For the past few years much of my travel has been confined to the rectangles of Zoom. Like many in this COVID-inflected time, I’ve actually spent more time with distant family members, as we’ve all sought to keep close remotely. But Zoom-time doesn’t measure up to room-time; we are always, in our frames, exhibits to each other, a sort of gallery of we’re-okay.
For much of March, vax-fortified, we’ve taken advantage of the current COVID-trough to see family in Rhode Island, and now in Georgia (where — I must share — it’s 70 degrees as I write this on a flower-rich front deck, before re-shoeing myself for a dip down to a local brookshed for some trail time). This road-tripping has, of course, taken place over interstate hours. Perfect listening time in these audio-rich times. A good story read aloud can transport you, and so I’ve sometimes found myself in two places at once.
That feeling came on with special power when I slipped into a recording of Bowdoin College author, Franklin Burroughs, “Compression Wood.” Here I was, driving through the pine-stippled south not far from where Burroughs grew up and which he evokes in his long essay. When I reached a section of the essay which placed me in the Carolinas and at home simultaneously, I nearly pulled over to marvel at the power of story in full voice.
Summarizing Burrough’s essay – nearly an hour in audio – is beyond the scope of this piece, but I want to both recommend it and think a bit about a moment early in the essay.
Here, in print, and so at more remove, is one place where Burroughs caught me:
It probably doesn’t make much difference whether you stay home or light out for the territories. Even Thoreau, who strove to shrink the gap between vocation and location to the disappearing point, often felt, as he said, ‘a certain doubleness, by which I stand as remote from myself as from another, and that enabled him to see Concord as though it were a distant land from which he was writing home to a kinsman. Something about writing, or even about the committed kind of reading that is a vicarious form of writing, takes you well away from your life and makes you homesick for it. – Franklin Burroughs, Compression Wood (first published in The American Scholar, Vol.67, No. 2, Spring, 1998)
Here, of course, is Henry Thoreau, whose spirit runs through the essay even as his name does not reappear. And there is the beauty of the phrased summary of Thoreau’s effort “to shrink the gap between vocation and location to the disappearing point.” But what compelled me was a full-body feeling of assent that to write or read well, to find your way to some truth, requires moving “well away from your life,” where you can then be “homesick for it.” To this, I would add a third verb: to walk well joins for me writing and reading well. All three “take [me] well away from [my] life and make [me] homesick for it.”
Yearning, it struck me, is a fine way to be awake to your life, which vibrates then like a plucked string. Every day when we write or read or walk, we create this distance. And then, with some luck and commitment, we find our way home, often changed a little, or even a lot. This seems a good way to aim toward the new season that invites us out…into sunny spots to read, onto local trails to walk and wander.
Here, at the southern apogee of our travels, early in our stay, I was on foot in a foothills park scribed with serpentine trails. The dirt underfoot was often southern red and, though gravel-infused, clearly absent the familiar glacial strew of our Maine trails. An early sighting of a copperhead had me alert and jazzed. I climbed a small ridge, and as I dropped over its crest, I came face on to a yearling feeding on some sparse greens. We both looked across the six feet of air separating us; we both stood still.
The moment joined with others like it in Maine, and in other trail-threaded lands that I frequent. Intimacy and strangeness intertwined. I was abroad and at home.
My other recommendation is probably familiar to many. Burroughs also wrote “Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay,” a fine evocation of place and people set in our remarkable local bay. The illustrations by photographer Heather Perry are first class companions to the book’s writing. If you would travel locally and visit the unusual too, this book is for you.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com
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