Hallowed Ground

A long time ago I went to New York with my family. My sister and I sat next to each other, and I believe we were on a bus as we made our way into the big city. We came out of the tunnel and as I looked across the coast and the grass, and out at the looming buildings and the bustling technological now, I imagined what this place must have been like when pilgrims roamed the earth and small wooden buildings were first being erected here. Because that really did happen here. I turned and voiced my thoughts to my sister: she had been thinking the same thing.

In Ethics class our professor was telling us about a friend of his who's a history buff. He's a professional in something about war history, and so he was telling us about a time that he went with his friend to see the real Alamo in Texas. He described it as a very small almost insignificant structure. He said it was smack in the middle of a large Texas city, surrounded by sky scrapers and highways. His friend would point out which troops had come from where and which direction, saying things like, "behind that big building right there, that's where the Mexican troops marched from!" I can see him pointing in my mind at a giant dark black skyscraper with a girl in a green skirt and umbrella walking down the sidewalk next to it as taxi's rush by her. And out from around the corner a misty marching band of Mexicans come storming around the corner behind her. They march toward the Alamo with ancient rifles and billowing roars, they float right through the umbrella girl in her heals. That happened. It happened right by the skyscrapers and the concrete and the coffee shops.

We're all so caught up in the world the way it is now that we forget the way it was. We've covered the past with the future and we've made the decision to exist in a world that's history is made up of fairytales and parables floating around in a far away land. We forget that the streets we walk on were once dust, dirt, and manure. We forget that people once farmed and hunted in our backyards. We forget that our playgrounds were once battlegrounds. We sit and tan on the beach and forget that armadas once sailed on that horizon and bombs once exploded in our bays. We forget that the ghost of our history still floats around us everywhere that we go. That the space that we occupy has been occupied before. The places we see as regular and mundane now have a soul and a story and it's exciting to remember that we walk in the footsteps of those written in our history books. If we had knocked down the Alamo, someone could be sitting in an office typing away not realizing that the ground they're inhabiting was once the site of a loving fathers death. How many people do sit in offices, sip their coffee and wait for buses at the same sites where indians slept in tepee's, political parties met in secret, battles were waged, guns were shot, tomahawks were thrown, where babies were born, and lovers had first encounters.

It would be a shame to walk through life just seeing streets with taxi's, strip malls with merchandise, woods with trees, and fields with air. There's a history there. It's exciting to know that I write this in a place where the Kalapuya indians once wandered and hunted and gathered and loved, where Quakers once farmed and preached (and still do), where the original men of the Pacific Academy once studied, and Herbert Hoover once played and roamed as a boy. That happened here.

3/30/11