Lakewood, Continued

A History of the Start of Civilization

Deepwinter

In the depth of deepwinter, a storm for seven days pours snow on the land, and I had to dig myself out of my hut and clear the chimney and roof; the snow was as deep as my chin in places, over my head in others. I worked with others in the darkness, finding dens and warrens, checking welfare, and helping repair and dig out. The sun peeked orange at the edge of the horizon at noon, and we gathered what we had to have a communal supper and trade news. Then we set forth to find those unaccounted for. One had slipped away, their body mourned by their children. It was unknown what had caused it, but two of the search party were medics, and together they formed an opinion that the deceased had died of a heart ailment. We said words and held hands as the body was passed through the door. It would be held in a metal hut until winter passed, it and any others.

Weather was at one point in near human history relatively predictable. Winters would produce cold and summers, heat. Spring existed still, as did fall. As the systems of man shaped the planet the weather stopped being a thing that could be predicted. Spring and fall disappeared after the fires (a trend that had apparently started before the fires). In these far northern latitudes deepwinter stretched to latewinter, which turned into summer in fits and starts normally between June and July. Winter would start again sometime between September and January, in fits and starts. One day it would be 26c degrees, the next -17c, the next 30c, the next 0c. Some years it would start snowing in September and not stop until July. The north was a difficult place to exist, but certain counties had always been, and the people knew how to build greenhouses partly sheltered underground, and they had root cellars and knew the local wildlife, and they had times of attrition and times of surplus and enjoyed both. They had grown harmonious with the chaos of their northern weather.

In my time in this county, I had adapted quickly to their reality: political and social decisions were made by family committees, which then sent representatives to larger committees. Family decisions were normally met with by the entire family, and children had as much a voice in the proceedings as their parents. This is not to say that children’s ideas were weighed the same, but this practice went hand-in-hand with the teaching that serious matters required serious discussion, and decisions about resources were never made lightly. Everyone worked, in the family, to procure and secure the resources required for their family and the families around them; each family was obligated to assist their neighbors in any way the neighbors required. Again, this was not treated lightly, and meetings between families were often held to keep communication current and capable. Not everyone’s needs were met precisely but everyone could count on assistance to at least survive, at most thrive until the next opportunity was presented to “pull their own weight.”

The county was named after the primary families that founded it more than a hundred years ago. Today all the families had at least one member who was related, in some way, to the initial clans of Boucher and Nguyen. Boucher-Nguyen county was made up of four settlements, and the one I was in, Bluebird, was the largest with roughly a thousand people. The initial settlements were on old farms, back when agriculture was industrial scale. The soil was largely useless when the four houses were founded, and it took 150 years before the prairie took solid hold, with deep rooted grasses and the life the grasses supported. The community had a mix of indigenous and foreign peoples, some could trace their lineage to before the fall, some could trace only to the fall.

My first contact and stay with this county had been five years prior in the Long Now. At that time, tenuous trade routes had opened to the northern reaches. There were great stretches of land with no people at all, old roads being overrun by nature. I’d journeyed that year with my bicycle, which, among its fixtures, had a kayak trailer. The kayak was made from plastic and had been made in 2008 according to the sun-faded label. I traveled for a month without seeing another person before one day finally smelling the smoke of a kitchen. That led me to Sunnyside, the southernmost settlement in Boucher-Nguyen. The initial contact was made with a young woman, a 12-year-old named Annie Nguyen who, after the initial surprise of seeing someone that she’d never seen before, introduced me to her mother, Mary Nguyen. I sat with Mary and Annie as they worked on grinding meal from grain to make bread (my appearance coincided with a good harvest year). My dress and manner of speaking were difficult for them to reconcile, initially, and it took a few days to get my voice and manner to mirror theirs more closely, facilitating ease of conversation and more comfort in my presence. Those first days were filled with meeting other households and finding out the basics of how everyone operated. I then spent a week looking through their libraries and sitting in on committee and family meetings, slowly learning the language of their community. After two weeks, I started working in fields and on hunts, putting in my hand when and where it was needed, earning my keep. Three months, and I was assimilated. I’d spent nights in quiet contemplation of the life and community around me, finding natural ways to co-exist while I transitioned to their reality. In the deepwinter that year, digging out from feet of snow to go hiking across the plains with small teams and make sure people were ok (“welfare checks”), I realized how fully I’d adopted the reality there. I could see myself becoming part of their reality, of my own Self being woven into their lives.

