Inner-scapes

View near Montescudo, in the Province of Rimini, Italy

A child is upset – perhaps a scoop of ice cream has fallen out of a cone onto a hot summer sidewalk. We tell her, “go to your happy place” and look for a distraction.
 
My nephew, when he was about four years old, carried a dead beetle around with him for a day or two. This progressively more dilapidated corpse, gradually missing more legs, was his special “friend” who was just “sleeping.” We had all gone grocery shopping together, my nephew and niece, my sister and myself. The “friend” came with us and rode on the children’s seat of the grocery cart, receiving the occasional vivifying poke from my nephew. 
 
On our way home, a few blocks away from the grocery store, a wail rose from the back of the van, “My friend, my friend!” The poor bug had been left behind. The flood of tears and heartbreak almost made my sister turn the van around but there was little chance of finding the desiccated little thing in a sea of shopping carts. We carried on home.
 
I can’t remember what eventually helped my nephew get over his grief. Maybe it was ice cream – or, better yet, frozen custard, since we were in the American Midwest. I do remember it was not easy getting him past this. I worried about him – he generally had a very hard time finding his “happy place.” He imagined monsters and zombies into his landscapes, even the spaces between the lines of a parking lot were filled with “dangerous creatures” and we had a time convincing him that we were safe walking through these spaces. His favourite blanket was really a ghost named Henry.

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I don’t like the term “happy place.” It sounds facile and cartoonish. Is this where go you when you’ve been bullied at school? After the death of a parent? When you lose your job?
 
Perhaps “inner-scape” may be a better word? It doesn’t reference happiness but does imply some kind of escape. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a better word out there.
 
I do know we must all have some form of an inner, peaceful (or riotously happy?) place we go to when needed. And I’m going to hazard a guess that these places, for most people, take the form of a landscape.
 
I have several – and they all have common elements.
 
Sunlight – scintillating, high-summer, high-blue-boreal-sky sunlight, the kind that makes you squint and think the sound of cicadas is really the sound of your brain sizzling.
 
Pines or spruce, and fragrant underbrush such as blueberry plants or Labradour tea.
 
Some white sand, and sometimes, but not always, water.
 
And a connection to childhood.
 
One favourite – the long, sweeping white sand public beach at Wild Goose Lake near Geraldton. I never learned to swim so I loved the warm, shallow water at Wild Goose. I'd safely walk far into the lake along the squishy sand bottom.
 
Another is any kind of landscape with blueberries, even the devastated 'scape of a cutover. My father was a logger and we spent many summer weekends going back to old cuts to pick berries.

Some of these inner landscapes take on other nuances as life’s complexities overlay the simple happiness originally associated with a place. The cutovers rich with berries were the first of these somewhat shadowed places.
 
Lately, another particular scene keeps appearing in the back of my brain – and it really feels like that, a physical sensation accompanied by warmth, a gentle pressure at the back of my head, pulling me away to another time and place. A hot, sunny summer day, late afternoon judging by the low angle of the sun. I’m on the edge of a plantation of young Jack Pine, none more than ten feet high. I’m standing alone on the sandy track left by the old logging road. The highway is not far away. I can hear an occasional transport rumble by. I feel a strange, existential vertigo in here. The moment has a delicious sensual feel to it. The heat, the soft sand under my feet, the sweet, sweet, warm air rising from the pines and undergrowth – the whole place smells like pine-tinged honey.
 
But I feel a darker undertone here also – a profound aloneness, as if I’ve finally reached some essential core of myself and can’t go any further. This feeling is both scary and compelling at the same time, like the excitement of sitting at the apex of a rollercoaster, a brief awareness of an incredible panorama, and the sense that it will only last a moment.
 
There are two possible directions I can go as I inevitably plunge down and away from this suspension of time – I can go back to my car parked on the highway shoulder and continue driving or I can walk into the endless forest of young pine and disappear – it would be that easy.
 
I’ve realized this isn’t a memory from childhood. When my parents were alive, I would drive regularly up to Geraldton, along Highway 11, past sparkling lakes and through endless boreal forest to visit them. To break up the long drive, I made a point of stopping somewhere along the way at least once on each trip, somewhere I had never stopped before, for a short walk. I think this particular spot was somewhere between Geraldton and Jellicoe. Was it after my father died and my mother was living on her own? I can’t quite remember but it probably was, that sensation of intense solitude feels like the imprint left by grief.

In his essay “Death in the Soul,” Albert Camus writes about something similar, or so I imagine. Perhaps, like him, “I have exaggerated a bit what I felt then so sincerely.” 
 
In 1936, after spending a miserable time in Prague, Camus travels to Vicenza, Italy. In Prague he was plagued by alienation and torpor, finally saved when some friends show up. He leaves haunted by the death of a stranger, another guest at the hotel he was staying at:
 
The door of the room was half open, so that all that could be seen was a high, blue-painted wall. But the dull light… threw two shadows on this screen: that of the dead man lying on the bed and a policeman guarding the body. The two shadows were at right angles to each other. The light overwhelmed me. It was authentic, a real light, an afternoon light, signifying life, the sort of light that makes one aware of living. He was dead. Alone in his room. I knew it was not suicide. I dashed back into my room and threw myself on the bed.
 
He arrives in Vicenza “…ready to be happy.” He finds a land there that “fits” his soul and remembers “the lesson of the sun and of the land” he was born in – Algiers. And in later years he still finds himself “…there again occasionally, when the scent of rosemary brings it flooding back.” 
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A little before noon I went out and walked toward a spot I knew that looked out over the immense plain of Vicenza. The sun had almost reached its zenith, the sky was an intense, airy blue. The light it shed poured down the hillsides, clothing cypresses and olive trees, white houses and red roofs in the warmest of robes, then losing itself in the plain that was steaming in the sun. Each time I had the same feeling of being laid bare. The horizontal shadow of that fat little man was still inside me. And what I could touch with my finger in these plains whirling with sunlight and dust, in these close-cropped hills all crusty with burnt grass, was one form, stripped to its essentials, of that taste for nothingness that I carried with me. This country restored my very heart, and put me face to face with my secret anguish. It was and yet was not the anguish I had felt in Prague.

Olive groves in the province of Rimini

I like that last thought...​it was and yet was not the anguish he had felt in Prague. I think it describes perfectly the multiple and often contradictory emotional tones that overlay, or underlie, our inner and outer landscapes.

Am I on track with this idea of inner-scapes? What landscapes do you carry with you? 

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