Did You See Him in the River?

As we were driving back recently from a shopping outing, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead it met an equally grey sky, and offered a single word in her native tongue, German, to describe another late January day, trostlos-hopeless.

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, to include folks like me who stare out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world at times.

I can recall seeing rock walls everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. 

In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up.

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel through the Real World, and none of the creatures I encounter in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. 

I can only imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to sow and harvest farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile.

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order. Reuse and recycle from plunder and leave and to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from lessons we've left unlearned for too long. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny