Walking the Fault Line

In the summer of 1790, William Wordsworth set off on a walking tour of nearly 3,000 miles across revolutionary France, over the Swiss Alps into Italy, then north through Germany before boarding a boat up the Rhine back to England, where he arrived late for the start of term and failed to distinguish himself in his final examinations at Cambridge University.

The Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson walked the hot and dusty road to Compostela from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in Roncesvalles in the late 1980s, arriving at Finisterre after a journey of over 500 miles, writing later that “Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle.”

In the spring of 1689, Matsuo Bashō walked nearly 1,500 miles through the uplands, lowlands, forests, and mountains north of Edo, visiting villages and temples along the coastline of the Sea of Japan—returning home to Edo nearly five months later, where he wrote a book with the resonant title Oku no Hosomichi, or The Narrow Road to the Interior.

***

To write a poem, you put one metrical foot in front of another.

In ancient Greek prosody, a line or measure of poetry is a stichos, akin to steichein, to walk, to go.

We derive our word for verse from the Old English fers, from the Latin vertere, to turn.

When your feet reach the end of the line, you turn and walk another line.

***

In 2021, the American poet Forrest Gander began to walk portions of the 800-mile San Andreas fault, north to south, with his companion, the South Asian artist Ashwini Bhat. Gander’s intended destination, he writes in Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024), the “novel poem” that recounts his journey, was the “desolate town where I was born”—Barstow, California, in the western Mojave Desert.

One of the great walkers in contemporary literature, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gander has embraced “a theory and practice of go” beginning with early books such as the collection Deeds of Utmost Kindness (1994). Walking, in Gander’s poetic imagination, is fundamental to what makes us human. “A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination,” from The Blue Rock Collection (2004), chronicles the discovery of “the most significant Paleolithic path, those Laetoli / footprints / which show that early hominids / were fully bipedal long before / they developed tool-making capabilities or / an expanded brain.” Core Samples from the World (2011) repurposes the walking tour of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior to document the poet’s cosmopolitan travels through China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and the United States in the form of serial haibun: “Arigato-meiwaku, Bashō would say as he hiked through villages accumulating gifts he could not humanly carry,” Gander notes from the road, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Whether he’s narrating a stranded woman’s harrowing walk through the Chihuahuan Desert in his novel The Trace (2014) or circumambulating Mt. Tamalpais in the poetry collection Twice Alive (2021), Gander returns, over a lifetime of writing, to walking as a fundamental human scene of discovery, recovery, rupture, and return.

***

A walking tour of the San Andreas fault isn’t for everyone, it must be said. The rift zone begins offshore near Eureka, California, where three tectonic plates meet beneath the Pacific Ocean—and it ends in the environmental and economic wasteland of the Salton Sea, some 800 miles south. Long stretches aren’t walkable at all; there are more scenic and practical paths to take along the Pacific Crest Trail. Nonetheless, walking the fault zone might seem like the thing to do if you’ve been asking yourself lately: “where is / the human place / in geological time?”

Nearly two centuries before Gander’s long walk, Alfred, Lord Tennyson sought out his own “human place” in the geological flux of In Memoriam (1850):

The hills are shadows, and they flow    
    From form to form, and nothing stands;
    They melt like mist, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,
    And dream my dream, and hold it true . . .

Tennyson was mourning the sudden death of his friend, the young poet Arthur Henry Hallam, as new theories about the horizon of geological time on our planet were revolutionizing Victorian thought. Like Tennyson, Gander writes verse haunted by the ghosts of deep time: “In molecular sand at the base of the cliff, / pale fossils appear after the rain, mostly / ammonites and bryozoa. Speaking to me.” The slow time of human grief once again intersects with geological time in the twenty-first century memorial of Mojave Ghost. Gander’s mother, who used to take “long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons of Barstow’s Rainbow Basin,” died two years before he began to walk the fault, and his wife, the celebrated poet C.D. Wright, had died five years earlier. Geologists, Gander observes in his book’s preface, are “given to disinter memory.”

