On milestone days, such as today, January 1, 2014, I often think of home. According to Augustine, past, present, and future time are all understood through the grounding of perception in the present. Without the present, there can be no valid memory of the past. Present circumstances are a prism which cannot be circumvented. The geography of childhood memory is the imprint which will ever follow the mind's and the body's path through the world of "coming-to-be" and "passing away". I was raised in a geography of Crowley's Ridge: Forests, water, and clearings where bean fields, cotton fields, and occasionally milo were grown en masse in large-scale farming operations whose crops were dictated by financial interests outside the Delta region.
The sloughs, creeks, canals, oxbow lakes, man-made lakes, the St. Francis National Forest, Big Creek, the St. Francis, L'Anguille, Mississippi, and the Arkansas rivers created by millennia of plate tectonics, ice melt, weathering, and natural decay and fossilization. De Soto's chroniclers of his years-long entrada through the southeastern and middle southern regions of North America, claim the region was the most populous they had encountered. Waves of death and migration left the region a veritable wilderness after European contact, possibly hastened by unbearable drought conditions of the time. I arrived to the landscape roughly 150 years since European and later African peoples began shaping the land as it appears today. Much of Phillips County was too difficult a place to cut all the timber and replace it with fields of row-crops until well into the 20th century, though the region had its share of feudal plantations prior to the Civil War.
My young mind was shaped by the world immediately surrounding me like any human undergoing cognitive development. It is inescapable. I remember every step of some of my long walks through the forest on Crowley's Ridge; today I would describe the walk as a hike (hardly a word I would have used until I moved to the Ozarks nearly 20 years ago). I look forward, on these milestone days, to remembering my past, the past unworthy of those gathering the story of our version of collective memory. My anonymous past combined with the ocean of human conscious, however, is certainly worthy of remembrance and analysis. A lot of ghosts in the Arkansas Delta for a wannabe medium to discern. These lands are filled with the ghosts of the instant, the present of these people who have come and gone. My view of the world is tightly linked to my instant, just as it must have been for ancient humans. Their present remains in shadow and any medium worth his/her salt cannot possibly miss these remains of lives occupying the land prior to European conquest of the continent and settlement of their own peoples and those from Africa, beginning the depopulation of native peoples on North America. Interesting to see bits and pieces of tv shows with a medium communicating with the auras or ghosts in buildings or on grounds that certainly were known to have been inhabited and shaped by humans millennia ago, but usually no contact. Perhaps the ghosts of our conscious minds flicker and fade just as the physical body dies and decays.
Every day is an opportunity to learn; perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my youthful geography. William Least Heat-Moon in Prairyerth included a passage from Joseph Brodsky's "Strophes"(1978), "Geography blended with time equals destiny." The sentiment seems to apply to the Flint Hills as it does to the Delta hardwood riverine region. In the woods behind my childhood home, the remains of squatters camps dot the hills. Tobacco cans, the metal guts of mattresses, surviving planks of wood and the headstones along the ruts on the crest of the hill provide evidence of the movement and settlement of people in this area in more recent times. The cans looked like WW II era advertisement and packaging. Not sure. My wish is for everyone to reacquaint with the past present of childhood and remember the home county as we saw it then at least for the briefest instant. Pay attention to the little things in your field of perception. Might be surprised what you stumble over. Have a great 2014! We all deserve it.
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