So it’s unfinished, this business of escape artistry, of finding the new in a delimited world.

My partner and I live in northeast London, a mosaic of Victorian terraces and forest remnants cut through by small rivers. From Walthamstow to Wanstead, it’s been home since the 1980s—and our entire world since March. Some weeks in, I found myself scouring the London A-Z and Google Maps for green spaces nearby. They were maddeningly featureless. But maps are products of cultural consensus. They’re not the territory, and certainly not the experience of the territory. So we became terranauts of the local, seekers of the sort-of known—even a “universe next door.”

When we first moved here, it was barely signposted. We discovered its history in stages and on the ground. Wanstead Park, for instance, is a zoo of monuments including an Italianate temple and decaying grotto crouched among towering oaks and limes. I discovered that they are all relicts of a “lost Versailles,” a Palladian-style villa and formal gardens sold off and broken up in the 1820s. Further back, the Tudor Henries (VII and VIII) hunted here, and the dubious favourite of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, owned a hall on the site where she partied up a storm in May 1578.

I was pleased too to find that an artistic hero of mine, the proto-socialist imagineer William Morris, grew up in Walthamstow. And that at the turn of the 20th century, it became ripe ground for techie innovation—not least in early cinematography. We have drunk it all in, the tangible and the intangible, a spirit of place that has somehow expanded mental space.

But these were discoveries of pre-pandemic times. As isolation wore on, I began to think laterally on my feet, nipping through gaps in hedges and gates passed a hundred times. I found old sewage works and scrubland, semi-wildernesses alive with birds. I heard cuckoos, now vanishingly rare, and saw thousands of swifts in flight. And I chased the new in the known. Wanstead Flats, for instance, is a 330-acre grassland I thought I’d “done” long ago. In social-distancing terms, a place where you can see someone coming for miles is a godsend. I went back.

Now, I see its subtleties. A protected acid grassland, where skylarks sing from the tussocks at sundown and kestrels hunt over the broom. Magisterial plantations of hundred-year-old oak, beech and hornbeam. A handful of iron barrage-balloon tethers from the Second World War. And I learned its history. A grazing land from the 12th century to 1996, a haunt of travellers, a military drilling range, the Flats have escaped enclosure and development through a combination of public will and, ultimately, protection by the City of London Corporation.

Proust noted that voyages of discovery are not about visiting strange lands, but possessing new eyes. By paying attention—knowing a place by inches rather than glances—I have become grounded. My mental map bulges with detail. In that process I recalled how young children map as they immerse in the physical world—an interplay of body, brain and environment that builds an interior cartography of space and our position in it.

So it’s somehow fascinating that up to the age of four, children apparently believe they can’t be seen when they shut their eyes, but only when meeting the gaze of another. The science writer Philip Ball noted this in his 2015 book Invisible, concluding: “how extraordinary it is that the self is not located from birth in the body.” I wonder whether the sense of self snaps in when we roam space—and I include imaginative space—with relative freedom. Whether we must move to be centred. Proprioception, sometimes called the “sixth sense,” is the feeling of our physical position, movement and balance in space, modulated by specialized neurons in the muscles and joints. It’s thought to be key to the sense of self.

Balance can be challenged by constraint. But children can see a cosmos in a backyard. The micro-odysseys of lockdown brought me back to mine, a few acres on London Road in Duluth, Minnesota, bounded by trees, a river, and the waters of Lake Superior. From that road, it may have seemed ho-hum. On the map, it was largely blank. But from the inside it was a multi-layered wonderland. It was also not a little weird.

The acid grasslands of Wanstead Flats in northeast London are a haven for birds—from kestrels to the iconic skylark. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

I grew up next to a disused lab, a long, imposing 19th-century pile. Once a fish hatchery, it looked as if it had spawned—clustered around was a clapboarded shoal, our ‘cottage’ and three outbuildings. The most mysterious of these resembled a playhouse on stilts, jutting out from the hill next to the lab, with a catwalk leading to the top floor. Down below were tucked a small, windowless octagonal structure and an inscrutable hut. The whole was like an exotic village inhabited only by us.

My father, who taught fine art, rented the cottage from the University of Minnesota. From this perch, I’d look over at the lab and wonder that a building so substantial could be forgotten. But then, we lived at the point where London Road becomes the old Highway 61, at a bridge spanning the mouth of the Lester River. We were denizens of a space both liminal and transformative. In that edgeworld, our complex had a fairy-tale air, half Grimm and half Perrault. It felt dropped off the map.

