On Hopewell: Christopher Beckmann

　

To Bonnie -- whose loyalty and selflessness has been immaculate.

　

　


All propositions are of equal value.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there, it would be of no value.
Wittgenstein (6.4 and 6.41 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

　



1.

On Sunday, August 5, 2018 my brother, Christopher, died at his home in Port Orchard, Washington. He was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), but thought he would survive another six months. On the night before his death, Christopher had trouble breathing. He could no longer sit up in bed and was mostly paralyzed. His wife, Bonnie, stayed with him at his bedside until 3:45 am on Sunday morning. Christopher told her to go to bed. A baby monitor was positioned next to the hospital bed so that Bonnie could hear Christopher if was distressed in any way. Before she fell asleep at 4:15 a.m., Christopher was breathing normally and seemed to be peacefully asleep. When she awoke at 8:45 am, he was dead.

Bonnie called me mid-day on the 5^th to say that Christopher was gone. My mother owns a funeral plot in Albion, Nebraska, a small village in central Nebraska located on the edge of the great empty tract of ancient desert called the Sand Hills. The funeral was scheduled for that place on Tuesday morning, August 14.

In the intervening days, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio to take depositions required for a large personal injury case on which I am working. Cincinnati is within sixty miles of a place that I have always wanted to visit, the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. Accordingly, I decided to take a day to drive to the Mound and explore its environs. It seemed self-indulgent of me to engage in tourism while my brother’s body was being embalmed and transported by airplane to Lincoln, Nebraska and, then, by hearse northwest to Albion. But he is dead and I am alive and so I ignored my qualms and made the trip as I had planned.

　

2.

The tavern called the Crossed Keys was fieldstone, but had been whitewashed to the color of bone. George Caleb took his breakfast there and, then, paddled across the Little Miami River to the wooded ramparts of the river bluffs rising 200 feet above the half-flooded bottom lands. He had planned a hunt for rabbit and coon on hillsides familiar to him on the east bank of river. But this morning the current was strong and carried him downstream to a place where he had never hunted before, perhaps a quarter mile beyond the promontory for which he had aimed.

It was autumn and the trees had dropped their leaves in thick brown windrows on the steep slopes, making them a little slippery underfoot. The day was unseasonably warm and frogs and insects sang loudly. The way uphill was not as hard as Caleb expected – there seemed to be an even ramp set between two low and regular ridges of earth that guided him in his ascent to bluff-top. Pale deposits of limestone rock extruded from the little hillocks at his side.

The top of the river-bluff was flat and the tree-cover was perforated in places with small circular clearings. Caleb had hunted other bluff-tops along the river and they were complex with deeply incised ravines clogged with fallen trees and boulders and descending to the river bottoms. This hilltop was smooth and seemed once to have been cultivated. The thorns and grass had a different texture, almost as if combed.

A ridge about twenty-five feet high walled in a clearing. Old trees grew on the ridge and, as Caleb approached the hill, he saw that it was continued for a hundred of yards as a long linear mound. He scrambled to the top of the mound and observed that it undulated through the woods, an earthen wall fortifying the level hill top. From his vantage on the mound, Caleb saw other mounds, some of them horse-tall, pimpling the blufftop. At intervals, the wall-like mound dipped down to form a gate with other long, narrow embankments beyond.

For several hours, Caleb followed the course of the hilltop mounds, convinced that they were man-made. The size of the fortifications astounded him. He had forgotten the gun that he carried, forgotten the game that he was hunting, forgotten everything but the serpentine embankment undulating across the hilltop for miles. In the shadows of the wood, he glimpsed bare circles, piles of ghost-pale limestone, ramps and trails, some of them lined with hip-high grassy knolls.

Later, Caleb wrote: "For hours, I walked along cyclopean earthworks, wonderful beyond description, and my great sorrow was that I was alone, utterly alone, in that wilderness with no one with whom I could share the joy of my great discovery."

At length, Caleb completed the circuit of earthwork ramparts and stood overlooking the river below. In the distance, he saw the tavern where he had breakfasted, pale as a cloud, reflected in the still waters of the lagoon at its foundation. The white building shimmered over the brown-green river and the rusty colored trees surrounding it.

This happened in the year 1820 A.D.

　

3.

"You, sir, have a groin anomaly," the TSA inspector said.

