A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Solnit describes coming of age amid the punk rock scene of San Francisco during the 1980s. She frames the experience in an abandoned hospital where she helped a friend make a movie that highlighted the ruins. Solnit sees the punk era as the end of something, a closure of the American dream and the modernism that upheld and ultimately destroyed the industrial economy. As cities succumbed to this loss, buildings were abandoned and entire districts were left in ruins. Solnit describes these decaying urban landscapes as the playground of punk, a place to explore and challenge memory. Ruins became a type of wilderness where young people could find themselves, mirroring the outside with the inside: “Like ruins, the social can become a wilderness in which the soul too becomes wild, seeking beyond itself, beyond its imagination” (88).

Solnit remembers a friend named Delphine for whom the ruins of the 1980s became the external representation of an inner life. Delphine was arresting, interesting, and always changing. When Solnit met the musician, Delphine was 17 and Solnit was 21. Over the years, Delphine flitted from one job to the next, constantly moving houses and switching out relationships.

Solnit admired Delphine’s wildness and free spirit.