“Come with me. We may find that home lies in re-membering–in piecing together the fragments left–and in reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory and to be one.”

Lauret Savoy, “trace”

It’s a human thing. We are obsessed with leaving traces of our being in a certain place at a certain time. We leave unintentional footprints, like horseshoes stamped in the dirt, and grooves in the rock from stage coaches, horse carts and wagons, and piles of trash: people are pigs and do not abide by the “Leave No Trace” rule. But mostly we deliberately make marks on our environment, ‘something to remember us by?’: abandoned carcasses of cars, trucks, lawn chairs; dates, names, declarations of love carved in sandstone boulders or, more currently, spray-painted tags nearly everywhere; post-modernist cave paintings on “the edge”, lime green acrylic boulders in caves, swastikas, not surprising; a padlock in an abandoned burrow, token of eternal love or lost object for future archeologists to marvel at?; sparkly dreamcatchers guarding a pond; wood, metal and tile plaques that commemorate, direct, prohibit or warn; railroad tracks and freeways that slice through eco systems; hearts pierced by arrows carved deep into the trunks of oaks, alders and sycamores; tunnels blasted into canyon slopes in search of bonanzas; and let’s not forget, video clips that seem to have no purpose at all, thankfully.