Searching for Place with Thea Kronberg
Part of an ongoing series that revisits different ideas I explored as part of my graduate studies in the Environmental Humanities.
The experiences that Thea Kronberg encounters in “the Ancient People” chapter of Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark speak deeply and reflect similar moments from my own life. The varying rhythms of time at work in Panther Canyon, cutoff from the cultural forces that have led Thea to a life lived profoundly out of balance have the deep aura and tone of familiarity.
Several years ago I decided to shrug off the responsibilities of life lived in Salt Lake City and journey to Canyonlands National Park with no formal plan aside from spending as much time lounging on desert rocks as I could. A friend agreed to accompany me, and for three days we roamed the canyon country in relative isolation. Little broke the unique acoustic soundscape of Utah's Colorado Plateau aside from our periodic dialogue and the sound of airplanes flying 20,000 feet overhead. Time didn't cease to have relevance. The sun still rose and set and our activities were intrinsically bound to that ceaseless cycle. But moving outside of expectations for how to fill ones waking hours is an abrupt shift from the demands that are usually placed on a human life. Big thoughts and dreams grow in the greenhouse of such space and experience, but in my history they tend to prove elusive, quickly melting away into the daunting desert of memory. This is a place Gaston Bachelard articulates in the Poetics of Space. It is a place that is potent and meaningful and fully accessible at the zenith of our imaginative daydreaming.
But spending too much time in memory has its own set of complications. Theories abound on the mechanical workings of memory, but one provocative hypothesis claims that memory isn’t so much rooted in triggering parts of the brain that are storing information. Rather, some evidence suggests that memory is an active recreation of experience that we destabilize every time we act to touch it. That is to say, experiences in a place can take on the color of our lives in the moment of remembering. Thinking back on my time in Canyonlands now my memory blurs events into something that resembles linear progression (but I can’t swear to the truth of the facts). Moments from other escapes into stark desert intrude and coalesce on this memory, blurring it further while simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically?) deepening my attachment to the place. In my mind I remember hiking out of Upheaval Dome and taking refuge in the shade of rocks to both contemplate the desert and find time to read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek...or was it The Last Temptation of Christ? Under the desert sun of my imagination I wrestle with the demons of memory.
Reading of Thea and her time spent in the canyon with Fred my memory wanders back to another collage of moments where the elusive dynamics of space and intimate immensity have worked to cultivate something with deep roots in the garden of my soul. The first weekend I spent with my wife, Sarah, she was living in Kanab. Much of that time together was spent roaming the desert near Kanab Creek and talking under a canopy of cold desert stars. On the last day before I left for home we made a quick afternoon trip to the eastern side of Zion Canyon National Park. That day, sitting high on a rock ledge, overlooking one of countless vistas that ring the park, she admitted to having feelings for me running deeper than friendship. Many months later we returned to Zion and climbed Angels Landing. Standing on the precipice of that monumental rock tower, as the sun set and dusk began spreading its shadows on Zion Canyon, she first told me that her feelings had crystallized into love. Other trips were to follow, but clearly through our shared experience together this place has taken on a profound meaning in our lives. It is why when I asked her to marry me I knew that it had to come on that same east side bench from that first weekend. It is the same mysterious reason that when we die a portion of our creamains will be mingled and spread in this place, our mortal remains of ash scattered to find eternal rest in the tight crevices of rock and gnarled roots of Zion’s Utah juniper and pinyon pine.
Again, these are deep feelings without simple words to attach to them, and perhaps the trick is giving up the attempt and exploring every nuance of the raw and unmediated experience while we are bound up in it. Perhaps the poet Robert Bringhurst (among countless others) is right, and the answer to this conundrum lies in poetry and acknowledging that the poetic spirit moves in all things - in their voice, in their movement, in their very living breath. Perhaps it is in this way that something of the deep meaning we ascribe to place and the way it acts to fundamentally alter and shape a human life can take on corporeal form. Perhaps it is in this way that we can shape our experiences into something tangible that can pass from one hand to another. Cather's story of Thea Kronberg's altered moments of time in Panther Canyon speak to this possibility, as do any number of other cultural artifacts that attempt to serve as such vessels. The meanings we ascribe to places end up being unique and our own, but we are all storytellers at heart. A deep poetic secret lies somewhere in making these life-altering shapes and contours of our vast and complex inner worlds turn outward and respectfully face the very same physical places that help give them depth and form.