Short story from late 2019
I have seen you closely. I have seen you from afar. Your story reverberates in a continuous loop that saddens, warms, and captivates me. I can’t and won’t turn away from you. Ever.
You clearly remember the whoop of excitement ringing out from your colleagues working closely by you in the kiln test pit the group was carefully revealing. One group member, Madeline, called to you by name urging you to see the pottery sherd they had just discovered. It was a reddish jagged ceramic fragment measuring about 12 cm by 7 cm and clearly part of a larger work given its image of a single eye with its deep red swoosh of an eyebrow flowing down the left side of a partially revealed nose bridge. At that moment you were more thrilled to hear her wanting you to join in her excitement than by the discovery of the actual artifact itself. Being invited into someone else’s joy was still a novel experience. You let the pleasure radiate for a moment before congratulating Madeline and the others on their find.
As one of six first-year students from UCLA’s graduate institute of archeology, who were all selected to participate that summer with Spanish archeological officials to assist in the excavation of a newly discovered Roman site on a hill overlooking the southeastern Andalusian coast, you were living the dream. This is what you worked and studied for, an opportunity to systematically excavate with a team of like-minded enthusiasts while being supervised and taught by masters in the field. Your emotions ranged from pride to profound satisfaction as you emerged from the long slumber of stultifying childhood into assuredness and professionalism.
You’ve reflected on that moment in the kiln test pit often. It has attained a symbolic status rooting you to a brief but significant apex in your development as a person. Sometimes you still carry regret for what might have been, but maybe not as often as you used to. Self-reflection was never something that came to you easily. Why should it? Your parents never seemed to encourage or even practice anything approaching rumination. But feeling badly for yourself. Now that always came more easily. It’s at these times you recall the meticulous unearthing of the stone column centered within the round brick kiln dating from the second to third century with people who felt like friends and remember what happiness was like.
Although being a child didn’t bring for you many moments of exhilaration there were times of contentment. These moments stemmed largely from you not minding to be alone. You actually preferred solitude most of the time. Your interests were your best friends. They consisted of situations and characters involving meeting challenges head on, overcoming hardships, clever problem solving, gutsy self-reliance, and codes of honor. In short, gallantry. However, when you read stories and watched movies replete with such incidents, they weren’t enough to fully satisfy your attraction to these themes. In your search for more information on these topics what developed was a pursuit of understanding people from far off places and times, stepping stones really which led eventually to your love of archeology.
Archeology represented for you opportunities to interact and commune with tangible links to ages in which you imagined such valiant deeds most often occurring. Your fascination began with weaponry, armor, and all things militaristic, but in time involved an appreciation of the primitive and mundane technologies, such as the development of pottery, fabrics, tools, and other material culture. You would envision simple people carving and shaping an existence out of the world as they found it. Individuals and communities battling with challenges presented by nature and fellow humans, while they also fashioned art and religion. This enchanted you. It still does.
You spent time alone in the woods and fields around your home practicing archeology as a boy. Despite knowing western New Hampshire had been occupied by peoples for thousands of years it wasn’t as if you could easily find human skeletal remains, Native American artifacts, or musket balls from early English settlers. You sure tried hard to do so, though. Rather, you learned about the historic record told by the woods themselves, especially of the many topographic mounds and cavities that told of tree blow down events from long ago, the intent of the builders behind the peculiarities of stonewall constructions, and what prompted placement of colonial era homes as evidenced by long abandoned cellar holes. You felt peace and purpose during those outdoor explorations and adventures.
As inconsistent as this may sound, another observation about your past is that you did care about what others thought of you. You cared very much, especially from members of your peer group. There were several, although few, other boys in school who shared at least part of your interest in things historic and archeological. Together you shared stories, played games, searched for artifacts, and watched movies. There was that Saturday when you and Joey made cavemen dioramas in his basement and the time Thomas’s mother took three of you to visit America’s Stonehenge in Salem. These are still good memories. But for the most part you were seen as aloof and well, weird. You realized quickly how feeble your attempts to interact with regular kids often led to embarrassment and self-doubt. It became easier for you to retreat into your own safe self-devised frameworks.
Of the little more than 500 students in attendance at your high school, coming as they did from your downcast hometown, a former cotton and woolen textile mill town having seen better days, there was hardly anyone you really knew or cared to know. The feeling seemed to be fully reciprocated. Not many of them wanted to know you either, except for you to serve as a ready recipient of teasing, bullying, and general harassment. There was a rock hound club that met after school on Tuesdays, which came close to an interesting school activity. However, the teacher who ran the club was young and although he had minored in geology, he wasn’t terribly inspiring. The numbers of student members attending continued to drop. It’s fair to say, your time in that school was often a silent and lonely hell.
You were smart, though. Grades throughout high school were very good, such that it wasn’t a stretch for you to get accepted into the University of New Hampshire to study anthropology, which you planned to use as a launch pad into your eventual field of archeology. Your time at UNH was certainly a life improvement. It got you out of your hometown and meeting other people. There were a few you could actually call friends. Not being into the college party scene disadvantaged you socially, however. There was a lot of time spent in your room and at the library. Overall, you were more accepted in college, enjoyed your studies, and continued meeting with success academically. You also found yourself wanting to stay in Durham more than returning to your parent’s home when school breaks came.
