Out of Place

David Gessner & Kimi Faxon Hemingway on our human patterns of migration.

It was the fall of 1996, a lunar eclipse was looming, and the world was different. Back in Boulder the four of us—my younger brother, my old friend Hones, my wife, Nina, and me—had semi-secured four bikes to the back of a rental Saab, crammed our backpacks and ourselves inside, and pointed the car toward the canyons of southeast Utah.

“Pick an animal. Any animal.” The words came, not from a magician, but from Linda Hogan, a Native American writer of the Chickasaw Nation, who was my teacher in a creative writing class at the University of Colorado.

I read all the Beats when I was young… though I never got to meet them.

The dolphins cut back and forth in front of our bow, rolling and jumping and twisting. They spotted our boat and began to chase it as we chased false albacore. . . .

My younger brother doesn’t recognize me when I walk into the Staples where he works in Hyannis on Cape Cod. “Can I help you?” he asks as I stand in front of his register. I just stare at him for a second. “My name is David Gessner,” I say, hoping this will clear things up. “Oh my God, you look so old,” he says.

It is a writer’s worst nightmare. True, it is a human nightmare as well, but it resonates especially with those scribblers of words, keepers of journals, and hoarders of paper who call themselves writers.