In the warmth of day, the bark of these trees gives off a fragrance like vanilla and butter-scotch, a sweetness that added to the tranquility of the place that seemed when we were in it as though it was all there was in the world, as though the trees went on forever, as though time, history, obligation were no longer on the map. We slept in our cars on a night so cold that the water in our dishpan was frozen solid by morning. We’d camped there the year before, and that time I’d gotten my car stuck in the sand, several miles from the paved road. It had been a lovely moment to realize that I could count on my traveling companions, and they had gotten me out with good cheer and little fuss. This freezing night I dreamed I’d driven into the backyard of that childhood home and gotten the car stuck again, but the yard and house belonged to someone else, a middle-aged Asian woman who had added a second story to it. It was her house now. I wasn’t going in, and friends were coming to dislodge the car.

And then as I was preparing to write this chapter, I dreamed of the place again, from the outside again. We were burying my father’s and grandmother’s hearts by rocky graves like ornamental excrescences around the edges of the swimming pool. This time the pool had dark dirt on its bottom, and its sides were no longer straight but wavering, encrusted with big stones. It was becoming a pond. The dark hearts had been in my refrigerator, in a Ziploc bag, like butcher’s meat. A dream doesn’t have to explain how long they’d been there. Which one was bigger, my dreaming self wondered, and did the size indicate generosity, body size, or unhealthy enlargement? Both died of heart trouble. And through a knothole in the tall back fence—and there was a real knothole I had forgotten, which in real life did look out onto the hilly pasture of a little quarter horse ranch—I saw horse-drawn carriages speeding by, then horses galloping faster and glossier than ever, exuberant with power, with life.

A few months later, I went to spend a few weeks writing in the county I grew up in, not the suburban corridor whose northernmost edge that house sat upon, but its wild west, mostly parkland and dairy farms. Geese were flying south, apples were ripe on the trees, and one day a naturalist named Rich took me around to look at birds. While we were watching a pair of white-tailed kites in the tree they roost in, he mentioned that they had been thought to be extinct, and they were now doing so well that they were expanding their ecological niche and range. Almost everywhere but the black bands on their wings, the birds were as dazzlingly white as doves, though their contours were the condensed ferocity of hawks. Some people call them angel hawks. We went calling on dozens of shorebirds and waterbirds, a king-fisher, green herons half-hidden in the reeds, one gulping a blue dragonfly still whirring as it went down that long narrow throat, songbirds, and then a turtle peering above the still water of an old millpond. Reflection turned its tilted head in profile into a notched oddity with two yellow-gold eyes looking back at us. We traveled to several places not far from the road, and through this guide’s eyes and tales I saw a completely different place than this the one I had been coming back to almost all my life. My place had been made out of plants and landforms and light and some human histories. His was crowded with creatures going about their lives, each living according to a pattern, the patterns interwoven into a tapestry of formidable complexity.

Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror. Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way. You know the the usual story about the world, the one about ongoing encroachment that continues to escalate and thereby continues to wipe out species. Rich told a different story about how here for a hundred years or so after the gold rush the newcomers blasted away at everything that moved, an era that let up half a century ago. And so, he said, in North America at least, a lot of species have come back. In this county with so many miles of open space, he told me, even coyotes became locally extinct. I realized that the hills I roamed as a child were empty and silent compared to what they are now. It was odd to think of what had been my paradise and refuge as an impoverished landscape, though I had long known its very grass wasn’t native.

Across the continent many of the common animals are coming back, the deer, moose, bears, coyotes, and cougars, a story that hasn’t been made much of. Many of the birds endangered by DDT four or five decades ago have likewise returned, peregrines, eagles, osprey, and more. But in this county, more happened. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, tule elk were hunted into extinction altogether on this coast, and throughout their California habitat only a few survived. These survivors were discovered in 1874 in a tule marsh in the San Joaquin, the valley the Death Valley Forty-Niners had pronounced as Sand Walking. Their discoverers were in the process of draining the marsh for agriculture. A serious endeavor to save the species began in the twentieth century, and ten animals were reintroduced to this coast the year I left home and the county. Since then they had multiplied into the hundreds, and they are, in the present order of things, safe as a species.

