Armies

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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

   Parking by a load of rubbish near Fancher Creek, I pulled up the parking brake: No one in the immediate vicinity. Then I grabbed my buck knife from the glove compartment, slid it onto my belt, and trotted across the oiled, single-lane road which snakes through one abandoned Native American village site after another in the lower foothills. Before I jumped up on the rock and stepped over the barbed wire, I noticed Fresno etched in the distance, so I rushed back to my car and checked again to see if the doors were locked.
   The foothills safer than most urban areas in the Valley, I could hike all the way to the Kings River if I wanted to, my path only blocked by orchards just before I made it to the river. Cows might stampede in complete terror away from me (or toward me), quails would occasionally burst out of the bushes, coyotes would pause and gaze and lope off as if hoping to be chased back to their lair. There was a slight chance that I might encounter a bobcat or a mountain lion or a rattlesnake, but with my buck knife I felt ready for anything.
   Most of the paths on the bluffs converged in the floodplain of the creek, whose bed miles away had functioned as one of the Valley's first irrigation ditches for a farmer who lured the railroad, the catalyst for urban growth, to the region. I chose a favorite path, noting all the pounding stones and pestles and house pits along the way that had apparently evaded the sight of the average trespasser, and perhaps of even the rancher, for over a century.
   After my first discoveries, I had trained myself to notice large, flat stones where I might find round holes filled with water or earth and grass and leaves, slightly tapered stones possibly used for grinding, and midden earth in oblong or circular indentations in the ground. These, along with the paths kept distinct by cattle and horses, were the only signs left of a civilization that had flourished in the area for thousands of years, the tribe gone now over a century, in which time the city had grown one pop-n-fresh neighborhood after another, subdivisions leap-frogging toward the hills.
   Hotter than I had expected. I had planned to hike for a mile or two in my work clothes, but after only about half a mile, I was thirsty and unusually tired, so I took a detour to my favorite pounding stone, where eleven pestles still silently waited. As I approached the pounding stone I noticed a bobcat in the distance stalking something in the grass, suddenly pouncing, then carrying a squirrel away in its teeth. After the bobcat skulked away, I found the site of the kill dotted by feces and stained by a streak of blood, far less gore than I had expected.
   A squirrel in the rocks was chirping loudly in fear or grief, or both, even though I was only a few feet away. At first I thought that I was only projecting human emotions onto the squirrel, but I had never before heard a squirrel make such a racket, even though it was still in danger because the bobcat and I were both in its vicinity. The squeals might have functioned as an alarm, but after a minute, they began to resemble cries of utter despair.
   I plopped down on the pounding stone as the squirrel's screams began to taper off. Suddenly I felt regret. I had been unable to grieve at my father's funeral. No outward display of emotion. I leaned back against a tree and closed my eyes. In my mind's eye, I saw my father's coffin in the funeral chapel, so I cleared my mind. After a while a few images flickered across the screen of my mind, but I cleared everything away again in my meditation by focusing on blackness, going into the gap between words, between sounds.
   After what might have been a long time, I imagined myself ascending a tree, the leaves wet with dew like tiny stars, and golden eagles wheeling around it. As I reached the middle of the tree, I gazed at the sky and faced, not the sun, but a bright, golden, equal-armed cross hanging, completely still, in the blue. Floating at each end of the cross was an indistinct angel, each dressed in a colored robe, one blue, one red, one yellow, and one white.
   I continued to focus on the balanced cross, hoping that each angel would become clearer, and suddenly I was bathed in warm, golden light, which felt so good that I didn't want to open my eyes. I continued to rise, almost against my will, as though I were floating upward on some moon path toward the Source of all creation. People and cars in the Valley below inched forward in the distance, utterly impermanent, as I rose closer to a brilliant light more intense than the brightest sunlight. I looked at my hands, which were empty. My entire body was empty, only transparent, crystalline light. All was emptiness except for the light, which permeated everything. At the light's edge, my mind truly became blank for a moment. I was just a spark of consciousness in a sea of light.
   Suddenly I heard a loud shuffling and with a jerk I came back to myself: only a squirrel scurrying through dry leaves. I had instinctively grabbed for my buck knife, but I couldn't pull it out immediately because a button held it securely within its sheath, which troubled me a bit, so I looked around carefully. Gazing at the pounding stone, I noticed two pestles with grass growing out at the edges of the mortars.
   The stone communicated nothing about the people who had pounded acorns there for millennia. I stood up and stepped into one of the house pits and closed my eyes. In my mind's eye I saw a Native American woman, light moving over her face and shoulders, as though I were envisioning either her image reflected in a pool, or the light from a pool of water reflected on her shoulders and face. I realized that the image could be like the reflection of someone looking at herself in water.
