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Stomping the Grounds

ByJessica Burke

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. 

-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

As a lifelong reader, I’ve stomped the grounds of many lands and worlds without ever setting foot on them. I’ve seen the wonders across the world and even across time, while staying in my own home. I’ve stepped out of my life as an American woman, a wife, a stay-at-home mom to become the friend of the hero of many stories nothing like my own. My eyes have seen, my heart has felt, my mind has endured tragedies and victories beyond what one woman could, even if I lived to be 150. But reading isn’t just about experiencing beyond what we might live. Reading also helps us connect to others and make connections within. Reading gives us a deeper understanding of the human experience. 

Sometimes my reading has been focused because I needed to walk in the shoes of someone specific. When we were traveling to Türkiye in 2010, I read Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women; A Thousand Splendid Suns; and The Kite Runner. Those books gave me a peek into the lives of Muslim men and women and broadened my compassion for humanity. A few weeks later, I sat in Antalya, Türkiye with a couple who had lived in Afghanistan for many years. They answered questions I had about their lives, questions which were so much better informed because of my reading. When we returned to our home in Skopje, North Macedonia, I was a better friend to the Muslim women we ministered to. 

Late 2010 put me in an unfortunate dystopian phase after staying up too late for a few days to read The Hunger Games. Although I sometimes feel like I’m walking in Suzanne Collins’s imagined capital, hers is a world I surely will not enter in my body. The questions I had after that reading led me to several other dystopian worlds—Fahrenheit 451; 1984; The Giver; and more. I didn’t realize at the time that these books would help me prepare for the digital and entertainment-saturated age in which we now live. I did realize, however, that I was becoming suspicious of ordinary situations and looking for my escape routes from potential dangers, and thus changed genres. 

In early 2011, I thoroughly enjoyed Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s beautiful telling of the life of Louis Zamperini. I can safely say I will never be an Olympic runner, I will never step into Nazi Germany, and I will never be lost in the Pacific Ocean after my plane crashes during World War II with only the lice-infested seagulls that I can catch for my food. But wearing Zamperini’s shoes for 500 or so pages led me to pick up another book: The Swiss Family Robinson. 

The Robinsons’ shipwrecked adventures were quite different from Zamperini’s, and, to me, a more preferable way to be shipwrecked, seeing that they were together as a family and able to construct quite an elaborately designed tree house. They also did not try to eat any lice-infested seagulls. Although they were stranded away from their lives, they were able to overcome challenges and build a home where they could thrive. 

After I finished rereading that fun adventure tale, I discovered another shipwreck book: Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus. Preus tells a story that is somewhere between Hillenbrand’s biographical narrative and Wyss’s fictional account of the Robinson family. Preus’s story is based on real events, but fictionalized due to limited historical records. She gave me another wonderful adventure, another wonderful hero in a world so unlike my own. Manjiro was a fisherboy born in isolationist Japan. When his raft gets swept to sea, he knows he can never go back to his home. With Manjiro, I got to learn about life in Japan during that time, board a whaling vessel, and travel seas I’ll never see. 

I was on a plane to Rome when I finished reading about Manjiro. Realizing that I’d be on a plane to the island of Malta shortly after landing in Rome, I opened up God’s word to read about his servant Paul, who had been to both the lands I was about to explore. The Rome and Malta I was to visit were much different from the Rome and Malta that Paul did, but it was exciting to think about the rich history I was stepping on. Paul’s shipwreck on Malta led me to reread Shakespeare’s The Tempest and journey to the fantastical world of that play. 

What a rich tapestry of story and imagination my reading had steered me to. In a meandering way, I was making connections with characters and places, both real and fictitious, that I would otherwise have never known. As my feet sank into the Mediterranean coast on Malta, perhaps the very grains of sand Paul himself had walked on after swimming to shore, I dreamed of Louis Zamperini, Manjiro, the Robinsons, and Paul and wondered at the Lord of the universe who transcends time and place. If only The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs had already been published, I might have noticed the current changing, the waves breaking at my feet, or the clouds overhead. 

A few hours later, I was safe in our hotel with my children, packing up our luggage to prepare for our return flights to Rome, unaware of how strong the wind had become. My husband kissed us goodbye and got on the elevator to go down to the ground floor, where he would leave the hotel for a short walk to a store. We had been told the store sold several American foods that we had missed during our years in Europe. 

He didn’t make it. By the time he got to the first intersection, the wind was so strong that he had to hold onto a street sign to prevent his feet from being swept out from underneath him. He ended up almost in a crawl to try to make his way back to the hotel. As he was trying to keep from being blown away, I watched from our hotel window the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen fall. Lightning flashed and thunder roared outside, more signs of the terrible storm that would only get worse.

When he got up to our room, we weren’t sure if we were safe to stay in it. The wind was blowing so hard that the window panes were shaking, and water began pouring in. Outside, we could see the pool chairs being tossed around as if they were as light as balloons. Just past the pool, we could make out waves unlike any others we had ever seen and noticed that the beach was much closer than it had been a few hours earlier. 

As water began to pool under the window, I began to look around the room for the items we would need—something to float on, some food rations, fresh water. 

“What are you doing?” he asked as I gathered everything.  

“Preparing!” I told my husband. I had recently been shipwrecked five times, after all. 

Jessica Burke
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