Cartography

The West Virginia mountains that shaped my grandmother’s formative years are not mine, nor is the North Carolina of my father’s childhood. My grandfather’s Cuba remains a mystery to me, and the Pennsylvania of my own youth is a landscape of such sadness I often struggle to find a sense of comfort in my memories of it. Though I feel at home in the Pacific Northwest with my own family, feel certain I have cultivated a secure warm feeling that will define home for my children, memories of this feeling in my own life are largely absent. Sometimes it feels as if I were simply dropped into my life mid-sea, set adrift without a heading, the maps that were left to me useless for wayfinding. I still do not know where I belong.  

My ancestors have not passed a knowledge of home onto me, since we have never been wedded to any particular place for long. We have been wanderers from the beginning, eager to pick up and move, from opportunity or necessity, a sense of adventure—the reasons were vast. But we used to bring our people with us, ensuring that, at the very least, we could remain rooted in our community, even as the landscapes changed around us.

At best I can say I’ve been given the occasional glimpse at where my family might have belonged in the past. The Scottish Highlands were one of the first places where I felt a bodily connection to the land, where I first understood, in a somewhat mystical way, what resonance really means. I had encountered musical resonance before, of course, had experienced the feeling of sound coursing through my body, of being—in a literal sense—in tune with my surroundings. But in Scotland, the resonance was more suffusive. It was in the color of the sky and the grass, in the ancient crags and windswept glens. Everything, including me, was fully alive there. That visit changed me.

Years later, when I discovered that my father’s family hailed from the Highlands and not from Germany as we had always believed, I began to understand the impact a landscape could have on a person’s psyche, how it leaves imprints on us in various ways, little clues to guide us home. I’ve tried to remain attuned to this resonance ever since.

Scotland revisits me from time to time. On that first trip I took over twenty years ago, I snapped a photo of Loch Ness in summer, framed by a tree in the lower left corner, gently sloping green mountains off in the distance. Years later, I would take a nearly identical photograph of Lake Wenatchee in winter, in faraway Washington State. I was stunned by the similarities when I happened upon the photos, particularly since the landscapes are not at all alike, Washington’s young mountains still tall and jagged compared to their well-worn Scottish counterparts and snow-capped year-round. But the winter clouds had made mere suggestions of the imposing mountains in the distance, and I had framed both scenes in the same way: tree to the left, a wide, still lake, rocky outcropping to the right. Like that country road in Pennsylvania that haunts me, there is something about this Highland space that I am always trying to capture.

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Lately I’ve been trying to enter into a conversation with the landscape when I travel, attempting to come into presence and wait for the land to speak to me, as if it might tell me that I have finally found my home. There you are, I want it to say. I’ve waited so long for you. In writing this out, it seems like the foolish longings of a child.

I felt the land speaking to me while hiking with my family through Bryce Canyon one cold Utah winter. I had stopped to catch my breath—we were at nearly 9,000 feet of elevation so I was regularly stopping to catch my breath—and as I looked around at the columns of sandstone hoodoos glowing orange in the late-day sun, I was nearly knocked sideways by memories of similar formations I had seen in my life, memories that flashed in my mind’s eye like microfilm being rewound, images passing by in a blur. I saw the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Gaudi’s architectural masterpiece that has been continuously under construction since the 1880s. Its spires resembled the hoodoos that surrounded me. In another flash I was a child again, making “drip” sand castles at the beach, more hoodoo-like formations that were the invention of a child without a pail, a child unable to build walls and fortifications but able to build spires upon spires, anointing the beach with these holy formations where she prayed for hours through her play.

Standing there in the canyon, I had the sense that my childhood self, the one building sandcastles on some lakeside public beach in the country, had constructed everything around me, had dripped into place the hoodoos of the canyon and the spires of the cathedral, that everything I had ever experienced in my life I had dreamed into existence as a child and made real with sand, that sand turned to stone, cemented into the world where it would wait patiently for me to venture out to discover it.

As I stood among those ancient rocks, marveling at formations that were all at once familiar and strange, I began to understand that I belonged to that place as much as I might have belonged to the Tetons or the Highlands or Cuba, or even to a bend along a Pennsylvania road. I belong everywhere and nowhere, home a simple construct. I belong, in the end, not in the world that I have inherited but in the world I have created for myself. I took a deep breath of the crisp winter air and steadied myself as the ledge narrowed along the canyon. My children called for me to catch up to them. I waved them on. I’m making my way, I said to myself, then louder once more, as if to confirm it.