These moments of third-person clarity were part of my training from childhood, and I spent a week writing about the connections between our prime and theirs, all the ways that some connections were easy, and some connections were without meaning or equal. I had to commit this to paper while I was in that moment of clarity, before it passed, and I lost sight of the subtle connections. Some of the writing was about belief systems. Boucher-Nguyen believed, for instance, in an exceptional God that was unavailable to humans, having created our universe then disappeared, off to create other universes. They believed that He had set things in Divine Motion and the goal was to discover, then flow within this Divine Intent. They did not pray, and they did not ask for guidance or forgiveness or bounty. They meditated weekly, in groups or alone, thinking on where their labors had been easy and where they had struggled, trying to determine if those struggles were due to being against God’s intent, if the easy parts were due to being in tune with God’s intent. They did not try to curry favor but believed that staying in line with God’s Will would help them succeed and thrive without as much suffering, without as much struggle, and without as much hardship, in their time on earth. They did not believe in any afterlife or reincarnation, instead believing that their matter would be consumed by, then used by, nature; in this way they would continue to be part of the universe for as long as it existed.

Their language was primarily clipped and cleaned up, their accent a neutral-to-flat palette but with some surprising sing-song vowel use and some novel clicks and sighs. It was easy enough for me to find and stay in their language, and my documentation of it concentrated instead on their use of language in formal and informal settings, how their pronouns and accents would change in more formal situations. As a diplomatic tool, knowing the difference, for instance, between the use of the word “Them” and “Chung no” or “Ho”, or the difference between “You” and “Vous” or “Tu”, would be valuable.

Their manner of fashion was simple but exceptionally well-crafted clothing, muted color tones, functional and without decoration, except for their winter coats. Winters were down times, without as much possible labor, and energy was conserved. Nights were spent, often, embroidering their coats with designs that related to the individual, or to the family. Meaningful maps of lives, drawn in thread across outer layers of carefully waxed canvas or waxed and quilted sturdy cotton. Along with those outer layers, middle layers of animal hide, and inner layers of quilted down or newer matter formed the basic winter coat. I sat with families as they worked their clothing while storms raged outside, fire in the stove and the scent of tea in the air. Children would often adorn their coats with feathers or patches on which were drawn scenes from their lives. Some coats had small metal bells sewn onto them, made from found material, which made quite a racket. This was to ward off bears, though it was also just a delightful decorative thing.

I learned to make a bow and arrows from local woods and procured feathers. Arrowheads were forged from found metals or from glass. Winter hunts were done in teams, with camps set up along the path back to the nearest house, to ensure that some warmth and support was always within shouting distance. At some point in their past hundred years a hunt had resulted in an entire family being lost, and since then these risk mitigating steps were folded into the hunting ceremony.

When summer arrived and the black flies and mosquitoes emerged, I stayed for one more lunar cycle before leaving. At that point I had found and fortified my own den and had helped plant for the coming harvest. I’d cleared irrigation canals, helped procure meat and fish, and generally been part of the larger community while still being an outsider. I had traveled to all four communities and met with many families and schools. The families accepted and welcomed my presence, and I was able to write four volumes about my year there.

In my Long Now I looked to my time there with fondness and, when the opportunity arose to travel there again, I took it. That journey was preceded by a difficult period in the south living among people who did not believe that I existed.

They were Jacobites, and they were partaking in an impenetrable reality.

Jacob’s Town

I’d been on roads for seven weeks from Albuquerque, heading southeast to my first “dangerous” assignment. In at my home county there had been talk of a problem between some of the traveling tribes of Choctaw Okla-Humma and some settlement south of them. Word of conflict had traveled over years to our gates, and I was chosen, having just had a success with contacts on the far west coast that had been considered lost and hopeless. For this Journey I would travel with a small team of Apache to the edge of the desert, where it started to become hills and trees. They would settle in an area two days from my location and wait for a year if needed for me to return with news.

My destination was a settlement known as Jacob’s Town, and we had almost no data about it. There was talk of violence, but there was also talk of the people there being affected by some malignancy of their brain, and they would apparently wander away from you, ignoring you, acting strange and without reason. I suspected a waterborne parasite, having read about such in books at our central Library, but this would normally have killed off any attempt at settlement. Intrigued, I took up the challenge and, while my siblings and friends wept at the gate, bid my home goodbye again.

Seven weeks of travel, before signage and indications. Along the way we’d seen and avoided some danger, we’d engaged with small settlements of ten to twenty people, we’d traded stories with one other traveling band, Tiguan Apache from El Paso del Norte. Settlers and travelers all knew of Jacob’s Town, but didn’t know much more than a sense of strange, a vague danger. Finally, my traveling party established camp near the Rio de los Brazos. I spent a day in deep meditation, formed my fashion and language, and walked for a little less than two days. The first Jacobite I saw was a shock.