The following essay is from my graduate thesis at the Vermont College of Fine Art. Most, but not all, of the following text is found within the publication, On Lost. The narrative, which is about how I lost my way on a hike off the shores of Lake Superior, does not exactly follow the same order as the publication, but was written with the intention of rotating two stories together within the same narrative. The story is reflective of what was going through my head at the time and how I remembered things thereafter. Memories are funny things. They ebb in and out of our consciousness and more often than not, and will fade in and out like the mists do across Lake Superior. The following reflected my feelings and memories of that experiences in the Minnesota woods. At the time of being lost, I was also thinking of what I had been teaching to my graphic design students.
- Peter Kery, July, 2022
Photography by Peter Kery
Pages 40–41, “What I Thought About Getting Lost”
Pages 42–43, “What I Thought About Getting Lost”
An Introduction
One day, last winter, and a couple of days after a heavy snowfall, I got lost in the woods in northern Minnesota. I was hiking with my dog, Hades, and I took a trail I had never taken. I had passed through the area before and despite the newly fallen snow, I was pretty confident I could find my way back if I got into any trouble. I followed a trail of footprints that seemed to have been made just a day or two before. After about a mile, the trail disappeared and there was no further path to follow. Instead of turning back and going back up the hill that I had just descended, I plowed further ahead. I felt certain about my bearings and was confident I would see a familiar landmark if I kept moving ahead. None of this became true.
****
I have worked as a graphic designer for a long time. I have created a lot of work. I have had busy times and not so busy times. I have worked for employers who needed fifty to sixty hours of work from me per week, and I have been unemployed for weeks at a time. I have had excellent bosses and clients, and I have had bosses and clients that were nightmares. I had never felt lost in the physical way I was lost on that cold afternoon in February. I’ve always done something related to my profession regardless of whether I was employed or unemployed.
****
Where I stood, I had lost my bearings. The snow disguised any semblance of a landscape that I might recognize. The leafless trees offered no resemblance of anything familiar. Their brown and black branches crisscrossed above the ground and hid anything behind them from my view. The snow blanketed the ground where I stood. I did not know where I was. Then Hades disappeared.
****
The feeling of being ‘lost’ in my profession has been a reflection of my financial situation more than anything else. Am I getting paid for what I am really worth? There’s gotta be a better job than this! This is a graphic designer’s dilemma and a viewpoint shared less by the business world than by the practitioners. We can all join the club. Even in independent projects, finding ‘good’ projects is more about the client sharing the worth of the design process than it is the perceived value of the final results. Final results and their worth can easily be lost in the viewpoint of a client who wants or needs to dimmish their expenses.
Perhaps I have been lost in the practical aspects of my design results.
As a graphic design teacher, there is always work to review and grades to give out. There again, I have been thinking of the more practical aspects of those lessons that I have given students. Grades are a sure-fire way and barometer of never getting lost. You passed! Ta dah! You failed. Shit! They are a sort of student barometer of moving forward and fulfilling administrative criteria.
When we hear the word lost, most of us think of our sense of being, our physical psyche. We think of being in a void, of having no orientation, the losing of our internal compass. Things are hopeless. Things are numb. We could also be lost in the cacophony of our surroundings. The discord could be the busyness of an unfamiliar urban environment as well as hiking in a vast open snow-covered field. Find yourself, find your way out is the resolution.
****
I was lost and Hades was gone. He was not returning despite my calling his name endlessly. I found myself struggling through snow drifts halfway up my thighs, yelling for a dog that was nowhere to be found, and looking for anything that I might recognize. At first, I was more annoyed and irritated than scared. After a while, I started to feel unsettled. Daylight was not going to last forever, especially in the middle of February in this part of Minnesota. It is an unnerving feeling to be lost, to not know where your present self is, to not know what direction to go in, to be surrounded by a monotonous pattern of tree branches and snowdrifts that have hidden things you once knew.
****
Stepping into a void seems like an intimidating thing to do. Years of logic take hold and you tell yourself, “Why the hell am I doing this now!? What good does this do? There’s the rent to pay, the dog to feed, the kid’s putting a fork into the electrical outlet, gas is so expensive!! Void? Lost? I should have done this a long time ago. What purpose does this serve if I am doing this for a client? For an employer? For myself? How do I teach this to a student when the job market is looking for the Illustrator-Photoshop-After-Effect-Motion-Video-Editor-CSS-PHP kid?
