John Graves, from a personal letter:
“To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into the backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth-not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails. But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one’s edge every spring and every fall. In recent decades it has become customary – and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight-to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn, mainly, though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best. But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in the books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky.”
Lately, I have been wandering the Trinity Corridor for a project with the Trinity Trust, trying to make sense of why this city feels like home. Thoreau wrote, “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness…” It’s exploring that heals, I think.
And yet with transportation the way it is: the ability migrate from sun-blanched Dallas to the frozen teeth of the Himalayas in less than twenty four hours, to swallow ground by bus and train and foot and still only just reach the crest of the wave where everyone else is headed soon, of course there is a sadness there. A fading sense of discovery. Where can we go to feel we have truly explored?
Perhaps our exploration is to dig deeper, to see what others pass by and therein find something new. Perhaps our wilderness has become an inward one. Or perhaps I am growing older, and talking myself out of another long journey.
I hope Graves does not mind me publishing words that are not rightly mine. We live to share just as surely as we live to explore. I’ll be checking out his book, Goodbye to a River.