I need to carve out some time in the coming month to go on a few long rambles along some new trails or in a place I haven’t been, camera at the ready.
Because the last time I did a lot of that, one of the things I realized is that there are a lot of strange things hidden, lost, abandoned just beyond where most people walk or drive. If you poke around a bit off trails or you go on a long walk on a trail that almost nobody takes, you realize both how much space there is that people don’t really touch—but also that in those untouched spaces, there’s every once in a while a sign that a few other people have gone rambling just as you have and are using those spaces for their own mysterious purposes.
That is not always a comfortable feeling. In fact, most of the time it’s a horror-movie scalp-prickling feeling. “I wonder what that is?” as you go deeper into a thickly wooded area with a glimpse of a shape or a color that you can’t make out and then suddenly it’s a little ruined cabin, an abandoned tricycle and stuffed animal, or in this case, a six-foot tall bright-white wooden cross. Something that has a story to it. You know it’s not a message for passers-by because it’s not visible from any trail. It’s not a site of pilgrimmage or secret worship: there’s no footprints, no clearing, no stones to sit on. But it’s not been there for years and years—it’s clean, it looks like someone left it there last week. It would be a weird place to store a cross that’s meant to be carried in some kind of passion play re-enactment: this is miles deep into a state park in northern Delaware, where even if the cross-owner came back for it, it would be a long haul along a muddy trail back to a parking area or a road.
Creepy as these experiences can be, they also re-enchant the world, they make me feel how impoverished our accounts of patterns, structures, everyday sociologies can be in the way they banalize and systematize the human world. Maybe somebody drags objects, makes stone piles, weaves branches in places far away from sight just for the one other person who might someday meander into the same hidden location.
When I was a child, my father and sister and I built a trail from our backyard up the side of a foothill in the Santa Monica Mountains. It wasn’t for other people, it was just for us. Going up a dry wash up and up through the brush and live oaks, we came to a hidden pool of year-round water that had thousands of spider webs stretching all across the open area above the pool. Any animals that used the water must have slunk in low, because the webs were so thick and undisturbed. It was a spiritual feeling to have seen it and feel we were the only people who ever had. And yet somehow I wanted just one other person, a stranger I didn’t know and would never know, to see it. Not to have people routinely going there, because they’d destroy it in no time. Just someone else, once. To make it more real, I guess?
I went back there once when I was in my thirties, to show my partner where it had been. A short distance above where our house had been, at the edge of the development, the entire hillside had been scoured, terraced into new housing lots that went almost to the top of the ridgeline. The webs were gone, the trail was gone.
Would it be a compensation now to have a photograph of a place that no longer exists, a photograph that could never quite represent the feeling of having seen that place for the first time? I’m not sure, but I think so. It’s almost like having that stranger’s confirming witness in my back pocket to have pictures of the surprising things that are just beyond the often-witnessed world.
I recognize the webbed place. Your ancestors would have, too. It’s the Old Ones’ place—or whatever you prefer to call them. I hope you don’t mind, but it might have to go into some writing I might do.