A LAST HOWL
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Found the pounding stone again
Under a blanket of oak leaves
And heard the cackling woodpecker
Forty years after you died, houses
Crowding closer. Went down on my knees
Before the stone, the mortars
Empty eye sockets, portending an end
Without grace. Had I been asleep--
Hearing the lark as one
Momentary ring appeared in the creek,
Then another, the petals
Of flowers beginning to tremble,
The oak canopy awake
With quiet tapping, whatever
I needed to say lost
In the stillness vanishing
Slowly with my dreams,
The roots quietly sucking up the rain,
The creek beginning to flow again?
On that ridge, I was a ghost
Of another nation, seeing not herds
Of antelope and deer and elk, but a herd
Of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
A few miles away, the city
Lost in deepening smog, a last howl
Far off in the distance.
As I explored the foothills near Fresno, CA, I gradually developed a sixth sense about a nearly forgotten civilization. Many years ago, when my wife and I first trespassed to get a closer look at a couple of buckeyes joined at the roots, we also discovered a Native American village site that still contained distinct house pits, as well as pestles in the mortars of one of the pounding stones.
When my wife and I found the pounding stones near the couple, which is what my wife and I from then on affectionately called the buckeye trees joined at the roots, a long-buried memory suddenly surfaced: My father loved to go fishing, and once at the Kings River when I was eleven or twelve I found a pounding stone. I had no idea what it was, but, fascinated by its mystery, I stayed with it a long time, hoping that it would eventually communicate its meaning to me. For awhile, I desperately wanted to understand it, as if it held the secret to another order of existence, but I didn't even know how to describe it to my parents, so I soon forgot about it. Soon after my wife and I found the pounding stone by Fancher Creek, I searched for the pounding stone that I had encountered many years before and eventually discovered it blanketed by oak leaves and moss under a drooping oak tree.
Searching for pounding stones in the foothills and mountains became an obsession. I began to go out by myself at least once a week to look for Native American village sites. Over the years, I have explored extensive areas and have discovered Native American trails, maintained by cattle, leading to village sites all over the foothills, with one especially large, nearly uninterrupted section of land from the Kings River in the south to Dry Creek in the north. Eventually I could sense when I was near a Native American site, as if I had developed some kind of psychic radar that reveals the remnants of Native American cultures.
After awhile, my wife got tired of hearing me talk about pounding stones and tried to banish the subject, especially when we were traveling on Watt's Valley Road with other people.
I also became deeply interested in local history, or what might be considered its neglect. I discovered that “the couple” looms near a creek that ended up playing a small role in the development of Fresno, California. Around 1870, a farmer diverted water from the Kings River, using the bed of the creek as a canal. The railroad got wind of the farmer’s bumper crop and it became clear that the Valley could provide food for a booming population in the Bay Area. Soon railroad tracks extended through the region. Legend has it that the tracks passed by a pond with an ash tree, hence the name of the town—"Fresno" is Spanish for “ash tree.” Fresno has grown dramatically in the last fifty years. When my family moved to Fresno in 1971, the population was only 100,000 or so. Fresno now has over half a million people. Due to cultivation and urbanization the Valley has transformed completely from a teeming wildlife area with countless flowers to a crazy quilt of farms and rural towns. My wife eventually got tired of me talking about how this piece of the Valley's history was usually ignored.
When my wife and I found the Native American site next to the buckeyes, I felt like a witness to thousands of years of human history, a witness to another civilization that I had been completely unaware of for most of my life, and I also felt a sense of timelessness that I didn’t ever experience in Fresno. As I stood next to the couple, I realized that when human societies disappear, nature slips back into a cycle devoid of the sense of time adhered to by most modern humans.
I went out to the creek and found the pounding stones again. Very little had changed after all those years, except that for me the "couple," one of which has fallen over, are now just buckeye trees by the side of the road.
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