The Land Remembers

Walking in my grandfather's footsteps © Erin Faith Allen

My grandfather was a cowboy before he was a soldier.

He worked this ranch in Southern California for five years before he enlisted and went to the Pacific, where he fought as an infantryman in hand-to-hand combat against the Japanese. He came home carrying things that never fully left him, or our family.

A few months ago I came back to this land and shot footage, walked the ground, and gathered the pieces of a landscape that held him before the war changed everything about who he was going to be. Standing here I can feel him. It is almost as if he never left, as if the land absorbed something of who he was before he went and kept it quietly for anyone who knew how to look. Lucky for me, that ‘anyone’ happens to be me.

The landscape here mirrors, in certain lights and at certain angles, the terrain where he fought. I have always wondered if he noticed that when he was there. If the hills and the dry grass and the particular quality of the light reminded him of home while he was trying to stay alive. Maybe it was a comfort or maybe it made everything harder.

I gather stories for the same reason I gather pieces of this land. Because nothing about life is permanent and documentation is the closest thing we have to making it so. I have spent years reconstructing the lives of men who went to war and came home changed, or did not come home at all. I understand why the families of those men need what I do. It lives inside me, it is my inheritance, in a way.

My lineage is sitting heavy inside me lately. A link in my chain is gone now. And so I hold this land a little closer than I did before. I come here to feel my grandfather's boots on the ground before the war. To stand in the shape of who he was when he was still just a cowboy on a ranch in Southern California, and who he tried so hard to hold on to for the rest of his life.