Remembering

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2010-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

He has two thousand miles to go, and if he is going he must begin. He thinks of how far he has come, how many miles, how many steps. Some who came here came by steps, across prairie and desert and mountain, past the whitened bones of starved oxen and horses and mules, the discarded furniture and wrecked wagons, the stone-mounded graves of those who had come earlier and come no farther. He thinks of flying. At what risk and cost do the fallen fly?

Preserve me, O Lord, until I return. Preserve those I am returning to until I return.

When he does remove his elbows from the parapet where he has been leaning, and turns, and steps away, a history turns around in his mind, as if some old westward migrant, who had reached the edge at last and seen the blue uninterruptible water reaching out around the far side of the world, had turned in his tracks and started eastward again.

He walks along the pier, past the backs of the intent fishermen and the concrete benches and back onto land again. There are swimmers in the harbor, early sightseers standing and walking about, and on the walks of Aquatic Park joggers trotting in pairs and talking. He makes his way among them, in the hold of a direction now, stepping, alone and among strangers, in the first steps of a long journey that, by nightfall, will bring him back where he cannot step but where he has stepped before, where people of his lineage and history have stepped for a hundred and seventy-five years or more in an indecipherable pattern of entrances, minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds: the worn and wasted, sorrow-salted ground, familiar to him as if both known and dreamed, that owns him in a membership that he did not make, but has chosen, and that is death and life and hope to him. He is hurrying.

“Hey, man!”

Andy stops, astonished, for it is clear to him that he is being addressed, though he does not yet see by whom. And then he sees the fringed and shaggy man hurrying toward him out of a side street, the rolled bandanna around his head, his hand in the air.

“Say, good brother, could you, like, spare me a buck for a light lunch?”

“Hold on, now,” Andy says. “Isn’t this the same day it was this morning when I gave you six dollars?”

“Ah!” the man says. “Indeed!” He steps back a pace and makes the low bow of a cavalier, sweeping the pavement with the edge of his hand. “Pass, friend.”

“Thanks, friend,” Andy says. He hurries on.

The city encloses him now, the bay out of sight behind him. The streets are all astir, thousands of directions and purposes shifting and turning, meeting and passing, each making its way in the midst of the rest, colliding, turning aside, failing, succeeding, so that a man without a direction would be lost there and carried away. Ahead of him, up

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