   I felt as if something were tugging at my ankles and shins and that I could drop into another world, as though through the center of the earth and out the other side, yet I felt at the same time that I was being presented with some choice, as though I were standing in the shallows of a pool, looking out toward the deep. Some Native Americans buried their dead in the earth under their houses, and I imagined my mind somehow mingling with the mind of the Native American woman, as if time were an ocean, as if I were somehow part of all of the energy fields of the world throughout human history and beyond.
   And it was empty. The act of putting one foot in front of another, empty. The act of thinking, empty. The city in the distance, growing like an anthill, gone in the silence. I gazed at a baby blue eye, no longer myself but the eternal gazing at itself, the observer and the observed and the process of observation. I was the flower and the stone and the oaks, a point of consciousness within a brilliant tapestry of infinite consciousness, and I felt the pressure of innumerable points of consciousness communicating with me in the heat in countless messages that I would never fully comprehend. I felt a timeless, eternal emptiness, the emptiness of transient form. Within seconds I again separated myself mentally from my surroundings, out of habit, carrying with me both the sense of timelessness that imbues everything in the woods and the realization that I was losing the sense of oneness--which made me want to head back to the car.
   Regretting that I was returning home sooner than I had planned, I drove to an old, disintegrating road, partially on private property and partially on public land, which sloped down to Sycamore Creek. Sliced by rivulets and broken up by roots, the road, unused for decades, descended about half a mile to a "gauging station," a measuring stick cemented into the creek bed. Although it appeared that no other signs of civilization existed for miles, hidden by bushes on the other side of the creek, the remains of a stone wall stood next to two piles of rocks, both the size of graves. A mile beyond the confluence of the two creeks, the walls of another stone house stood, the stones on top pulled down for two other piles, also the size of graves, nearby.
   The first time I had trespassed at Sycamore Creek, I knew when to stray from the old road into the grass to the pounding stone on the ridge, perhaps because the faint rushing sound in the distance pulled me from the road or because I had noticed a trail etched in the grass, but because of my excursions in the foothills I had begun to believe in retro-cognition. I couldn't see the past, like a truly gifted psychic, but on occasion had known with overwhelming certainty, in places that I had never been before, where I would find trails and pounding stones. Once, sitting on a pounding stone, I actually heard the laughter of women, as if the earth and the stones were all to some degree conscious and retained the memory of all that had transpired, and I could access that memory because I could tap into the timeless consciousness in moments of profound stillness.
   I rested in the shade, part of an ocean of consciousness holding all time, near a trail thousands of years old. I was the rock, the tree, the squirrel, the woodpecker--my consciousness not just a wave but the ocean itself. I also extrapolated that I was also one with every human being but dismissed that thought immediately.
   When I'd first started trespassing, I had dismissed the possibility of finding house pits as unlikely because at least a hundred years had passed since the tribe had occupied the area. For a long time, I had believed that resting cattle had made the indentations in the ground, but after witnessing many abandoned village sites, I finally understood, with a slight shiver, the significance of shallow hollows in the ground near pounding stones.
   Obviously I could not prove that where I stood uncountable generations had loved and slept and given birth and died. I couldn't prove that settlers (probably all killed around the same time) were buried under those piles of rocks unless I wanted to dig up the bones, and I lacked both the time and the stomach for that. Showing how those settlers had taken over an ancient village site would change nothing. Proving that an ancient civilization once thrived there would not keep the area from being developed. Far worse had happened there already with the aid of the army or militias: most of the tribe had been killed or driven onto a reservation where the members succumbed to alcoholism and disease and starvation, the most recent generations operating casinos on reservation land. I was quite certain of one thing after finding many abandoned village sites along the creeks in the lower foothills: After a point no mercy had been shown anyone. And history, I suspected, without a major change in the human consciousness, would keep repeating itself.
   I counted the mortars in the pounding stone again and stared above the tops of the sycamores to the ridge on the other side, squinting to see a hint of the other pounding stones across the creek, my gaze finally following a slope down to another ancient village site about a half mile away on a small hill above Sycamore Creek. I tried with my binoculars to make out the trail that led on that slope to the village site near the ruins of the stone house, again without success, but I could make out without difficulty the house being built on the ridge about half a mile away.
   I could go out on a little night hike, since no one was living in the house yet, douse the wood with gasoline and light a match, and no one would know that I had started the fire, in all probability. This was my window of opportunity. I decided then to hike on the trail next to the creek, past other pounding stones, climbing over barbed wire to the building site.
