Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,69

places. That transformation convinced me that culture could change politics, that representations could shape realities, that what we did as writers and historians mattered, that changing the story of the past could change the future. It was the genesis of a profound hope for me about the possibility of deep, unanticipated change and the capacity of those deemed marginal or insignificant to bring it about. The rising visibility and power of Native nations in the Americas felt of a piece with the nonviolent revolutions that had toppled the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, which I’d followed closely, with exhilaration.

That was my golden age, not because I had escaped the evils of this world but because I had found ways to think about them and sometimes do something about them, valiant companions in the efforts, places to fall in love with, and ideas that transformed me. I had begun returning to the place in which I spent the first two years of my life, Northern New Mexico, where I had the great fortune to be befriended by the older feminist writer Lucy Lippard, whose response to the manuscript of Savage Dreams was, essentially, to give me the key to her little house (and a nice blurb). I began spending part of every summer house-sitting for her out on the prairie, enraptured by the sky, the space, the light, and the thunderstorms. Later in the 1990s, I got involved with a man who lived in southeastern California’s Mojave Desert and spent part of my time there for four years.

Our best as well as our worst emotions are contagious, and I benefited from the gallantry, boldness, dedication, and humor of all these Westerners close to the land (and Lucy’s transplanted New England brisk fearlessness). And I grew close to the places themselves, and drew from them joys and strengths. I had developed the confidence to start moving freely around the West, gotten the pickup truck that let me go farther up dirt roads and into remote places and in whose camper shell I spent many nights, gotten friends in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada to visit. I was now roving across the western United States a lot, not to escape but to arrive in a deeper sense of home and to build and maintain ties across the region. I was cultivating a persona rooted in this place, in nonchalance about physical challenges ranging from driving and walking long distances to living outdoors and facing down the authorities in environmental protests. This was who I wanted to be, and some of it was a performance complete with trappings—pearl-snap shirts, dusty country-music cassette tapes for the pickup truck, a nice camp kit—but some of it went deeper.

The writing was going well enough that I felt hopeful about it and not so well that there were, as there would be later, a lot of demands on me. So I roamed and explored and made the most of the invitations that came my way. I was rich in time, and alive with excitement about the worlds and connections and ideas opening up to me. I miss the ability I had then to jump into my truck and go someplace for a week or two, to take the long way around, to linger and explore and not worry too much about obligations. I was free.

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In the evenings when the sky near the horizon is apricot and the sky above is still blue I sometimes try to find the seam between the two colors, but in the heavens there is only a pallor between these opposites that is easy not to notice. Sometimes too in the evening I try to watch the colors change or a shadow grow longer across the landscape, and almost always my attention flickers for a moment and then I realize that the tree that was half in light has been swallowed by darkness or the brightness and sharp shadows have suddenly diffused because the sun has dipped or the sky that was cobalt is now midnight blue. Things are one way and then another and the transitions are hard to mark.

The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure; suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived. So much of what changed