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I have traveled more widely than most, I believe. I was a travel writer for my newspaper (among other things). But even outside of vocational duties, travel has been central to my life. My late wife and I have been on the move considerably, visiting each of the 48 contiguous states many times, and gone outside the country when we could. In the summer of 1981, for instance, we put 10,000 miles on the car while driving around the country. We were both teachers and the summer gave us the chance to wander.

There are places, however, that I have gone back to, over and over, throughout my life, not through mere happenstance, but because they have been meaningful. They are destinations for non-religious pilgrimages.

Meaning can be hard to define. On first thought, one thinks “meaning” implies a second message: “This” means “that.” “I know what he said, but what did he mean?” That sort of thing.

But meaning has a more personal existence, a psychological one. Something can have meaning even if you don’t know what it means. I suppose you might otherwise call this significance. And there are places I visit over and over because they bear the weight of personal significance. They have meaning. And I go back to them.

Bodhgaya

It isn’t just me. The world is full of such places, some personal, some cultural, some religious or spiritual. They can be sacred spaces or holy ground. They have accrued some emotional hold on those for whom this kind of significance has meaning. It can be the Buddhist bo tree, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, Independence Hall. For a few of us, the list would include Fenway Park. These are places of social significance and people will make the hajj to see them out of devotion or just to absorb the numinous halo surrounding them. Life is empty without meaning, although what we call meaning and where we might discover it is personal.

Meaningful places needn’t be so to groups, or to have religious importance. I have no belief in ghosts, spirits or ouija boards and I don’t believe that the past hangs on to the present to make itself palpable. But I have several times experienced a kind of emotional resonance when visiting certain famous sites.

Normandy beach

The thought re-emerged recently while watching the recent commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. I have visited those beaches and had an overwhelming rush of intense sadness. It was inevitable to imagine the thousands of soldiers rushing up the sands into hellish gunfire, to imagine a thousand ships in the now calm waters I saw on a sunny day, to feel the presence in the concrete bunkers of the German soldiers fated to die there manning their guns.

The effect is entirely psychological, of course. If some child with no historical knowledge of the events that took place there were to walk the wide beach, he would no doubt think only of the waves and water and, perhaps, the sand castles to be formed from the sand. There is no eerie presence hanging in the salt air. The planet does not record, or for that matter, much note, the miseries humans inflict on each other, and have done for millennia. But for those who have a historical sense, the misery reasserts itself. Imagination brings to mind the whole of human agony.

Perhaps I should not say that the earth does not remember. It can, in certain ways. Visiting the woods of Verdun in France, site of a horrendous battle in World War I, I saw the uneven forest floor, where time has only partially filled in the shell craters. Once the trees were flattened by artillery, leaving a moonscape littered with corpses. The trees have grown back, but the craters are still discernible in the wavy forest floor. The same child who thought of sand castles in Normandy might well think the churned land at Verdun merely a quirk of geology, but the land itself bears its scars.

The presence of the dead was overwhelming at Antietam, site of the bloodiest battle during America’s Civil War. In one spot alone, a 200-yard stretch called Bloody Lane, 5,000 men were blown apart in a few short hours.

Before Sept. 17, 1862, the brief dirt drive was called the Sunken Road, and it was a shortcut between two farm roads near Sharpsburg, Md. All around were cornfields rolling up and down on the hilly Appalachian landscape.

The narrow dirt road, depressed into the ground like a cattle chute, now seems more like a mass grave than a road. And it was just that when Confederate soldiers mowed down the advancing Federals and were in turn mowed down. The slaughter was unimaginable.

You can see it in the photographs made a few days after the battle. The soldiers fill the sunken road like executed Polish Jews. It was so bad, as one Union private said, “You could walk from one end of Bloody Lane to the other on dead soldiers and your feet would never touch the ground.”

It is difficult to stand now in Bloody Lane and not feel that all the soldiers are still there, perhaps not as ghosts, but as a presence under your boot-sole, there, as blood soaked into the dirt.

