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"Nothing Lives Forever; only the Mountains and the Sea"


People have lived in the Americas for . . . what? . . . fifteen or twenty thousand years.  It is a relatively short time, even for human beings, and in the large scheme of things, human life is a suddenly recent thing:  a few million years.  Human life came lately to the Americas because it is a long walk from Africa, across where the continents used to crowd each other, and provide, not so much a pathway as a horizon; a ridge, or a woods, or a sea of grass beyond.

There are places, perhaps most places, with a keener sense for history than here, nearly at the end of the long walk.  Even so, this week Mari and I stood at the Taos Pueblo, and tried to comprehend that people had lived in that place, in that little, lovely space inside an arc of small peaks, with a stream running down through the village, where it had run for more than thousands of years, where the small town that is the Pueblo had harbored human beings for a thousand years.  There.  In that place.

Every year, the men from the Pueblo, and those who still say it is their place, come to mix new adobe with straw, to maintain what the sun and the rain want to reclaim.  The straw shines like gold, holding the brown earth together, and the Pueblo stands, several levels high, as if to assert itself against the mountains, against the grinding down of sand and water, against everything that has happened for a thousand years.  It is a human place.

They probably came from Asia, across the land bridge that is no longer there between what is now Russia and Alaska, to settle there at the side of the stream, while other walkers continued on.

In town, Mari and I had lunch in the restoration of what is the oldest building in Taos.  "Only that wall, and that one,", we read, "is original."  Almost as a recent event, the Spanish had been there, too, picking up the pieces of the past, and staying for . . . oh . . . about two hundred years before they left again.  We live, not only where humans came walking from Africa, but where they came on boats and on horses.  "This," we remembered again, "was once and for a while also a part of Spain."

The water in the little stream runs down from the mountains to become part of the Rio Grande, and it circles south and away from the continental divide, to go back to the sea, a very long walk away.

I am older than my house.  I wonder how I would be different.  

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