Topophilia

I’m chatting with a colleague about last year’s buffalo hunt up on the reservation. He’s cycling through hundreds of photos of landscape, family, blood, and dust and it’s so painfully obvious that he’s in love. Desperately so. In geography we call this topophilia, or literally, the love of place, and from the sound of it there is no cure, nor do those afflicted desire treatment.

The Engineer and I have been clobbered with temporary bouts of topophilia, often in familiar yet unlikely places. On the last trip to Hyde Park to see the parents, we took a jog through the hills of the Hudson Valley in the mist, in the cold, our sodden clothing contrasted by the broken morning light. Up and down knolls, we run and laugh and grow momentarily solemn, lost in our own memories of a childhood in the Northeast, with its all deep, tangled roots and wanderings and enough unstructured play time to make creativity blossom. The Hudson Valley produced the inimitable Casey. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt lived not far from here. Mercury and lead toxins made a home here as well. We grow hungry for rootedness as the Middle Period approaches.

Back home in Colorado, I phone my Dad. He’s got strong opinions on all 50 states and has created internal rankings based on population density, life expectancy, and gross domestic happiness. He’s on the floor fixing circuits for his train layout, a winter wonderland that spans three rooms throughout the house.

“Yeah, what’s the problem? You guys all right out there?”

Dad worries about us out here, afraid the winds will sweep us off the prairie and slam us into the barbed, unforgiving Rockies. I imagine he sees us from aloft as if on a large map, alone out here in the West, clutching desperately to one another, with only our wit to buffer against snow and wind and harm. He loves us. And to reciprocate I mess with him.

“Whew. We just got back. Upstate New York was BE-autiful, Dad, even in the dead of winter. Never seen anything quite like it.” I’m baiting him, the red and white bobber poised atop the water.

“Yeah, it’s not bad. But like I always say to you kids (he’s taking the bait) there’s no place like Vuhmont. We got it all. Green mountains without the brown spots (this is a dig on Colorado) and good, caring people. Mark my words, you won’t find that anywhere else. You guys should’ve opened a hardware store there when you had the chance.”

“But what about Alaska? Remember how incredible THAT was?” I remind him that there are other equally nice places.

“I remember the dirt in the streams and the stumpy growth they call trees.” He is dead serious.

“That was just glacial moraine. The earth builds up and breaks down.”

“Yeah. I’m surprised the salmon can survive in those polluted waters.”

This last retort, not so much an attack on Alaska as a defense of Vermont, makes me ponder: Maybe if people have soul mates – by definition, someone with whom we have a deep and natural affinity- then perhaps we each have a place mate, too. Dad found his in Vermont.

Weeks later, Casey and I walk to the store under a lunar eclipse shrouded by clouds, hand in hand, the Black Dog tugging forward at the leash longing to get somewhere else. Don’t get me wrong. Colorado is impossibly perfect with its rugged mountains to the West, lush prairies to the East, and glut of good lookin’ features in between. But as I think of tomorrow’s drive down I-25, the straight and narrow spine of Colorado, I contemplate a plate of rice and beans without the hot sauce. And I know we’ll land elsewhere some day, two soul mates on a search for someplace just a little bit spicier.