But it needn’t be horror or blood that gives meaning to a place. It may be achieved through personal association with something we lived through, or through esthetic appreciation — the sudden awareness of sublimity — or through an awareness of a less traumatic history born in a landscape. And I thought about places I have gone back to over and over; places that bear significance to me. I’m sure most of us could make such a list, whether long or short. Here are 10 of my personal pilgrimage sites that I have visited and revisited over a long life.

Walden Pond — I cannot count the number of times I have visited Concord, Mass., or how often I have made the pilgrimage to the glacial kettle lake just outside downtown where Henry David Thoreau built his cabin and lived for two years, and which led him to write his book about the experience.

The most recent visit was only two years ago, passing through on my way to friends in Maine. The site now has a large parking lot and a visitor center (although the parking is primarily for summertime local beachgoers, who use Walden Pond as a swimming hole). When I first saw it, there was not much there but the water and the woods; I had to park alongside the road.

I have circumambulated the pond, a walk of just under two miles, the first time in the early morning when a mist hung over the water and the sun slowly burned through. I have read Walden several times, and own several editions, both cheap and deluxe, and Thoreau’s other books, including his Journals, and eaten up his idiosyncratic style of writing with relish.

Walpi

Hopi Mesas — In northern Arizona, the Hopi have built their towns primarily on three mesas, First, Second, and Third, which are really the southern fingers of the larger Black Mesa. We have visited all three mesas many times, including one snowy Christmas spent with a Hopi family we knew on First Mesa in the village of Walpi. The warmth of the hearthfire in the stone house, and the cookies we were offered, and the smiles on the faces of the children are indelible.

Another time, we were invited to a social dance on Second Mesa in Old Oraibi, and climbed to the roof of one of the houses with the rest of the Hopi to watch and cheer the Kachina dancers. Another time, driving past New Oraibi, at the foot of Second Mesa, we were caught as traffic was halted so the sacred Kachina dancers could cross the road from where they emerged from the kiva and marched toward the plaza. We were not supposed to be there but couldn’t leave, with the Kachina traffic cop in front of us and several cars behind. We apologized profusely, but the angry cop didn’t seem to care. We shouldn’t have been there, but we also couldn’t have known a sacred dance had been scheduled for that day.

You can stand at the cliff edge on First Mesa and look south over the Navajo Reservation, nearly to Flagstaff and marvel at the intense beauty of the Colorado Plateau.

Chartres Cathedral — It wasn’t until our second visit to France that we managed to get to Chartres, but after that we went back over and over. The cathedral is, of course, a World Heritage Site, and a sacred place to many. But it spoke to me less of religion than of history — architecture 800 years old and still functioning for its original purpose.

Most of the cathedrals and basilicas of Northern France have been restored and reworked (Notre Dame, before the fire, was largely re-imagined in the 19th century as it was restored by Viollet-le-Duc) but Chartres is almost entirely original. If you are sensitive to it, you can feel all that passage of time embodied in the stonework and the interior space.

The cathedral sits at the top of a hill at the center of town, and can be seen in the distance from miles around. I have spent hours sitting in the transept meditating over the great north rose window, which remains the single most beautiful manmade object I have ever seen. The entire experience engenders awe.

American Museum of Natural History — I was originally going to list New York City here, but then narrowed it down to Manhattan, but, really, the center of magic for me is the Natural History Museum. I first visited on a third-grade school trip and fell in love with the dinosaurs. But all through my childhood and adolescence I visited the museum as often as I could. I loved the dioramas, the dinosaur bones, the giant stone Olmec head, the huge suspended blue whale — even the “Soil Profiles of New York State.” To say nothing of the room full of chunks of quartz, each with a little typed tag explaining where it was collected.

I could also have mentioned the George Washington Bridge, which my grandfather helped build; he was an engineer working on the bridge in the 1930s. Through most of my life, when living in or visiting New Jersey, I would take the bus to the bridge and walk across the bridge to 178th St. I have walked the bridge too many times to count.

The Outer Banks — I went to Guilford College in North Carolina beginning in 1966 and soon met lifelong friend Alexander and we made annual camping trips to Cape Hatteras, usually in winter when the beaches were empty. Later, my first wife and I spent our honeymoon camped directly under the lighthouse. It was February and the regular campsites were closed, and so we pitched our tent in the dunes.