The old hatchery’s necessary siting near water made it a natural paradise too, an ecological and geological miniature, exquisitely compressed. Hazards came with the territory: the hatchery pond was a muddy sump, black bears legged it through the elms, and in a bush-choked pond across the road lurked a snapping turtle that could, my father noted with clinical relish, “take your arm off.” I learned to observe, and fast.
 
We can be possessed by spirit of place at points all our lives, but there is no intensity in that process like a child’s. To keep my bearings, I became a namer of places. The Smooth Rocks was an expanse of glacier-ground basalt at the river mouth; the turtle-haunted copse the Little Wood. A hollow cupping a humming sewage processor was the Dell. Shore End was a spiked metal barrier a mile along the beach. Yet close, pressing on the imagination, was the ragged edge of the boreal forest biome. We camped in it, hiked along its fringe, but it was something I couldn’t yet map: a vast realm of moose, bear, great grey owls and the deep darkness.

That tension, between known and unknown, is of course the spring of all discovery—leading humans across oceans, to the poles and tin-canned to the Moon. But I was a kid. I acquainted myself more deeply with what I could reach, and that was in any case in constant flux. Not just a rabbit’s nest under a bush, unpeeled momentarily by the lawnmower, or a gust of cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries. But the primordial mud and slush of spring giving way to brief summers, the snap of smoky Octobers, the epic winters when the lake froze over and, between blizzards, you held your breath amid silent drifts. And we were always seeing with new eyes—my father urging us to look again and deeper, at the ethereal layers of a wasps’ nest or a cobalt shadow on snow.

Meanwhile, I was reading. Books perfectly meshed the quest for certainty with the quest for the new. When I first saw Ernest Shepard’s endpapers for Winnie the Pooh, it was with the shock of recognition. The world of Christopher Robin and Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood was one I understood and soon inhabited: Eeyore’s Gloomy Place became as solid in my mind as the Smooth Rocks. Shepard’s genius was to give a bird’s-eye view of places of the mind, to zoom out just enough from extreme locality to keep it personal.

A handful of WWII barrage-balloon tethers on Wanstead Flats are a visible reminder of its long human history. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

We left London Road when I was nine. Long after, navigating new cities, states and countries, I discovered that I had the dreaded “lousy sense of direction.” I found unfamiliar urban grids as confusing as off-road expanses of the Sonoran Desert. Map-reading I learned, but it was meaningful only when I did the route on foot.

Some years ago I was drawn to Wayfinding by the science writer M.R. O’Connor, which investigates human navigation in the satnav age. O’Connor’s research took her to Australia, where she wrangled with the idea that the Dreaming tracks of indigenous peoples are a “mnemonic device” for finding one’s way—a memory palace with the landscape itself taking the place of mental model. She meets Bill Yidumduma Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people who has memorized thousands of stars, and tells her that many long tracks align to them. She quotes the scholar David Turnbull on the Dreaming in Maps Are Territories: “The landscape and knowledge are one as maps, all are constituted through spatial connectivity.” This “noospheric highway system,” she writes, manifests as a sense of direction in the mind.

So what is happening to our sense of direction under quarantine? Tragically, it has rocked many to the core. I feel it has also clarified what matters. I am looking deeper at where I am, redrawing my inner cartography to get to the other side, wherever that is. That has not been just a journey in space. It’s time travel into moments of improbable humanity: barrage balloons, Virgin Queen, and all. That I’ve pinned down the functions of all those outbuildings on London Road seems no less improbable. My Eden there is no longer a place of enigmatic decay. It’s restored, and on the map. But the beach, the rocks, the curve of land are the same. For now.

What lasts, and what doesn’t, preoccupy us all in this pandemic. There is no real escape from it. On walks in a vast cemetery near the Flats, we have seen ranks of spoil from many new graves among the historic trees. Once we entered a glade and stumbled on a fenced marquee—a temporary morgue for COVID-19 spill-over.

We restless bipedal apes have survived plague, famine, century on century of war. But on this leg of the journey we face interlocked crises—ongoing environmental neglect and damage, self-serving politics and greed-driven industry—in tandem with terrible injustice. All of it plays out on a limited Earth.

I know that science has laid the depth of necessary fact, that technology can leverage potential solutions, that the blueprints and roadmaps proffered by international organizations have their place. But there is another kind of knowledge.

In my bones—or at least my hippocampus—I know how irrevocably we’re tied to nature. An early drenching in it tends to do that, bolstered by exposure to the science, from the stardust floating through us to the seething cosmos of the human microbiome. The wonder comes first, then curiosity—and respect. Perhaps, like Bill Yidumduma Harney, we need to memorize more stars to feel the path beneath our feet.

