Re-Entry
“Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, ‘to get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning ‘track’). ‘To learn’ therefore means at – at route – ‘to follow a track’.”
Robert Macfarlane, “The Old Ways”
A few miles south of La Pine, Oregon, highway 97 offers travelers the opportunity to turn hard east onto highway 31. At this sudden intersection in the ponderosas – it is easily missed – there is a small sign welcoming motorists to the Oregon Outback Scenic Byway. It’s a pleasant enough sign, adorned with a silhouetted coyote yipping at the rising sun, and seems appropriate in its understatement if only to remind people that the entire world is not made of concrete, steel, and inter-personal friction.
This intersection has also come to symbolize, for me, the precise point where I am able to slip the pull of earth’s gravity – by which I mean the daily grind through the mustard gas of partisan messaging, third-world election shenanigans, virus hysteria, the evaporation of constitutional guarantees, the infiltration of big tech, and the endless salvoes of sheer stupidity fired by their allies in the entrenched batteries of Big American media.
Buckaroos. Murphy Ranch, Paisley, Oregon. l to r: Brett Vickerman, Len Babb, Martin Murphy, Peanut Babb
I am not an astronaut, but it isn’t difficult to imagine that first moment of weightlessness after achieving orbit, a bright blue earth shrinking in the window, the sudden lightness of merely being, and what must also include an acute awareness of the millions of earthbound absurdities that complicate our lives beyond measure. It isn’t hard to imagine because I feel it every time I turn east onto highway 31, as though sucked through a pine-forest portal and launched out onto the vast sagebrush and basalt reaches of the Great Basin desert. This is my home country, an interior landscape as well as an exterior phenomenon, and also happens to be where we are making a documentary film. The people, places, imagery, and daily concerns are so radically different from popular culture they are, for all intents and purposes, on another planet.
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