The Callouses on Our Feet

As certain as the bones and stones they left behind them, the first Americans walked here from Asia and Siberia, and kept on walking to the place where land ended.

The walk began, eons before, almost certainly, in southern Africa. "Out of Africa", as Karen Blixen named her book about something else, is how the human race has come on a path that goes almost everywhere.

When the Italians and the English and the Spanish came to the Americas in ships, other human beings were already here, having walked here so long before that no one, no one, had even a cultural memory about it. It was common for people almost everywhere to assume they were the first people, and that they had been where they were since the beginning. Maybe in a Garden in Iraq. Maybe hunting seal in Canada. Maybe at the foot of a pyramid in Central America, at the center of the world.

We do know, now, that we walked, everywhere, eventually and occasionally building boats, but mostly walking.

Sometimes I go out through our back yard, through the fence that encloses our immediate living space, to the hillside that is pretty much what it has been for thousands of years, only occasionally spotting small iron stakes set by surveyors to help us pretend that we are the first peoples here, right here, in this place. It is hard to find those stakes. It is easier to find the paths that the javelina and the coyotes and the deer make, walking.

The newspapers on our kitchen table are decorated with stories about human beings walking, sometimes sailing, everywhere: from Central America back up the old pathways, from the Sudan, and Syria, and Iraq and The Sudan. Almost to the land bridge from Siberia, to Greece and Hungary and Germany and France and Sweden.

And we, the First People whose ancestors came here at the beginning of time a few generations ago, scared by the people who look just like all of us, hear ourselves telling them to go back to where they came from, because we did not come from anywhere: we were here first.

Weren't we? We still have the callouses on our feet.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

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