Landscape Nostalgia, or, How My Brain Replicates Pulaski County Topography

Certain landscapes will never leave my memory: clouds hustling over the continental divide at Monteverde, cow-spotted pastures in purple-and-gold winter, and the welcoming bluffs on Stadium Boulevard. None, however, are so ingrained or so pure than my childhood world in Dixon, Missouri. Rivers and cliffs direct the curving roads. Foliage looks lusher, the fields more trim than any of their counterparts in my second home of Lebanon. There's the oak-walled house my great-great grandfather built and that little house on the hill where a nice farmboy once lived. There's the east edge of our field where the deer always appeared on misty mornings. The fallen log between two trunks that my cousins and I used as teeter-totter. The country was my playground.

I've returned lately with friends. Even places I had never seen, such as the view from above Riddle Bridge or panoramas across Maries County, strike familiar chords.

Nostalgia comes with some caveats. The drives remain beautiful, but the gas tab hurts (those rivers and bluffs keep good roads away; it would take hefty blasting jobs to change it, and frankly, the government doesn't have that kind of money for backwoods folks). Recently at a Dixon festival, I couldn't help but desire better food, different music and more culture. People gawked at my dreadlocked, colorfully dressed friends. Memories, meet Reality. Suddenly moving to industrial Lebanon when I was 10 years old seemed like a good move for the sake of culture. Thanks, grandparents.

But the landscape abides.

The most translucent, shimmering rainbow I've ever seen appeared above I-44 as we crossed the overpass at St. Robert. It faded in two minutes. I pulled two brook lampreys out of the Gasconade River near Boiling Spring (beautiful place, by the way) and watched snails munch on moss by the bank. Hundreds of snails. Grazing like cattle.

I waited too long to journal about the latest trip, though I doubt it would say much more than this: I want to be a fish in the Gasconade, a bird on a bluff. I want to fall asleep to whippoorwills calling and wake up to cool air on my face. I want to exist as an animal in the land of my forebears. I want to disappear and do nothing but crawl around this landscape the rest of my life.

But that would mean missing out on these beautiful people.

All their joy and heartache. Their intelligence and wit and drive to keep whole the very landscapes I yearn for so fervently. I can't turn away from that.

Look at us. We're animals. Sure, our lives are more complicated than children or lampreys. That kind of sucks, but that's the hand we're dealt. And we can still romp and swim and imagine we're flying. We can snuggle up in a moldy tent and laugh about it later. Yes, when the weekend ends we have to return to "the real world." That sucks, too, because laid over our entire Experience of Being Human, bridges and power lines and complicated engineering (cars, technology, politics, etc.) bypass what's deep and ancestral. But, BUT you can only change that topography so much.

The landscape abides, up there, in the folds of my brain. It would take a pretty hefty blasting job to change it, and frankly, the government doesn't have that kind of money for backwoods folks like us.