Where We Are This Week
A stroll through the woods and back through time.
After a brief respite over the last two weeks, we’re back. I’d love to say that I’m back and ‘better than ever’ but let’s not get ahead of ourselves; I’ll settle for a return to form.
Earlier this week, in the cold, winter sun, my wife and I took our dog and daughter - not necessarily in that order - to Old Stone Fort State Park in Manchester, TN. Hikes have been a regular feature of our lives since our girl was old enough to fit in the backpacking pack we bought her, but we’d yet to venture out of our hometown stomping grounds.
Old Stone Fort is one of the many prehistoric architectural sites that pepper the Ohio and Tennessee River Basins. This particular site is estimated to be around two thousand years old; it features an earth and rock wall built between the Little Duck River and the Duck River and a 50-acre clear meadow. According to experts, one of whom I am not, the site was not used for dwellings or defense but for religious purposes.
This all sounds a little high-minded for what is essentially conjecture. The more you learn about archaeology the more you realize that the ‘experts’ are just making educated guesses at how old something is or for what it was used. Sometimes, they’re plenty accurate, but for others, as is the case for Old Stone Fort or Sellars Farm in Lebanon, TN, your guess is probably as good as theirs. But, I digress.
Regardless of the use of the site, it’s a special place to be. Walking between the wall and the river, under the shadow of the rockface, it’s difficult not to imagine the people that lived there before. Holding my daughter’s hand, because she demanded she be let down to walk alongside the water’s edge, I wondered how many times this had happened before. How many times a parent, modern or ancient, had been careful not to get their child’s feet wet on a day like this, or the countless instances of looking up to the sky from the riverbed, wondering what the rest of the day would hold.
The footprints recede all the way into antiquity.
From centuries beyond the veil, the people who built Old Stone Fort may have not been able to convey what exactly it was that they were up to or who they were, but what have done is managed to do something most humans strive to do. Despite the site’s ambiguity, one thing is for certain; they existed.
The builders left their marker in the Southeast of America, staking their claim to that little peninsula between a river and its tributary for at least a couple of millennia. They built something that, so far, has stood the test of time and the destructive force of man. While the way in which we toil has evolved over time, the goal has essentially been the same. Who doesn’t aspire to be remembered?
The mystery that is imbued by the earthen mounds up on top of the cliff and the people that inhabited the area is enough to give you pause. If you let it, the quiet stillness of the river gorge will sneak up on you and suggest something reminiscent of eternity. Knowing that life has grown here in abundance for thousands of years is enough magic to make yourself vanish - if only for just a while.
Of course, it’s about as equally mind-numbing to ponder the fact that you also had ancestors alive during the same period as these innominate wall-builders. More still when you realize that you’re the product of an unbroken line of successful individuals who suffered, survived, loved, and lived long enough to reproduce - a line that stretches back in concentric circles until it reaches the first act of Creation itself. We’re all miracles of perseverance and good fortune.
Like them, and like you, I hope to use my time building something that will outlast the usefulness of my body. I’d like to spend my time celebrating the miracle of living. I don’t want to be forgotten.
I’ll remember you if you remember me.
No politics again this week. I figure the Houthis will continue to attack ships in the Red Sea into the new year, a few more states will ban Donald Trump from the ballot, and Venezuela will hold off on invading Guyana for at least a week or so.
I’ll see you all on the other side - with more love and more wit to spare. God willing.
To a better next week.
Cheers,
~FDA
Very nice piece of writing. I always have those thought provoking exercises when I’m hiking. Thousands of years of human existence and we are only here a second. How can you be remembered? I’ll remember you forever if you remember me forever, deal?