I was at the Cincinnati airport (actually in Hebron, Kentucky across the Ohio River) and had just stood with my hands over my head and legs apart in the transparent inspection compartment.

Like a doctor explaining a painful procedure, the TSA man shoved his face close to mine and, then, rattled-off, as if memorized, the variety of searches he intended to implement. I heard him say that he would pat down my buttocks, run his hand up both thighs, and so on. It took him many words to describe what he was going to do and I didn’t react in any way at all.

After the inspection, the TSA man told me I could go. Of course, he had found nothing. With rubber-gloved hands, he had rimmed the inside of the waist-band on my trousers, slapped at my genitals, stroked my buttocks and, even, rubbed my belly a little. I was in no hurry. The plane to Minneapolis wasn’t scheduled to depart for two hours. I sat down and pulled on my tennis shoes and put the coins and cell-phone and pens and mechanical pencils back in my pockets. I wondered what was a groin anomaly.

It was hot in the airport terminal and, in the twenty minute line waiting to be searched by TSA, perhaps I had sweat overmuch, or, even, wet myself a little in anxiety, and, so, maybe, the imaging had shown my groin wet and hot and swampy; possibly, the imaging showed some ketchup-red abnormality like a tumor between my legs. Or, maybe, something had slipped unbeknownst out of my pockets to lodge in the front pouch of my underpants – unlikely, I thought, or maybe it was simply that I had a beard and seemed to be male, but had no sign whatsoever of male genitalia (this would be a "groin anomaly," I supposed.) The latter explanation seemed to me the most plausible.

　

4.

My mother was the daughter of Albion’s most prominent and successful businessman. My father was the rebellious son of the local Lutheran minister. My parents were high school sweethearts with the predictable outcome that my mother became pregnant before she graduated. She had been selected as an outstanding young woman to travel to Turkey to live with a family there as part of an exchange program. But the pregnancy intervened and my parents married after graduating from High School and, then, left town to live in the Pine Ridge country at Chadron, Nebraska, about as far from Albion as you could get in the Cornhusker State.

Nonetheless, my mother bought a funeral plot in Rose Hill cemetery on the little knoll a half-mile outside town and this is where she buried my father when he died at age 58. Her parents are both buried in the cemetery as are members of my father’s family. Further, my mother’s two brothers, Dean A. and David, killed in action in Vietnam, rest on that hill.

There were formerly trees growing among the graves and imparting shade to the graves and the grass yellowing in the August drought. A contagion killed the trees and most of them were never re-planted and it is always scorching on that hillside when I am in Nebraska. If it is not scorching, the cemetery-hill outside town is devastated by the wind. My father was buried in a howling blizzard in February many years ago. This was deemed appropriate and symmetrical with his entry into this vale of tears – he had been born in a howling blizzard 58 years before.

There is one grave-plot remaining among the family graves on that barren hillside. The grave is next to the place allotted for my mother and beside the tomb of my father. Christopher asked to buried in that place.

　

5.

I woke with the conviction that my life was all wrong and that I had erred terribly. Troubled, I limped to the toilet. A bad dream was casting its influence over my morning. It was Sunday and, on that day, I don’t have to get up early and so I try to sleep an extra hour. But, a lifetime of rising early has made lounging in bed impossible for me – I feel anxious and am unsettled and, at last, I abandon the attempt to sleep. And, on this Sunday, I was urged into consciousness by a nightmare. What was it? The details of the dream had evaporated, leaving mostly its mood – fearful, depressed, hopeless, a sense of urgency that had no real object. There had been something about a family gathering, possibly Thanksgiving, and I was supposed to attend, but my route home was obstructed – I found myself hiking along dirty sidewalks in a part of town unfamiliar to me. I had lost my car and so I planned to take a train or a bus home. The sky was dark and I passed ruinous places, a wilderness of walls and cyclone fences and rusting scaffolds. Someone accompanied me, an important person whose presence was necessary to the family gathering. Sometimes, we put our heads together to plot how we would find the bus stop or the train station and, in that way, make our way to the family celebration. At last, I found a block that I recognized and another: some tall buildings loomed overhead and there were people standing near intersections. I breathed a sigh of relief – it seemed possible to make progress from this place. I turned to the person accompanying me and, then, saw to my horror that I was alone -- there was no one at my side. I had lost the person that I was guiding back to the family. Perhaps, I thought, I must retrace my steps but my way had been long and confused and mournful. Aghast, I opened my eyes and found that I had been sleeping and that the light filled the window over my bed and that I was awake, but, nonetheless, forlorn with sorrow.

