along Tewksbury Hollow Road, Auburn Township, Pennsylvania

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

I really like the fawns, he said, especially the fawns. I was walking down Pennsyvlania Route 6 to the intersection and was just about to turn onto Tewksbury Hollow Road when he pulled up beside me. He idled there in the center of the road, an older gentleman who leaned out from his open window into the morning air. His pickup had some serious battle scars, and its antenna hung unnaturally from the hood like a dislocated limb. It took me a few seconds, but then I realized that he must’ve been watching me watching the deer that had come out of the trees to graze in the clearing yesterday.

Did you get a good picture of them? he asked. And it was clear that he’d seen me photographing a doe and her fawns about 300 yards from the road. I did, I said. And though for a moment I wondered if I should be wary–after all, here was a strange man who’d been watching me and now sat idling in the center of the road–I began to tell him all about the deer in southeast Iowa, about the bucks I’d seen walking across my back yard last fall. And when he motioned up the big hill to the south and told me that he lived way up at the top in the house with all the stacks of cut wood, I found myself wondering what it would be like to ride up with him and to look out over the hollow from such a magnificent vantage point.

These are the perks of a good walk. You see things. You meet people you probably wouldn’t otherwise meet. You hear your feet on the road and fall into a rhythm as familiar as your own heart beat. I suspect that if there was a charge for all these perks, we probably couldn’t afford them. They’re that precious.

During the three weeks I spent in northeastern Pennsylvania, I walked daily along Tewksbury Hollow Road. Each morning, I set out from my lodgings, but, as John Muir writes, I was really going in. Into a world where fields of goldenrod flanked the road; where a great blue heron stalked the perimeter of a pond covered in algae; where the rain brought spotted red newts onto the road and sent the stream–previously just a trickle–crashing over the rocks like a full-fledged river; where the hardwoods arched over the road in a canopy so dense that I walked for yards in near darkness; where the cattails had burst, and the milkweed pods had just begun to spill their milky floss; where deer dotted the tree line, and somewhere, deep within the forest, black bears slept. Each day, I was walking into another world, and I marveled at the new things I encountered there.

In his essay, “Walking,” American author Henry David Thoreau writes: I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. I confess that there were days I walked down Route 6 and onto Tewksbury Hollow Road bodily but not necessarily spiritually. My body struggled with the humidity and with one wicked hill that literally took my breath away and often caused me to stop, mid-hill, to regulate my heart which was hammering against my chest. During these moments, it was challenging to be there in spirit. Still, there were more times when my spirit grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the road. Even now, weeks after I’ve returned home, I walk the road in my mind. As I mind-walk, I see each bend, each sunny field, each tree stand, and cabin.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking, examines the many benefits of walking. She writes:

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett’s] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

Oh, to be taken out of the social sphere and ushered into the larger, lonelier world where you are free to think! This is it, exactly. A good walk opens up real space to flex your mental muscles. It pays no heed to your reputation or attire. You can be unabashedly yourself. You can make unfiltered exclamations when something catches your fancy. Will you look at that! I often say to no one in particular. There’s no etiquette about this sort of thing on a good walk. And truth be told, most drivers or passersby who might be alarmed if they saw you talking to yourself are probably texting or scrolling through social media, so they won’t register an occasional Oh, wow!

You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. J.R.R. Tolkien is keenly aware that a good walk has the power to sweep you off to places you’ve only imagined. Or perhaps to places you’ve never imagined. I’ve been so wholly swept away that I lost complete track of where I was and how I got there. For minutes or hours, I’ve walked into great tales in which, as heroine, I met every challenge and vanquished every evil handily. I’ve been swept into other ages and other places, and all this sweeping became, in the words of poet Robert Frost, a momentary stay against confusion. I gratefully let myself be swept into all sorts of worlds, and as I walked on, the miles kept the pain and terror of this world at bay.

