One with the Ancients

On the hearts of men.

Approximately a decade ago my brother, our three cousins, and their father were floating down the John Day River in central Oregon. We were out for five days.

At camp one afternoon, we climbed above the river through grasslands where columnar cliffs of basalt rose up from the ground like ruins of bygone fortifications. From up high, the river snaked in the distance as far as we could see, and when the wind ushered through the canyon it brought with it the purling noise of rushing waters. There was nobody out there but us and the bighorn sheep.

After wandering around on the cliffs and ridge tops and taking photographs and hollering echos out into the void, we began our descent toward the river and camp. Without intending to we broke into a collective run, and as we trotted across the vast rolling hills, a sharp recognition dawned in our bodies.

We fell into synchronous striding gaits over the land, the way a murmuration of starlings shoals through the sky, somehow without language congealing into collective purpose. Who were we then?

Myself, inside me stirred ancient blood, a mitochondrial knowing that pulsed into glee. There were mates by my side. Together we could hunt, we could war and raid and count coup, we could network and scout and relay. Gone was the tedium of convenience, the boat coolers full of store-bought foods and the cans of beer that wasted our bodies and sunk our minds in saccharine pathos. Gone were the windmills on the far horizon and the notifications on our phones.

During those brief minutes suspended in vertiginous country above a great river we became primitive again, and it touched something within me, within my brother too, who is in general so taciturn he is more like a tree than a man, and who said with emotive surprise that whatever that was, was cool.

There was no denying that our comfortable lives were good. Each of us lived among a material wealth unfathomable to our ancestors. Whatever we could possibly desire was purchasable. This was our world; we’d never known any other. But somewhere in cellular memory as we moved over the grassy earth there was the sensation that we had been here before, a glimmer of the past that was hard and adventurous. Briefly, we felt it—the long ago—and the urge to cover country.

Then we were at the river. I heard the coolers squeak open, the telltale pop of sealed cans releasing pressure. There is no going back.