Answers in the Time Before

 Answers In the Time Before

The big stone house that I grew up in in rural Pennsylvania was built sometime around 1755. Because it took so long to construct such a house in those days, we only know that it was either begun then or finished around then but no details remain in my memory about how long the construction took. What I remember is that it was very old and its age fueled images of the German family that dwelt there, living on what was then very nearly the westernmost frontier of the colonies.

As they eked out a homesteading existence against the cold and unforgiving backdrop of primordial oaks, pines and chestnuts in not quite yet the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, that family no doubt felt very small and vulnerable and were grateful for the bareboned comfort afforded them by the limestone ramparts that they built up around them for defense and shelter. The house they built became an artifact; evidence that they had been there. Well before they arrived, though, people lived where that house would be built and I wonder now if the newcomers ever thought about those they displaced. That family couldn’t have known that, roughly 220 years later, a young boy’s imagination would be fired by the rugged lives that this lone group endured, any more than that lad could have fathomed the truly difficult and trying agony of their lives in the New World.

Ever since then–and no doubt because of how much being raised in that house influenced me–I have thought and reflected on what some places must have been like for previous generations; how they have changed and what they must have looked like before our people lived here. This fascination with historical views of the world was further inflamed when I started working with librarians who have done a great deal of reconstructive work to provide significant portraitures of the early history of the part of the world where we live now. 

During a walking tour with two of these engaging and learned colleagues, we passed across streets and sidewalks that I have rambled over for nearly fifteen years and yet they drew us back in time filling my mind with tales and characters from generations ago. It made me a little more reflective and meditative on my walks to and from work after that.

It takes a truly gifted eye to see the artifacts of history in the modern world. Many of us aren’t looking. We’re deceived and distracted by traffic lights and the abysmal architecture of modernity. We don’t stop to look at houses or streets or other landmarks that are the red pins in a map of years and decades and centuries. 

On another of these walks I learned that a few feet from the entrance of one of the places where my wife used to get her hair cut in the early years of our residence here, was the site of the original town square and courthouse. Here a gallows platform was set where criminals were hanged. It’s an intersection, now, as boring and unappealing as any in our town and yet, just below its surface was a crossroad at which many poor blighters met their fate. All evidence of that period is sagging under the weight of years and life stories, hidden in plain sight.

It’s like this in every town, on every street, in every square inch of this land. Just behind the facades of modern life and shops and ball fields and schools and fire stations and train tracks and highways and farms is a land filled to bursting with history that occurred well before any of those modern accouterments were there. Each of these places has a touchstone or totem to those eras that can only be discovered by the wizards that can draw back the scrim of mystery and plumb the depths of the lore in that place. Sometimes that lore is in spells of official language: deeds, obituaries, census lists. Other times it is in a far more primitive oral sorcery woven by family traditions and shared down the dark alleys of family stories from parent to child and grandchild. Navigating between these many labyrinthian tales, a historian can place on a piece of ground or building or other artifact of our heritage a tiny jewel of knowledge that will, if the light of modernity hits it just right, catch the eye of the rest of us and can tell us those stories.

We have one such touchstone in our front yard. Huge and leaning to the southeast, a great pin oak raises its massive thews over our house and much of our part of the street like an ancient sentinel. Indeed it is an ancient sentinel, because it has stood there for an incredibly long time. Several years ago, when I called a well-known and well-established tree man out to ask about the health and safety of this great oak, I learned a bit of its history.

The tree man inherited his business from his father who spent much of his life saving or taking down the old trees in our town. He said that his father was up in our tree (well before it was “ours”) and trimming it back a bit from the house on the day when Kennedy was shot. Even in those days, he said, it was a big tree and that it had probably been there seventy-five to eighty years at that point. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Eighty years before that is 1883. Our house was built in 1937, so this tree was there and growing tall fifty-four years before the property was marked out and sold as a plot.

