How To Keep Your Roots On The Road

I’m going to be gone until August 27, doing this:

Boulder - Black Hills - Keystone - Blue Mounds - Winona - Nappanee - Gambier (and some stops in between)

To make up for my absence, though, expect a Massive Artsy Post (MAP*) on my travels when I get back. I’ve got my travel sketchbook packed, my watercolors condensed into a travel kit, my camera is charged, and I’m prepared to spend some quality time with a scanner when I get back.

Road trips always make me feel excited and uncomfortable at the same time: I don’t want to be one of those tourists that takes advantage of a rural place and then just heads back to my cushy privileged “regular” life. But in this case, I’m taking a friend back to school– legitimate reason, right? –and the Dakotas are calling to me way more than that long drive across Kansas.

Rurality (that is: roots, heritage, history, physicality, wisdom…) is functionally incompatible with Jack Kerouac. There are no roots “on the road.” That’s why trickster figures– the unpredictable Coyote and Ravin of myths and folk tales –appear in varied settings in different stories. Trickster figures are without a home (or at least, any stable or consistent home). They lack roots, and so it’s ironic that they have been consistently present in the indigenous folk tales of cultures for millenia.

Trickster has smarts, but no wisdom. (That’s why they say one has “street smarts,” but wisdom seems to be something more associated with rural values). And thus stealing, deception and trickery all reside at the crossroads. They characterize the traveling life.

Yet “on the road” is also where adventure, flexibility, and possibility come into play. And those things are necessary too. Justso long as one’s sense of Play doesn’t overwhelm one’s sense of Place.

Until the 26th, then!

*ha!

History of the Orchard

At times the world seems to demand a moment of reflection: to bring your feet together and stand still, to breathe deeply the newly-crisp air.

In Virginia I was only just beginning to feel it: the peak of Harvest time, full of watermelons. But the academic calendar forced me to jump start a new season, driving north and skipping a few weeks forward into cooler weather.

So I thought (in my moment of reflection) that it would be a good time to revisit The Orchard. You know, that mental place where ripe ideas hang low on the branches, the namesake of this humble blog.

Ironically, I was sorting through poems entitled “The Orchard” when I came across a poem by Kathleen Norris, whose book of nonfiction sits just to my left, dog-eared halfway through. Her book Dakota got me through last Spring Break the same way that In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens saved me a few years ago. The poem is titled “The Monastery Orchard in Early Spring,” and ends:

Encounter with fruit is dangerous:

the pear’s womanly shape forever mocked him.

A man and a woman are talking.

Rain moves down and

branches lift up

to learn again

how to hold their fill of green

and blossom, and bear each fruit to glory,

letting it fall.

*   *   *

In one sense, the orchard resembles the garden in parallel world mythologies and fairy tales. It is enclosed; it is forbidden; it is the realm of the gods. More than the garden, though, the orchard is immortal; it is old (these are trees, after all, not daffodils).

Poor Persephone, who ate the pomegranate seeds from Hades’ orchard and was thus tied forever to the world of the dead. The Monkey King, on the other hand, stuffed himself with the Peaches of Immortality, setting off a long chain of events which ends with his elevation to Buddhahood. But Pomona, the wood nymph, tried to enclose herself in her orchard in order to keep suitors away, and was eventually forced to marry Vertumnus. Daphne too, being chased by Apollo, turned into a tree. Coincidence?

It’s a complicated place, the orchard: women running every which way, trying to find safety in trees, or running away from them. Some do find safety; others are victim to Trickster’s invasion (The Monkey King is China’s Trickster figure; Vertumnus disguises himself as an old woman to seduce Pomona, the Norse Trickster god Loki allows for the theft of the goddess Idun’s orchard, which contained the apples of immortality).

It’s a place where women, having always been the target of theft alongside the other ‘forbidden fruits,’ are beginning to climb trees.

And some are wandering into the woods, which are equally immortal but a bit more crooked than the orchard’s rows. Women are re-learning how to graft trees, which is the method for repairing fruit trees, and for making hardier breeds. Beautiful beautiful, to be grafting new trees from history.

Others are writing in the shade, resulting in something like Alice Walker’s Celie, who says, ”my first step from the old white man was trees.”