Storytellersunplugged

I really should fly more often, I guess. Here I am after another flight (this time to Wiscon in Madison, WI, one of the best cons on the circuit) - and another epiphany.

We flew out of Seattle, and then east - across impressive mountains, razor-edged peaks clawing the sky, endless tumbled ranges of it, evergreen forests breaking up the snow like the mountains had raised thorny hackles on their backs, the occasional glint of sunlight on river or (often, startlingly at this time of year, still frozen) high lake. Water and wind and wood and sky.

I watched for a while and then lost track and by the time I looked out of the window again something strange was happening.

The mountains were falling behind, their lower slopes still chaotic with random patterns of water and vegetation - but right there, right where the skirts of the foothills met the plains, a remarkable transformation began. Things became *geometric*. Fields suddenly drew straight lines across the landscape. Roads cut across the ground, occasionally dog-legging at sharp angles when they ran up against some large field they had to go around. Even the water features, some of which were undoubtedly natural enough, felt… bullied into shape, stuffed into convenient spots where they would be of maximum use and minimum interferance, tamed, tramelled, hobbled, broken to bit and saddle and bending their necks to Man like some once proud wild stallion taught to accept a burden on its back.

I’m hardly Thoreau, and “Walden” is hardly my bible - hell, I don’t even CAMP willingly. I tell my husband (who would love to do it, and used to do it regularly in years gone by) that I’d be happy to drive him to a place where he can pitch his tent, I’ll even sit by the campfire with him in the evenings and toast marshmallows, and then I’ll hop back into the car and go back and sleep in a real bed at the local hotel and bring him a fresh bagel and brewed coffee for breakfast. And I know full well that it is these manicured fields that grow the food that ends up on my plate every day. And it isn’t that I am not grateful - who wouldn’t be, when they eat regularly and well?

And yet… and yet… something stirred in me at the sight of that boundary. It was the writer in me that woke and began to explain the feeling to me - EVERYTHING has its price. I am a spoiled little civilised person who likes her beds soft, and her foods cooked well, and is completely addicted to a drink made from the berries of a plant that grow in only a few places on the planet and have to be imported at a certain cost from those places to be freely available to be at my friendly corner coffee shop. And I would find it, on a physical level, hard to give up any of those things - not even in the relatively limited framework of a camping trip. And yet, I remember that I used to look at a much darker sky when I was younger and lived in places where less light polluted the atmosphere - and I cannot recall the last time I actually saw the Milky Way in the sky. I offer the humble sacrifice of tears of awe when I stand in the presence of an old-growth tree (and I still haven’t seen the California redwoods; I suspect my heart will burst when I do). I shiver at the sound of a wolf howl, or a whale call. I cannot begin to explain the feelings that roiled inside of me when I watched an iceberg calve once - the eerie silence preceding the creak, the crackle, the sharp crack and then the thunder of the falling piece of ice the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and the resounding splash as it fell into the icy waters at the glacier’s feet, it all made me want to weep, to cry out in triumph, to apologise, to want to see it all again in slow motion so I could remember to breathe through it all.

That wilderness, those mountains, that is as essential to the survival of the human spirit as any loaf of bread, as any drink of water.

That is where the stories are.

They live up in the high crags, out among the tall trees in primeval forests, in the middle of the shining unexplored seas. The places of mystery and power where we haven’t gone often, or gone at all, where our gods have withdrawn to live apart from the human throng, where the wind sings songs we have forgotten how to hear, where the cry of the eagle circling in the sky above you starts “Once upon a time…”

Don’t get me wrong. There are stories aplenty in the cities that we have made. Stephen King made an entire subgenre of stories which make me absolutely certain that I never wish to live in a small Maine town where the smiling faces conceal demented murdering clowns or pet cemeteries that come to life or any other sort of quiet horror. Writers like Charles de Lint have populated entire fictional towns like Newford with characters half of this and half of some distant, other, weird world - and those characters are just as much at home in a city street as they are out in the wild, thank you very much, and if you don’t believe me you don’t want to meet up with them in a dark alley some night to find out different. But these are stories that we have made, that have grown up with our cities. They are city lights - they exist to compensate for the vanishing of the Milky Way from our heavens. Some of them shine far brighter, and thus cast far darker shadows, than the starlight ever did - but the starlight was there first, and it cuts far more sharply. The city lights come in through the eyes; starlight is absorbed by the soul.

Summer is coming. I hear the call of the wild. I should go hunt me some stories, to store them carefully against the long dark winter that will come again in its turn. And I shall tell them by firelight, and in them the memory of sharp sunlight and the the bright alpine meadows of the brief mountain summer and the cry of the eagle on the wing will keep the spirit alive and dreaming until the next summer comes and I hear the call again.