Ever since learning this, I’ve cast my eye up to our great, massive tree and wondered what it looked like before our house was built, before there was any hint of our street (or more than an old rutted lane). Now, like the nimble child I used to be, I scale up into that massive oak (in my imagination) which surges over the roofs of the houses around us and I look out and down, watching as the years peel away as we go backward into that history, seeing all of this in reverse like a hyperlapse film. Gone are the lawns and paths and cabins and stables. Gone too are the fields and farms. Soon enough, our oak is but a sapling and I have to leap down as it shrinks in this backward plunge. Trees as great or greater than the one in our yard rise up and fall in storms that flash before the sun like the shadows of great birds sailing on stiff winds. Forests grow and fall and grow again. Dense smokes rise, hailing fires set by lightning that cleanse and bring bright green growth rising again. I see ships departing back across the sea in the east and people filling back into these very lands. The time wheel continues to spin back.

What families lived here before our ancestors came across the ocean? What traditions and histories were shared by each of those generations? How many of the children who walked on the land where our house now dwells, once lay in a sun-dappled clearing gazing up at this sky and wondered what would come next for them? They could not know what the future held for them as a people anymore than we can. They were no more able to divine the vicissitudes of the world than we are. Despite the depths of time between us, though, far more time stretches back from then into the fogs and mists of prehistory. At one point so far back that it makes me dizzy to consider, this area–our piedmont–was under water and the hills and small mountains in and around Asheboro were volcanic islands in those shallow, warm seas, very much like Hawaii is today. What people lived and fished on those shores or used carefully hewn boats to row between those islands to hunt and plant new homes?

We cannot know. 

In my library there is a collection of stone tools and arrowheads and knapped spear points that date back into the tens of thousands of years. We have almost no idea who used these ancient tools or what they believed or feared or cared about, unless we assume that they, like us, had families they loved and homes they wished to protect and fierce loyalties to deities and battles between one another. I wonder about those people often. 

As I climb back down into the modern era, I feel that same slight disappointment that all historians feel as they close their books, shut off their research computers and close the library doors for the evening. Stepping back into the real, current world, there is sadness that we don’t know more despite the unworthy hubris we have that makes us think we’re masters of our own age. We’re newcomers here and the artifacts of those ancient ones aren’t as clearly marked as they are in other places, but we know that they were here. That is enough for me to feel as if it is worth spending a little time to nod back at them and acknowledge them and hope they left us something to learn that we have yet to discover. 

We could use their lessons and their wisdom. We could apply their mythologies and legends to our modern era; our own being nothing more than fairy tales to argue about or for excuses to kill and steal land—the heirloom behaviors of those sandy scrolls and tablets dug up in other lands, the title deeds for other peoples. Perhaps the one who dwelled here before us understood better their place in the web of nature and had no such illusions that they were in charge of anything. They likely had no ultimate or final solutions, no haughty belief that one way of seeing the world was the only right way. 

There is nothing wrong with modernity–not really–but it does feel slightly paltry sometimes, as if we’ve lost the plot as a species. It sometimes seems that we are doubling down on ideas of our own construction, falsely attributing to these faiths and ideologies power and gravity that they do not possess of themselves in order to keep us from facing the stark truth of our ineptitude. Some cultures revere their ancestors. My ancestors are worth remembering and learning more about. Their stories, hopes, dreams, frailties, failures and successes led to my generation. Much is true of the ancestors of our species; the peoples that walked here well before our ancestors left their homelands have something to teach us. The desire for that knowledge may lead us back into mysterious times but perhaps it is worth the mental effort to find something we have in common. Perhaps within their worldview is the secret for our own modern-day concerns.

History may reveal the key to these mysteries yet and while I do not support a “golden age fallacy” worldview (this fallacy is the mistaken belief that a past era was problem-free and idyllic, where we tend to romanticize the past, forgetting its challenges and inequalities) I nevertheless feel strongly that the ancients knew things that we have forgotten, both about how to live peacefully with our brethren and how to understand our own place in the web of nature. We walk the same ground they did, we see much the same world that they did. It seems a shame to me that we haven’t listened more carefully to the wisdom they left for us hidden right under our feet.