I have been back over and over, with each succeeding wife or possl-q, although as I got to be old, we tended to sleep in motel rooms. When my brother began teaching in Virginia, he lived at the northernmost bit of the Outer Banks, Sandbridge, and when visiting I often made a side-trip back down to Hatteras and Okracoke.

Once, with Alexander, we went after a huge storm, and parts of the road were washed out just north of the lighthouse. He got out of the car and walked in front, feeling the asphalt under his feet and leading me safely past the overwash. Another time, at night, we walked down to Cape Point with a Coleman lamp projecting our shadows, like giants, up into the misty black sky.

Grand Canyon — My brother once observed that unlike most hyped destinations, where you are always at least a tiny bit disappointed when you finally get there, the Grand Canyon is actually more impressive, more overwhelming, when you actually see it live: It never lets you down. It is 200 miles of vast geology, color, and depth.

We lived in Arizona for 25 years and so I cannot number the times we visited the Canyon, mostly the South Rim, where most of the tourist action happens. But the second time we came, in 1982, we went to the North Rim and when we couldn’t get a room at the hotel there (it is always full), we went out of the park after dusk into the national forest, where it is legal to camp anywhere, and pulled into a side road in the dark. In the morning, we got out of the tent and discovered that if I had backed the car up 10 feet further, we would have tumbled down into the canyon. We were right on the edge.

And once, on assignment from the paper, I drove 60 miles off road to the Toroweap Overlook, also on the North Rim, but in pure wilderness where only a rare person ventures, and camped away from all city lights, where the night sky was neon in intensity.

Hudson River Valley — I grew up in northern New Jersey, in the apotheosis of suburbia. But my father’s family had a rustic house — a “bungalow” — in West Park, N.Y., halfway up the Hudson River, and we spent many summer vacations, and at least one winter ski vacation, at the bungalow. It was the town where the once-famous nature writer John Burroughs lived. There was woods, a swimming hole with a waterfall.

But up and down the river, from Dunderberg through Bear Mountain and the Seven Lakes Drive, it was the escape from the ordinariness of the suburbs. We regularly went swimming in the summer at Lake Welch, or watched ski jumping at Bear Mountain.

In 1986, we drove up Perkins Drive to the top of Bear Mountain, during an outbreak of gypsy moth caterpillars. The tower at the top was covered in a sheath of hairy worms and the ground was gooey with the squashed ’pillars. It was eerie and more than a little stomach churning.

The bungalow at West Park

The Nilsen family drove up Route 9W on summer weekends to visit the bungalow, and the three-lane highway had to curl around Storm King Mountain, a section of road that made my cautious father extremely nervous with a sheer drop down the edge to the river. They are gone now. That portion of 9W has now been re-routed and the treacherous third (middle) lane now long gone. Near Haverstraw, the “Ghost Fleet” of WWII-era liberty ships were moored. They are gone now. So is the bungalow. I am sorry for that.

From the Palisades up through the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River is holy ground, as far as I am concerned. It glows with the inner light of myth.

Schoodic Point — Maine is its own mythology, and like the city of New York, I was going to include the whole state in my list, but likewise, I have narrowed it down to the place that I have been back to over and over for the longest. I first visited Maine as an infant when my parents took a trip there. I can’t say I have any memory of then. But subsequently, I have been there many times, now to visit my friends Alexander and Mary Lou. I’ve traveled the whole state over, camped at Mt. Katahdin, driven round Mooselookmeguntic Lake, reached the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Mt. Desert Island, took the tour of the paper mill in Millinocket — and you can get there from here.

But the mythic center of Maine for me has been the rocky bit of coastline that juts out into Frenchman’s Bay north of Acadia National Park, called Schoodic (with the double “O” pronounced as the “oo” in “good.”) It is one of those windswept romantic landscapes where the spume blows into your face, the waves crash against rock with an explosive boom, and the sky, water, and land still seem of one substance.