This uncanny feeling lingered all morning. A little after noon, Bonnie, my brother Christopher’s wife, called me. She said that my brother had died during the morning, probably between 3:45 and 5:00 am. I was shocked. She said that the hospice nurse had come from Visiting Angels and pronounced my brother dead. The body was still in the house. She was awaiting the arrival of the mortician’s hearse.

I called my mother an hour later. She cried for awhile. She told me about a dream that she experienced early in the morning. "I was trying to get to a family gathering," she said. "And I had a baby in my arms. I was lost and it took me a long time to reach the place where the family was located. And, then, when I got to that place, I looked down and the baby that I had been carrying in my arms was gone. The baby had vanished."

When she spoke those words, I recalled my dream from that same morning.

"It means I should have gone out there more often," my mother said. "I should have taken care of him. I should have been with him when he died."

This made me cry a little bit.

　

6.

Fountain Square is a plaza in central Cincinnati. Two-hundred years ago, an Indian mound as big as a church stood in that place. The pioneers and first settlers leveled the mound and sliced it open to loot the graves inside. Cincinnati was famous for its slaughter houses. Prior to 1871, the shambles of an abattoir occupied the place where the Indians had raised their burial mound. The city appropriated the land and ordered the butchers to depart. But you don’t readily move men armed with sharp knives and cleavers. So the marshals came after midnight, during the hour that nightmares rule, and tore down the reeking slaughterhouse so that the butchers were dispossessed of their enterprise.

A fountain was commissioned and shipped in bronze and porphyry fragments from Munich. The fountain was erected where the shambles had been. The fountain is called "The Genius of Waters". A nine-foot tall maiden with a solemn mask-like face extends both arms to her sides and, from her downturned palms and fingers jets of water spray downward. The water anoints a desperate bronze fire fighter standing upon a burning roof and bathes a little boy led by his nude mother to the stream; a grateful farmer turns his eyes upward to the showers of water perpetually descending from the enigmatic Kore-like maiden. The entire assembly rests on a complex granite plinth with great basins that overflow continuously gushing water down into a pool that surrounds the fountain. The fountain is 43 feet tall and the bronze maiden, who is really, I suppose, just a tube for a hydraulically elevated column of water, seems dispassionate, inhuman, a figure from an archaic play or an ancient nightmare.

With one of the lawyers present for the depositions, I went to the Rocky Bottom brewery in Fountain Square. The other lawyer had just come from his fiftieth-class reunion. "A quarter of us are dead," he said. We drank some beer and ate nachos, then, shrimp and crab jambalaya. The waitress called us "baby" when she spoke to us about the menu. We were seated at the bar and a man sat next to the other lawyer. He said that he was a recruiter for executive positions in the paper industry. It was his dream to travel to Duluth. "I want to be there in November," he said. "I want to see the ‘storms of November’." He was quoting a song by Gordon Lightfoot, a folk-singer most famous for "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

"The lake is very violent in November," I said. I told him he could go out on the breakwater jetty and watch the huge waves crashing against the concrete and rip-rap pier.

"I would very much like to do that," the man said. We told him about the waterfalls and intricate gorges of the North Shore, about the cliffs rust-red with hematite, about the ore-boats, and the lift-bridge and the dunes on Minnesota Point where the water was ice-cold even in August. We told him about the light-house at Split Rock and the mountains looming over the great inland sea north of Grand Marais.

In the square, the fountain-maiden was lit so that her hands seemed to support her as ice-white columns of falling water. She hovered over the square, lifted skyward by the luminous pillars of falling water. The dark bronze figures beneath her seemed like the denizens of another world, corpse-figures hidden in the darkness.

　

7.