***

Who can walk the length of grief? Death stops us in our tracks—it stops time. Gander registers this sense of being stuck in time as he walks the fault:

My younger sister died today. My
father died today. My closest friend
died today. My mother died today. Each
of their deaths detonates in iterative
simultaneity inside the tissue
of my being ...

There’s something unseemly about grief that disobeys time’s forward march. Hamlet would approve Gander’s claim that “No one bears tragedy. It holds you in place.” And yet nobody wants to be held in place by tragedy—we want to move on. Was I a good son to my dying mother? To my father? Was I a good brother? A good friend? Like a penitent on a pilgrimage, the survivor carries a sense of fault within himself wherever he goes.

Gander doesn’t walk the fault—he walks his fault.

***

A ghost is someone—or was someone—who forever walks their fault.

Spectral reflections drift through the echo chambers of Gander’s poetic stanzas:

There is nothing in me now
of what I was before. That’s
what he tells himself. In order
to live with himself.

A ghost might say, “there is nothing in me now / of what I was before.” So might a pilgrim trying to walk off their past sins. But Gander refuses the consolations, or the fantasy, of kenosis—the emptying out of oneself—throughout Mojave Ghost. (Something remains, in every ghost, of what it was before). Shifting from the first to the third person, Gander concedes that his dream of “nothing in me now” is merely “what he tells himself. In order / to live with himself.”

The transition from “me” to “he” throughout Mojave Ghost is the stylistic signature of a poet who “finds there’s no way / to mind the gap between first- and third- / person perspectives.” It’s also a way to register the shifting and unstable tectonics of subjectivity writ large. Where does any “I” find itself across the fault lines that divide “him” from “her” or “them” from “you”? Throughout his novel poem, Gander habitually tries to imagine what his own “I” looks like from another’s point of view:

Dressed to the nines for New Year’s, they stand together
a moment before the mirror. Does she catch
a trace of cowardice lodged in the corners of his eyes?

Few poets write of their self-doubt and sense of failure with Gander’s attritional ferocity. Haunted by “certain irrevocable choices I made,” the poet wants to step out of his “I,” only to find, like Dante at the outset of the Inferno, “I simply / finds no way.”

What is “his” fault? Gander asks himself, and us. What is “my” fault?

***

Maybe it’s our fault.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” Shakespeare’s Cassius reminds his fellow senator in Julius Caesar. Walking the fault, Gander reads the signs of environmental devastation that we—the underlings of American capitalism—have collectively inflicted on the landscape of Southern California. “Now the Joshua trees are withering,” the poet observes, “and the desert below them / is spalling, unstitching itself.” Not only is the rift zone’s biome in crisis—“not to recover / in our lifetimes”—but its vital network of intricate root systems can no longer hold the desert itself in place.

Spalling is a technical term for the failure of a surface as it begins to fragment under external pressure. It’s one thing for the trees that sustain this desert ecology to wither as a result of our inept water management; it’s another thing entirely for the ground beneath our feet to give way. In free fall through personal, civilizational, and geological time, Gander registers the metaphysical dimensions of environmental disaster:

                                 . . . Now
itself is spalling. Incrementally

making itself unavailable to us. Unavailable
to use. Our rapacious use.

Perhaps the gravest consequence of our rapacious depletion of natural resources is how we rob ourselves, consequently, of “now.” “Making itself unavailable to us,” the present tense withdraws like a resigned, exhausted god, “unavailable / to use,” leaving us with little more than an internal slant-rhyme that associates “us” with “use.”

It’s hard to not hear Biblical resonances in Gander’s long walk through the Mojave’s rocky desert regions. The rundown Southern California towns he visits live on borrowed time, like idolatrous cities in the Old Testament. Wandering this wasteland, the poet comes across a sign of some cataclysmic reckoning to come:

Someone has spray-painted two orange arrows
        in opposite directions across the road
                 to let the next earthquake
                        know which way
                               to go.

Gander’s artfully arranged language makes a third arrow of this stanza, pointing down.