   Standing on a slope overlooking the creek, the house was less than a mile from a hub of ancient Native American trails where a rancher had dropped blocks of salt. On a forty acre lot at the edge of public land, the house was ostentatious, commanding a view of a large territory that I had explored for years, with only cattle and wild animals witnessing my intrusions. In that area alone I had found a pestle collection and three pounding stones with pestles still in the mortars. Two of the trails led over a hill down to a huge abandoned Native American village site next to another creek several miles away. For Sale signs had popped up all along the road advertising forty acre lots, with wells and utilities.
   Each time I trespassed in the hills, photographing the artifacts and the rare or threatened species, I imagined spear-heading an effort to preserve the lower foothills, pressuring government officials to buy up development rights along a fifteen mile stretch where ancient village sites were still connected by a network of continuous trails thousands of years old, but even that would provide protection for only so long. As an activist for many years, I had witnessed how the system of private property, enshrined in law, coupled with “representative” democracy, remains the instrument for piecemeal development that profits both landowners and developers. Elected officials were continually changing zoning and land designations whenever expedient. Most ag-lands and wildlands were doomed, it seemed to me, yet very few seemed to notice.
   The ranchers probably did not go beyond the barbed wire strung along the edges of their own lands. No one else seemed aware of the significance of the trails or the mortars or the pestles. (I estimated that about one out of ten pounding stones I had discovered still had pestles on or near them.) A freeway extension was being constructed in the valley just over ten miles away from the main village site at the base of the hill, but along the creeks, little had changed for over a hundred years except for that house.
   I sat down on a pile of wood and pulled out a box of matches from my backpack. I struck the match and let it burn down to my fingertips. The house where I had grown up was still at the end of its street, nondescript, occupied by another family for many years. This mansion, on the other hand, was being built for elites, promising a life of seclusion and happiness while the Valley in the distance was boiling over with trouble.
   I let the match singe my fingers again. The mansion was the first sign of urban sprawl that in the next fifty years was going to engulf the foothills. The last traces of a whole race would be wiped out in the process, leap-frog development conveniently eliminating the signs of genocide committed by a system spreading into the far corners of the earth, ecocide the logical partner of genocide.
   I lit up another match and held up the flame, hearing woodpeckers cackle and the peeps of bush-tits, the air growing cool. Being an activist in the Central Valley was like stepping with a bow and arrow into a mine field to face the tanks of a well-equipped army. I did not want to harm anyone or destroy property. I knew that I had to decide then whether or not I should continue fighting covert battles by myself until they caught up with me. 
   People in the San Joaquin Valley who challenged the system were sooner or later slapped down (usually sooner, if effective). A few had lost jobs; professionals had been slandered with impunity; an organization had to close down because of bogus lawsuits; one activist, a teacher, had been fined and bankrupted for using his democratic right to sue the government for higher review of a local land use decision. I had witnessed or heard about activists being threatened and blackballed by developers and government officials and townspeople alike.
   I felt spaced out, a little unsteady on my feet, unable to belch, with pain in my joints, all symptoms of celiac disease. I had indulged in a few bites of toast (which contained gluten and corn syrup) at breakfast and was suffering the consequences. If I ate any more gluten, I would risk severe muscle and joint pain, fatigue, depression, atrial fibrillation; I might have difficulty functioning at my job the next day. If I continued eating it despite the warning signs, I would become sure that I had some terminal illness or would start mumbling on a street corner.
   I wouldn't be able to function in jail.
   My life was no more and no less significant than the tribe members who once occupied this area, no more and no less significant than the buckeyes and sycamores and oaks, the bluebirds and the juncos, the rosinweed and blue curl.
   This sorry civilization, I thought, was going to blow itself up or let climate disruption finish it off. We should feel anger like a clean flame (I chuckled), not self-pity. We should burn out all the corruption, cauterizing as much of the cancer as possible.
   I was making a speech in my head. Sighing, I put the box of matches away. I envisioned a white flame at the crown of my head, stretching down to my heart, then down to my groin and feet. I was on fire while everything around me was swirling, transient, empty.
   Bats looped silently overhead, the sun kindling the bare branches of the oaks in the distance. The moss-covered stone, cold in the light, now seemed almost as warm as an animal in the cooling air. The buckeyes and sycamores smelled dusty and wet at the same time, the creek still gurgling, making more sense than I would ever understand and no sense at all. The first lights were appearing in the valley and the sky, one constellation on the ground for a moment appearing to reflect another in the sky. With an almost inaudible groan, I stood up and started the hike back on a moon path toward my home.