A quick trip back in time
I’m in my LinkedIn feed right now, transfixed by a primal spectacle—a gang of faces haze another who appears to have misspoke. Their victim types, “That’s not what I meant!” but they do not hear. They torment him, and as two factions emerge in the comments, they trade barbs. I delight in it because I am reminded of archival footage of Guineans warring and how joyously thin the veil is that separates us. This film I’m thinking of is profound in its mundanity: Two bands on a hill yell and jab heroically, but keep a valley between them. Someone suffers an arrow wound and both sides call it a day. I wonder if any of them would have described themselves “passionate” about flint knapping. Or “humbled” to have been there.
I hit send on my message which I’ve spent far too long on—a sure sign it will fail but my obligation is met. I shut my laptop. I’ve reserved this morning to abscond from work to visit the oldest known human habitation dig site in Northern California. It’s dark as pitch as I speed down Highway 101. Mists swirl about the car. I feel the elation of truancy and hear the peal of time reversing.
We walk these same trails
Have you ever noticed that when you drive into the embrace of California’s towering redwood trees, there’s very little brush? Just lime green ferns and the occasional madrone? It’s not just the height of the redwoods. It’s also because their needles coat the forest floor with an antimicrobial acid. When they go up, they do not send the ladder back down. I turn down into Samuel P. Taylor State Park headquarters at 6:55 am, precisely as agreed, and through the riverine fog, my headlights settle upon my dad, arms crossed, legs splayed, khaki fishing shirt and boonie hat, in shorts and well-worn hiking sandals.
I fumble with payment and for a moment, am sixteen again, but brush his hand away—I actually have bills tucked somewhere. Then we are off, dog taking point, down a brumous path that I don’t question because my dad has always surveyed the night before.
If we wind back the clock 10,000 years, these same dewy trails ferried dire wolves on hunts to fell gargantuan camelids that roamed the swampy central valley. And in these ethereal, cloud-catching hideaways, humans walked too. Many people I know think of California’s history as starting at the Spanish arrival or gold rush, and this upsets me. Humans have been leaving tracks here for dozens of millennia—possibly 130,000 years. If California’s human history were a clock face, nearly all of it is occupied by those who became the Chumash, Yurok, Modoc, Ohlone, and so on. On that clock face, Spanish caravels do not pierce the mists of Monterey until just a fraction of one second before midnight. And just a precious fraction of a single millisecond before the bell tolls, silicon bubbles up and produces computers. All that interests me happened before.
My dad’s here at my calling because we two share a fascination with that indecipherable riddle of lives, deeds, families, loves, bones, and funerary pyres this represents, tumbling way back into the howling mists when our ancestors “lapped brains from skulls,” as Joseph Campbell so memorably put it. So too my dad’s father, who died early but left us boxes of petrified wood and geologist’s hammers.
It is here in these winding forests that 40 years prior, people as curious as we, the local archeological society, discovered a 12,000-year-old civilization at a now long-forgotten lake littered with the bones of great beasts pierced with chert points and roasted on spits. This is the sensation I am here to steal a feel of—to set my bootprints into theirs, to collapse time for just a moment and feel the full weight of that heritage of all that history in an eon lit only by fire.
We reach our destination—the lookout peak—but in typical California coast fashion, there is no “out” to look upon—just a donut of fog. But here on this quiet, hallowed site, where woodpeckers hammer a hollow pine, my dad and I talk about things we’ve needed to. His trepidation around therapy. My clumsy apology for how I acted recently. About how growing up went, and the forces that sculpted our habits. Something about this terrain invites all that, makes it easy.
On the way out, we stop by the Scotts Valley City Hall to see what I’ve been told is a display. There is a glass case with one pixelated printout of how Pomo Indians might have stored food for the winter. There are labels for objects soon to be added. A few fallen papers. A QR code that asks for feedback.
On my drive back north, as buildings and civilization reemerge and the fog burns off, I’m left with a feeling of security knowing that there’s been such a long clock. That we figured it all out a hundred thousand times before and may yet again. I feel that in walking those trails, I am now holding a memory so much greater than all of us—in which all petty troubles are consumed, and where nothing remains but artifacts and silence. All living dramas will be flattened in history’s unfurl. We are no different from those who lived through eons of predation. It makes our online squabbles as trifling as shouts across a valley.