The forests of Portugal are burning. The forests of Finland and Sweden are on fire. The forests of Chile are burning as well. Northern California is ablaze and there are over 180 wild fires burning in British Columbia. The Canadian wild fires don’t have names. One of them is north of Quesnel, another is near a place called 100 Mile House; others are raging far from human eyes near the Arctic Circle and known only from satellites that have photographed the burning forests from space. Smoke from the Canadian conflagrations is borne on the jet stream to Minnesota and, then, trapped in lens-like inversion layers over the State. Air quality is poor and the elderly and very young are threatened. Last night, the earth was dragged through a great meteor shower, the Perseids, I think, but the flickers of light streaming across the sky were concealed behind the cream-colored drifting labyrinth of smoke in the air.

　

8.

After the depositions, I drove east from Cincinnati to the town of Hillsboro. My Mapquest directions sent me along narrow two-lane highways, directing me to make turns at remote and nameless places in the country. The land was hilly and heavily wooded and, as the afternoon lengthened, I drove past gloomy lakes and dense thickets to come upon Hillsboro, a village atop a flattened bluff a few miles from a big lake created from waters impounded behind a small, decaying dam.

Like many small towns, strip malls on the perimeter of Hillsboro had disemboweled the old downtown with its brick churches rearing steeples to the sky and the old rust-red brick buildings lining Main Street. The sidewalks were all tilted and fractured and most of the buildings downtown were vacant. On lamp-posts, banners showed the faces of boy-soldiers killed in World War One or the Second World War: fresh-faced young men with archaic-looking pince-nez glasses and freckles on their cheeks. The dead boys grinned at the camera, or, if they were in uniform, tried to look gruff and military, but it was obvious that they were all just kids killed long before their time. The only viable businesses downtown were chemical and alcohol dependency treatment centers, a few ancient and windowless bars, and lunch counters closed when I rolled into town.

My motel was on the outskirts, a Day’s Inn, and things were no better on the edges of town. Several strip malls had shut down and weeds were growing in their parking lots. A half-dozen sit-down restaurants seemed to have all been built and, then, failed at the same time, probably during the boom just before the crash in the Fall of 2008. Some fast food joints were operating to mostly drive-through customers and a Walmart stood on a hill, a sort of vacuum sucking the life out of the other businesses in town. It’s a bad sign when half the enterprises in a mall are either detox facilities or storefronts offering music or dance lessons. What level of desperation is implicit in trying to make a living out of teaching little girls in pink ballerina suits to dance or teaching recalcitrant ten year olds how to play electric guitar or keyboards?

I knew that Cincinnati was famous for its chili and there was a fast food place offering something called Gold Star Chili. I ate in the dining room, some french fries drowned in chili and, then, a cheesburger. The chili had a metallic taste and was spiced, I think, with cinnamon – the stuff was unpleasantly sweet. Everyone in the restaurant was immensely fat and, because it was warm and humid, greasy with sweat. Indeed, everyone in town seemed fat and was wheezing with the humidity, the men poorly groomed with weedy fibrous beards and the women sloppy with thick, chaffed thighs and heavily tattooed biceps and chests. The place seemed remote, although Cincinnati was only an hour away, and a wretched backwater.

　

9.

Mr. Messelmeem, the proprietor of the Day’s Inn, was not fat. He was slender and fit and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He greeted me in his hot lobby dense with the fumes of turmeric and cardamon.

The room was somewhere in the rear of the house next to a desolate parking lot carved into a low, overgrown bluff. Some fat boys and girls plotting some kind of orgy were unloading coolers full of beer from their pick-up truck. My room had asphalt tiles that were clean enough but unsettling underfoot and the air smelled wet and toxic like a swamp. It was the kind of place that was either too dark or too bright, depending upon whether I had the heavy curtains shut or open.

I ate some potato chips and drank a diet Coke. I turned the air-conditioner up until it was icy and, then, shivered in my underwear. The room was the kind of place to which you retreat before committing suicide.

When you checked into my brother Christopher’s Embassy Suites in Burlingame near the San Francisco Airport, you walked through a fragrant garden where big rhododendron bushes, heavily laden with great wet flowers, nodded at you. The bay stretched bright and clear across to Oakland and the blue crest of the mountains beyond. Planes rose and fell like balloon over the airstrip a couple miles away and the point of land where the hotel was located was a municipal park with lush green lawns and rose gardens. On the credenza, there was a big wicker basket full of fruit and garlanded with flowers and my brother had sent me a bottle of fine California wine to celebrate my arrival in San Francisco. The air was fragrant and all the appliances worked and, although Christopher was busy (or purported to be busy), he greeted us in the lobby and shook our hands vigorously and, then, introduced us to his staff telling them to "take good care" of us. Then, he went to the parking place closest to the hotel tower and got into his convertible Porsche and jetted away. He didn’t really have time for a visit. It didn’t matter: we were in town to see the sights and not for a family visit.