Giverny — I’ve been to Monet’s house and gardens three times, once in the spring and twice in the fall. He and his family lived in the small town 50 miles north of Paris, from 1883 until his death in 1926, and many of his greatest works were made there, primarily his extensive series of water lily paintings.

I had become familiar with some of those wide canvases in museums in New York and at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. And I had been inspired to make scores of photographs of waterlilies in imitation of Monet’s paintings.

But the chance to get to see the genuine article in situ, in the grand gardens in Giverny was a pilgrimage from the get-go. One enters, of course, with curiosity, but also with reverence.

Austin house

Rock Castle Creek, Woolwine, Va. — Some of the happiest and unfettered moments of my life have been spent on the porch of the Austin house along Rock Castle Creek in Virginia. I have been back many times, beginning during my college years, when a group of Guilford students hiked the five or so miles up the creek, fording over logs, and reaching the 1916 farmhouse, with its spring house and barn.

With my companion, or with a group, we would break into the house (not recommended, for legal reasons) and roll out our sleeping bags on the floor. At night in the summer, the field in front of the house was a galaxy of blinking lightning bugs.

At the end of Bergman’s film, Wild Strawberries, the old professor Isak Borg, lies in bed after a tumultuous day, full of cares and regrets, and in voice over, says, “If I have been worried or sad during the day, it often calms me to recall childhood memories,” and he thinks of a time he saw his parents together, with his father fishing. It soothes him and he sleeps peacefully. For me, that moment of pure calm happiness that I recall is of sharing a hammock with my beautiful red-headed mate on the second floor porch of the Austin house and watching the sun go down over the creek and meadows beyond. Such moments consecrate a place.

These are all places I have gone back to multiple times. But there are places where I have only ventured once that still have that emotional buzz that signifies a sacralized locale. These may be places set aside by history or by personal experience, or simply by their extraordinary natural setting.

We all have such places, and they while they may be widely shared, such as the World Trade Center, they are just as often special only to one or a few people. Places where we stand in awe, and may not even be able to speak.

From top right: Cape of Good Hope; Gaspe; Montauk; Finisterre

For me, many have been where the land runs out and the seas begin. There is something about the extremity, the sense of the limitations of land and the seeming infinity of the watery horizon. I seek them out, such as the Gaspé Peninsula, Long Island’s Montauk Point, Brittany’s Finisterre, or South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. At my age, I know my existence shall soon run out and the dark infinite void is the horizon, and that I will not likely ever get to visit such places again.

And I have been to Civil War sites where I felt the ghosts in the soil: places such as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Appomattox, Gettysburg, Petersburg, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Five Forks. And important places in the Western expansion: Sand Creek, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, Washita. Japanese internment camps at Manzanar and Poston. And to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was shot; and the slave quarters at the Oakley Plantation in Louisiana. All places where death and suffering are felt in the air breathed there — at least to anyone with an awareness of history.

Mt. Saint Michel

And I could list many less fraught places with their own resonance that I have only visited once, but that have created space in my psyche: Mt. Saint Michel; Big Bend National Park; the catacombs in Paris; the caves at Lascaux; the town of Moosonee on James Bay in Ontario; the Okefenokee swamp in Georgia; Mt. Angeles in Washington’s Olympic Mountains; Hallingskarvet mountains in the spoon of Norway; Chaco Canyon; Taliesin in Wisconsin; Ice Water Springs in the Smokies; the Salton Sea; Glacier Bay in Alaska.

Each of these places has become a part of me. They are my sacred spaces.

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Circling the middle

October 25, 2015

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I have lived in the four corners of the U.S. I was born in the Northeast, lived in the South, the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. And yet it is somehow the vast middle of the nation that most draws me to it.

In the Northeast, there are cities and woods, the Hudson River slicing up New York State, the “bare and bended arm” of Massachusetts jutting out into the cod-waters of the cold Atlantic. There are the great curved ridges of the Alleghenies forcing highways into what look like Golgi bodies on the gas-station maps. This is the land of salt-rust on the undercarriage of family cars; Of hillside cemeteries bordered by brick apartment buildings. Warehouse districts and tract housing; turnpikes and wharves; glacial till and the stone walls the till makes both possible and necessary — and the fallen ruins of those walls making forgotten property boundaries in second- and third-growth forests. Swimming holes from abandoned quarries and the ever-present nose dust of bus fumes.

