Perhaps it is sacred ground, hallowed, even. Maybe the ground you tread is the site of some notable historic moment. Or maybe, like me, it's just one of the millions of square miles of Earth that has, since the beginning, been silent witness to the turning of the universe. Just a piece of Earth's vast acreage, somewhere on the outskirts of any ol' town, like Sacramento, say. Imagine if this unassuming dirt could talk. Just imagine. Go back through time. Go back, back, back.
Darkness.
Hmm, just before the spark that ignited infinite galaxies. Perhaps that's a bit too far. OK, moving forward with a bang a few billion years...
Through those years, this material that will become unassuming dirt is surrounded by molten rock, thrust upward, exploding into a hellish landscape of unstable existence, only to be subsumed once again by cataclysmic upheaval and endless reformations. In time, long slow time, it cools, collects dust and volcanic ejecta. Then, with the atmosphere cooling down, water starts to fall. This is something new! This water floods the land and eventually there is darkness once again, but in the darkness there is movement. The presence of wiggling and bumping. Yes, an eager bumbling and thrashing about! Life in fits and starts. A fumbling toward something else, something rEvolutionary!
But in the meantime, floods and dry spells. Greenery covers anything with dirt in small threads at first, and then the myriad of growth from shrubs to the tallest trees take root, spreading far and wide. This is the land, telling about lifting up, crashing down. Volcanoes always threatening.
Given the ability, this spot of land could tell tales of the unfolding of time. Oceans coming and going. Mountains rising and falling, with new peaks stretching toward the sky. More volcanic rumblings. This spot could tell of meandering riverbeds, drifting this way and that, unhindered by man. It could speak to the cycle of flood waters that doused this land with fertile soil and made an Edenic garden, swollen with potential, like the rivers themselves, so swollen with silt and the glittering flakes that will one day drive future man insane.
If given opportunity, this spot could converse factually about prehistoric beasts, sagging under their own weight, lumbering toward extinction. It could tell of a time when woolly mammoth and saber cats passed, uneasily eyeballing each other, unaware of the two-legged threat just around that ice sheet. It could describe the flora and fauna of millennia. It could mimic the song of the yellow-billed magpie, the desperate wail of the coyote, and the low, satisfied grumblings of the occasional bear.
Given the chance, this ground could attest to the coming of the first humans to this valley. How they walked gingerly onto this spot, exploring, adapting, surviving, following the deer and the rabbit. It could bear witness to the comings and goings of these new creatures and how they settled into this place and gave it a name, Natomas, though the ancient name, unknown to all but the very Earth, remains unspoken. This ground could share how these humans made feasts of acorns and how they passed in and out of the world, like the clouds, for thousands of years.
It is possible that from this very spot the beginning of a new era could have been witnessed as tired, half-starved men on horseback ventured past. This random location could tell of tall-masted ships that appeared floating on the rivers to the south, first one, and then dozens. In time, this ground would relate, how new people from every corner of the globe, stricken with a golden fever, infested the land, driving off the first people, chasing away the animals, and constructing a new domain. This ground would also complain about how they all: Just. Kept. Coming.
And how they come here still.
This ground could tell stories of leviathans to rival the dinosaurs that came chugging and gasping into view, lurching down from the mountains, blasting black smoke into the sky. It could describe the whistles and bells of the riverboats, and how, if the wind was just right you could hear the churning of the paddle wheels in the everflowing rivers of silt all the way over here. It could describe the new-fangled gasoline-fed vehicles that putt-putted with abandon hither and yon. This patch of uninteresting earth could describe with wonder how those vehicles changed their spots faster then any animal this ground had ever seen.
This land, if gifted with voice, would describe how it was turned and tilled, grazed and fallowed for years. It could describe with hilarious detail how the people ran in a panic as some nearby volcanic giant blew its top for the first time in ten-thousand years, reminding them that this world is impermanent and prone to sudden change, but usually it's almost imperceptible. It would speak enviously of parts of the valley that received raining bits of smoking lava while it received none.
It would whine about being scraped flat and smooth, creating a long, straight gash that buzzing birds used to touch down out of the wild blue. Perhaps, this ground would casually tell of its meager brush with fame when silent film star Buster Keaton flew in on one of those buzzing birds and jumped out onto the dirt, walking on shaky legs across this very spot to make a movie.
This little plot, it could describe the comings of roads and highways, the rise of downtown buildings that rival the distant mountain peaks. It could spin yarns of roving youth on BMX bikes looking for thrills. It would relate tales of surreptitious figures lurking in night-shadowed fields looking to shotgun beers from cans that they squashed and left to deteriorate. This land, if you could hear it, would tell of new houses and families growing up nearby. It could relate, in detail the coming of an immense structure that brought basketball and loud concerts, along with thousands of vehicles and shuffling feet to this quiet corner of the city. This patient ground would tell of calling out the name displayed on its side, Arcoa Rena, but to no avail. (Yes, the land understands language, it just can't speak.) This ancient land would talk disappointedly of being saddled with a mute behemoth, frenemies from the start.
This ground, it could talk endlessly about the loneliness of this outpost north of the city, except on game days or when Ozzy came to town. It might share the stories of lonely travelers streaking past on the highway in the grey light of dawn, how they gazed at that improbable arena in sleep-deprived disbelief, wondering why on Earth it made sense to anyone to build it there. This random spot on a randomly lucky planet in a random and unstable universe could tell so much, if only it could speak. It could describe current events or how it watched its neighbor, the arena, take on a new name and then, one day, go dark, how more identical homes sprouted, and a little school was built right here.
This ground, so old and wise, might chuckle a little when one of those same early morning travelers, all grown up, came to work at that little school many years later.
This ground, a potentially excellent conversationalist without vocal capability, might relate how strange it is to see all of time, knowing that in time everything will change. Surely, this ground would speak confidently on the subject of how one day all of it will crumble, and shuffle, and be riven into dust only to be reformed into the next patch of land. And this little bit of earth would smile, if it could, thinking of all the stories it will tell then.
10-25-19
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