In the Hillsboro Days Inn, I was bothered all night by sound of heavy feet thudding and thumping in rooms and corridors overhead. But, then, when I went out to my car, I saw that there was no second floor to the motel, that it was only a single story set on the terrace above a desolate and crumbling strip mall.

　

10.

I guess it’s easy getting lost driving to a place you don’t want to go.

Although I have driven to Albion a dozen times, I entrusted the route to Julie’s cell-phone. I didn’t want to get lost in Sioux City. Travelers always get lost in Sioux City; it’s some kind of vortex of disorienting and malevolent energy. Therefore, I told Julie to plot the route, primarily to avoid losing one or, even, two hours in that city and its environs.

A freeway bypass let us glide by the city and we crossed into Nebraska on a sleek, aerodynamically designed freeway bridge over the Missouri River. From the river’s western bank, the State was all open to us, without borders and impediment, and we made good progress, riding up and down the high hills to reach deep into the State. After an hour, we saw signs pointing the way to Albion and, finally, reached an intersection 37 miles from the town. I told Julie that there was no way to reach Albion without driving through Norfolk, Nebraska, the hometown of Johnny Carson, and that I supposed we would come to that place very soon. She checked for restaurants on her phone and we selected a place where we could eat a late lunch.

The voice on the phone told me to turn right and proceed north. This seemed counter-intuitive to me, but the phone’s directions were often quirky – the algorithm had earlier piloted us down gravel roads and sent us through impoverished neighborhoods at the edges of small towns and, so, I supposed that the cell-phone’s computer knew a better, and secret, route to Albion. So we drove 25 miles in a direction that seemed wrong to me and, then, were directed westward.

Julie said: "I thought that we were only 37 miles from Albion."

The sign next to the road told us we were entering Madison County. "I thought Albion was the county seat of Boone County," Julie said. "This is some secret short-cut," I told her. "Perhaps there are road closures and we must just be cutting across a corner of the county."

After another twenty minutes driving, we came across a sparkling city with a range of high-rises at its edge and some brand-new office buildings with glittering black-tinted windows. The place seemed prosperous and a number of retail stores lined the highway including some large groceries and a Target.

Of course, the town was Norfolk and the phone led us to the restaurant that we had selected, a barbecue place. We had gone (round-trip) 100 miles astray.

　

11.

We stayed at the Cardinal Inn in Albion. The room smelled strongly of disinfectant, a raw chemical odor that invaded your throat and tilted your imagination toward morbid thoughts. In the toilet, some intensely slippery, but clear, fluid had oozed onto the floor and I imagined myself slipping there, cracking my skull on the porcelain and bleeding onto the white tiles.

I drove out alone to see the Sand Hills. As I was returning to Albion, my wife called me on my cell-phone and said that she couldn’t tolerate the chemical stench in the room. She asked me to buy a scented candle. I went to a Dollar General store on the edge of town where you can get anything. I bought some pumpkin and cinnamon-scented air freshener and a small candle also pumpkin-scented. Julie lit the candle and it helped, but only a little.

Christopher’s Embassy Suites on the outskirts of San Francisco had a garden in the atrium. Water spilled down terraces into a pool where brilliant, orange and yellow koi rotated slowly like great fat and luminous globes. Succulents stood over the little translucent pond and there were orchids and dewy plants with heavy, pendulous flowers. The air was perfumed in that place. But in the morning it smelled slightly of fried eggs, bacon, and maple syrup – this was the Embassy Suites’ famous "cooked to order" breakfast. In the early evening, the garden was faintly scented with the smell of bar-pour whiskey and beer – the evening reception was underway near the glass column in which elevators rose and fell.

　

12.

