Driving through England

I must admit that I had my reservations when I booked a car to drive from London to Edinburgh, then from Edinburgh to the far north shore of Scotland, and then after a ferry around the island of Orkney, then finally back to London. I have actually been studying how the various bus and coach drivers drove through the streets while I was a passenger for the last two months. But I will now report that my sister, myself, and the car survived. I usually drive everywhere in the States and while I may seem to be rushing through the landscape compared to hiking or biking, I love experiencing the speeded up vistas seen through my windshield and always having the option to stop and take pictures. I didn't stop as much as I would have liked to but as soon as I got out of London, the end goal was in my mind.

Driving up I was almost alone in the car since Kitz slept most of the way. I was left with my thoughts as I drove and they were occupied mainly with how humans had shaped everything I had seen through many thousands of years. Forests had been felled, regrown, and refelled to make pasture land. I remembered Sherwood Forest, Enclosures, and Clearances and pictured people used to living on the land being evicted. I imagined the poet John Clare only being safe and sane when he was in his little corner of the world. With no real home, I have always felt more transient than settled. Home could be a building, but could also be how you feel most at peace. I always feel peaceful when I am driving on long roadtrips. By exiling myself from the everyday and then taking myself to a place where I am a stranger makes me feel peaceful.

We never lived anywhere very long while I was growing up and the house we lived in the longest has survived in my dreams and memories as an imagined haven of security. But the home I remember in Cincinnati, Ohio no longer exists. We returned to the house a few years after we had moved and the new owners had renovated it. The outside uncleared forest and shabby old trees with wild onions and dandelions growing all around had been meticulously manicured. The mulberry trees with moss and wild strawberries overgrown underneath was no more. Even our ancient wooden shed was gone. This place had been my fairy kingdom and it was gone forever. The inside was the same. All the eccentricities and inconveniences of the 80 year old house had been molded into a fashion plate for Architectural Digest. Slowly the house I remember has become more dreamlike and less real.

The first memory I ever had was in the Gulf of Mexico. I was sitting in a floatation device for a baby that was brightly colored and had many different toys around the outside. The only real memory was of how amazing I thought this float was. But I know my parents were there and slowly my memory has incorporated facts that are not my memories but things my parents told me. The memory has always been mire like a dream than reality because it is so far back in my own memory. It feels like a memory of a memory. That is how driving through England feels. It is crowded in more memories that obscure the reality.

The reality is that this is farmland. It is beautiful farmland, but only farmland. I see novels, essays, and poems I have read as I drive to Lake Windermere, Edinburgh, the Grampian Mountains, Orkney Island. I see paintings painted and photos taken all along the road. But most of all I see what I want to see: beautiful history.

As I was driving from Lake Windermere to Edinburgh I kept thinking of the human forces that shaped the land and not the natural forces. I was looking at sheep and thinking of all the natural forces that shaped the geography of the States away from human influence. Even as I was driving past farmland thinking of this I realized my own Euro-centric fallacy. The Americas had been shaped by people as much as any continent. We imbue the many many civilizations of Native Americans that existed for thousands of years with an inability to completely change the shape of the world around them. They cut down forests, made new hills, and created deserts with the same force as any other civilization. We just forget them. We forget that our continent has been occupied for the same amount of time as all the other continents. The so-called discovery of America happened within a couple thousand years as the discovery of England. These people do not deserve to be forgotten any more than we deserve to be forgotten. The Native Americans have faded beyond even a memory of a memory. Now they are always thought of by myself with surprise. That is my own fault. I may not build pyramids for people to remember me, but what is this writing except a cry out to not be forgotten.

On Orkney Island, we went to a Neolithic grave mound called Maeshowe. It was the largest burial chamber from this Neolithic Age they have ever found. Do note that this is way before the pyramids were built. These communities up in the North Atlantic constructed a stone burial chamber that is still intact today. But when this burial mound was excavated, no bodies were found in it. We don't know why there were no bodies in it. The chamber had been opened before when some Vikings heading to fight in the Crusades were caught in a sudden Blizzard and fell through the roof. Maybe they took the bones out, but it is not likely. They were headed to the Holy Land to kill many heathen to make more bones. Why would they want these old bones? The Vikings actually spent the three days they were trapped in the tomb carving runes into the walls. Most of them carved their names I'm conjunction with something indicating they were the carvers. Some were more creative. If you are educated, what better use to put literacy than carving your name into walls? They wanted to be remembered as did the tomb builders. What use is a tomb besides being remembered by the living and the gods?

Humans have been trying to think of ways of being remembered since there have been humans. I went to the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney. This is the third largest henge (or ring of standing stones) in the British Isles. This was also the second henge I have been to after Stonehenge and I could walk right inside of this henge and lean against the stones that had been placed 5-6 thousand years ago. No one really knows the purpose of the henge exactly, though speculation about religious and calendar needs have been theorized. But these people probably didn't need such a large reminder if they only needed a calendar that lasted a lifetime. These stones took thousands of man-hours to move so they would always be there to be seen and remembered. Even me, with my indoor plumbing and cell phone, couldn't help but think about the people that chipped these stones out of a quarry and then transported them nine miles before standing them in a specific place. These people still dressed in fur but they created hundreds of stone circles throughout the British Isles and a large incredibly empty tomb. I joked with Kitz about the fad for henges because I don't understand what would motivate people to put so much effort into being remembered, or even making permanent changes to their environment. It is so easy to change our environment that our struggle is to keep it the same. I can't even comprehend a people with so little control over their own environment that nothing they made or did could prevent plagues, epidemics, all the cattle dying. The environment was always something to be feared because it could kill so easily. I can just imagine these people standing up the stones and then watching year after year as they stayed put lending some permanence to their fragile existences. Maybe all these words I am writing are supposed to do the same thing.