I look back on these things and a wave of nostalgia warms me. Manhattan in the winter, with the Con-Ed grates pouring steam into the air; the periodic burst of warm air blowing up from the sidewalk as the subway train rumbles in the Stygian underground. People in vast tides walking with purpose up Fifth Avenue. The smell of coffee and pie at the Horn and Hardart.

But I left the Northeast at just about the same time as the Horn and Hardart began fading away. I moved to the South, where I became accustomed to slower talking, slower walking and human interactions that were not based on efficiency and gain. It was a land of pine trees grown for paper pulp, a coastline of sea oats and dunes on barrier islands, cities of fewer restaurants, and what there were served meatloaf and fried chicken. When I moved there, the single Chinese restaurant in Greensboro, N.C. pretty much restricted its menu to chop suey and egg foo yung with pot roast gravy.

I have lived in the South now longer than I have lived anywhere else, although I have not been faithful, and have moved elsewhere, yet I seem always to return. There are pinxter flowers dripping with rain along the Appalachian Trail; there are bass-filled man-made lakes where small towns used to be; there are old lawyers in worn suits who meet every morning in the coffee shop to talk about the day’s events while sipping hot coffee cooled by pouring it out into its saucer slurp by slurp. When I moved to the South, the Klan was still common — in both senses of the word — and otherwise perfectly decent white folk made a sincere case for not changing things too precipitously. Every town had its black community, usually on the other side of the railroad tracks that had once provided the reason for the town’s existence and formed the terminator as clearly as if there were the lit and dark sides of the moon.

There were cotton warehouses and tobacco barns; men actually used spitoons — and if they didn’t have one, they might have an empty tin can into which to spit the brown excess saliva from their chaw. I know of one old reprobate who actually died when he passed out drunk and rolled off his couch, cutting his throat on the jagged edge of his spit can.

If, in the North, people had little time for each other, always in a rush to get somewhere and do something, in the South, everything revolved around relationships, around talking and with that talk establishing social rank and responsibility and anyone you knew, you also knew who their daddy was. People talked endlessly, about weather, business, politics, gossip, taxes, planting, hunting, dogs and church meetings. Even now, so many decades later, when I made my first visit to the local barber, one of the things he asked, making small talk, was what church did I go to. He wasn’t being nosy nor was he proselytizing, he was merely establishing a relationship.

A good deal has changed in the South since I first got there four decades ago. Accents that used to define hierarchy have begun flattening out: You can walk through whole blocks of Atlanta and hear the same language you might hear in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Fine dining is now possible if your city or town is now large enough. Your mayor has at least a 50-50 chance of being African-American. When I got there, every white Southerner was a Democrat; now, they are all Republicans.

I moved to Seattle in the late ’70s, before half of California swept north, and before every streetcorner had baristas pouring white swirls into the foam of a latte. The railroad switchers shunted cars from dock to dock along Alaskan Way where homeless men in dirty coats and black watchcaps clutched brown paper bags while sleeping in industrial doorways. The ferry moved out of its pier in the morning light to make its way to Winslow on Bainbridge Island or to Bremerton. Although it rained most days during the three non-summer seasons, it was mostly a drizzle and few people even thought it counted as rain and no one I saw ever carried an umbrella.

From my house on Phinney Ridge, across from the Woodland Park Zoo, you could see the snow-capped Olympic Mountains to the west and the snow-capped Cascade Mountains to the east. To the south was the biggest permanent, unmoving white cloud you ever saw — on those days you could actually see it for the weather — and it was called Mt. Rainier, which was pronounced, unlike the sovereign of Monaco, as if it described the precipitation in the Puget Sound: rainier. Certainly rainier than Arizona, where I moved later.

There was Olympia beer and Rainier beer, and I could hardly believe it to see pedestrians stop at the “don’t walk” lights, even at 2 in the morning when there were no cars on the road. No New Yorker would do that; I had friends who otherwise had a cavalier attitude toward authority who would stop me from jaywalking, as if the Stasi were keeping files.

