The Wide
Path of Destruction Along the Road to Extinction
“Gone like the one last turn,
She took before Atlanta burned,
Gone like everything I learned,
Gone, gone away...”
-
John Hiatt
My friend and I took a little bike ride,
pausing at certain segments of the stone walls along the way. Funny how the light strikes those
stones, revealing something you’d passed a million times without noticing over
the course of a life time.
Funny how it starts at home, a shadow revealing a Serpent's Eye pecked into a stone:
I’m filled with a sense of wonder when that happens
and I couldn’t have been any luckier than to find myself in this particular
place in Woodbury CT, on old Indian fields near one of two historically known
Pootatuck Villages, the Nonnewaug Wigwams, learning what makes up a Sacred
Indigenous Ceremonial Stone Landscape, even before I knew that term would become applied to what I see - gratified to find other reliable sources echoing my best guesses about just what I was observing and speculating...
Looking up, I just have to climb up, get closer and closer, and find a human-like Antropomorphic Effigy that seems to be looking back at me:
In a way I don’t want to see what I think
happened up there on those stone outcrops and beyond, but we’ve come this far
we say to each other, so we climb the crumbled rubble that once was a hill “decorated”
with Ceremonial Stone Landscape features, now “gone, gone away,” as the song I
heard in my head goes. I feel like a Sacred Site Coroner, about to pronounce
another victim dead...
And it’s my heart that’s heavy as a stone
when I see the wide path carved into the land. As we climb, we can see them working in the distance, and my friend spots the trucks stringing the new wires:
I'm looking at where there once were a great number of features, but they are all "gone like my last pay check." All those once familiar outcrops of stones, all those rows of stones connecting them "gone like the car I wrecked," crushed and turned to a tabla rasa, a blank slate...
I recognize a significant boulder pushed over to the edge of this new scar:
I get a little glimpse of what
is still not bulldozed but I have no idea if it will stay that way for long...
And I can't go further - I'm already tired and I know my knees will scream louder walking down the hill we just scrambled up, four weeks off the last Lyme Disease treatment, my third within a year...
And the thought occurs that it's almost certain that this serpentine row between the low bush blueberries has been bulldozed or buried, "gone, like the shape I'm in, gone gone away."
I'll never see this sight again:
I will only be able to match some of these rows of stones to these LiDar images:
I can only tell you that this no longer matches up with any of those stones:
Well, wait a minute, those lower stones actually haven't been bulldozed yet.
I think of every picture file I’ve lost
over the years, all the attempts I made along this swath of power lines trying
to capture these Rows of Stones, how that opportunity is “gone like a Nixon
file, gone, gone away.” Later that night, again in the early morning hours, I
pluck a few photos out of this blog, my Flickr photos, spot some shot I meant
to stitch together as panoramas...
(Above: a stretch of North/South zigzag;
below an entrance to a former, perhaps Indigenous, blueberry garden.)
I can't "hit you between the eyes" to bring this Serpent Row of Stones above to life:
Below: Open mouthed Serpent Effigy head, perhaps screaming as loud as thunder,
right beside a fine example of a Manitou Stone:
I can only show you some eyes I didn't have to draw:
Can't joke about a Pit Bull with a (Horned and Jeweled) Pit Viper:
This is longer than a good post should be, and infinitely sadder.
It breaks my heart that this Spirit no longer watches over the Nonnewaug Floodplain below:
If you can bear it, you can see the whole collection here (and I may be able to add to it):
Under the Power Lines
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