When everyone had arrived in Albion, we went in a caravan to a little sports bar next to the Runza sandwich place. This was at the intersection where the two state highways crossed. In the tavern, it was the waiter’s first night on the job and he was confused by the large group and their orders. The food came out cold and was set before the wrong people and there were whole meals carried to the table that no one had ordered. My mother bought as an appetizer a basket of fried "Rocky Mountain Oysters". The testicles had been beaten flat and were deep-fried and, in fact, over-cooked to my taste. No one ate them but me and John LaPorte, who is mostly Anishiinabe and from the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota.

After the meal, we went outside and, then, drove in a column to various places in the small town significant to my mother: we saw the huge imposing house where she was raised (now mostly a ruin), the old hospital where she was born, the homes where her grandparents had lived, the location where my grandfather’s John Deere and car dealership had been located – it’s the Serviceman’s club today with a list of war casualties embossed on bricks next to the front door.

Julie asked me about the shrieking sound in the air. "Cicadas," I said. The cicadas in their millions were screaming as if in mortal pain hidden in the dark trees overhead.

　

13.

In San Francisco, Christopher’s Porsche was small and accommodated only one passenger. He took my son, Jack, in the car to the In-N-Out Burger in San Bruno. We met at that hamburger place. "These are the best hamburgers in the world," he told us. We each had a double-double with the secret sauce. Then, Christopher took Angelica in the sports car and they drove along the highway a bit faster than was legal and the sun was shining and the wind blew in their eyes and mussed their blonde hair and the road ran alongside the bay for a distance and white sailboats dotted the great, tranquil inlet and all was well in the world.

　

14.

At the Day’s Inn in Hillsboro, I rose early. Mr. Messelmeem’s breakfast was appalling – some stale bagels and a couple boxes of old cereal and the smell of the milk and the curry sauce in the lobby made me a little dizzy. I left the motel before 8:00 am and bought a sausage and egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s at the foot of the hill. Then, I drove through the deserted crossroads downtown and found the highway that led to the great Serpent Mound of Adams County.

The humidity was stifling and the hollows and bends in the road were foaming with fog. The way to the mound led through barren, deserted country, a place where it seemed that a great and nameless catastrophe had occurred. The highway bent and twisted and oozed its way south and east, passing through ruinous villages at unnamed and unnumbered cross-roads. Next to the road, I saw a small brick church, just a stone closet in a field surrounded by a vast number of old graves. The shacks in the towns were engulfed in vines or crushed by big thickets like spiders squatting along the road and, in the distance, the grey-green fog was welling up out of the wet pastures. I saw some strange hunchbacked cattle in a wet field and, then, some dilapidated horses standing stoically against a collapsing fence-line. The road was deserted, no one coming toward me and no one following. The terrain was walled with gloomy copses of trees and the little soaked pastures looked desolate between the dark walls of the woods.

I passed a tiny church, really just a small lathe building like a renovated chicken coop: Serpent Mound Congregation of Christ. Somewhere I had read that the people in these parts regarded the Serpent Mound with superstitious awe – it was dangerous, a place where witchcraft had been practiced, and there were many who thought that bulldozers should be used to erase the mound so that, after a generation or two, even it’s evil memory would be forever gone. The Devil and his works are powerful. A great stillness brooded over the empty landscape, the blurred bits where the fog was doing its work to dissolve the world, the black tangled trees and the wounded-looking marshes. Sinkholes opened down into another world. The sun was stuck up in the sky but, not, yet powerful enough to burn off the mist.

16.

Although signs said the Serpent Mound was closed, I turned right anyway and drove up the hill to the park entrance. The way to the mound was open and so I drove to a parking lot a few yards from a small museum that looked like a WPA building, solid but rough-hewn and made from heavy, dark brown field stone. A conical mound stood next to the parking lot and a sidewalk led into an field claustrophobic with stands of trees on all sides. A stark steel observation tower rose above the undulating mound and its deck was about forty feet above the wet meadow.

The tail of the serpent was a tight spiral about forty feet across, the grass-covered embankment about four-feet high. The serpent, then, twisted in tight, elegantly cursive loops across the level hilltop. Through most of its length, the embankment mound was about five or six feet high, extremely distinct and well-preserved. A little old man on the rusty riding lawn mower was cutting the grass alongside the sidewalk. It was obvious that the mound was also periodically mowed and treated so that weeds didn’t grow in the bright green sod. At the head of the serpent, the mound stopped, expanded into a separate canoe-shaped or vaginal form, and, then, ended in another small peaked mound representing the tip of the great snake’s nose. I knew from reading that the serpent’s peculiar head probably represented the star Antares and that there were astronomical alignments related to the effigy’s loops and undulations. Others have argued that the serpent is portrayed as swallowing something, possibly an egg. The egg, I suppose, would represent the disk of the earth as the ancient people imagined it, all of reality wrapped in the coils of the great snake.

