Breadcrumbs

When I was in elementary school, I watched Lost Horizon with other kids in a Florida hotel utility room while our parents went on dates and bored staffers kept us from terrorizing the guests. This was long before the internet, even before video stores populated every city block. I’d like to know how the hotel chose that particular film, but I never will. In Lost Horizon, a ragtag band of English plane crash survivors stumble through a blizzard in a remote part of Asia and mysteriously find Shangri-La, a harmonious Himalayan valley where no one ages. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, a whole new world opened for me that night. Not just the discovery of a warm place, where magic is possible, but the idea that you could round a corner and find something unexpectedly wonderful. I have, more or less, given up on finding an actual Shangri-La or Atlantis or portal to The Shire, but my eyes have become permanently fixed on the pleasure of looking. The joy of following breadcrumbs, is like coming in from the cold. In Lost Horizon, most of the travelers are enchanted and remain in the valley, their health restored. A few travelers cannot believe in Shangri-La and demand to leave, determined to get back to the real world. Their fate is sealed when they return to the snowy mountain pass, instantly age, and the entrance to Shangri-La seals behind them. The looking is Shangri-La. The breadcrumbs are the prize. The horizon is lost. I will never know why I was shown a movie that was made thirty years before I was born on that particular night. I will never know the back story behind what I find on the street, but l've got the pictures.