Then during your senior year came the big break! Acceptance to the University of California Los Angeles’s graduate institute of archeology with a generous financial aid package. You felt elation at the prospect of living so far from home studying a topic that always spellbound you and at a university that seemed alluring and exotic. The Westwood section of Los Angeles was trendy, bustling, and engaging with a warm winter and a cosmopolitan atmosphere. You dove into your classes and other program offerings at the institute. You enjoyed the city’s diversions. And what started as an intent focus on the historic story behind buried artifacts quickly turned into an appreciation and enthusiasm for disseminating this rich body of knowledge to localities and communities hungry for specific information about their pasts. You thrived on opportunities to share the work being done on conservation and field projects with community groups, museum guests, and public school students. The more subject matter you absorbed the more you wanted to share it with others. Occasionally, a thought would actually cross your mind that you might enjoy becoming a teacher in addition to an archeological research expert and scholar.
Given the related pursuits of your college peers you made friends and acquaintances surprisingly easy. These relationships began simply enough due to assigned collaborations on class projects, but in time several of these interactions developed into true friendships — some of them the most genuine and satisfying of your life. Over the course of your first months in LA, it was as if a great weight of insecurity and dearth of confidence had been lifted. Your intellectual self was merging with a social identity, creating in you an certitude and conviction never before realized. Optimism started to make appearances into the back streets and hideaways of your days. You had never been happier.
Alas, this gratification, this enlightenment, this indulgence was not to last for you. About a month into your second year at the institute you received the frantic call from your mother in New Hampshire. There had been an accident involving your father. Your dad had a small excavating business, which he had started as a young man after a stint in the Army. He generated a small name for himself in your area and managed to secure just enough business to keep your family afloat financially. Each fall it was his habit to pick up as much work as possible before the winter settled in when he would again rely on his snowplow. This fall was no different. One late afternoon in mid-October your dad was operating his bulldozer alone at a remote site some distance from town. He apparently stepped out of his machine to pull on something of interest from the freshly scraped earth when the idling dozer suddenly advanced pinning him to a large white pine. He wasn’t found until the next morning. You were told with precious little tact by the land owner that he was found unresponsive with a swollen blue face and well beyond the use of any life saving techniques. Your mother was called by the police and told an investigation was ongoing, but that it appeared this was simply a “tragic accident”.
You are an only child. And in your family in-depth disclosures of feelings were never typical conversation topics. Hearing your mother’s anguish on your phone was unlike anything you had ever heard before. Her voice was so profoundly sorrowful. This sound shocked you more than the actual news of your father’s death. There was no question, but that everything you had going on at UCLA would have to be immediately dropped, so you could be with your mother straight away. In a stupor, you arranged to fly from LAX to Boston and from there took a Dartmouth Coach to Lebanon where you had arranged for a ride to take you home. The silence and darkness that awaited you in your house was more than unnerving. Your mom was sitting alone in her easy chair. She looked up at you once when you turned on the light, but said nothing. She didn’t need to. The woeful look and swollen eyes said enough.
Your mother needed help and you had just lost your father. You were unquestionably in mourning for both of your parents, but the event didn’t paralyze you. It felt odd to you that you could carry on with burying your father and helping your mother put one foot in front of the other. In retrospect, you see it was a show of strength. But at the time, you were just doing what needed to be done. Not to say any of this was easy for you. Once your dad was laid to rest there was the matter of closing his business, dealing with his creditors, finding other excavators to complete his unfinished jobs, and selling off his equipment. You approached these tasks as if they were school assignments. You researched, formulated strategies, developed processes, and implemented each step systematically. This approach would have been improbable had you not had the training provided to you in college. For that you were grateful.
There was never any going back to normal for your mother. She descended into an incoherent, depressed, and agitated state, which fluctuated greatly. Not very social to begin with, she withdrew almost entirely from friends and the community. Continuing her office administration job at the furniture and lighting fixture retail store where she had been employed for years was impossible. Anxiety ruled her days. She would veer from days of staying in bed for hours upon hours to pacing around the house during early mornings, because she couldn’t sleep. Soon it was clear to you that by remaining a constant presence in her life was helping her to achieve relatively functioning plateaus. This realization solidified a decision you were hoping to avoid. You were not going back to Los Angeles and school.
Your degree in archeology was never completed. You never accepted this. Why should you? Rather, you only surrendered to it. This distinction left you feeling forsaken. Nevertheless, the pressure to find work took hold. The thought of your mother losing her home in addition to the upheaval her life had already become turned into an urgency. Fortunately, in short time your passion for learning and your disdain for taking a less than stimulating job combined to crystalize a pursuit you never considered before.
While walking in your old woods one afternoon, feeling wracked with uncertainty and confusion about how to carry on with a job search, you were struck by the stature of a grand red oak. This beast of a tree was probably one hundred and fifty to two hundred years old. Being winter, only a few brown crinkled leaves remained of its crown. Still, the massive diameter of its trunk and reach of its stout limbs spoke to you of strength, endurance, and fortitude. Standing at the tree’s base you removed your gloves and placed the palms of your hands on its gray deeply crevassed bark. In the field of archeology, you were practiced at holding artifacts both precious and mundane and would feel their presence. You perceived an aura from these objects as if waves of long past human experience were being communicated to you. You found these encounters extremely satisfying.
As you pressed your hands against the magnificent oak it too spoke to you. An ancient wisdom, viscerally tasted, produced a connection between the plant and you. Minutes passed. The tree continued to transmit and articulate its message, obscure at first, but increasingly evident. The environment in which you were destined to remain rooted was heavily forested. Trees could be the living and tangible artifacts of your life going forward. A notion began to take shape, transferring your thirst for knowledge about concrete substances and materials from the past to actual, palpable, and physical entities of the present may lead to a possible path out of your despair.
Today, you are working toward building a specialty in the creation and maintenance of groves and orchards. Spaces that are often functional or aesthetic for your customers, but which are to you are sacred. Knowing things could have been different continues to interfere with what is. Your salvation, such as it is, involves being in these woodland places of light and growth where you need to forget what was and envision what can be.
I remain ever hopeful for you.
