A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online

prairie, getting lost and staying lost, starting up an unimaginable new life unlike the one allotted to her by her family and her ethnicity, stepping out of the noisy compression of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story into the expansive calm of a Willa Cather novel. The vast spaces of the American West, so little known to its immigrants even now, have always invited travelers to lose their past like so much luggage and reinvent themselves.
    I realize now that it was my own desire to step out of the train, the car, the conversation, the obligation, into the landscape that I gave this imagined ancestor. I grew up with landscape as recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. Such spaces are not as easy to enter as might be imagined; they are often the private land one passes on the way to the public lands of trees and steepness, private both because prizing nothingness is harder than prizing something and because when they aren’t the utter blankness of desert-dry lake beds they are useful for growing or grazing.
    One Independence Day a few years ago, I was at a picnic at a huge cattle ranch in northeastern New Mexico, a stranger to the people there except the friends who brought me. In this the monsoon season, the grass was a green carpet patterned with small burrows, stubby cacti, and with wildflowers from which bright insects leapt at my approach. It rolled on uninterrupted to the blue mountains a day’s walk or more away, an expanse in which it seemed you’d never have to stop or would have become transformed by the time you’d traversed that whole distance. With excuses to the party I went into it, walking until the cluster of cottonwoods and elms, sole trees in all that vastness, had grown small long after the people beneath them had vanished. Summer breezes caressed me, my legs stepped forward as though possessed of their own appetites, and the mountains kept promising. I stopped before the trees were gone, not ready that day to disappear entirely into the vastness. Perhaps these spaces are the best corollary I have found to truth, to clarity, to independence.
    “Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,” said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word “track” in Tibetan: shul, “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.” In Yiddish, shul means a synagogue, but I was trying to send this missing ancestor not to temple but to a path through an uninhabited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet.
    For a long time I imagined that she was the woman in Lewis Hine’s 1905 photograph “Young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island.” For a photographer known for his social documentary work, it’s a strange image, with its brooding, intense face and its indistinct, soft-focus background. Ellis Island, which in most photographs appears overrun by people, is empty and still here. The only indication of place is the blurry bars of the fenced walkways through