****
I could hear a distant sound of cars and trucks coming from a highway some distance away. I knew I wasn’t totally lost. If I kept walking, I would eventually come across some slice of civilization in the form of that road. I just didn’t know how far away it was. Sound can be a deceptive thing traveling over the surface of snow. With no foliage on any of the trees, something that one can hear could be around the corner or a mile down the road. There did not seem to be any trails leading me directly to that sound. I had a sense, despite my current situation, that the noise was in the opposite direction of where the car was parked and where I needed to go. I really did not know how close I was to that road and that sound of traffic. There I stood, with only a distant noise for which I knew would take me even farther away from where I thought I needed to go, and yelling, “Hades!” repeatedly to absolutely no one.
A bit of panic set in. Then I saw what I thought was a familiar landmark and I headed towards it.
****
Lost.
If someone came up to me and said, “you seem lost”, I probably would respond right away with a reply, “What the hell are you talking about?”. The image of lost seems to make myself appear vulnerable and without direction. “Where’s my purpose?”.
The history of the word, like many words, is not confined to a tidy historical package. Lost has many meanings depending on geography and its cultural context.
Nathan Bierma writing for the Chicago Tribune with Anatoly Liberman, author of Word Origins and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone, tells how in Old English, the noun ‘los,’ means ‘to come to destruction, perish.’ This is what many of us feel today if you are told that you seem lost.
Then they write that ‘los’ disappears from texts and manuscripts for a few hundred years and reappears again in the 14th Century. ‘Los’ got lost. Apparently, this is not an uncommon occurrence in etymology. Words and their meaning get lost in history and they may reappear either as the continuation of the old word or reappear by chance as a new formation.
The Germanic word of lost comes from ‘leus-‘, which means to loosen, divide, cut apart.” If you remove yourself from the idea of destruction, this can be about breaking down past expectations and ways of doing things. This can be a new beginning, a reboot. This can be reengaging with oneself, one’s work, one’s relationships with other people, with the earth and the environment. Hey, loosin’ up. Now we’re cookin’ with gas! In Mandarin Chinese when you are lost you are ‘deeply absorbed in thought’. The light is on.
To be lost is not an end unto itself. Like its own history lost is a rest stop, a pause, longer or shorter than most, perhaps a little resonance sprinkled here and there, maybe a lot of resonance poured in instead. One can be a little lost, wander, find something, leave something behind, pick it up later, drop it off, get lost again.
****
Before the panic… well, during the panic, it had been a sunny, beautiful winter day. It was the middle of February. It was cold, but I was dressed in plenty of layers. It felt comfortable and refreshing to be walking and breathing in the cold, clear, crisp Minnesota air. There were two feet of snow on the ground. The local parks department had flattened the main trails in the area for cross-country skiing and dog walking. It was getting late in the afternoon and another round of snowy weather was on its way but wasn’t going to reach us until later in the evening. The sun lies low in the sky in the middle of winter in northern Minnesota. Darkness comes quick even during cloudless days such as today. Mid-winter snow is light and fluffy when it falls. When the winds pick up, you can see snow devils rise off the surface of the snow. They twirl and dance across the snowdrifts, and when they stop, the snow settles back to the ground and a miniature snowfall is created.
It had been easy to walk over the flattened snow. Everything felt good. Upon the farthest point out in the woods where the trails ended, I looked at Hades and said, “Hey, let’s go this way.”
Hades’ first look at me was a dubious one. I am always reading how it is emotionally healthy to break up one’s routine when taking your dog out for a walk. Although illiterate, Hades is always up for an adventure. I am always up for an adventure. So, Hades’ second look at me was, “What the hell?”.
****
Can one get lost in their design work? Sure, you can follow the Mandarin Chinese definition and dive into your work, but is there another way to get lost? Is it a big moment or a little one? a big giant… thud, or a bang? Is it a light flurry of snow? Are there letterforms dropping here or there? memories and relationships ebbing and flowing? big and small point sizes playing with each other? some things important and not so important? mixing up fonts? Do some things fade to nothing or fade just a little bit? What remains? What gets lost? or what forms into a jumble? Is it all just gobbledygook? Do some bits come back? Reappear? Then fade, then reappear again, ebbing and flowing until we ourselves fade from whatever we are doing and leave it to life and then for others to reflect the same about us.
Bill Bryson in his book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, makes the argument that nothing ever really disappears, nothing really is destroyed, or is totally lost. “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms — up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested — probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. So we are all reincarnations — though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere — as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew.”
This thesis tells some stories, and they are told in different ways. Some parts are going to be a pain-in-the-ass to read. Other parts might be fun to read. There is a ‘loosening’ up of typographic conventions here, a ‘cutting apart’ of that good old comfortable grid mixed in with some personal history. I am hoping to get a little lost in the telling and making of these stories. Make some things, tear apart some things, a little step here, a little step there, forward, backward, big step, little step. Get lost.
