Safekeeping
Safekeeping
By R.M. Wilcher
Where I’m from, everything is in flux. It’s a place where transience rules, and leaving is just what comes after arriving, like breathing. The whole city is divvied up by highways leading in and out; you can’t get anywhere without getting on one. It’s a place you don’t like calling “home” because, for whatever reason, to do so would be to give up. It’s a waste of a perfectly good highway not to take it and leave, I guess. If you do settle, someone will ask you why you stayed; you’ll breathe in and out once and heavily. You’ll say, “It just seems right,” and shrug, holding your empty hands briefly outward.
This place was my home for nineteen years, and I hated it for eighteen-and-five-sixths. I only recently left it, shipping myself across an ocean to secure my future, so I told myself, with more schooling. But I know now that whatever my future would be long ago took root in that place. I was unknowingly ushered into its safekeeping.
The reason I think people leave is that there are no rolling hills, no mountains. Well, there’s one. It was once a landfill, but it stands so close to the highway that tourists could see and smell it on their way to the beach (the main attraction). So it was covered over in earth and suburban-style sod. It achieved the standards of a state park and so became a state park. But now that I’m gone, I think about going back and walking through the invisible cloud of methane up that pile of concealed trash, rooting myself at the small summit, watching tourists drive by.
I have found (or have I half-remembered?) safekeeping in the hands of others, that I cannot keep myself safe except by recognizing the many others who constitute my innermost being with their friendships.
For better or worse, it is my place. Though it will never be, I wish to God it were like Port William, the town in Wendell Berry’s novels hard-pressed against the flux of places like mine. Athey Keith and Troy Chatham live and work and lose ground to the global economy, are swept up by dreams of somewhere else perhaps, are in their place beside the river which reminds them always of where they have come from and where they are, and where they are going. But in my town, tourists replaced the river. They remind us only of other places. And yet in their passage, I have loved them.
Luis González
I have found here, amidst just one locus of the great disengagement that characterizes our time, my friends for whom I can no longer remain disengaged. We have come from far-off and from near at hand, but far off all the same. We have suffered a few toils and a tragedy, all of it together. Our words have borne the weight of attention because we have set to work at that first hospitality called listening. We have become different. We have misunderstood each other, and we have confessed as much in trust. Laughter is precious and plenty. We have spanned the infinite distance between each other and arrived in each other’s safekeeping. We have in each other, taken up root in our place.
It is from my friends, in this gas station of a town, that I have learned to extend this hospitality to others, passers-by and passers-on. They have taught me what is in the heart of all people to a certain measure. I return to live here, here where I have always been.
And that, I think, is what I have infinitely desired in God: not safety, to remain unmoved, impassible, self-actuated. Rather, safekeeping: to entrust myself to the hands and the attention of other and kindlier gazes, and the memories they collect behind them. This is the true river and mountain of my town: friendship. It changes the perceivable character of an entire population. It has been enough now for me to recognize that this was always my place, will always be my place. One day, I will go back. I will again put roots down beneath the flux, and I will be the safekeeping of others. And someone will ask me why. “Seems right,” I will say. I will breathe in and out. I will be in my place.
R.M. Wilcher
Writer & Academic
Photography by Kai Bauer