When I got out of the city, the forests were populated with douglas fir and western redcedar. Nothing else. Endless miles of the stuff, climbing up the sides of mountain ranges and with downed logs greened over with moss, and the path a spongy loam under your feet.

I think that is what finally drove me to move back to the South: The sense of homesickness for a forest with scores, even hundreds of varieties of tree. The sameness of the Northwestern forest seemed unnatural to me, as if I shouldn’t be there.

There is much I loved in the Northwest. The moist air, the cool summer, the planked salmon and Ivar’s Acres of Clams. I knew a bunch of bicycle messengers, known as “Buckies,” and enjoyed the friendship they provided. There was a political progressiveness that was nearly universal; one could shop at the co-op grocery, the Public Market at Pike Place. Stop off at a bar and have a beer like a real person.

Finally, there is the American Southwest, as dry as Seattle was moist. One can see for 20 miles at a glance, taking in a meaningful quadrant of the earth circumference. The Southwest mean space. At least outside the city of Phoenix, where we settled — and we got out of the city as often as we could — the desert was intense, sharp and beautiful. Before a rain, the humidity made the creosote bushes smell like spicy cologne. The saguaro cactus stood vertical above the thorny undergrowth. Jack rabbits, roadrunners, the occasional javalina or rattlesnake darted in and out of view. The air was dry; sweat evaporated before you even knew it had escaped your pores. The sun bleached the landscape and radiated heat like an open oven door.

There were three different experiences of Arizona. The most common one was the urban experience of Phoenix.

My wife and I moved there because we had traveled summers across the country and thought it might be pleasant to live in the West for a few short years. I’m sure we were thinking of Flagstaff or Santa Fe. We wound up in Phoenix. We were thinking of having a little adobe house with a white picket fence and perhaps a butte in the background and a few pinto horses grazing in the pasture. We wound up on Seventh Street, the busiest thoroughfare in the city, with traffic noise like endless surf crashing outside the house, and exhaust soot collecting in the cooling ducts of the house.

The street grid was punctuated by Circle Ks and 7-Elevens. The right-angle network of streets were broken in places by the eruption of mountains: Camelback, Squaw Peak, South Mountain. Enthusiasts climbed them to get a view of the city below, which spread out like a plaid tablecloth, divided into square patches. You could hardly get lost in this checkerboard of roads; you were either driving north-south or east-west, and the city’s mountains provided easy landmarks. You always knew where you were.

Outside the city, the land was split between northern and southern Arizona. To the south, there were greasewood flats, saguaro cactus and stony mountains catching the sun late in the day to demarcate the rosy lit areas from the bluish shadows. Dry lake beds hovered in the distance, white salt pans, and the taller mountains caught snow in the winter.

To the north was the Colorado Plateau, Flagstaff, the Navajo and Hopi reservations and the Grand Canyon. The air was noticeably thinner and cleaner — no Phoenix, no Tucson to fill the valleys up with yellow smog. Roads unrolled in long ribbon streams ahead of you heading to the horizon bounded by mesas and buttes. The landscape painted tawny, ruddy, sooty, whitish and blue by streaks, the sky larger than you have seen it anywhere, and most likely uniform blue, only darker toward the zenith.

At First Mesa on the Hopi reservation, you can hardly tell the blocks of stone making up the hillside from the stone houses built atop. You drive endless miles across grassy plains to the next habitation. Streams are marked by slight empty depressions that only fill up in the rare rains that come, mainly in late summer as thunderstorms and mid-winter as constant frontal drizzles. They can become roiling mud rivers almost instantly. Cars will be washed away in the flow. You can always tell the newbies in the desert; they think they can drive through the flooded washes. They fill the nightly news and we see the cars floating downstream, their owners on the roof waiting for rescue.

We spent one Christmas day with friends in Walpi. We brought apples and oranges, coffee and sugar. They gave us cookies they were baking. It snowed on First Mesa; the fire in the stove heated the low stone house.

