A Field Guide to Getting Lost Read online

  The protagonists were often anonymous, nameless, described in only the vaguest terms. A man, a woman, a beloved dead a long time ago, a faithless wife, a cruel husband, a hope abandoned, a dream glimpsed once and lost. But the territory in which these dramas played themselves out were evoked in detail over and over again, and if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love, they were also love songs about places, whose names were recited like incantations and caresses. The names or just the facts of bridges, mountains, valleys, towns, states, rivers (lots of rivers), highways were recalled in reverie, and psychic states themselves became places, “Lost Highway” and “Lonely Street.” So though they were overtly love songs, in most of them the landscape was a deeper anchor for being and the object of another, more enduring love. The grave, the town hall light, the hills, and the gallows are all more vivid than the protagonists of “Long Black Veil.” Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

  In my old Tanya Tucker cassette, Brownsville, San Antonio, Memphis, New Orleans, and Pecos were the only proper names mentioned, though streets, fields, rivers, stores, jails, ferries, and other locations also showed up. The people were nameless and sometimes the women began to dissolve into places, like those tragic figures the gods would turn into rosebushes or fountains to stabilize their grief. There was, of course, the jilted bride called Delta Dawn, and far more scorchingly, there was the young rape victim who withdrew into herself and became known as No Man’s Land. She grew up to be a beauty, a nurse, and one day found herself called upon to nurse her rapist—the song is vague about the details, but she seems to have watched him die rather than treating him, “and now his soul is walking / In No Man’s Land.” It’s a terrifying song, about the damage people can do to each other and about the way the rapist comes to possess her twice, once as the soul who haunts the limbo she has become.

  The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities—a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.

  There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful? There are songs of insurgent power; they are essentially what rock and roll, an outgrowth of one strain of the blues, does best, these songs of being young and at the beginning of the world, full of a sense of your own potential. Country, at least the old stuff, has mostly been devoted instead to aftermath, to the hard work it takes to keep going or the awareness that comes after it is no longer possible to go on. If it is deeper than rock it is because failure is deeper than success. Failure is what we learn from, mostly.

  All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from being the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.

  So were the people in those songs, and it seemed that place-names had an evocative power there that they did in my life: I love to hear people say those names. Once when I was living in New Mexico, a student who’d lived in my part of California would charm and mesmerize me by saying, “Sebastopol, Occidental, Free-stone, Gravenstein Highway, Petaluma . . .” Now, it’s the New Mexico names that have the most power over me, Golondrinas, Mora, Chacon, Trampas, Chimayo, Nambe, Rio en Medio, Canyoncito, Stanley, Moriarty, the East Mountains, Cerrillos, Cerro Pelon. There’s a whole genre of song that began in the blues that consists largely of place-names, a recitative of geography, of which the famous “Route 66” is only the most popular. (Perhaps they came from conductors’ cries on the railroads, as does the list in the bluegrass tune “Orange Blossom Special”; perhaps travel and lists are inevitably wed, so that a music of restlessness paces itself in place-names.) An outsider’s insightful approximation of its essence is “Wanted Man,” which Bob Dylan wrote in 1969 and Johnny Cash most famously covered. It’s a boastful list of all the places a criminal is wanted, a recitation that includes Albuquerque and Tallahassee and Baton Rouge and Buffalo, a confusion of being desired with being hunted that has unsettling intimations about the motives for committing a crime.

  That life is a journey is a given in these songs whose background after all is the urbanization of rural whites and northern migration of southern blacks, but the intense love of place frames this journey not as an enlightenment narrative of discovery of the unknown but an insular tale of loss of the formative terra cognita that exists in the song only as memory, a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart. Nobody gets over anything; time doesn’t heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones’s most famous songs has it, it’s because he’s dead. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it’s made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs.

  People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange. No logic and no prophesy could explain the evolution of the whale from an ancient aquatic creature through eons on land and then back in the sea to become something utterly different from anything that could survive on the surface of the earth. The music called the blues is as good an example as any of the unlikely, an evolution of African music in the southeastern Americ
an landscape, inflected by slavery and exposure to the English language, European instruments, and, perhaps, Irish, Scottish, and English ballads—the passionate melancholy of murder ballads and songs about abandoned maidens and bloody revenges. The term blue comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness, blue moods, blue devils, the blues, first tracked to 1555 in my etymological dictionary.

  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 . . .”

  Two Arrowheads

  Once 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 sud
denly 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.