Lickable Landscape Memories

My friend Johnny went to visit an art gallery in NYC recently (masked and socially distant, of course). When he sent me this video of little nature scenes projected inside of acrylic cubes, the first thing I wanted to do was lick them.

Source: Kristin McIver at the Jane Lombard Gallery.

Maybe I have a problem with wanting to lick the things I like in general. Every year, I usually volunteer for the National Book festival, and most years they give me an assignment like handing out posters or telling the tourists where the bathrooms are but one freakish year, they had me introduce Billy Collins. Yes, as in the Poet Laureate of the United States. The one who started his poem, “A Sense of Place,” like this:

If things had happened differently,

Maine or upper Michigan

might have given me a sense of place –

a topic that now consumes 87%

of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou,

or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline …

But as it is the only thing that gives me

a sense of place is this upholstered chair … [and so on]

They didn’t give me a script either, so I wrote a little introduction on my own, shook Billy’s hand about two minutes before the reading, and climbed about a mile up to the podium in front of a packed conference room. All I could think was, “don’t lick him. DO NOT LICK the Poet Laureate. Don’t do it!”

I have no idea what happened after that or how I sounded. I’ve never gone back to look at the video. I’m pretty sure I didn’t lick Billy Collins — I think someone would have mentioned it if I had — and I’m counting that as a win.

I can’t explain why I want to lick the things I like so much, except that maybe it’s a way of immersing myself in them, experiencing them in every way possible.

It’s been a difficult week for me — my Mom came through one outpatient surgery but she’s scheduled for several more — and the week’s endless waiting rooms got me thinking about all the tactile memories we keep of the natural places we’ve loved, those little back-pocket cubes with videos we can play and re-wind and play again.

I have a few such places. One is Donaldsonville, Louisiana, on the banks of the Mississippi river. I used to go there with my friend Johnny — the same Johnny who sent me the acrylic cube videos — to visit our mutual friend, Anne-Louise.

To get to Donaldsonville, you drive over the Sunshine Bridge, halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. If you’re driving at night, as I often did, the sky starts to tint orange many miles out from the oil refineries that line the banks of the Mississippi near Donaldsonville — a murky orange, as if I had tie-dyed a black thrasher band t-shirt without bleaching it first.

Driving closer, the light intensifies, until finally you’re in a kind of nexus of pipelines and tubing. Each tube and pipe is lit by strings of tiny red lights, and rising above this alien world, there’s an inferno of blazes, huge chimneys supporting fires that tower several stories high, touching the sky and staining it orange.

Drive through this alien world, however, and suddenly, you’re back on the banks of the Mississippi. Anne’s parent’s house was across the street from the river’s levee, and we’d take blanket out there, just over the levee’s curve so no one from the house could spot us and ask us to do anything. It must have been hot, but I don’t remember the heat, just the ants, and the thick, stalk-like grass, half burnt from the sun and prickling its way through any blanket we brought with us. I plucked blade after blade, shredding them between my forefinger and thumbnail.

I remember the way cold coke tasted, and cold beer too, and the way the glass bottles — covered in cold sweat — would almost sting next to your own steamy, salty sweat. Beside us, the Mississippi lazed along, an implacable beast, intent on its own broad-shouldered concerns and not thinking a thing about the three children sitting on its banks.

It’s a lickable memory for me — not pristine, certainly, and maybe not even very beautiful, but still, it’s a memory of sensing myself in the natural world, and of being small, and enjoying all the textures and delights of my smallness.

Feel free to share in the comments any nature memory that returns to you, full of senses and textures — or feel free to keep it private, and think of it only when the breeze hits you just right, or when you find the first woodchuck disrupting your garden, or when a howl breaks the glittering peace of a still-cold March morning.