What you are never quite prepared for is the sense that the canyons are not, like mountains, something that rise from the level, but rather are gigantic holes in the ground you don’t see until you are right on top of them. The stratigraphy is a geological story that is told, part by part, as you move from one part of the state to another. The same layers, in the same order hundred of miles apart, although they might be covered by yet more layers in one place, and rest on the surface elsewhere. You could, like a good geologist, anthologize the landscape to tell a continuous saga.

When we left Arizona, we immediately became homesick for the Plateau and the desert. I cannot say, however, that we missed the city. I used to call it “Cleveland in the desert.” I loved my job there, and my colleagues and friends, and my wife loved her job and her colleagues and friends, but the city itself is rather charmless. The South called us back.

And so, we returned — for me it was my third homecoming. Now we live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and I am constantly amazed, as a Yankee, at just how open and friendly the people are — so much so, it sometimes creeps me out.

But as I was saying at the head of this periplus, I have lived and absorbed the people and land in the four corners of the country, but somehow, there is a gravitational pull to the middle I have always felt, to the place I have never managed to live, the vast gut of the continent.

For me, there are two emotionally resonant attractions to the middle. First, there is the rustbelt city, the factories, the immigrant populations, the train yards and highway junctions that all spoke of the industrious rise of the nation from the late 19th century through the Second World War. It is where so many of our great writers came from. It is the home of pirogis and deep fried ravioli, sausages and red cabbage. I have loved taking the train across the lower shores of the Great Lakes past Cleveland and Toledo to Chicago. There is a Midwest that is populated. What is not industry is farm. And there is corn and wheat, silos and tractors. The land tends to lie flat. You could play billiards on the ground in places in western Indiana.

But there is the second middle of the country that calls to me even more insistently: It is further west than the prairies; it is the Great Plains. Driving through North Dakota or Nebraska, eastern Colorado or eastern Montana — there you feel more than anyplace else in the 48 states that you live on a planet. On the coasts, it used to be proof of the roundness of the earth that you could see the ships and their masts slowly dip below the horizon; on the plains, you see the next grain elevator rise from the same horizon in front of you as you drive and later drop again behind you. You are always on the high point of a dome; the earth falls away from you in all directions. And on this dome, the grasses curl like whitecaps on the ocean.

It is this sense that Melville captures so well in his late story and poem (or is it poem and prose prologue) John Marr. “Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor — no geologist — to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.” The landscape between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains was “hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.”

There is little in this expanse that can count as a city. Much that seems uninhabited. Moving across the Dakotas and into Montana, you find that neighbors count their separation not by fences but by miles. The land rises and falls like sea swell, and from the top of any ridge, you can see the land spread off in grassy waves.

Why this landscape should call to me so seductively is a mystery, even to me. I have wondered if it is some atavistic genetic memory of the Indo-European origins in the Caucasus, the Trans-Oxiana, where the grass continues unabated for a thousand miles, that Scythian homeland of my peoples, or at least of my language.

Or perhaps, even further back, it is the imprinted memory of the African savannah where even before the global diaspora, we hairless monkeys were born. Why should I feel a homesickness for the grasslands that I have never actually lived in, unless there be some tick in my chromosomes that was molded there?

Whatever the cause, I feel it strongly. I feel it also in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and eastern Alberta. The grasses swirl in the breeze, like animated hair whorls on an infant’s head; you can see the breeze moving through the grass in waves, the way a man in a sailboat sees the fretting of the lake surface as the gust approaches.

I am old now, and it is unlikely that I will dot the center of a quincunx of habitations by finally moving to the continental center. I will stay fixed in the North Carolina mountains. The Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Northwest are part of my past. The spindle around which they all turn will remain a psychic locus, not an actual one for me. And the gust that frets the water a hundred yards off is the final one.

Christmas of the four gifts

December 23, 2013

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Walpi

The best Christmas I ever had was the Christmas of four gifts.

It happened on the Hopi Reservation a few years ago, when my wife and I left Phoenix because we just couldn’t take another holiday season under the palm trees.

Like many who lived in the desert, Carole and I grew up elsewhere, where Christmas meant freezing weather and the possibility of snow. Santa rides a sleigh, after all. But in Phoenix, Santa wears sunglasses. It just doesn’t seem right.

