They know we sing
to call home the birds,
we Lost Ones who see both ways,
one and the other.~Linda Henderson Hogan (Chickasaw), from ‘We Lived’
photo: in the hills east of Felt, creeks number in the hundreds, a brownie is as common as a housefly, the sage after a thunderstorm will bowl you over, and the light looks like something that could be scooped up in a Mason jar. Irresistible remnants of an old homestead among towering native grasses, smack in the middle of far-flung wild, a sunny 2010 afternoon crawling all over it with a camera, sitting later inside on a dirt floor with only the crumbling chinked walls, listening, watching the afternoon sun move across the pane: beyond the fascination and immediacy of the place itself, it was impossible to not think about the unknowable span of time and loneliness that vanished with those for whom this was a home, maybe wondering themselves if perhaps the distance had become so great, having gone so far up the trail from anything recognizable or anyone of personal significance, that any return now seemed not only unlikely but utterly impossible.