A Field Guide to Getting Lost Read Online Free

phenomenon found among the Pit River Indians. The Indians refer to it in English as ‘wandering.’ They say of a certain man, ‘He is wandering, ’ or ‘He has started to wander.’ It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, traveling aimlessly. He will stop here and there at the camps of friends or relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry. . . . The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps and villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on the tops of mountains, in the bottoms of canyons.” This wanderer isn’t so far from Woolf, and she too knew despair and the desire for what Buddhists call unbeing, the desire that finally led her to walk into a river with pockets full of rocks. It’s not about being lost but about trying to lose yourself.
    De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various froms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.” You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found, De Angulo’s editor notes, “All white men are wanderers, the old people say.”
    During this long spell when stories rained down, I gave a reading at a bar on a street that faced water before the shoreline was filled in to squeeze a few more blocks of city out of the north face of the San Francisco peninsula. I read a short piece that ended in a downpour and another one about the sea and then went to collect my drink. Carol, the wife of the man who’d invited me to read, waved me over to the bar stool next to her and wound up telling me about the tattoo artist who’d been their neighbor for many years. The tattoo artist was a junkie for decades, and then a scab on his hand from shooting up got infected. He ended up in the hospital with a near-fatal systemic infection, and they had to amputate his arm, his right arm, his working arm. But, to his amazement, at the end of that long period of going to the edge of death and coming back, the doctor told him he was cured of his addiction. He was thrown out of the hospital without his craft, but clean, starting from scratch, as abrupt and overwhelming an emergence into the world as birth. A dragon had been tattooed up that arm, and all but the head of the dragon was gone.
    My friend Suzie told me while I was driving her home from that bar about the real meaning of the blindfolded figure of Justice holding the scales. Suzie was drawing her own tarot cards and rethinking each card as she went. Justice, a book on classical lore asserted, stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in, and to go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self. It made going to hell seem different. And it suggested that justice is a far more complicated and incalculable thing than we often imagine, that if everything is to come out even in the end, then the end is farther away than anticipated and far harder to estimate. It suggests too that to reside in comfort can be to have fallen by the wayside. Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side. Finally she drew a group around a campfire as her picture of justice, saying that justice is helping each other on the journey. Another night, Suzie’s partner David told told me about a Hawaiian biologist he met who discovers