A Field Guide to Getting Lost

In her final chapter, Solnit turns her attention to her childhood home—a single-story house that appears repeatedly in her dreams. Her time in the house was unpleasant, marked by her father’s abuse. In one dream, she is circling her childhood bedroom, carrying a tortoise that is leaking water on the floor. In another, her mother renovated the home in gothic style: “[T]he swimming pool was surrounded by broken glass, the bathroom had two sunken tubs shaped like coffins, and my own small bedroom had been brightly repainted with a line of dancing skeletons on the wall” (179). In her dreams, there was no loss of the past.

Solnit wonders where the image of the tortoise comes from and remembers rescuing a desert tortoise from a road in the Mojave Desert. This unique animal that has existed on Earth for approximately 60 million years is now going extinct. Solnit compares the loss of the desert tortoise to the loss of Indigenous languages and customs. She draws a line of distinction between things that are naturally lost and those that have being lost forced upon them. Solnit points to the California Gold Rush for its greed and waste of wild lands—a period that she feels became a catalyst for modern ravaging of wilderness.