“When I was training to become a green beret medic, I had a small road map of Wyoming and Montana I always carried with me. I kept it hidden in the notebook in which I was supposed to keep my military notes. I stared at it, especially at the blank spaces, for several hours of every day for over a year as I pulled duty on different military bases scattered over the deep South, where the soil was always the color of clotted blood.
With this map, I would travel in my mind over the ridges and peaks into hidden basins and high cirques of the Wind River Range and the Yellowstone Plateau, or explore the emptiness of the Bob Marshall Wilderness up north.
In those days the image of a single wild place- a great canyon of the Southwest, a cascading mountain stream, or a high ridge of tundra dropping off steeply into a hidden alpine basin-could bring on a bottomless homesickness.”
– Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years
__________
“And I had to get home. ‘Home’, here, does not mean a house. In Russian the word is rodina. Rodina is the land, our life force. If we were to be taken from it we should know only the dead slab of the fallen wood.”
– Alan Garner, Powsels and Thrums
__________
I would love to be someone connected to the land.
But my suburban upbringing failed to place me in contact with any wild places.
I do not live near where I grew up.
I feel no especial pull to go back.
But I do have an understanding of home.
For me it’s not a place but a season.
Early spring.
The first verdant greens and lengthening days.
The promise of just a little more, tomorrow.
I can’t quite remember the sensation during winter but I know something isn’t quite right.
Now I feel a renewal of my life force: I am becoming more myself.
Closer to where I started.
In total ignorance of the cycle repeating itself.
Not too long for now I will be slowly taken away again, packed away for winter.
But not today.
Conversations With Quotations 