Memory of Place
Memory of Place
The red rocks of Capitol Reef loom over us, at once imposing and fragile, the sandstone fragmenting in oddly symmetrical sheets.
We’ve come to Capitol Reef many times in our marriage: for us, it’s come to represent a place of refuge and retreat, a place for family renewal—and a place for grief.
I’m convinced that places have memories: both the sacred grove and Gettysburg carry a gravitas in their landscape, as if what happened there is impressed onto the surfaces. Beyond that, I believe that places have a significant dimension in our own memories. The Romans, who were among the first to study ars memoria, or the art of memory, called the mental storage places of memory loci, the same root in our word location. Memories take place, both literally and figuratively.
Driving into Capitol Reef on the fringes of a thunderstorm in mid-September, all the linked memories of the place come flooding back to me, forming a kind of spiritual palimpsest over the rock and sage landscape.
July 2003
My husband and I are three days into our honeymoon. We spend our mornings hiking along trails where the light refracts off sheer rock, our afternoons swimming in the hotel pool. Mostly, we’re puzzling through the exquisite strangeness that is newly married life—the way someone can be familiar and foreign, the way eternity seems both a terrifying omen and a gift.
August 2011
I look out the window at the hills behind our hotel, at the green boulder strewn rise meeting abruptly with the fortress-like wall of the red rock. Above, the sky is so blue it hurts. My children tumble around the room behind me, excited by the promise of vacation, but I am still. I am waiting.
We take our kids hiking in the heart of the park—well, walking might be more apt for our three- and five-year-old children. We scuff our feet in the dust, listen to the call of a rock wren, and watch an eagle soaring overhead. My oldest clambers up a small mound of rocks and crows at me, king of the mountain.
That night, when darkness textures our room and my children and husband sleep, I go into the bathroom and I bleed. The baby I knew I was miscarrying passes, and I sit silent vigil beneath the bright fluorescent lights.
September 2013
Driving into Loa for what has become a bi-annual family reunion, we hit a deer. The kids (there are three now) are traumatized; my husband and I are relieved the car still drives.
We don’t let the accident shadow our weekend, though. We drive the dented minivan into a campsite where our extended family exclaims over it, glad we’re safe. We eat grilled quesadillas in the long shadows of the bluffs, and hike along the riverbed to a pool where my toddler baptizes himself.
When the reunion is over, we drive our flagging car home to face the damage: one deductible and two weeks later, we get our van back. Trauma and tragedy are softened by family and woven back into the thread of everyday life.
September 2014
Like most family gatherings, this one is mixed. Some of our favorite people are missing. The food is excellent. My youngest wears blisters on his feet before I notice. And while nothing can dampen the grandeur of the surroundings, the relentless rain on the last morning creates a somber atmosphere.
But there’s something about this place that I can’t shake—something beyond the red mud now ground into the carpet of my car. Something in the bones of the rock, the way the hills beyond the red walls are crowned with white, the way the trail beside the Freemont River grows thick with yellow flowers and plants as high as my head, incongruous in an arid region. I suppose I could call it numen, that inexplicable sense of the sacred that sometimes obtrudes itself into mundane routines.
One line of research into theories of place explores what makes places sacred. Ideas range from human ritual, beliefs, even the shape of the landscape. But part of what makes individual places numinous are the memories that light it, layers and layers like a fine patina adding depth and richness to the landscape of our lives. When we drive into Capitol Reef again this September, I won’t see only the rock and shadows. I will see all of our shared history: the hope and love, the blood and grief, the blisters and embraces, the tears and laughter, all carved along the rocks and ridges. I can’t experience this landscape independent of my memories of it, and I wouldn’t want to. The hills store and refract the memories back at me like so much light; under the weight of all those pasts--shaken, pressed down, softened by time--the landscape blazes before me, my fire in the desert. Whether I walk under sun or in shadow, I enter sacred ground.