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I am an immigrant from Vietnam. I left the land of my birth in 1978—just shy of my first birthday—and arrived in the U.S. a few weeks after I turned two. All of us on that boat, and hundreds of thousands of others, fled for the same reason: to escape the oppression of the communist regime. It took us more than one full year to arrive in the United States, most of that time spent on an over-packed freightship smuggling 2,300 other refugees on a cargo hull full of festering flour and one functioning restroom.

Like many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, my family members were merchants. My maternal grandma, who had fled to Vietnam from British-held Hong Kong as a teen to escape the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, had a fabric stall at Saigon’s Ben Thanh Market. My dad had a factory that manufactured shampoo and detergent. After the Vietnam War officially ended in April of 1975 with the fall of Southern Vietnam to the Northern Vietnamese communists, the new regime stripped our family of its livelihood, confiscating our family businesses and much of our savings. They also introduced a series of new currencies—each time capping the sum families were permitted to exchange. Anyone found with more was punished, the money confiscated.

Years later, my grandma would tell of counting her life savings, exchanging the maximum allowed, and burning the remainder. She described watching her tears fall into the flames as the money burned; just burning and crying, because what else was there to do?

Early in 1977, the year before we fled Vietnam, my mom was six months pregnant with me and my father was in jail for “unpatriotic acts” after commissioning the building of a small junk boat he’d hoped to use for our escape. My mom visited my dad in his cell so he could help name me. He must have had money on his mind, as my name translated means Gold and Jade.

Fellow refugees transfer a Vietnamese child onto a Coast Guard boat in Manila, Philippines on Jan. 8, 1979.

My grandfather had just passed away, but my maternal grandma still had five kids at home to raise. She was 4’9” on a tall day and a breadwinning matriarch before her time. She negotiated an escape route for us on that Panamanian freightship, but it would come at a steep cost.

There were 19 of us in total in my nuclear and extended family. Passage on the ship was purchased through luong, 1.2-ounce, 24-karat gold bars. All told, 154 luong—more than $135,000 in today’s dollars—were required to smuggle my family out of Vietnam. Those bars were the culmination of a lifetime of work, coated with love and stamped with faith, molded into 24 karats of black market gold. Which is how we found ourselves part of the mass exodus that would come to be known as the “Vietnamese Boat People.”

After being denied entry at the ports of Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Brunei for temporary asylum, we floated aimlessly at sea, waiting. My mom watched over my two-year-old brother and me while we all sat atop a two-foot by two-foot table. Another family lived in a permanent crouch underneath. All around us, families staked their claim to plots of floor, sleeping upright, backs propping up backs. If someone needed to do their business or go in search of food, family members would stand vigil over the hard-won territory. Somehow, even as we were reduced to human freight, the framework of family held, in the form of “Go shit, I got your back.”

Eventually our freighter docked in the Philippines, but we were not allowed to disembark—all of the existing camps were full. After a full 10 months at sea we were finally transferred to a makeshift refugee camp on a Philippine island. My mom set me on the ground to roam and was pleased to discover that I could run.

At the camp, my parents and extended family underwent an arduous vetting process including background checks and physical screenings with blood tests. Then came the search for a sponsoring country. A refugee who could claim a relative in another country was given priority there. Barring that, where you wound up was a crapshoot by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

My parents, my brother, and I lingered in this system for several months until a church group in Minnesota agreed to sponsor us. In one fell swoop, we were whisked from the humidity of the tropics to the sub-zero temperatures of a midwestern December. The commitment and logistics of sponsoring and providing for a refugee family are significant, so the church group shared the responsibilities for clothing, sheltering, and integrating us into American life. One group of volunteers met us at the airport with donated second-hand winter jackets. Other volunteers helped us find and furnish a small two-bedroom home in the suburbs, while still others worked on getting sponsorship for the rest of our family, until all 19 of us were re-united.

Our family also relied on public social programs as we adjusted and assimilated into American society. My parents enrolled my brother and me in a Head Start preschool while they studied English, passed the GED, and took job-training classes. For a year or so, we lived on welfare and food stamps, supplemented by baffling 10-pound blocks of bright orange government cheese.

Within two years, my mom spoke English well enough to take a job in a bank, the start of a 30-year career that became our modest family livelihood. When it came time for my brother and me to think about college, we benefitted from the expectation of our family that we would go. We had as role models close relatives who had recently graduated. But we also relied on programs like need-based grants, low-interest loans, and work-study programs.

