Crumble

most stuff will.

Spring has sprung, albeit in fits and starts. What once was dead and cold is pushed through the detritus of the years past to grab its piece of an errant sunbeam. To be honest, the woods and rivers appear ugly this early in the year; leaves, woods, brush, and trees are all naked and brown. Even the water is running high and brown, mixed with life and dirt from the north.

Picking my way along the smaller of two rivers, heading east from their confluence, it’s clear to the keen eye that someone long ago cut a path through these trees and dug into the hillside that hugs the riverbank.

It’s not hard to take oneself back about 190 years and imagine well-worn pioneers pushing through and up these bottoms, worried that someone is unhappy about their unwelcome presence.

If one takes a walk along that river between the bluffs, it would be easy to miss the past that is crumbling and falling into the ground right in front of you. We don’t look back enough. Or maybe too much. They were people too, with life, love, fear, anger; going through the struggle of survival on the then edge of the frontier.

• Few traces of these people who paved the way for Western expansion remain, both in our memory and in the physical world around us.

No doubt in another 50 years, any trace will be well gone under yet another layer of forest life.

Most of us think that death and destruction are something particular to our age and time; we live with our noses too close to glowing screens, watching the comings and goings on the other side of the earth.

• This is untrue of the human condition; we have long struggled with a strong desire to assert our will and dominion over nature, over those other people we find in our way, and over ourselves.

Sitting here listening to the river gurgle and bubble with a faint happiness now that it’s been released from winter’s frozen grip, I think about the young boy who, confronted by the Sioux, abandoned by his father, raced south through an empty and mysterious landscape, moving 20 miles before succumbing to the elements with not a soul around.

Who watched him struggle through the snow, under the large oaks and cottonwoods, maybe a few elk and deer raised their curious heads in calm notice.

The problems are always far from over. Some things never change, even after 200 years. Repaying evil for evil eventually leads to bad things.