Roots

My belongings were set – boxed for storage or stowed in my pack – my house cleaned to a state unrivalled since I had first entered, and my last paycheck deposited. But I did not leave immediately. It did not matter that I had reckoned everything as it should be, I did not feel it time to go. Rather, I had that latent feeling that must be held by all migratory creatures, when they reason not by calendar though by intuition. A few stray from the flock, pressing out the boundaries in short, tethered flights, till all at once some desire seizes all by the wings and it’s goodbye for other climes, other trees, other seasons. I would leave when the time was right and not press its arrival.

On a hillside, we spent a final night, I and my friends, camped out together. A few left that day, another at dawn. Late in the morning, the remainder of us, eight, went to breakfast and spoke words that would have no bearing on whatever followed. All talk was of inconsequential subjects that when had with strangers make up small talk and when shared with friends make conversation, the words pressed with significance when passed between. It was a good meal with good friends. Time was getting closer. The hour was there when I could feel my heart, like a flock of swallows, rise and swell within me, then spread out everywhere. This was the ending that I had wanted. I shouldered my pack and walked away.

Why the stubbornness? Why the solitude? Better asking why the clarity that comes from such doings? Why the movement of the swallows? Why does the agave plant spend a quarter century in thrift so as in a single season it might have a sparse blossom? Why the hard-pated determination of salmon to breed and die? Why consider this an ending that it is not? All my reasons previous, and all those to come, could be reduced to a single urge: a bare desire for commune. Like the Baptist. Like Whitman. Like Francis. I would walk to see, and let what I saw enter into me, to become me. To live my life by circle that would ripple outwards pressing back the walls of my world till they became my world, and to be outside was to be inside.

When I first came to California, and now in leaving where I had been, I had felt a shame. Was I not limiting my allegiance by giving up on a place? I had been around some years, though had spent many more growing up in New York, where my family still was. There they had lived – from Brooklyn and Long Island – for centuries it seemed. The Wood family name, it was rumored, went back to Dutch times, being among the first English to see the worth of this continent. Certainly by the proud portraits my parents displayed, there was a history at least to the early years of popular photography. A portion of the family, in the days before and during the Civil War, moved to Pennsylvania, but we remained by name and blood in the Northeast. Though I am not one to judge a person’s character by a name inherited, when families were first given names it was for suitable reasons. The ironworkers were named Smith. The wagon makers cartwrights. For my own family, the Woods were an unremarkable, sedentary forest people. And though my mother’s side claims some Italians, their family name of Silvestri – forest – is ironically suitable. As the names suggest, rooted.

But then, mine is a family richer in rumor than story. I had little proof of any family history before 1850. Even so, that was only the family name. That first Wood may have arrived early on, but still had given up on calling another place home. He had cut his roots to some old world turf and learned to love another land. Nor is this a tree of Wood alone. Grafted to the branch were Danes, Germans, French before it came to me. More than that, my Scottish-Italian mother had a family that was completely of the 20th century. Does this make me a third generation American? Or a fifth? Or an eighth? Or a twelfth? Or not at all? My past is populated with the restless vagabonds of Europe. And before, they too claimed lineages that had come, unrolled, to them by steps from some eastern relations. Out of Africa, out of Eden, they came walking. It is easy to see a tribe of footloose folks drop their packs and their children then set out again, till their heirs became footsore and dropped their own children on some new earth. By such was the world peopled, and whether it is from the earthly paradise, or Ethiopia, we come descended, the story is no less great, or less beautiful. This then, would be a retracing of family history, giving me the chance to relearn – or to make it up – as I go.

So, my roots were cut. For my own part, in the past 8 years I had moved 6 times, received a college degree, learned a foreign language, picked up 9 musical instruments, seen more of the planet than any relative I had ever met, made family where I could not find it. Had I stayed in the town where I had been a boy, I would work at the grocer’s, or a farm, or a truckstop, and my hours of freedom would be tedious recovery from work. I would trade my daylight hours for the right to a place to sleep. So much for roots.