On my very last walk down Tewksbury Hollow Road, I met a man I’d seen walking a few days before. We met in a sunny spot of the road where the morning sun burst through an opening in the upper story of the poplar and oak trees hemming the road. For 15 minutes, we stood and talked about all sorts of things. As if we’d been friends for years. As if we’d expected to find each other at this very time on this very road. As if the bounty of the day depended upon our meeting. A great walk can really deliver the goods.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
― George Eliot

On my 16-hour drive to northeastern Pennsylvania to attend a writing residency, I listened to half (yes, there are actually 32-hour Audible books!) of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, a novel I’d read in graduate school when I was thrashing through one Victorian novel per week. At its heart is Dorothea Brooke, a woman who desires a life of more significance, a life in which her appetite for beautiful and good things would be sated. Early in the 880-page novel, Dorothea marries an older scholar, Edward Casaubon. Initially, she sees her marriage as the fulfillment of all she’s longed for, for she hopes to learn from her wise husband, to serve as his secretary, and thus, to contribute something intellectually meaningful to the world. In a short time, however, she discovers that she’s yoked herself to a man whose life’s work ultimately puddles into pathos. He suffers from fragile health, spends their honeymoon cloistered in a series of Roman archives, and, worst of all, shares little time, thought, or love with his new wife. It is not, sadly, a marriage made in heaven.

And yet, in her article, “Middlemarch and Me, What George Eliot teaches us” (Feb. 6, 2011, The New Yorker), Rebecca Mead explains how Dorothea defends her husband as she insists that [f]ailure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. Mead argues that Dorothea promotes an idea central to much of Eliot’s work: that individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are.

Author Virginia Woolf believed Middlemarch to be one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and Mead elaborates on this, claiming that it’s also a book about how to be a grownup person—about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness. In youth, we tend to point our longing towards the future, believing–or at least hoping–that when we grow up, what we longed for will be realized. And though the act of longing isn’t the exclusive territory of grownups, it’s often felt most deeply as we age, as we realize how little time and how few opportunities to satisfy our longings remain.

But lest I lapse into maudelin musing, I have to say that hope and joy can live companionably with longing. In her novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson writes:

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, our very craving gives it back to us again.

I like the notion that our longing, our very craving for something might give it back to us again–or simply give it to us. In my father’s poem to mother, “On Your Birthday, Remember,” he writes that:

For some a remembered hand
can be almost as real as any
made of flesh and blood.
Just so your hand in mine,

brought back by love. 

Herein lies the sweet meat of longing: that your hand in mine might be brought back by love, that, as Robinson contends, to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. Miles away from my grandchildren, I long to sit with them on the screen porch. Today as I sit in my small room listening to the rain, this longing for their presence all but makes it so. 

In his 1941 sermon, "The Weight of Glory," theologian and writer, C. S. Lewis writes:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Lewis writes of what we truly desire, the country we have never yet visited, a life and place beyond the temporal. And I take heart in his claims that the beautiful, good things we've discovered in books, art, and the natural world are but good images of our real desires; that it's the longing for these things that spiritually blesses us, reminding us that we're made for much more than this life and this world. 

For those of us, like Dorothea, who long to contribute something of significance and real value to the world, we might take heart in George Eliot's parting words from Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

We may have lived largely hidden lives, may have yearned for so much more, but the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon us and our small contributions, upon the silvery threads of our longing which pull us along and point us toward home. 


Fawn, at Six Feet

A rosebud of ache
bruises the dawn as you call 
to your mother.

Six feet from me, alone,
you stand your ground,
a silver tremor running along
your back.

Neither of us moves.
Our shallow breathing worries the air
between us, and the distance
can’t find its voice. 

The pansies at our feet have fallen
over the edge of the terrace,
and their violet heads drowse
on the grass below. 

But we don’t see them.
We have eyes only for each other. 

Will you close the gap,
gentling your busy tail,
quieting the injured bird who lives
in your throat?

I imagine it so. 
For then I’d take you in my arms
as the maple of your longing
runs clear and sweet into the day.
I’d breathe my finest words into your ear:
all will be well.

And when your mother stands—
expectant—in the clearing beyond the gate,

I’d set you right again 
and point your lovely ache toward home. 

The Coal Palace, Ottumwa, IA, 1890

If I should attempt to interpret the lesson of this structure, I should say that it was an illustration of how much that is artistic and graceful is to be found in the common things of life and if I should make an application of the lesson it would be to suggest that we might profitably carry into all our homes and into all neighborly intercourse the same transforming spirit. –President Benjamin Harrison, Oct. 9, 1890

Although President Harrison was undoubtedly the most famous visitor to the Coal Palace in Ottumwa, Iowa, he was one of thousands who visited the medieval coal-clad castle, the brainchild of three prominent locals: Colonel Peter G. Ballingall, Calvin Manning, and Henry Phillips. When I first moved to Ottumwa decades ago, I recall seeing a photo of the Coal Palace. I was smitten, absolutely gobsmacked. A 230-foot long structure with turrets and a central tower rising 200 feet, all veneered with local coal, this was the stuff dreams are made of. At least for me, for whom both architecture and fantasy have been lifelong passions.