***

And yet it’s possible, even in the wasteland, to find faint traces of Eden:

                                               Squatting
and listening to a desert marigold bloom.
When the hum of an invisible plane
made me suddenly aware of the sprawling
underflow of stillness around me,
it was not loneliness I felt, but
some nevertheless of enchantment.

Deserts and xeric shrublands cover fully one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface; Gander isn’t one to cede so much ground to the psychological barrens of despair. Like a desert father, he asks, “What / is more sacred than the gratuitous / opulence of this emptiness?” If poetry’s raison d’etre is to estrange us from the things of the world—so that a stone, as the twentieth-century Formalist Viktor Shklovsky reminds us, may once again feel stony—Gander helps us feel the astonishing stoniness of our planet as such. In all its geological detail and richness, his writing registers “the gratuitous / revelation of mineral forces.”

Walking one of the world’s most active fault lines—the plates along the San Andreas fault move about 1.3 inches per year, about as fast as human fingernails grow—this poet (who trained as a geologist before turning to verse) can’t help but feel the ground’s own restless motion underfoot:

                                    . . . The earth
keeps stretching, knuckling, stretching
out from under itself, hungry
for a new shape, a new address.

Where does the ground beneath our feet want to go? Will it take up a new residence elsewhere? How should we address our correspondence to it? Accompanying Gander on his long walk home, we come to understand that the ground we traverse is itself peripatetic. Poetry, to this writer, is a change of address form for the itinerant earth’s “incessant / immanence.”

***

Some people look down when they walk—others look up. “We hug the earth—how rarely we mount!” Henry David Thoreau pauses on his perambulations to clamber up a tree in a celebrated essay on walking: “Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more.” Walking with Thoreau, we’re enjoined to look up from the trails trod by Indigenous and white hunters and farmers of New England and marvel at the constellated flora overhead:

We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Thoreau ends his essay with a dream of transcendental walking: “So we saunter toward the Holy Land,” he writes, “till one day the sun shall . . . perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light.”

Gander is the other kind of walker. This devotee of “incessant / immanence” stops on his perambulations not to climb a tree but to taste the desert soil underfoot—offered up like a sacrament by his walking companion, whose name, Ashwini, abbreviates to “Ash”:

                                  . . . you bent and touched
your finger to the warm, ant-fenestrated dirt
while I surveyed the hairpin turn in the arroyo beside us
and then you stood and brought it, your finger,
to my lips, you said here, and you watched me
as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face.

The clinical term for eating earth is geophagia. Some animals and birds consume soil or clay to supplement the minerals in their diets; among humans, the practice is more commonly associated with mental illness or extreme poverty. Gander’s hunger for earth stems from another source: “The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert,” he recalls in his book’s preface. Geophagia, for this poet, is a return to origins.

***

But where is—or was—home, anyway?

Readers might be forgiven for overlooking the passage in Mojave Ghost when Gander and Bhat finally arrive at the poet’s birthplace:

When we stop for gas in Barstow,
where I was born, a boy offers to let you hold
the horned toad he is gently stroking
in the direction of its spines.

Barstow, “that desolate town where I was born,” comes and goes in the space of four brief lines midway through Gander’s book-length poem. Like Wordsworth crossing the summit of the Simplon Pass without even noticing it in The Prelude (1850), we might easily miss Gander’s return to the site where he first tasted dirt in Mojave Ghost.

Quietly tucking away his walk’s destination where it might go unnoticed, Gander invites us to reflect on the enigma of arrival. There’s no resolution, no encounter with the dead, no revelation at the end of Gander’s long walk home—only a boy with his horned toad at a gas station along the road. Unlike Carson in “Kinds of Water” or Basho in The Narrow Road to the Interior, Gander doesn’t map his literary journey onto a step-by-step narratology of walking from beginning to end in Mojave Ghost. Destination, in his poetic peripeteia, arrives in the middle of things.

