Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: Latitudes and Departures

What if your life to this point was all prelude to what you will be remembered for? What if all your lived experiences to date were destined to wind up as footnotes in your autobiography?

That's where my head is through 250-plus pages of Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon," as the surveyors/astronomers are almost sunk at sea, chased by lustful women around Cape Town, and as Charles Mason is visited by a ghost in James Town, St. Helena. This is my first Pynchon novel. It's written in 18th century language, it's Pynchon and I'm frequently confused as to what's going on. I touch base with a solid set of reading notes after finishing a chapter. And they've got a whole Mason & Dixon Wiki to help lost literary surveyors like me.

But as I'm feeling abandoned or bewildered, Pynchon casts a fly into the deep water and I take the hook. Flies like, "a part of the Soul that doesn't depend on Memories, that lies further than Memories." Or "I owe my Existence to a pair of Shoes." Or:

"The Pilgrim, however long or crooked his Road, may keep ever before him the Holy Place he must by his Faith seek, as the American Ranger, however indeterminate or unposted his Wilderness, may enjoy, ever at his Back, the Impulse of Duty he must, by his Honor, attend."

And one more, "a People who liv'd in quite another relation to Time,-- one that did not, like our own, hold at its heart the terror of Time's passage,-- far more preferably, Indifference to it, pure and transparent as possible." A people who lived among and through us, in a different version of time. And they were pygmies, of course.

Flights of imagination and language. That's Pynchon's hook that brings me to the surface and keeps me reading. Talking dogs, time-floating pygmies, secret societies and ley lines are all bait. And the friendship between Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, whose names I have known since I was little, only because Maryland's border bears their name.

History felt flat to me in school: learning about people whose lives were distant from us, didn't relate to us, weren't like us. Then you start to read history books by Joseph Ellis or David McCullough or Howard Zinn, and you recognize that historical figures, in their own time and lives, woke up with worries and quirks and passions just the same as any of us. History was not predetermined. It was based on people's choices, commitment, mistakes, dumb luck, love.

I picture Pynchon sitting at a desk with charts, maps and notes in front of him, surveying the time, the lives, the interior motivations and hang ups of Mason and Dixon. And I want to know more. I want to know where Pynchon's imagination goes, where Mason and Dixon go--where fantasy meets history.

Part I of the novel, "Latitudes and Departures" is in the rear view mirror now. Part II, "America" lies ahead.

Time Traveling with friends. And Pynchon.

I've taken up time traveling. It's not a new adventure, really, I've been doing it for some time. At St. James School, we would run trails at the Antietam Battlefield. My mind would drift, wondering what it would have been like, rewinding time, what they went through... but then a turn in the trail, a friend running past, something would bring me back to the present.

As someone who reads and writes, time travel is a vocational habit. Walking through the Natural History Museum, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, my mind is anything but stationary.

In this case, time travel takes a couple forms. It is going back in time with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Traveling to their world through the imagination of Thomas Pynchon and his historical novel, "Mason & Dixon," and through traveling with a group of friends/adventurers to find stone markers and walk the trail that Mason and Dixon surveyed and marked, the border of Maryland and U.S. history called the Mason-Dixon Line.

On Nov. 17, nine of us set off through early morning fog (there is always fog involved in time travel) to the Millington Wildlife Area, on the border of Maryland and Delaware. A couple folks in our group knew the park and we had GPS coordinates for where there was rumored to be a Mason-Dixon marker, off trail, somewhere in the woods.

Our group includes a couple of marine biologists and a card-carrying naturalist, who is working to catalog all the living things in Maryland. It's a fascinating band of vagrants to walk through the woods with, especially for me, who is fascinated by everything I encounter on a hike or a trail run, but no very little about what it is.

Following our directions, we hiked in on a marked Millington trail, then went off trail, blazing thick, blood-thirsty briers, log-crossing a stream, and wandering until we found the stone marker in question.

Finding a stone in the woods may sound unremarkable. But a stone that was laid in the 1760s during a survey/expedition that has become mythical in its own right; a stone put there by two men whose names any Marylander has heard practically since birth; a stone whose boundary has become synonymous with the Civil War; a stone about whose setters I am embarked on a literary journey with via the fantastic mind of Thomas Pynchon, well, that to me transforms it to remarkable. Then again, bourbon may have factored into that alchemy.

This was the "official" kickoff to our Mason Dixon Pynchon adventure. As we contemplated the stone and Mason and Dixon, I read the opening passage of Pynchon's novel aloud. That may be as far as a couple members of our group get in the book. ;) But as much as the book itself, and traversing one of the great writers of our time, for me the adventure is equal parts reading, experiencing the physical artifacts of history, experiencing the natural world and landscape around us that I haven't explored enough, and doing it with a group of friends equally disturbed enough to meet at 6:30 a.m. on a foggy Sunday morning to go look for a rock in the woods.

Mason Dixon Existential Adventure

The Mason-Dixon Line is a tractor beam for Marylanders. When I went to college in Raleigh, N.C., people called me a yankee when they heard I was from Maryland. When I've gone north, people call me a southerner. No one knows what to make of us. Geocultural shapeshifters defined by our proximity to Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon's line.

We drive over the line on Route 70, crossing into Pennsylvania when we visit my wife's family outside Pittsburgh. I've always been fascinated by the thought of it. I was downright giddy when I found out that there is a 193-mile Mason Dixon Trail, which connects the Appalachian Trail to the Brandywine Trail. We've even tread on some of it at White Clay Creek State Park in Newark, Del. There are different sections mapped out and detailed for hiking trips. It doesn't take much to get me amped for a trail adventure.

Then there is the me who digs being down a literary-historical-philosophical rabbit hole read of an adventure. Imagine how cool it would be to tie together an in-the-world trail adventure with an in-the-mind imagination-bending quest. Enter Thomas Pynchon.

Tom Robbins, a literary hero of mine, called Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" essential reading for the enlightened. Pynchon's novel imagines the lives and work of the surveyors who would divide the north and the south. I've been looking for a reason to dig into Pynchon and "Mason & Dixon" in particular. And I've been searching for some kind of in-the-world adventure to get back on the trails that have fueled and filled my soul. It's time to make a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter Reese's Peanut Butter Cup hybrid.

We've got a core group of willing existential adventurers who are going to read "Mason & Dixon," and then go experience the trail. Logistics are still being worked out, whether we will cover the whole trail, section by section over the course of a year, marking where we stopped and picking up there later, or just hit some of the most scenic stretches. Our current crew includes birders, teachers, a former rugby player, historians, trail runners, marine biologists, writers, among other semi-arbitrary labels. The roster is expanding.

Mason Dixon immersion. Deep, cool, fun experiences. Thought-provoking stuff to read. Soul-searching adventures to ponder and write about. Meaningful ways to connect with great people and experiential ways to connect with American history and landscape.

Details, progress reports, updates and further Mason Dixon Pynchon trail musings to follow. The adventure is just beginning.