The Sand, The Sound

First of all, let me apologize for the formatting.  I can't seem to fix it, so please bear with words that suddenly break in two.








It occurred to me today that I’ve always craved a bit ofwhat I’ve always had.  To backtrack (and gosh, my fingers are oddly numb even though they’re not cold anymore): I have always longed for places like England,places with trees and castles and a thousand years of literature and druids andspells and the mystique seeping like fog from the very moors.





And I am here.  I have arrived, finally, in Tolkien’s backyard (and, literally, in Lewis’—which is nowmostly a row of block brick houses) and it is filled with castles and trees andbooks and history.  






But the strange thing is that it is also filled with trashand busses muscling their way through pedestrians in crowded streets and drunk sand homeless and every sort of unalluring bit about modern life that I’ve always known in America.  The sun was shining in Oxford today, and indeed, it was beautiful to see the ancient stones lit up, basking in the pale and temporary warmth.  But as I was walking home, I felt a strange nostalgia for the desert, for that burnt-white sky and the jagged upheavals of mountain ranges and the ruthless nature of the still-wild stretches of emptyland.  












To put it another way, you could not have a Western in South Kensington.




I’ve always had a sort of snobbish thought that America was somehow less beautiful than Europe—England, specifically, because its books brought my imagination to fill it with only perfect things—that it was in its entirety somehow dull.  But the beauty here is an arrogant thing, calling attention to itself, boasting in its hills and its history, as if it had some claim to all that is timeless.  But the stones here are cold, and the water is muddy.  I wear on my left wrist a copper bracelet, an ore native to my Arizonan birthplace.  It retains heat, and when my hands are cold, I press it against my skin and feel a flush of heat creep outward.  What English metal could do that?











And even on the other end of things, have I not said that the lake, whose name I will no longer post because I am afraid too many people will hear it and wish to go there, in the mountains isparadise?  Its trees are more grand, and just as old as any here.  Its peaks would have inspired Tolkien perhaps more than his own rolling hills.











My point, I suppose, is that I have discovered a quality to the places I know intimately that was hidden before under a layer of grimy predisposition.  The place where I am  from could not be special.  The place where I am from could hold no mystery, no sense of awe.  

And yet, I look back at the desert, at the Sound, and I think, “How incredible.”  There is as much story in what I left behind as there is in the place I have come to.  











Perhaps more.  Perhaps these hills have been wrung out of stories. Perhaps the next Tolkien is sitting in a little cabin in the woods or in a low ranch house glorying in the sun and the sadness and the narration in the rocks themselves, revealed as the wind scours clean the stratifications of their history.











I wax poetic yet again. But it is a fine feeling indeed to realize that where you started from rivals in beauty the places you have yet to go.  Not to discourage one from travel or exploration, but to find pride in what you have always known and only now realize you love deeply.
















Emily






*All photos are my own except the one of the Grand Canyon, which I stole from my dad's facebook profile.  :)