Travis mentioned the woods of New England.
There’s a small park nearby, tucked behind a little hobby farm – comparatively young regrowth forest. No benches and few trail markers – just a peaceful trail wandering through the trees. It’s the kind of place where ladies go jogging and kids go to start a fire in the middle of the trail and take a drink away from mommy and daddy.
Typical suburban woods I guess.
… but it can get a little haunting once you step off the trail and go cavorting through the woods proper – or even just really start to look. You can be walking through the woods, feeling as primal as you please, and then you come across something like this:
A farmer’s stone fence, winding its way through forest land. Here and there the stones have fallen over. Once I found an old tin bucket recently half unburied. It’s picturesque in its own way, but it’s just there. Something to step over.
… and I realize just how easily the ruins of Rome or even the stone circles of Britain could have just sat there for centuries. It’s just something that’s there. A part of the landscape as nondescript as a tree or a rock.
And yet, not at all long ago, men who called this land home would walk along it, repairing the damage of the last winter or hauling fresh stone out of the plowfields. For some New England farmer, TEOTWAWKI has come and gone just as sure as if Lady Liberty herself was leaning over in the sand.
… And for that matter, his own world was built on the ruins of the Wampanoag grounds. One world continues to give way to another.
I remember once wondering how this little stretch of ground we once called from our history books the Cradle of Liberty has turned to a net of laws so much of the country shivers at. The answer I think is slowly coming – a hash of romanticized images from the start, and changes over the years – but it is as it is.
Four hundred years – from hunting ground, to plowed field, to peaceful suburb. For now, the flag still flies.
Until the next change of worlds.
