59 pages • 1-hour read
Where the Lost Wander
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Themes
The Power of Love
One of the novel’s major themes is conveyed through dialogue by Jennie Lowry to her stepson, John: “The more you love, the more it hurts. But it’s worth it” (26). The power of love to create, endure, and transform pain is demonstrated in the narrative arc of the relationship between John and Naomi.
Before John and Naomi fall in love, neither really has any interest in truly getting to know other people. John says he can’t think of anyone he wants to know except for Naomi, and Naomi says she would rather “draw faces than know what’s going on behind them” (126). This changes after they realize how much they matter to each other. In learning how to be vulnerable with Naomi, John also finds a sense of purpose and direction in his life that he previously lacked. Meanwhile, Naomi experiences the kind of fulfilling romantic relationship that she failed to have with her first husband, Daniel.
When Naomi is kidnapped by the Shoshoni, however, their love brings them the greatest pain that either one has ever endured. For John, it is the pain of not knowing whether or not Naomi is alive as he searches for her frantically. For Naomi, it is a yearning for John so great that she thinks of herself as a lifeless girl and someone who is drowning. Even after John secures her rescue, they feel lost. John is lost in guilt for not being present at the attack, and Naomi is lost in shame over not fighting her captor Magwich’s sexual advances.
Their sojourn in Washakie’s camp is a healing time for Naomi and John, allowing their pain and guilt to slowly fade. Naomi loves her brother Wolfe too much to leave him, even though it puts her in a limbo where she has no real home and is separated from her other brothers. John, in return, loves Naomi enough to stay there with her until she can believe his words: That endurance of the sort she has shown is a form of battle and is a “hell of a lot harder” than fighting (295).
John recalls Jennie’s words for the last time as he watches Wolfe’s foster parents, Biagwi and Weda, grieving after the baby’s death. Their pain tells him that Wolfe was loved and cherished and, “at the end of life […] that is all there is” (327). The vision he shares with Lost Woman afterward, seeing a trail made up of a woman’s and a wolf’s footprints, represents the final transformation of their pain. As Naomi states in the Epilogue, the baby’s death enables her to finally find a true home with those she loves.
The Complexities of Cultural Identity
The novel’s two most complex characters are John Lowry and Washakie. Both are “Two Feet”—John’s Pawnee nickname for having one foot each in two cultures. Their experiences are very different, because John was mainly raised in a white household and Washakie in a Shoshoni one. Washakie is John’s foil, a view of what John’s life would have been had circumstances been different. However, for both men, their mixed heritage ultimately provides them with the skills and knowledge that allow them to thrive in a changing world.
Since childhood, John has believed he is simply “a stranger in both” worlds (11), and he experiences and tolerates derision and slurs from both whites and Indigenous people. Mr. Caldwell, who doesn’t like anyone he doesn’t understand, calls him a “half breed,” while one of the Pawnee, who “don’t know what to make” of him (110), calls him “half man.” His lack of a clear identity makes him wary around Naomi, leaving him convinced that she could do better for herself than to marry him.
It is the love and acceptance of Naomi, who uses “Two Feet” as a term of endearment, that allows John to be comfortable in his own skin. Strengthened by her love, he is able to use his understanding of both people and languages to achieve his own ends, whether it is getting his wagon made at Fort Bridger or convincing a warrior to return Naomi’s drawings to him. Gradually he comes to the realization that he can’t change the past but can control his own destiny—in his words, “what could be” (320).
Washakie is a “two feet” like John. Unlike John, he was raised by Indigenous people, the Shoshoni, but he is similarly skilled at negotiation with all sorts of people. He helps defuse the tension at Fort Bridger and uses it to his advantage to barter with the white traders, and his intervention succeeds in freeing Naomi from Pocatello’s band. Washakie is successful in keeping the peace and exercising strong leadership. Washakie’s embrace of both sides of his heritage models for John what being confident in one’s own skin looks like.
The novel thus suggests that learning to reconcile different parts of one’s identity is an important part of self-acceptance. In marrying Naomi and starting a new life for himself with her in California, John begins to embrace both sides of his heritage, regarding it as a source of strength as opposed to a source of tension or confusion.
The Nature of Home and Belonging
The concept of “home” is constantly shifting in the novel and is ultimately revealed to be just that, a concept rather than a reality. Belonging to another person, on the other hand, is permanent. Winifred expresses this theme in Chapter 11 as she tells John that marriage is not shelter but “finding rest in each other” (170). Where the Lost Wander thus interrogates the nature of home and belonging.
Naomi understands sooner than John does that home is a moveable concept. Like her family, she hopes to find a better life in California than the one she had in Illinois. However, she can’t understand John’s desire to have his own wagon, since she has never had a room or bed of her own. She thinks that the only “space” she has ever had is “the quiet of [her] own thoughts and the blank page” in front of her (200).
John, in contrast, clings to the idea of home because he resists the idea of belonging anywhere. He believes he doesn’t need to belong, since his birth mother and father didn’t belong together. This is why he insists on having a wagon where he and Naomi can have some privacy along the trail, even though his insistence will inadvertently contribute to the horrific deaths of Naomi’s parents and brother. He attributes her desire to be with him above all else to her impulsiveness and reliance on feelings instead of thought.
After Naomi is kidnapped, John must lose the idea of having a home before he and Naomi can move on with their lives. As the Pawnee break up camp after the Gathering, Lost Woman tells John that Naomi can’t go home, to which John replies, “I’m not sure where home is. Home is a wagon that I turned into a grave” (292). In the chapters that follow, Naomi has the task of convincing John that belonging to each other is more important than having a home.
In the end, “home” is where the other is, as when Naomi welcomes John following the buffalo hunt and he lets her “find [her] way, [telling] the story of a woman coming home again” (301). Naomi expresses this understanding in the novel’s Epilogue. She reflects that, while she and John have struggled to find a new home from the beginning of their journey to the end, all she can really give him is “something—someone—to hold on to. To belong to” (333).
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