Not that we thought we’d find a traditional Christmas among the Hopi. Their traditions are rather different. But we thought we could at least escape the TV beer ads littered with reindeer and find something new outside the city where the backyard Christmas barbecue passes for holiday cheer.

Maybe we couldn’t have our old traditions, but we could start new ones.

If the traffic and commotion of the city get on your nerves, no better tonic exists than a visit to the three great mesas of yellow-gray sandstone that rise like gigantic library lions from the vast plains of the Colorado Plateau. Atop them the Hopi have built most of their villages, all from the stone of the hills.

From the mesa-top the view is biblical: You can see for what seems forever. The San Francisco Peaks sit on the horizon, some 75 miles to the southwest, yet they seem so close you feel you can walk to them.

On that Christmas Day, the temperature was about 29 degrees and the sun was low and cold, poking through an intermittent overcast. We stopped at the base of First Mesa to get gas at the little store in Polacca. We also bought a few gifts — some coffee and sugar — to bring to the women on the mesa-top who give tours of the village.

When we got back in the car, we discovered the woman behind the counter had quietly dropped candy and fruit into the poke with our purchases.

That was the first gift.

WALKING INTO HISTORY

The highlight of a visit to the three villages atop First Mesa is a tour of Walpi. The Hopi have lived in the community on the prow of the mesa for at least 1,000 years and some of the stone homes seem to be almost that old.

You park your car in the middle village, Sichomovi, and find a tour guide in Ponsi Hall, the community center. From there, you walk out across the narrow stone causeway to Walpi. Our guide was a woman we had met on several previous visits to the area. She is a warm, generous woman who was free with her answers to our many questions. I will not embarrass her by printing her name.

She showed us the ancient masonry, the village layout, the meaning of the kivas and their spindly ladders that protrude from the ground. She told us of the kachinas, of blue cornmeal and of pahoes , or prayer sticks, whose feathers danced in the breeze on the edge of the mesa.

She also told us of her life in San Diego and how after years away from the mesa, she felt drawn back to it.

And she told us how, like many Hopi women of First Mesa, she makes pottery.

Unlike most, though, she doesn’t make bowls, but effigies of turtles.

”They are like the Hopi,” she said. ”They live a slow-paced life.”

At the highest point of Walpi we came to the home of her aunt, who is one of the better-known Hopi potters. The old woman and Carole hit it off perfectly. They seemed to speak the same language.

They talked for quite a while. At one point, Carole asked if she knew where we might buy some of the blue cornmeal we had seen all over the reservation, and the woman reached a brown paper bag down from a high shelf and gave it to Carole, with instructions for cooking Hu zru’ su ki , or fried blue-corn polenta.

And when we bought one of her bowls, she smiled and whispered something in Carole’s ear and sprinkled some corn pollen into the pot.

That was the second gift.

OFF THE USUAL TOUR

Then, on our swing around the north side of the mesa top, our guide stopped in front of one small, square building and invited us in. It was her home, and inside, her daughter was putting the final touches of frosting on a batch of Christmas cookies.

The small room, with its stone floor covered with small rugs, was a toasty 75 degrees, with a fire going in the woodstove and condensation beading on the icy window glass. The family was bustling around, with Uncle in the back room attaching some down to the end of a ”lightning stick” and two boys helping the daughter with the cookies the way youngsters always help — by eating them.

A narrow shelf ran around the top of the room, about a foot below the ceiling, holding a collection of kachina dolls, lightning sticks, a toy bow and arrow and pottery.

Our guide explained what they were and handed out cookies. They were angels, and they were the best Christmas cookies I’ve ever eaten.

That was the third gift.

So, it was Christmas Day in the gracious, generous Hopi home, spending the afternoon with the family of a woman we now consider a friend.

When we stepped back out into the cold to leave, snow was falling all over Hopiland.

And that was the fourth gift: the wonderful warmth of Christmas snow, dropping gently in large flakes, catching on our hair and coats.

So, I say on leaving the mesas in my best attempt at Hopi: Quo-Quai – Thank you.

—Richard Nilsen

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