"...each of us carries an inward map."

I’ve just spent the last two weeks in the desert southwest. It was a bewildering and often disorienting trip.

First, to my eyes while driving the freeways in Phoenix, what used to be desert seems to have disappeared. So sprawling has this city become, so voracious in gobbling up what was once the natural habitat of cacti and ocotillo and choking it with traffic and a hovering brown haze, it’s hard to locate the natural desert in the city my parents moved to 38 years ago.

But then there’s no denying Phoenix’s desert roots. And in spite of seemingly unchecked, cheek-by-jowl housing developments, irrigated golf greens and mega-resorts and conference centers, vestiges of a natural desert landscape do still exist, if only in yet-to-be-developed tracts and unprotected pockets or in distant horizon vistas. Still, driving from the Phoenix airport north to Prescott where for the past several years my father has lived, I passed mile after mile of indistinguishable shopping malls, fast food franchises, Wal Mart Super Centers. I’d crossed a continent to an entirely different ecological habitat but felt like I could’ve been anywhere, in countless other landscapes bulldozed, paved over, rendered featureless, as if our nation-wide aim is to make places so indistinct and homogenous that at the sight of a Red Lobster, Olive Garden or Best Buy, we’re somehow oddly comforted. We travel hundreds of miles to a new environment but, as poet Gertrude Stein once observed: “When we get there, there is no there there.”

In 2007, Phoenix’s sprawl was swallowing up the desert at approximately an acre an hour, an astonishing but inescapable fact when considering just how far out of the city you must travel before finding any swathes of indigenous landscape. In one instance, Anthem, an entirely new town, was created by virtue of a few recently built housing developments, a mega church and a regional shopping mall. When naming a complex of outlet stores, Anthem’s developers used the word Village, figuring perhaps that was enough to make it one.

Driving miles past Anthem, things decidedly opened up. Near Bumble Bee and Black Canyon City, the natural landscape returned. Saguaro marched up and down the slopes like sentinels. Prickly pear lolled in the heat. Climbing a few miles further, the road leveled out as though on a table top in what, not knowing the correct terminology, I had to consider a mesa. All of it is more welcome certainly than another Walmart or Burger King but nevertheless unfamiliar. Invisible to my eyes were surely the crannies and caves, the burrows and hidden nests, all the inventive, unknown-to-me critters and plant life that go with wash, arroyo, gulch.  And having just come from the island with its bountiful greens and blues, the palette was disconcerting. The way, beneath a high, hot sun, its hues tilted toward scorch and dust.

On the northern horizon, like magnets, the mountains beyond Prescott commanded attention, as though each of us heading in their direction couldn’t resist their pull. But what of this landscape would draw me to it? What in it and in the mountains up ahead might spell to me home?

Little in the American West’s mountains suggests to me the gentler curves and kinder elevations of the Bay’s domed islands or Blue Hill’s blue hill. Nor, even, Cadillac Mountain. They’re magnificent certainly, even jaw-dropping in their grandeur, and another example of our planet’s many gifts for which I’m mightily grateful. But to me, they often seem – and is this part of their attraction to others? – impossibly huge, especially indifferent. I might think they were thumbing their noses were it not for the sense they’d already turned their imposing backs to me.

A few years ago, on a family visit when my mother was still alive and my father able to drive, I traveled with them to the top of a canyon’s rim. The view was gasp-inducing, the scenery undeniably beautiful. But after several minutes, I became overwhelmed, not just by the immensity of it or my proximity to a distinct, unequivocal edge, but by how far I was from any landscape in which I felt anchored. I didn’t know how to look, or where. Like a visitor to a hostile country, I wasn’t invited by the landscape toward a closer, come-hither intimacy. Oddly, from such a panoramic aerie, my imagination did not soar. I looked, admired, but didn’t feel connected, drawn in, claimed. How high up I was and yet I didn’t sense that it would be any easier to feel closer to anything that might reside in all that sky. And surely, when viewed from such a height and so far from any tide-tugged sea, the moon had to be up to a whole different kind of business. After several moments, I gratefully stepped back.

I’m still stepping back. From what has happened to Phoenix and its landscape. From the distant mountains and the tawny-matted mesa that at a posted 75 mph speed limit (hey, this is the wild West!), I sped through much too quickly. And in spite of whatever family ties remain.

