A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canons)

by Rebecca Solnit

Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror. Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way. You know the the usual story about the world, the one about ongoing encroachment that continues to escalate and thereby continues to wipe out species. Rich told a different story about how here for a hundred years or so after the gold rush the newcomers blasted away at everything that moved, an era that let up half a century ago. And so, he said, in North America at least, a lot of species have come back. In this county with so many miles of open space, he told me, even coyotes became locally extinct. I realized that the hills I roamed as a child were empty and silent compared to what they are now. It was odd to think of what had been my paradise and refuge as an impoverished landscape, though I had long known its very grass wasn’t native.