Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,44

Santa Fe one afternoon in early August, where she’d arranged for the artists Meridel Rubenstein—another landscape photographer I knew slightly—and her husband, the painter Jerry West, to meet us. We had come all this way like an arrow flying through the air past many other things to hit exactly this target that was the table in a shadowy alcove in the honeycombed hotel, where Meridel’s assistant, Catherine Harris, was also seated. We ordered margaritas, and Meridel and Jerry invited me to come stay at the house Jerry had built on the prairie outside town on land his parents had homesteaded during the Great Depression.

And Catherine—a darkly beautiful young artist with tawny shoulders in a sleeveless white jumpsuit—and I began talking. We became close friends, perhaps best friends, for years after, had a falling out that kept us apart for years, then I dreamed of her one night and ran into her on the street in the morning—she had moved to San Francisco at that point—and we exchanged phone numbers and picked up where we left off. I am not a proper memoir writer in that I cannot reconstruct a convincing version of any of our conversations, even the long one last summer in the house where she lives in Albuquerque with her husband and two kids and some dogs.

Those conversations were analytical, confessional, usually punctuated with gales of laughter, taking up the pieces of our education, the ideas and templates and pigeonholes, and trying them on to see how they fit our urgent personal needs. I do remember how amused we were one time as we rejected the earth-mother ecofeminism of the moment by noting that our mothers—squeamish, anxious, repulsed by human bodies and their smells and secretions—were not in the least like nature. And of course in those early years we talked about the boys we were pursuing or entangled with or disentangling from, but that was mixed in with books, politics, ideas, projects, and plans.

When we were eating breakfast in the yard of Meridel and Jerry’s house a day or two after I first met her, Catherine told me, as she watched me untangling my damp hair, about going to the pueblo corn dances two days before and seeing women with hair down to the hems of their long dresses, and then about the job she’d had photographing the students at a Native American school and how one of the girls told her about cutting off her own long braids. The story found its way into an essay of mine, because Catherine was told the child “was ashamed to go home afterward, and when she did, her grandfather chided her gently, telling her that her hair contained all her thoughts and memories.”

I had published journalism and reviews, but I was exploring a more intimate, lyrical kind of writing, one where the spirit guiding the connections and trajectory was intuitive and associative rather than linear or logical. The results were short and dense, though this essay was a thicket of stories about hair and its power. Catherine’s anecdote gave me its conclusion. Then she made a photograph of me sitting and looking back at her with my own hair hanging to my waist, against one of Jerry’s unfinished adobe walls, the concrete scraped into rough ridges so the mud would adhere.

We began a correspondence by mail and then email and launched a series of adventures, driving back and forth together between Santa Fe and San Francisco, doing projects together and encouraging each other as she came into her own as an artist and then a landscape architect and I kept writing. And so out of the lecture of Linda’s that I wandered into so casually came some ideas about place and landscape, friendships, eventual collaborations with all four of these artists, a cherished friendship with Catherine in particular, and an anecdote about hair as a repository of memory. And a return to the region in which I spent the first two years of my life, a place I fell in love with as an adult for its sense of deep time on the ground and constant change in the sky.

Your life should be mapped not in lines but branches, forking and forking again. Meridel introduced me to people who became significant friends in New Mexico, and I’ve returned there nearly every summer since, and that summer landscape became one of my