“Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present—no, it melds past, present, and future into one indistinguishable, multilayered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are.”
—Fei Xiaotong, “A World Without Ghosts”
“My life is created as I narrate, and my memory grows stronger with writing.”
—Isabel Allende, Paula
TRACE
PROLOGUE: THOUGHTS ON A FROZEN POND
In the dead of winter I like to walk on water, held above liquid depths of the nearby lake by a vast frozen plain.
This ice demands respect. I look . . . again. Listen again . . . attentive to any k-r-a-a-ck or yielding to my weight. When the surface is more solid than a hardwood dance floor, and much thicker, I venture far. Even then I hear the ga-loop. A distant plo-o-rp. A muffled gal-oosh. Water undulating beneath ice and me.
Sunlight appears to emanate from above and below on cloudless February days, raying through the crystalline lattice underfoot. With my eyes but inches from the surface, any sense of depth, of refracted distance, yields to a sense of motion arrested. Air bubbles halt in mid-ascent. White oak leaves descend as if on invisible steps, suspended for a season above the lake bottom.
The recent past lies beneath me in these marcescent leaves, plucked and blown here by January’s heavy winds. Inches away, they are out of reach. I kneel within the next stratum.
Thoughts of time’s passage always come to mind on such walks, thoughts of how memory of any form becomes inscribed in the land. The hills surrounding this lake and my home are worn remains of long-vanished mountains. Glacial debris from the last ice age produces a rock-crop in my garden each spring. Stone walls that two centuries ago bordered fields and pastures now thread the dark heart of forests.
Loren Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey that human beings are denied the dimension of time, so rooted are we in our particular now. We cannot in person step backward or forward from our circumscribed pinpoints. I cannot touch a leaf encased in ice—nor can I feel the calloused hands that stacked these walls. Yet we make our lives among relics and ruins of former times, former worlds. Each of us is, too, a landscape inscribed by memory and loss.
I’ve long felt estranged from time and place, uncertain of where home lies. My skin, my eyes, my hair recall the blood of three continents as paths of ancestors—free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—converge in me. But I’ve known little of them or their paths to my present. Though I’ve tracked long-bygone moments on this continent from rocks and fossils—those remnants of deep time—the traces of a more intimate, lineal past have seemed hidden or lost.
Yet to live in this country is to be marked by its still unfolding history. Life marks seen and unseen. From my circumscribed pinpoint, I must try to trace what has marked me. The way traverses many forms of memory and silence, of a people as well as a single person. And because our lives take place among the shadows of unnumbered years, the journey crosses America and time.
Come with me. We may find that home lies in re-membering—in piecing together the fragments left—and in reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory, and to be one.
Lauret Edith Savoy
Leverett, Massachusetts
Trace.
NOUN. A way or path.
A course of action.
Footprint or track.
Vestige of a former presence.
An impression.
Minute amount.
A life mark.
VERB. To make one’s way.
To pace or step.
To travel through.
To discern.
To mark or draw.
To follow tracks or footprints.
To pursue, to discover.
One journey seeded all that followed.
We had entered Grand Canyon National Park before sunrise, turning west onto the primitive road toward Point Sublime. This was in those ancient days when a Coupe de Ville could negotiate the unpaved miles with just a few dents and scrapes. My father had driven through the Kaibab Plateau’s forest on Arizona Highway 67 from Jacob Lake, Momma up front with him. No other headlights cut the dark. I sat in the backseat with Cissie, my dozing eighteen-year-old cousin. Our Kodak Instamatic ready in my hands, cocked. For two hours or more we passed through shadows that in dawn’s cool arrival became aspen-edged meadows and stands of ponderosa pine. Up resistant limestone knolls, down around sinks and ravines. Up then down. Up then down. In time, through small breaks between trees, we could glimpse a distant level horizon sharpen in the glow of first light.
Decades have passed, nearly my entire life, since a seven-year-old stood with her family at a remote point on the North Rim. I hadn’t known what to expect at road’s end. The memory of what we found shapes me still.
POINT SUBLIME TIPS a long promontory that juts southward into the widest part of the canyon, a finger pointing from the forested Kaibab knuckle. It was named by Clarence Edward Dutton with other members of field parties he led between 1875 and 1880, first on John Wesley Powell’s Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, then under the new U.S. Geological Survey. To Dutton the view from the point was “the most sublime and awe-inspiring spectacle in the world.”
The year the Grand Canyon became a national park, in 1919, more than forty-four thousand people visited. Most of them arrived by train to the South Rim. On the higher and more remote North Rim, those daring could try wagon tracks used by ranchers and “pioneer tourism entrepreneurs” over rough limestone terrain to Cape Royal and Point Sublime. Or they could follow a forest service route to Bright Angel Point. Soon roads scratched out on the Kaibab Plateau would replace the old wagon paths, allowing work crews to fight fires as well as infesting insects.
But the summer of 1925 would be a turning point. For the first time, and ever since, visiting motorists outnumbered rail passengers. The National Park Service encouraged and responded to this new form of tourism by building scenic drives and campgrounds on both rims. Auto-tourists often attempted the twisting, crude road to Point Sublime.
The Grand Canyon now draws nearly five million visitors each year. The seventeen-mile route to Point Sublime remains primitive, and sane drivers tend not to risk low-clearance, two-wheel-drive vehicles on it. Sometimes the road is impassable. One year it was reported to have “swallowed” a road grader.