We hear so much talk about individual resilience, self-reliance, and the proverbial bootstraps being the ingredients of the American Dream, and I’d like to think my family exhibited those traits in our extraordinary journey. But there is a lot more that goes into the American Dream’s promise of providing people an opportunity to improve their lives and to contribute to this great nation. Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all, and certainly not opportunity. We all rely on the springboard provided by our extended families, our communities (like those Minnesota church volunteers who made our American story possible) and, yes, government-backed immigration policies and programs like those that let us enter, fed us, and then helped us obtain an education.

Now, more than three decades and a generation after we fled Vietnam, my youngest child has just turned two—the age I was when I arrived in the U.S. Her first words? “Milk,” “mama,” and “dada.”

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In a conversation with Los Angeles Times columnist and fellow memoirist Meghan Daum at MOCA Grand Avenue, Strayed discussed the perils and pleasures of writing about personal history–history like her solo journey into the wilderness at age 26, in the summer of 1995.

“I always say that memoir is not the art form of what happened but rather how the writer makes sense of what happened,” said Strayed. It took her over a decade–years during which she wrote and published a novel, and gave birth to two children–to figure out that this story was worth telling.

The story begins in an unexpected place: a line at the outdoor emporium REI outside Minneapolis. Strayed’s truck had gotten stuck in the snow, and she had to buy a shovel to dig it out. She spotted a book at the cash register–The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California–and although she’d never heard of the trail before, had never been to California, and had never even gone backpacking, a few months later she was in the Mojave Desert with 24.5 pounds of water strapped into an enormous backpack she nicknamed “Monster.”

“A lot of this book just has to do with just how utterly unprepared you were for this,” said Daum. “Does this shock you today?”

“I do think it’s ridiculous,” said Strayed. But she’d grown up in the wilderness and felt safe in the country. Plus, the passion of people at REI for their gear was infectious. “I walked out of there feeling like an expert,” she said. “I had all this stuff, so that meant I was ready. It turned out that wasn’t the case.”

For the first eight days of her hike, she didn’t see a human being, nor did she realize that it’s not normal to be unable to lift your pack off the ground. “I thought that’s what backpackers did,” she recalled. “I didn’t know it was bad. I knew it was heavy.” But when other hikers looked with horror at her pack–and her feet, which were destroyed by boots a size too small–she realized just how unprepared she was.

Daum also asked about the process of writing a memoir of transformation. “Did you ever feel under pressure to say, I have to have the clouds part and someone speak to me from above?” she asked.

“I was so conscious of working against that,” said Strayed. “I wanted to write a book that was as true as a book can be.” The journey transformed her, but discreetly.

Although the book is personally revealing, it’s not confessional in the traditional sense. Strayed chose to omit certain details and cut passages that she felt told too much. “I’m always asking myself, for what purpose am I confessing this thing?” She added that labeling writing by women as “confessional” has historically been a way to marginalize bold writers.

Strayed admitted that writing about going to the bathroom in the desert wasn’t pretty, but she considers her own admissions to be far from the thorniest part of the writing process. “The most difficult thing when writing a memoir is writing about other people,” said Strayed. She had to account for her parents–to tell the story of her father’s abuse–and write about her siblings.

Strayed also draws on her personal life in her work as an advice columnist. Since 2010, she has written an anonymous column called “Dear Sugar” on TheRumpus.net. (In February she revealed her identity for the first time.) She was reluctant at first to take the job. “Who am I to give advice? I don’t have any experience as a therapist; I haven’t even gone to therapy very much,” she said. “The thing I do have to offer is that I’m a storyteller, I’m a writer.”

Strayed pointed to one column of hers, “The Truth That Lives There,” encouraging breakups for people who love their romantic partner but want to leave, that elicited a huge, mostly grateful, response. She only realized after writing it how powerful her message might be. “People responded to my giving them permission to do what was painful, and to break someone else’s heart if it meant that they needed to open up their life,” she said. “I’ve wrecked a lot of marriages, so that stays with me.”

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked Strayed about the role of anger in good writing and about the mechanics of baring secrets.

“I do think that good writing can come from rage and anger,” said Strayed, particularly when it’s anger about something external, like a political issue. But to write about relationships, you need to come to grips with a situation–and writing, for her, has been a part of that process. “When you write about people who failed you, it has to do with acceptance,” she said. “It’s not that these things happened, but that you accept that they’re true.”

Strayed said she asks her husband before she reveals something from his personal life in a column. But in Wild she changed people’s names.

She was also asked how she’ll introduce the book to her family: her children are six and seven. “I’ll leave it to them to read when they’re ready,” she said. But she will tip them off to the chapter with the sex scene, so that they can skip that if they’d like.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read opinions by authors and artists about the role of solitude in their busy lives here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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