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PROLOGUE: THOUGHTS ON A FROZEN POND

In the dead of winter I like to walk on water, held above liquid depths of the nearby lake by a vast frozen plain.

This ice demands respect. I look . . . again. Listen again . . . attentive to any k-r-a-a-ck or yielding to my weight. When the surface is more solid than a hardwood dance floor, and much thicker, I venture far. Even then I hear the ga-loop. A distant plo-o-rp. A muffled gal-oosh. Water undulating beneath ice and me.

Sunlight appears to emanate from above and below on cloudless February days, raying through the crystalline lattice underfoot. With my eyes but inches from the surface, any sense of depth, of refracted distance, yields to a sense of motion arrested. Air bubbles halt in mid-ascent. White oak leaves descend as if on invisible steps, suspended for a season above the lake bottom.

The recent past lies beneath me in these marcescent leaves, plucked and blown here by January’s heavy winds. Inches away, they are out of reach. I kneel within the next stratum.

Thoughts of time’s passage always come to mind on such walks, thoughts of how memory of any form becomes inscribed in the land. The hills surrounding this lake and my home are worn remains of long-vanished mountains. Glacial debris from the last ice age produces a rock-crop in my garden each spring. Stone walls that two centuries ago bordered fields and pastures now thread the dark heart of forests.

Loren Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey that human beings are denied the dimension of time, so rooted are we in our particular now. We cannot in person step backward or forward from our circumscribed pinpoints. I cannot touch a leaf encased in ice—nor can I feel the calloused hands that stacked these walls. Yet we make our lives among relics and ruins of former times, former worlds. Each of us is, too, a landscape inscribed by memory and loss.

I’ve long felt estranged from time and place, uncertain of where home lies. My skin, my eyes, my hair recall the blood of three continents as paths of ancestors—free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—converge in me. But I’ve known little of them or their paths to my present. Though I’ve tracked long-bygone moments on this continent from rocks and fossils—those remnants of deep time—the traces of a more intimate, lineal past have seemed hidden or lost.

Yet to live in this country is to be marked by its still unfolding history. Life marks seen and unseen. From my circumscribed pinpoint, I must try to trace what has marked me. The way traverses many forms of memory and silence, of a people as well as a single person. And because our lives take place among the shadows of unnumbered years, the journey crosses America and time.

Come with me. We may find that home lies in re-membering—in piecing together the fragments left—and in reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory, and to be one.

Lauret Edith Savoy

Leverett, Massachusetts