photo credit: Félix Arnaudin
Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world. —Robert Frost
Personally, I’m all for being “educated in metaphor.” And I hope, by Robert Frost’s standards, that having schooled myself in metaphor, I’m safe to be loose in the world. My father, poet Don Welch, argued that metaphor is first founded on something’s “thingness, its irreducible, but wonderful value, its one-of-a kindness.” Things must be first valued for their “thingness” before they’re valued for what they might represent. The things of the world, my father claimed, “are the material of surprising comparisons and resonance.”
Perhaps the greatest gift my parents gave me was a love for metaphor, the eagerness to love a thing for its own sake and for what it might represent. What a marvel it is to let things transport you from the literal into the symbolic. Metaphor can take you on a remarkable journey, if you have eyes to see.
A few years ago, I discovered this photo of a group of French stilt walkers. I was fascinated with the black and white images of these men and thought immediately of my own history with stilts. One Christmas, my sister, Timaree, and I received a pair of stilts and a pogo stick. We vowed to master the stilts first. And though our pair only elevated us a foot off the ground, we proudly stomped up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, showing off our newly acquired skills.
In this photo, the shepherds of the French Landes region used wooden stilts that elevated them considerably higher off the ground on what the locals called “Tchangues” or “big legs.” In a September 26, 1891, Scientific American Supplement article, the authors describe their fascination with these stilt-walkers:
The shepherds of Landes… acquire an extraordinary freedom and skill … [the shepherd] knows very well how to preserve his equilibrium; he walks with great strides, stands upright, runs with agility, or executes a few feats of true acrobatism, such as picking up a pebble from the ground, plucking a flower, simulating a fall and quickly rising, running on one foot, etc.
Located in southwest France, Landes is a marshland with few roads, which makes travel challenging. Enter the stilt-walking shepherds, whose unique invention allowed them to travel efficiently by staying above the soggy marshes and, from this vantage point, to keep watch for predators.
In the late 1800s, Félix Arnaudin, a photographer who specialized in Haute-Lande folklore, set out to record the shepherds’ way of life, for he feared that in time, it would be forgotten. In an article from SimilarWorlds.com, the authors describe how Arnaudin captures these shepherds “as tall, ghostly silhouettes on the flat horizon—figures shaped by wind, mud, and patience,” their “balance, a quiet defiance against the elements.” His photographs have prompted others to marvel at these stilt-walking shepherds. In her article, “Rare Photos Of France’s Stilt-Walking Shepherds: Grassland Life From 1843 To 1937” (historyinsider.com), Phyllis Brown writes that although no one is certain about when this stilt-walking practice began, it was first noted in the 18th century. She explains that “[m]oving on stilts allowed the shepherds to match the speed of a trotting horse, making it easier for them to watch over their sheep and cover more ground in the expansive heathlands.”
These men are remarkable enough for their thingness as stilt-walking shepherds. But they are remarkable, too, as metaphors. In them, we can see symbols of human tenacity and spirit, of the desire to literally rise above the Earth to overcome the environmental challenges before us. And through them, we might also see the desire to figuratively rise above the world’s pain and suffering, to elevate ourselves above the muck and mire of life. For what might we see from such a height? What predators and pitfalls might we avoid? Imagine strapping on a pair of metaphorical “big legs” and rising above whatever the day throws at us as we move with ease through the world’s trials. Now, that would be something.
And imagine being a part of the Artemis II crew, looking down at the Earth from space. What perspective might this afford? How might it feel to rise thousands of miles above the Earth and life as we know it? The commander of the Artemis II crew, NASA’s Reid Wiseman, shared his insights:
This was not easy being 200,000-plus miles away from home. . . Like, before you launch it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth, and when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.
As I read Wiseman’s words, I thought of these lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches”:
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
Perhaps the stilt-walking shepherds, like the astronauts of the Artemis II crew, shared this paradoxical desire: to “get away from earth awhile,” but to return to the “right place for love,” that beautiful and painful place we call home. Perhaps, as Frost concludes, to rise and return “would be good both going and coming back.”
