The summer I was ten, I woke in the mornings having dreamt of arrowheads. I grew up on a ranch in the Rockies, a place of fields and forest which were, to me, borderless. Of all this land, I loved most a small granite cave, no bigger than an apartment den. I would enter this cave through an aperture in steeply-leaning rocks, searching in the dark. I was looking for something my grandmother described when she told stories of the past. As a child, she said, she and her brothers used to find arrowheads at the foot of this cave, buried shallowly under moss and loam.
I was captivated by the stories of these things, these ancient flint tips, and I wanted to discover one for myself. So I went on expeditions, alone or with my brothers, to the cave. But, scour and dig as I might, I only found arrowheads in my dreams, where I would look down at disembodied hands and see chipped black points between my dirty fingers.
When my parents asked about my excavations, I said I was looking for something to take to school for show-and-tell. But that was not the real reason I bent to dig in the dirt at the foot of the cave. Privately, I was trying to solve a mystery.
In second grade we had learned about “the Ancient Ones,” Anasazi Indians who had lived nearby where I grew up. The only fact I knew about the Anasazi was that they had carved homes into cliffs near the Four Corners, where the four states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. But they had abandoned their cliff dwellings in the fourteenth century. Nobody knew why they left or where they went. Their homes are now ruins, and pieces of themselves have been scattered across the land they once inhabited: painted potshards, glyphs, arrowheads. I suppose I thought, if I could find something of theirs, maybe it would tell me what had happened to them. I wanted to find them.
*
A long time after the Ancient Ones had left, and a long time before I was born, my great-great grandparents, Homer and Evelyn, homesteaded the parcel of land that would become my childhood ranch. They arrived in tractless wilderness, amidst miles of cottonwood and alfalfa. There was a creek, too, not big enough to boat, glittering with pyrite and skimmed, on the surface, by water spiders.
Homer built a home from flat paving stones culled from the shores of the creek and logs hewn from the pines that shaded it. The family house was a single room, four walls sitting on a wonky stone foundation. There was also a root cellar, where my great grandfather would brew applejack from which the children took furtive sips at Christmastime. Time added rooms: a cramped kitchen with an icebox, a bedroom downstairs and two in the attic for the children, a west-facing sitting room with a fireplace, a pinched back staircase through which the kids squeezed into the attic. The floor plan ended up as a modified cruciform, which is the way I knew it when I was ten.
My siblings and I called my great grandparents’ house “the Old House” when we lived on their property growing up. I remember playing in the Victorian garden outside the old house and wondering about those who had lived in it, wanting, as I had wanted with the Ancient Ones, to know who they had been and what had happened to them.
In my ten-year-old curiosity, I played a game which, to an adult, might have seemed strange or morbid. Balancing on lichened rocks among the muscari and wild geraniums, I would imagine the homestead away, unbuilding it before my eyes. If I peeled away the layers of time, rewound the memory, back and back, how far could I reach? Who might I meet?
I would imagine the fireplace going up in smoke, the kitchen vaporizing, the rooms deconstructed, piece by piece, their wooden panels combusting into clouds of sawdust, their stone floors melted by visionary fire. I could scroll back through the construction process. Each rock in the foundation rolled back into the creek, and each log stood on end, until every pillar and stone returned to their places in the pine forest that surrounded us. Last, the reversal having cleared the ground, I would picture Homer and Evelyn in my mind, holding hands, alone in a field of clover in the middle of nowhere.
Whenever I studied the house they had founded, I could see its memories, could feel and taste them, touch them. I could mark layers of time arrested. Wood and words, statements and stone, speaking together: through these daydreams, I communed with my ancestors.
*
One day during the summer of arrowhead hunting, a visiting uncle returned to the house from an afternoon hike in the hills with a gift for me. He had found, near the cave, a palm-sized rock, which he held out to me cupped in his hand like a chick. It was a pierre shale fossil, embedded with the body of a long-dead mollusk, curled on the rock as it would have on the ocean floor. I took the shale in my hand. It felt heavy and cold. I traced the shell-coil with my fingers, frozen in stone.
I marvelled. What heavy water that must have been to press that hard body into mud. What violence to forge a creature into a relic, to make an animal into a tiny black urn the shape of itself.
That set my mind circling a new mystery. How had the creature arrived on a hill in the middle of the Rocky Mountain range, thousands of miles from any coastline? I had only a vague notion of geologic history. Further, at that time, I believed the Bible could be read straight off the page, and I expected the answer to my question would have something to do with the Genesis flood. Noah’s cedar ark must have rollicked over these hills, floating on water, fathoms above the jack pines, and the flood carried this slumbering shelled animal with it, depositing the ammonite in my backyard.
I wasn’t wrong about the flood, not fully, though I was misguided. Noah never sailed to America. I had not understood that the fathers of my faith had not even resided on my continent. Nor did I understand the variety of ways such ancient stories can be read. I did not know that there was a difference between poetry and prose, history and myth, and that an account does not need to be literal in order to be true.
And then there was the science I hadn’t understood. Later I would learn the legends of geologists that would illuminate what imagination and faith had dimly conjured. Time and mighty forces—subterranean bubbling, erosion, rivers, wind—had animated these hills for centuries before human remembering. During the Cretaceous Period, an inland ocean molded this place with successive floods and recessions, leaving in its wake vast tumbles of silt and mud.
Over years of pressure, the crust of the mountains wimpled and pierced, tender as skin, its shale and schist compressed and shoved above the crust’s surface. Within fat ribbons of black earth in the range of hills around my family’s ranch, these fossils proliferated, a geological paradise. Today, a blunt shovel can bring up countless relics like the one gifted to me back then. Still this fossil remained my treasure.
*
Like his long-ago father, Homer, my own father, Don, built a home on his ancestors’ land. Contractors broke ground on the foundation for our family house in 1992, when I was four years old. I was there to watch the start of construction. I witnessed large machines churning up massive clods of clay, flecked with mica crystals the size of tea-saucers.
As I observed the men at work, later approaching the soil they’d excavated to crumble it in my small hands, I was also becoming part of the land’s history. By denting the surface with our structure of wood, metal, and glass, my family joined a line of creatures that had lived and died in these woods. By the act of helming the bulldozer, the workmen broke the surface of history.
*
In time, all things yield themselves as tablets of history. A man takes a piece of flint in his hand and chips away at it, carving an arrowhead. Every nick he makes is a mark of himself, written in stone. He cannot guess that later, a little girl will squat among the saltgrass and wine-colored little bluestem, gouging at the dirt with a stick. She is looking for something at the foot of the cave. She is seeking an artifact in the compressed ground. She is hoping, somehow, to touch an old hand in the dark.