I knew about the elk, but as Rich talked I began to see a picture I had not before, of all the animals who had hovered in the doorway of disappearance and then returned to this place. Elephant seals had vanished for a hundred and fifty years from this stretch of coast and by 1890 vanished from all their breeding grounds but one place in Baja, their numbers dwindled down to about a thousand. Four years after the elk returned, the first breeding pair was sighted here. Now, twenty years later, a couple thousand of them heave themselves up onto this county’s remotest beach in winter to quarrel and bask and give birth, and there are altogether about a hundred and fifty thousand of them in the world. Brown pelicans and crested egrets had come back from the brink, as had other waterbirds, and almost half the birds of North America are in this place at least some of the time, up to two hundred species at a time. The place also has a number of unique subspecies, evolved in isolation over tens of thousands of years, and more than a score of endangered and threatened species altogether, including coho salmon spawning in its streams. I had seen them too, golden female and ruby male thrashing their way up shallow water in the early dusk of drizzly midwinter.

After that day, I found a book at the house I was staying at, about how the land on which these creatures flourished was protected from development, and found my father’s name in the index. We moved back to California when he was hired to write the master plan for the county, and he spent the next five years working on a document that protects from development most of its western portion that wasn’t already under state, federal, or land-trust protection. The drive for protection came from citizens first, and it was their support that made it possible for the professionals to push their plan through, but it was the planners who wrote the rules of this protection and took much of the heat. The book spoke of “a revolutionary Marin Countywide Plan, which used ‘designing with nature’ as its method for preserving Marin’s extraordinary landscapes and preventing its cities from sprawling together.” I own a copy of the environmental plan whose title was drawn from a poem by Lew Welch quoted on the flyleaf, “This is the last place. / There is no where else to go,” and so it was called
Can the Last Place Last?
So far it has, though Welch didn’t. He walked into the Sierra Nevada wilds in 1971, and no trace of him was ever found.

The plan “went through fifty-seven public hearings and was adopted in 1973. . . . The plan was the inspiration of talented county planners Paul Zucker and Al Solnit. Zucker later lost his job after he lost a supervisorial race, and Solnit was the victim of vicious attacks by developers and hostile editorials. But the Plan was embraced by the public and has prevailed through minor revisions for over twenty-five years.” One summer evening when I was about nine, my father came home late and found a forgotten glass of chocolate milk gone sour on the kitchen counter. Waste enraged him, and since I was the principal drinker of chocolate milk, he rushed into my room, flicked the light on, and dashed it in my face as I slept, so that I woke up dripping with a giant roaring over me. (That the milk was a brother’s is only a detail; it was a very random universe in there.) Reading that account, I realized that what he had come home from was one of those rancorous meetings at which the fate of this place was being decided.

The house was a small place inside a larger one, or a small story inside a larger one; picture the stories nesting like Russian dolls, so that terrible things were happening in that house, but they were tied to the redemption happening on the larger scale of the county, which was in part reaction to the violent erasures going on across the country and the world. I had left the house for good a quarter of a century before and just gotten out of it in my dreams over the past year, but the county was something I chose to return to again and again, and on this return I’d seen the nesting of those stories, as well as some of the animals that had come back. I revisited the elk a few days before the day of the angel hawks. Most of them live out on the remotest peninsula of this remote place, a spit of land like a north-pointing finger, segregated from the rest of the world by a ten-foot-tall ring of cyclone fencing across its knuckle, a peninsula at whose tip I had realized that the end of the world could be a place as well as a time. They’d been lounging among the grasses and the domelike lupine shrubs, herds of cow elk with a few bulls among them and herds of young bulls who scrambled to their feet at the sound of my approach so that their antlers looked like a forest rising up. The end of the world was wind-scoured but peaceful, black cormorants and red starfish on wave-washed dark rocks below a sandy bluff, and beyond them all the sea spreading far and then farther.

Poe:
in his “The Daguerreotype,” 1840, reprinted in Jane M. Rabb,
Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 5.

Benjamin:
in his “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Walter Benjamin,
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986).

Boone:
is quoted in many places, with many versions of this statement he is said to have made to Chester Harding, who had come to paint the eighty-five-year-old man.

Dorothy Lee:
in her 1959 book
Freedom and Culture
.

Native California language preservation and revival:
“A Faith in Words,” a September 2004 article by Kerry Tremain, in the University of California, Berkeley, alumni magazine,
California Monthly
.