Roots Are Where You Spread Them

Do we ever really identify that homeward tug?

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

Quick quiz: If asked about your roots, where does your head go? To a seaside image of your childhood? A forested mountainside? A faraway continent? Maybe a windswept plain you can’t quite identify?

In a few hours — God willing and the creek don’t rise, as we used to say — I’m headed to the rugged seaside cliffs of Cornwall in the southwesternmost tip of England. I’ll be scattering some of the ashes of my good husband, whose ancestors toiled in the deep underground Cornish mines for generations.

It’s a land I grew to love. Bud and I made frequent trips, always staying in St. Ives (if you haven’t been to the Tate St. Ives museum, put it on your bucket list!) and always walking parts of the Tinners’ Way. Along that 16-mile stretch of historic, sometimes desolate, breathtakingly beautiful countryside we would imagine those sturdy men in centuries past, trudging through pre-dawn darkness with pasties made by their wives or mothers to sustain them. It’s said that they only saw daylight on Sundays, when they could sleep in until time to go to church. Whew, talk about life of hardship.

Still. Attachment to that life and landscape ran deep. Even for the son born (in 1929) on the more forgiving soil of Michigan, USA. (When earth’s bounty was discovered in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where else could anyone go to find men ready to work those deep underground mines? And why should we be surprised to find Cornish pasties abundant in the 21st century towns of California’s Gold Country?)

Photo by _MV on Unsplash

It’s hard — especially when you approach ash-scattering age — not to reflect on roots. Hard to avoid, and easy to delight.

Where do your long-ago roots of reminiscence go ? Mine go to Northern England, Scotland and France, at least, that’s what I was always told.

My father, in fact, liked to tell his young daughters of aristocratic British ancestors in some sorts of medical/pharmaceutical trades. When he made his first train trip into the ancestral lands much later, however, what greeted him were signs advertising the wonders of “Moorland’s Pills.” We deciced our itinerant forebears hawked some sort of snake-oil elixir.

Searching the internet now I find, in Yorkshire, His Majesty’s Moorland Prison, where reportedly “almost half of all prisoners claimed it was easy to get drugs.” Maybe I should leave Ancestry.com alone.

But something in that part of the world still sits in my psyche. On visits to Northern England and Scotland it’s been easy to feel connected to the landscape, somewhat the way my husband felt anchored in the rugged, windswept Cornish countryside.

Where do your dreams go? Your images of some rootedness in Mother Nature’s small, blue planet earth?

My most visceral connectedness is to the shores of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. Walking barefoot on those beaches or roaming the adjacent farms of my aunts and uncles on balmy afternoons are among my earliest, happiest memories. And I can return today, through the unrecognizable urban developments everywhere, to the sights and seabird sounds and saltwater smells of those gentle shores — and feel, simply, a belonging.

Photo by Taylor Cole on Unsplash

Who knows what it’s all about? I think our roots may be sensory as much as factual. Somewhere in the depths of our hearts and minds are smells and sounds, hazy images and tactile memories that were imprinted before we knew about imprints. If we’re lucky those are imbued with nostalgic warmth. Peace.

But maybe we send down new roots with just as much power.

I somehow think that more recent roots — adopted lands and landscapes — must be equally valid. How else to explain a ferocious affinity for my adoptive San Francisco and its serene, fog-shrouded Bay? Wherever in the world I go, when the plane dips into its landing pattern on return and I spot the salt flats of San Francisco Bay’s southernmost edges my heart lifts. Maybe new family ties are like the roots of the Monterey Pine, fast spreading in all directions, tenacious even if they don’t go deep.

Back to the ashes business. Some of Bud’s already went onto his first wife’s grave in the Jewish corner of an old, oak-shaded cemetery in St Helena; a package or two more (don’t tell the TSA people please — I have no idea where that documentation disappeared to) will soon return to the Cornish fatherland. But there are plenty more! He was a big guy. So the rest will commingle with mine one of these days, not in the immediate future we trust, and return to the Chesapeake and San Francisco bays.

Land, sea, glaciers, mountains — what a remarkable little planet we share. And in which all of our roots intertwine.