RERUN: The ghosts on that ridge (plus postscript w/updates)
If you got invested in this story after I originally ran it last February: scroll to the end! I have ne-ews.
Hiya. I’m on vacation, returning July 6. This essay originally ran in February, but I have updates at the bottom.
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I want to tell you a story. Like most of my stories, it’s going to start out sounding not at all relevant to your interests, but I swear it’ll end up somewhere close.
Follow the asterisks, padawan.
*
A few weekends ago, I was metal detecting again in the woods behind my house. Normal.
I’ve spent two years plus now detecting a single slope out there—one I’ve taken to calling my Special Area. Situated about a hundred yards from the nearest trail, it contains multitudes: innumerable shards of early-Republic farm garbage; Civil War shell fragments; Early 20th-century hunting supplies; a few contemporary beer cans.
I dig something new and wondrous every time I visit my Special Area, most of which I’ve donated to the local historical society: a c. War of 1812 naval officer’s button; a penny from 1817; pre-Revolutionary War farm hoe; a minié ball; hundreds of similar things where those came from.
In my Special Area, time collapses. At least three hundred years of American material culture commingle just beneath the forest floor.1 It’s like this place is determined to outdo Forrest Gump’s record for All Time Corniest Material Allegory for American History.1
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Three weeks ago, something new happened out there. Since then, I’ve been on a wild ride. Half my nights and weekends I’ve spent sparking with dopamine-lit certainty about what I uncovered that day, overcome by an obsessive desire to learn more.
The other half I’ve spent boiling with shame, undone by strangers’ criticism.
This all strikes me as kind of like the experience of writing and publishing a novel.
*
You know that feeling when you’re writing and The Muse shows up? When everything synthesizes in your brain, the signal emerges from the noise, and that old alien genius shimmers awake inside you again, intoning words with the calm clarity only an ancient, spooky oracle could possess? Just me?
I felt that feeling that day on the ridge.
My metal detector picked up a new signal. The signal sounded like iron. So I knelt down and dug.
What my shovel hit first was not the boring old colonial nail it turned out to be. It was this:
Abruptly, I heard rustling. Up snapped my head to discover an audience:
These woods are in north Arlington, VA. The deer are a bunch of hand-fed snack grubbers with no survival instincts. The neighbors are lily-livered hippies who would not eat venison unless Patrick O’Connell served it to them with microgreens as course 5 or 6 of 8.
I’d seen deer in here before, most unbothered by me. It therefore wasn’t at all weird that this one was watching me from no more than 15 feet away. Of course it wasn’t.
Then I reached into the ground again and pulled out another piece of quartz that looked similar to the first.
I also heard more rustling, this time from a completely different direction. On a nearby ridgeline, another deer was watching:
In the end, four of them showed up to stare. “I don’t believe in ghosts!!” I yelled to the one with antlers. He didn’t flinch.
Meanwhile, plunged into the darkness of the dirt, my hands touched piece after piece of quartz just like the other two.
At some point, the deer wandered away as quietly as they’d come. After an amount of time that could have been 2 minutes or 2 hours, I just looked up and….no deer.
I pulled so many things. I pulled what looked like flakes left over from flintknapping. I pulled one or two pottery sherds. I pulled a giant piece of quartzite that looked like some kind of utility scraper and some blue-spotted pebbles I’d never seen before— kind of like mica, but more festive.
All the while, inside my brain—my largely-ignorant-of-indigenous-history brain, my limp, surrendered, overtaken brain—the Muse intoned away:
The people who left these lived before Abraham.
They were here. They were here. They were here.
This was their home.
Reader: I wept.