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

down and kissed me while we stood outside. She left lipstick on my cheek, and my mother turned around and gave a little scream because she thought it was blood. Later on, she was transferred from this place to the state asylum in Napa, not far from where we lived. For years I thought it was a retirement home, because she was on a ward populated entirely by elderly women who, thirsty for the sight of children, used to flock around us and give us coins when we visited, and because no one told me otherwise. It was an uncannily tranquil place full of broad lawns scattered with trees casting pleasant shade around them. When I try to recall it now I remember the red-winged blackbirds we used to see in the marshes of San Pablo Bay on our way there; and an afternoon or many afternoons my younger brother and I spent making daisy chains on one of the lawns there, which my grandmother wore till they were wilted around her vast bosom and hunched back; and I remember the cherry cider stand under a huge tree we used to stop at on the way home and the taste of cherries. It never occurred to me to ask her about the past, and she probably wouldn’t have had much to say.
    She was supposed to be a paranoid schizophrenic. That was the diagnosis she was institutionalized with during the last decades of her life. I always thought that her worldview might have been perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, though by the time I met her she was a ruin of a human being, her mind altered by shock treatment and years of drugs and by whatever toll institutions take. It’s hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible.
    I can count on one hand the stories my father told me about his childhood and family. He was a foot taller than his parents and, with his blue eyes and once-blond hair, far, far fairer than his mother, as though he sprang directly from Southern California with all its sunlight and abundance. He was part of that great assimilationist wave of the 1950s, when the ethnic past was regarded as unnecessary baggage, when America believed in the future like a religion. It’s not hard to imagine why he wanted to erase his rogue father and his crazy mother from his identity, though he was more like them than he looked, riding all kinds of runaway horses all his life. My father’s younger sister, my aunt, was as dark as her mother, and in her teens, when she lived with her father in El Paso, she was routinely suspected of being a Mexican and often had trouble coming back across the Rio Grande from Juárez. From her second husband, she got the surname to go with her appearance and passed as a Latina from then on. Caustic, literary, radical, she was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served less as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.
    Another time my aunt hung a picture of her mother, my grandmother, in her house, another image I saw there only once. It showed a child standing next to a rough-hewn wooden farm implement. Had photography existed five hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine this was a photograph from that time. It conveyed how backward was the world