When I was in Italy, I stood before the Duomo in Florence, sorely amazed. But then, I felt the same fascination with all of the other cathedrals and castles I saw as we traveled throughout Europe. I kept asking myself–sometimes silently and often aloud–how could they have made these exquisite structures? Looking at an old sepia photograph of the Coal Palace, I wondered the same thing. How in the world did they build it?

Charles P. Brown, the architect who’d designed the first Corn Palace in Sioux City, was hired to design the Coal Palace. In the last decades of the 1800s, palaces sprung up from the prairie all over the midwest. Made of all sorts of natural materials like hay, bluegrass, alfalfa, flax, sugar beets, and corn, these palaces were built to advertise the bounty of the prairie and to attract visitors to the middle of the country, a region largely ignored by tourists. There were at least 35 of these palaces built in 24 cities. It goes without saying that these palaces were generally fire hazards and vulnerable to weather and time. They were also expensive, and some of their investors failed to break even. After erecting its fifth corn palace, Sioux City called it quits. Mitchell, South Dakota, however, carried the tradition forward and committed to making their corn palace a permanent feature in their town. Long after the other midwestern palaces had been razed and interest in them gone, the Mitchell Corn Palace remains.

But the magnificent Coal Palace, built on a site that I drive by frequently! If only, it, too, had become a permanent feature, a legacy to the local coal industry of the time and testament to the vision of an Iowa architect and local investors. If only I could take my grandchildren there and lose ourselves for an afternoon in the medieval wonder right in our backyard. If only the ebony turrets still rose up from the Des Moines River banks. Palaces transport us from our ordinary lives and dwellings to places only our imaginations can take us. They draw us in; they make us wonder.

The facade of the Coal Palace was constructed of a variety of coal, including bituminous coal (nut and pea) and vitric coal, from ten surrounding counties. The structure was, indeed, impressive. In 1890, The Ottumwa Courier reported on the the artistry of the palace:

Aloft in the main tower, a ‘hanging garden of Babylon,’ with richest contribution of the tropics, with a frieze of classic figures in relief round the entire building, carefully and artistically chiseled out of bituminous blocks which make ‘light, heat, and power.’ With flagstaffs on the various turrets proudly waving the pennant of the various countries which the palace is to represent, and with the undisputable evidence of Uncle Samuel’s higher authority even over the rich feudal baron, King Coal, from the Stars and Stripes waving from the staff of the main tower—a new flag with 44 stars in the field of azure.

As night fell, the arc lamps in the palace towers and colored electric lights illuminated the Coal Palace, making the scene more splendid than any illuminated castle of the rich barons of the middle ages, according to the Ottumwa Courier.

If the facade was impressive, however, the interior would’ve taken your breath away. The central tower held an observation gallery and dance floor, which could be reached by stairs or by elevator. In the central hall, one could find a large auditorium with an estimated seating capacity of 8,000. Behind the stage–this is the part that really gets me–was a waterfall which fell 40 feet into a little lake below. Lit by 700 lights which threw rainbow colors into the falls, it was surrounded by miniature boulders and live fir trees. A suspension bridge spanned the little lake which required 1,600,000 gallons of water daily. And beneath the main floor, visitors could actually be lowered into a miniature working coal mine where they could observe the coal-mining process as real miners worked.

Sadly, the Ottumwa Coal Palace–like most of the midwestern palaces–was short-lived. Opened in 1890, it was closed and razed in 1892 when interest in and enthusiasm for the palace died. Still, it stood for two glorious years, and its opening was celebrated in The New York Times. Above all, perhaps, it’s a reminder of–in President Benjamin Harrison’s words–how much that is artistic and graceful is to be found in the common things of life. I spent some of my happiest childhood hours imagining palaces all over the Rock Garden of Harmon Park. They lived among the rocks and trees, the wildflowers and moss-covered ponds. In that season of palaces imagined among such common elements, I discovered other worlds and found much delight.