It’s said we each have an inner landscape. If we’re lucky, we live in places with landscapes that reflect our own inner terrain. To which we’re drawn and in which we most comfortably reside. I’ve yet to determine if the island and its bordering, increasingly-known-to-me landscapes match my own inner landscape, or what exactly that means. I do know that almost from the start, from that first summer in a rented cottage, the island exerted a strong and emotional pull on me, and also a physical one, as though I were a bird following the earth’s magnetic forces on its annual migration to the northeast Atlantic.

Twenty years ago, I doubt I’d have believed that an island topography would put out its welcome mat to me. I never dreamed that I, a Midwesterner, would find herself most at home at the edge of the ocean – along with its sidekicks: an ever-changing sky above open water, endless gradations of light and color, a play of wind and tidal current, evanescent waves. A landscape of horizontals over which the eye can stretch. And not the horizontals of Midwestern fields or an Arizonan tabletop mesa.

This is not to say I don’t often feel as puny at the ocean’s edge as I do at a canyon’s rim. But from where I sit on the island, the sea is home to jutting granite ledges, jagged outcroppings, to numerous offshore islets and distant larger islands heaped with immense boulders, spiked with thick dark spruce. Massive rock formations punctuate the deeply indented shorelines. In them are niches, fissures and crevices where life forms teem and which in my numerous explorations I’ve come to know though surely not yet as completely as some hikers in the Bradshaw Mountains might recognize javelina and pinon. Or the way someone else might know his way around the menu at a Jack-in-the-Box drive through window.

The island landscape is one that, for me, comforts. A typography that’s been shaped in part by having been at the edge of an Ice Age glacier and, tough enough to survive, still proudly displays its old battle scars. Though surely no impervious mountain, its rugged ridges and half-submerged ledges appear impenetrable. Outcroppings boast they’ll not yield without a fight. Together, they give form to the open sea and the distant horizon's thin porous-seeming rim. They corset immensity, frame wildness. In them a bounded unboundedness.

The mountain-lovers among us might well claim a similar draw to the landscape they cherish. But for them, the scale is different -- bigger, as it always seems in the West. And let’s not forget the bigger difference – water. What makes an island an island. The ying to a rocky topography’s yang.

Maybe my increasingly obvious need for a watery element was long ago imprinted on me, despite my land-locked Midwestern roots. Perhaps, as unlikely as it seems, it dates back to my childhood, to the curving Little Calumet, a narrow, sluggish river that along with a highway and railroad tracks enisled our gridded-street neighborhood and was home to adolescent imaginations as my pals and I fashioned grassy huts on its banks like those we saw in National Geographic or reinvented ourselves in boisterous, swash-buckling renditions of Swamp Fox. A continuing need that followed me into my adult years in Chicago when, at the very least, I had to live within easy walking distance of Lake Michigan. Or why now, in my drives into the city, I inisist on taking Lake Shore Drive, that water-hugging route. Or even why, perhaps, during this trip, I found an odd comfort in discovering that one of the main roads I took daily, across parched ground with nary a drop of water in sight, was named, and not intentionally ironically, Lake Shore Drive – after, I found out later, a prehistoric lake whose source and shores are long gone and to my eyes not even hinted at.

Of course being in a familiar landscape, among recognizable topography and landmarks, doesn’t necessarily make things less strange. Or more comfortable or easy to navigate. What had brought me to Arizona might have made any terrain difficult. I was there to move my father, in his post-stroke, post-acute rehab phase, to an assisted living facility. For that I had no reliable compass. All the necessary assessments and appointments, the need to establish services and make the physical move itself, were disorienting. And as foreign to me as the streets bordering federal grazing land from which my father was being moved after only a handful of years there to the new small apartment where he now resides, the distance between them great, emotionally and psychologically. And from me on a northeast Atlantic island, literally.

 And yet I understand why he continues to refuse to move East. Philosopher Jose Ortego y Gassett delared: "Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are." Perhaps so, but a physical landscape is only one part of community, of what shapes us, of why we settle in a particular place and not another, other factors being family, work, opportunity, all that which whether by choice or not we settle somewhere and make it ours. In all likelihood, I may never fully know what in his landscape drew my father to it and holds him still. But for him, despite his recent move, it spells, unquestionably, home.