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If you don’t know where you’re from, you
won’t know where you’re going.
A time came at y four that I wasn’t sure about eitherof the wheres in this truism.
I wrote out my perplexities every morning in an online
journal. I brought home pictures from nearby for the
clues they could give, to help me know beer where itwas that I was from. And in the end, the map that tookshape to guide me forward became a book--a “book ofdays” called Slow Road Home.
The imagery of language and memory in the manyshort passages of the book have been worthy vessels
to carry fellow travelers along on the journey with me.And yet, in one sense, words have not been enough to
get me to a nal destination to which I felt I was headed.
Language wielded imperfectly by a novice writer has
not been enough to bring readers fully home.
What the words alone don’t tell is the story of light and
color; of form and dimension. Language alone bypasses
the eye, even while it can conjure powerful images in
the mind. Words alone don’t fully paint the picturesof the whole experience of being here in the way that
words and images together can do.
Where are we from? Where are we going?
WHERE is about a place, and place about a material
reality experienced. Its features change moment by mo-
ment as the sun rises, as its light casts blue shadows
or goes weak and at with the somber day of overcast
skies. Where I’m from is peopled with a million trees
and the leaves on them. Its music is from a pair of spar-
kling creeks whose music rises and falls as they con-
verge just o our front porch, as they freeze in winter
and wither in the heat of summer. Place is somewhereI can take you with your eyes open.
Vision is perhaps queen in “sense of place”. I can show
you in a picture of home things I cannot say in words.
Show, don’t tell, our teachers tell us. Doing both--in the
conuence ofwriting and photography together here
will be as close as I can come to sharing where I’m from.
And as it turns out, this book has been where I have
been going all along.
When winter comes, our morning walks don’t end, but they are no longer
a casual tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a deep-sea dive into
cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down. Peeking out from stock-ing hats like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting
currents of polar air that wash over us like waves. Without our swaddling
spacesuits, our frail pink esh would turn blue and brile as December
leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again.
A summer breath, outdoors or in, is lile dierent. But with the rst breath-
ing in of winter air outdoors, you know that you have stepped out into a
world that is remarkable for things missing. Winter outdoors is a play on astage vaguely familiar, from which most of the props have been temporar-
ily removed. Heat is only one of the absent characters. Diminished too are
color, smell and the sounds and motion of living nature. Even molecules
move with lethargy.
Come the play of winter, all the best lines have been spoken by autumn;
and, except for the wind, there are no words.
Summer is so, yielding and supple. Winter is hard, unyielding and brile.You feel winter through your feet and hear it in your steps. Cold dry air has
its own smell, and there is a sound that belongs to the cold of winter. It is
the sound of breathing, ears mued, holding the beat of your own heartin wool like an echo in an empty shell. No birds call; insects sleep frozen
solid under bark and sod.Winter smells of wool and of wrapped humanity inside. From beyond thethick shroud of winter clothes there is only the near-fragrance of frost. Nomotes of aroma escape on warm currents from spicebush, sassafras, white
pine, from dank so creek mud or pasture clover. There should be an olfac-
tory adjective, like monochrome, to describe the lunar-stark aromasphereof winter.
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