All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

House Pits near Pounding Stone

Open music in a new window.

GHOSTS

A quarter-century after I first snaked
down through a foothill valley, down
along a dying creek at the base
of the foothills, I found the pounding stones

of a people who had vanished over a century ago,
some pounding stones only a few feet
from the road, one with pestles still on top,
less than a hundred feet from the barbed wire fence,

the mortars blanketed by dry leaves and shielded
by the drooping limb of a huge oak, the paths
I once thought created by cattle leading into clearings
where the earth appeared trampled, bare

and dark and a little greasy in places,
pounding stones nearby, and I followed every path
from Kings River to Dry Creek, a web connecting
ancient village sites across the foothills. Once,

at dusk, a band of coyotes began howling
by the creek, close to my car. I waited, straining
to see a ghost, until the howls began to drift away
into the valley, but nothing appeared. Twenty-five

years ago, a boy first drove here with his father,
a boy who could imagine herds gathering by the creek,
predators never far away, flocks of migrating birds
and butterflies drifting through. A few woodpeckers

remained, making granaries of rotting fence posts.
Once, following a trail away from the creek,
I spotted at eye level several rocks
on top of a large stone. I climbed a few feet

and found eleven pestles on a pounding stone,
as though just left the day before, one pestle
inside a mortar with a little grass growing around it.
Standing on a ridge, I gazed a long time

into the valley where in just over
one hundred years almost every trace of wildness
has been wiped out. I thought of a friend
who sued developers to preserve in trust

a few acres of farmland, what he called the last vestige
of nature in the Valley--he longer worked as a substitute
after a city official complained
about his organization to the school district;

of another activist fined over $100,000 for submitting
a "frivolous lawsuit" to stop urban sprawl by the river;
of my own organization brought down by a bogus lawsuit
tantamount to legal extortion, forced to settle

because of court costs, a lawsuit I can't describe
without fear of being sued; of those threatened
or fired because of their activism.
On that ridge, I was a ghost

of the Gashowu, seeing not herds
of antelope and deer and elk but a herd
of cattle in the floodplain, the new freeway
extension less than ten miles away,

the city lost in deepening smog,
a long pestle jutting
from a deep mortar at my feet, the woods
cold but still, a last howl far off in the distance.