Sometimes, as you go through your day, maybe bouncing from link to link on the ‘net, you’ll stumble across something unexpected. A picture or profile or book review — something that reminds you of something you used to do, or like. Something like Wander Woman in the Village Voice, a book review of A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

I was struck by this paragraph in the review:

The word lost derives from the old Norse term for “disbanding an army,” and Solnit fears that “many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.” In Wanderlust she delved into the shrinkage of public space, and here she pursues the idea that children’s lack of opportunity to roam freely—”Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely)”—will strip away our culture’s sense of adventure and imagination. Wildlife has returned to many American neighborhoods because, “[a]s far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape.”

I think that’s exactly right, and I know because I watched it happen.

crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter
We moved around a few times until I was in fourth grade, when we settled in a small town with some man-made lakes northwest of Chicago. It was a patchwork of winding streets w/ small little ranch houses, established older neighborhoods, a few planned developments and some old farms and what I thought was untamed woods. They seemed untamed to me, and as a seventies “latch key kid”, I was free to explore as a wished. Sometimes on foot, sometimes on a Schwinn Stingray, either alone or with a friend or two, I’d find a trail, a path, an unused rail bed or gurgling little stream and follow it.

I’d purposely try to get lost.

Now, there probably wasn’t much real danger of actually getting lost, but I remember walking through the fairly thick woods of northern Illinois, picking fresh mullberries, gooseberries, raspberries and blueberries off bushes as I walked. Sometimes I’d get turned around, and end up coming out far away from my usual stomping grounds. Or I’d come through a thicket of thorny bushes only to discover an old, cracked foundation, remnants of an old home nowhere near present roads. Occasionally, amongst a treefall deep in the woods, there would be an old dead campfire, some scattered beer cans, maybe a discarded Playboy, the leavings of older kids doing whatever older kids did.

Last I was back, all of those woods are gone now. It’s all subdivisions, and the abandoned rail beds are carefully laid out bike paths. I don’t know if it was better. I’m not sure that it was good that we were left so much to fend for ourselves, but that sense of unbounded possibility does seem diminished.

I used to walk or bike or hike all over the place, as well as traveling through the books I read. Sometimes I carried them with me and read them in a quiet place in the woods. Now I roam on the internet. I’m not much for walking around anymore, much to the detriment of my long-term health, no doubt.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in some time, until I stumbled across this review in Village Voice. How something I used to enjoy had been lost through the course of time.

Although the title pronounces this a field guide, it’s closer to a walkabout. Solnit’s essays sweep through myriad varieties of loss, from objects to memories to love, with plenty of slippage between the categories. She believes that losing things is intrinsic to human life, a never ending process of abandonment and discovery. “Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names,” Solnit proposes. “This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery.” Solnit’s writing switches gracefully between these two modes of perception—between melancholy regret at what’s been discarded ( Hollow City documented the displacement of bohemian San Francisco in the dotcom era) and fragile optimism ( Hope in the Dark rallies around the power of grassroots activism).

I’ve always enjoyed learning new things, and I used to enjoy meeting new people, seeing new places. I look forward less and less, and won’t let myself look back. It’s important to remember to do both. It’s in the clues gleaned from both past and future that we find connections.