“Twenty thousand light years from earth, one looking at the escaped light would see those paleo-Indians as if they were the ones living today. Twenty thousand years from now, I will be nothing more than a ghost on the galactic wind,” writes N.C. Harrison.
Once every five years or so, my father will decide that he is in need of a car different than the one that he has been driving. Although he never gets rid of his 2000 Mazda Protégé, which he refers to as “The Green Jeep” (and has only just gotten over the loss of his 1992 black Mazda 323, fifteen years ago), the fever seems to get in him and the hunt begins, consuming all facets of life around the house. His requirements are rigid. The car must be Japanese—preferably a Honda, Mazda, Toyota or Nissan, which his friend Mr. Jin refers to as “strongest car!”—and a five or six speed manual. He will not countenance the possibility of a Ford or Kia, especially, and refers to them respectively and derisively as “found on road deads” and “killed in actions.”
He stalks them on Autotrader and at car-lots with the wily patience of a Nile crocodile waiting to pounce on some particularly unlucky gazelle and is fully capable, in his little brim hat and sunglasses, of spinning the head of any used auto salesman as badly as they think that they will twist his around. Our latest adventure ended only a week ago with a trip to Butler Toyota, of Macon, and the acquisition of a 2010 Toyota Yaris that he has christened “the Plum,” to replace the Mazda 626 that he called “the Grey Ghost.” It was a good day, a good deal and an inspiration to me in finding a Yaris of my own, preferably a blue one which I will name “Idris.”
Ocmulgee National Monument (Great Temple Mound).
This trip was a special one, though, much more so than our previous journeys to North Carolina (after a 1997 Altima called “the Black Widow”) or Atlanta (pursuing the aforementioned Grey Ghost or my mom’s blessedly nameless 2004 Nissan Quest Her previous vehicle was a 2000 Mazda Protégé, which he called “the Goldenrod.”). Since this was, he said, the last car that he will buy before retiring, he decided that we would visit the Ocmulgee National Monument, right outside of Macon. It would be the first time that he had been, since he was a boy, and the first time that my sister or I (since an anthropology class trip fell through, back in college) had ever been.
There is no escaping the enormous majesty of such historical, and indeed pre-historical, scope. I felt small, because mine is only one lifetime among so, so many, but also simultaneously large since I was here, living and traveling in the same place that they had before, connected to them at least peripherally.
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I must say that it was a good decision. The museum near the monument is fascinating, and the park ranger was a lovely old gentleman who spoke with my father about wars between the English, Spanish and local Native Americans, especially the Cherokee and Eastern Muscogee tribes. They discussed the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Hornets’ Nest of the Revolution, where Tories and Patriots massacred each other up and down the coast, from Charlotte to Savannah. The museum also featured a Clovis point, the oldest such artifact found east of the Mississippi. It left me goggling as I imagined the small, chipped piece at work, perhaps attaining the scars it bore piercing the hide of a Megatherium, like the one whose remains are on display at Skidaway Island, near Tybee Island off the South Georgia coast.
Real learning, on a level deeper than the conscious and intellectual, took place during my visit to the lodge and funerary mounds, where the lives of these paleo-Indians, Woodland Peoples, Mississippians and Muscogeeans had been carried out so long ago. Along with a fellow sojourner I met in the museum—it’s always a pleasure to meet people with a mind as weird as mine—I explored a thousand year old floor where people so similar to my own ancestors, from the Cherokee or perhaps Yuchi tribes, gathered to discuss vital affairs of the day, things which couldn’t be decided by one man alone but required, instead, the collected wisdom of the community, from the lowly to the high ranking. I felt the eyes of a great, stone eagle piercing me, saw the men gathered round, heard them murmuring to each other.
Twenty thousand light years from earth, one looking at the escaped light would see those paleo-Indians as if they were the ones living today. Twenty thousand years from now, I will be nothing more than a ghost on the galactic wind.
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The greatest moment I felt was on the funerary mound, though, when my companion and I took a brief moment to rest from the one hundred degree later afternoon heart, offer our compassion to those who had come and gone before us and reflect on things we had seen, heard and felt. It seemed so large, to me. We talk about the weight of history, bearing down, and I can imagine that feeling true, perhaps in the Old World Cathedrals. I felt the pushing up against me, here, reaching through the earth with ghostly fingers, callused and worn from hard work, hunting, making war—the business of living, a business which had gone on in that place for almost eighteen millennia before the birth of Christ. There is no escaping the enormous majesty of such historical, and indeed pre-historical, scope. I felt small, because mine is only one lifetime among so, so many, but also simultaneously large since I was here, living and traveling in the same place that they had before, connected to them at least peripherally.
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It struck me that twenty thousand light years from earth, one looking at the escaped light would see those paleo-Indians as if they were the ones living today. Twenty thousand years from now, I will be nothing more than a ghost on the galactic wind. Little problems don’t seem like so much, in the shadow of that certainty, and so I let the great weight of history, pushing up from beneath me, take a little of what I carry off my shoulders.
Image–Flickr/Boston Public Library