Solnit and Steinem

       Some books are better tasted a little at a time, not read whole.  A Field Guide to Getting Lost is one of those.  Just when I start to fall asleep in a chapter, up pops a line or a paragraph that shines like a neon sign and keeps flashing in my mind for days!

       "Leave the door open to the unknown," Solnit writes, "the door into the dark.  That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go."

       She quotes a philosopher named Meno, before the time of Socrates, who asked, "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" 

       "The things we want," Solnit writes, "are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.  Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration--how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"

       While Gloria Steinem (in her book, My Life on the Road)  doesn't make a single reference to the Solnit book, the two writers could be having a conversation about that exact question!  Since I'm reading them side by side, they are having a conversation in my mind.

       Steinem's childhood was shaped around her father's desire to live on the road.  They only returned to their house for short stays between long road trips of living in a travel trailer.  He was a kind-hearted, rule-ignoring, unconventional, free spirited wanderer.   He sold small antiques to strangers and refused to work a regular job.

       As a child she sometimes yearned for a more conventional life, living in a house like other kids instead of following his impulses to drive to California or Florida or wherever. She learned to read from road signs instead of going to school.  She would ask her father to drive slowly by pretty houses so she could imagine what it was like to live in one.

       She remembers visiting abandoned ghost towns, one of which was being used as a movie set:

       Ever challenged by rules, my father took us down the road to a slack place in the fence, and sneaked us onto the set.  Perhaps assuming that we had permission from higher-ups, the crew treated us with deference.  I still have a photo my father took of me standing a few feet from Gary Cooper, who is looking down at me with amusement, my head at about the height of his knee, my worried gaze fixed on the ground.

       As a child who wanted too much to fit in, I worried that we would be abandoned like those towns one day, or that my father's rule-breaking would bring down some nameless punishment.  But now I wonder: Without those ghost towns that live in my imagination longer than any inhabited place, would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them?