A Field Guide To Getting Lost

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Rebecca Solnit. A Field Guide To Getting Lost

AFieldGuidetoGettingLost

OpenDoor

TheBlueofDistance

DaisyChains

TheBlueofDistance

Abandon

The Blue of Distance

Two Arrowheads

The Blue of Distance

One-Story House

Sources. Open Door

The Blue of Distance

Daisy Chains

The Blue of Distance

Abandon

The Blue of Distance

Two Arrowheads

The Blue of Distance

One-Story House

About the Author

ALSO BY REBECCA SOLNIT

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Open Door

The Blue of Distance

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Nineteenth-century Americans seldom seem to have gotten lost as disastrously as the strays and corpses picked up by search-and-rescue teams. I went looking for their tales of being lost and found that being off course for a day or a week wasn’t a disaster for those who didn’t keep a tight schedule, knew how to live off the land, how to track, how to navigate by heavenly bodies, waterways, and word-of-mouth in those places before they were mapped. “I never was lost in the woods in my whole life,” said Daniel Boone, “though once I was confused for three days.” For Boone the distinction is a legitimate one, since he could eventually get himself back to where he knew where he was and knew what to do between times. Sacajawea’s celebrated role on the Lewis and Clark expedition wasn’t primarily that of a navigator; she made their being lost more viable by her knowledge of useful plants, of languages, by the way she and her infant signified to the tribes they encountered that this was not a war party, and perhaps by her sense that all this was home, or somebody’s home. Like her, a lot of the white scouts, trappers, and explorers were at home in the unknown, for though the particular place might be unfamiliar to them, the wild was in many cases their chosen residence. Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” Lost, these people I talked to helped me understand, was mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Along with his own words, Sachs sent me a chunk of Thoreau, for whom navigating life and wilderness and meaning are the same art, and who slips subtly from one to the other in the course of a sentence. “It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods any time,” he wrote in Walden. “Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

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