Four Directions

AFOX, a house cat, a salmon all have a sense of where they are in the world. Birds know north and south. Salmon find their way back to where they were spawned. Foxes know where their dens are. The cat comes back. As for myself, whether I emerge out of the subway in New York City into a neighborhood I have never seen before, or find myself river-miles from the cottage I am staying in while fishing my way upstream along a river in northern Michigan with no recognizable landmark along the bank, and it is getting dark—wherever I am when I need to find my bearings, I stand at the center of my childhood outside our family home in midtown Memphis, facing north between two trees, a magnolia and a water oak, at the midpoint of my four directions.

As I write these words I am facing east. The Irish farmer who built this house a hundred or two hundred years ago trued it, so the gable ends point precisely north and south. When set on the newel post at the top of the stairs, the needle on my compass darts due north. My task is to figure out where I am beyond the room where I write, beyond the bed, beyond the breakfast table. As to the east, I know little more than that the sun rises there. A line of tall pines at the edge of a pasture, and a ridge beyond, define that direction of sight. I know that when I walk north I follow a path through gorse and heather and brambles into acres of pine trees planted by the Irish forestry service. The road west leads further uphill onto the sparsely populated slopes of Sliabh na mBan, “the mountain of the women.” As you walk up the road to the west you know you are leaving the settled communities behind and entering the abode of the mountainy folk. The road becomes steeper, the trees scarcer, the farms scrappier.

South is the direction by which I connect with the world beyond. Going out is like tunneling. On many of these roads the trees have grown canopies overhead. I know that if I drive down the boreen past the neighbors’ houses, none of them close to any other habitation, each of them gradually acquiring in my mind a family’s name and a story, down to the town of Ninemilehouse, and if I turn left onto the main road there, I will get to Callan, where there are shops, the ruins of a Franciscan friary, a supermarket, and a post office—and eventually I will reach the ancient city of Kilkenny, site of St. Canice’s Cathedral and the Butler castle, ancestral home of the dukes of Ormonde. At Kilkenny I can board the train to Dublin.

If, however, I keep going straight at the crossroad where Willie Walsh’s bungalow stands, down underneath the dark beech trees at South Lodge, and turn right onto the main road, I can get to other centers: scruffy little Carrick-on-Suir, which has in its favor a beautiful name, a river, and a Chinese restaurant with mediocre food and an entertaining maitre d’ from London called Sammy; and then Clonmel, a sunny, bustling town where my bank is, a good regional library, an Internet cafe, and at least two decent restaurants.

The orientation that lives in me, and will never leave until something deeper than my mind deserts me, centers in that front yard in Memphis, where I stand between a magnolia and a water oak. At some point in my childhood I learned that the city of Memphis is rooted in the far southwestern corner of the long and narrow state of Tennessee—750 miles from Bristol on the Virginia border—with Mississippi and the Deep South below it; and that across the Mississippi River lies Arkansas, where farms start to be called ranches and where, as a state of mind, the West has its beginnings. Some brain cell or inner Global Positioning System must be aware that two busy east–west thoroughfares, Union and Central, run...