***

On his long walk through revolutionary France and over the Alps in the summer of 1790, Wordsworth was accompanied by a college friend named Robert Jones.

Carson made her poetic pilgrimage to Compostela with a companion whose identity she protects with the alias “My Cid.”

Basho walked the narrow road to the interior accompanied by a literary disciple who wrote poems of his own along the way under the pen name Sora, which means “always good.”

When we think of poets’ walks, the image that most often comes to mind is a solitary figure on a winding road. But the literary history of long walks in poetry tells a different story—not of solitude, but of companionship. Sometimes a poet’s literary travel companions go unacknowledged, like Dorothy Wordsworth, who only emerges into view as “Tintern Abbey” draws to a close. Sometimes it’s only an imaginary reader who accompanies the poet, like Whitman’s “Camerado” at the end of “Song of the Open Road”:

                                    . . . I give you my hand! 
I give you my love more precious than money, 
I give you myself before preaching or law; 
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? 
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Perhaps the most moving contribution of Mojave Ghost to the long historical tradition of long walks in poetry is Gander’s inclusion—and celebration—of his walking companion, Ashwini Bhat. Underwriting Gander’s book from beginning to end is the long-overdue marriage of the walking poem with the love poem in contemporary American writing:

Walking side by side
through Armstrong Woods,
its terpinated air strong as snuff,
we feel the kick-in of elation.

“Arm in arm, coming down the stepwell,” Bhat walks the geological disturbance zone with Gander as if it were a wedding aisle. Over the course of Mojave Ghost, Bhat emerges as a character in her own right, in some ways even more alive than the poem’s speaker: “The moments brim with her liveliness. He’s / aching to see all the colors in her spectrum.” Again and again throughout Gander’s novel poem, their covenant is avowed and renewed:

Came home early and caught her 
singing in the shower.

His insides stirred as though, for lunch,
he’d eaten sardines and a parrot.

The covenant and affirmation of being
his beloved’s beloved.

It’s Bhat who pets the boy’s horned toad at the gas station; it’s Bhat who sings in the shower; and it’s Bhat whose taste, intermingled with the dirt of the arroyo, brings a change to Gander’s face.

“Every moment rivets you into me,” Gander addresses Bhat—or maybe he's addressing the reader, or creation itself? As the pair walks the rift zone together, a “you” and a “me” are riveted into, and by, one another:

She’s funny. Her jokes
become his. And she adopts
certain gestures from him
into her vital movements.

Her jokes become his jokes. His gestures become her vital movements. “After all they’ve undertaken and lived through,” Gander inquires, “have they effaced one another’s outer limits?” Walking the fault, they walk out of themselves and into each other.

***

In the “Coda” that concludes Mojave Ghost, we find ourselves not in Barstow, but somewhere on the way to that desolate town where the poet was born:

And so find myself in a shell 
jacket and approach-shoes
strolling past boulders 
on the xeric canyon path 
limned with mustard flowers 
as though it were my garden.

Hiking the canyon, Gander passes between trees bowing on either side of the rift, inclined toward one another in an attitude “which strangely resembles a gesture // of devotion.” Bhat is elsewhere for the moment—maybe she’s wandered ahead on the path, or maybe she’s stayed behind at their motel for the day—but she’s on the poet’s mind as he walks through “the ballet / of trees” in this bower of devotion.

Gander trains his binoculars on a mountain slope, hears birdsong, and thinks to himself, “the fault is the earth’s / junction box, / where its wires are / bared.” And then he walks on, ending his book in motion, with an anaphora of “as”:

As I continue my solo descent
along the canyon’s seam. As I sip
and hold a quick breath. As I slip from sight
into a chimney of rock.

Like a spelunking Santa Claus, the poet vanishes down a geological chimney at the closure of Mojave Ghost. These final lines bring to mind the valedictory ending of “Song of Myself,” another great American poem of walking. “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman addresses us from the earth underfoot as his poem draws to its conclusion. “Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Gander’s exit from the book feels like both a burial and a kind of birth in reverse. It may be that he’s found his way home.