The serpent is 1100 feet long. An excavation a year ago revealed that ancient people actually re-fashioned the serpent at some point, possibly a thousand years ago, removing a loop near the snake’s head. Signs said that the mound represented the underwater panther, a water spirit something like a dragon, thought to be lethal to men. But, ordinarily, that serpent was represented as horned like an antelope. In fact, from the contradictory writings on the signs marking the site, it was pretty clear to me that no one was sure what the serpent meant or, even, when it had been made. A marker said that the serpent was first thought to have been made by the Hopewell people but that later studies and carbon-14 dating showed that the huge coiled embankment had been made by the so-called Fort Ancient people, a woodland culture that flourished about 1000 A.D.

A jeep appeared and the park ranger tramped down the sidewalk to the museum. The little fieldstone museum would not open for an hour. I talked my way into the museum so that I could pay the admission fee for parking. I saw some arrow- and spear-points, a primitive wood digging tool, and, a tattered wicker basket. The earth used to make the serpent was carried to the effigy mound in hand-woven wicker baskets.

Although people in the area knew about the Serpent Mound, it wasn’t formally discovered until reported in archaeological journals at Harvard in 1887. Frederick Ward Putnam first surveyed the mound and published sketches of it (although a couple of local men had published drawings of the mound in 1848). Putnam learned that local people were plotting to plow through the mound because it was deemed evil, a great insignia made by the devil. Putnam persuaded the "ladies of Boston" to donate enough money so that Harvard could acquire the land. The land was owned by that university until the turn of the century when the property was deeded to the Ohio State Archaeology Society.

　

17.

The Serpent Mound is built on the edge of a huge meteor-impact crater. The meteor smashed into the earth in this place about 25 million years ago and the outlines of the vast pit gouged in the earth have long since been completely concealed by topsoil, rivers, and hills and the great gloomy forests. But the traces of the calamity are written indelibly in the bedrock, an enormous circular dent in the earth encircled by high ramps of stone cast up around the crater.

The Fort Ancient people who built the mound didn’t know about this catastrophic event. How could they? The world is always being destroyed and renewed – perhaps, that is what the snake meant.

　

18.

You can live next to the Serpent Mound all your life and still hate the place. Some sorcerer enchanted this landscape, made your momma into a slut and your daddy into a vicious, heroin-addicted drunk. Some sorcerer sent the jobs away and scattered across the roads knuckle-sized pebbles to make your motorcycle skid and fall. Some sorcerer closed down the factory and poisoned the wells and darkened all prospects until the little villages were rotting like carrion. Some sorcerer gave grandpa Alzheimers and grew a cancer in grandma’s lungs and put ALS into your brother. Sure ‘nuff – it’s true. Everyone in this fuckin’ country is living on top of one huge, ancient Indian burial mound and so, of course, it’s all cursed.

So on a July night in 2015, nineteen-year-old David Dargaville got drunk and drove his pick-up onto the old Adena conical mound near the great Serpent. He didn’t dare encroach on the monstrous snake but, instead, sunk his tires like teeth into the mound and, then, gunned his engine, tearing up the sod and flinging it down the sides of the nine-foot hillock. When he was done, the mound was half-bald with tire gouges and Dargaville thought he heard the old, dead Indians moaning underground.

Of course, they caught him and hauled his ass into court. He did three days in the slammer, had to pay restitution to have the mound re-sodded ($3,790), was ordered to perform 100 hours community service, and had to write a ten-page essay on the history of the Serpent Mound.

Dargaville expressed remorse. He wrote the essay and turned it into the official who manages the museum at the great Serpent Mound. The park ranger read the paper and said it was adequate, but he didn’t disclose its content to anyone.

　

19.

The steps were a bit slippery as I climbed the observation tower to look down at the Serpent Mound. From the top deck, the undulating embankment seemed as sharply delineated in the earth as a feature built just yesterday. A little thrill of awe and horror came over me.

The mound was raised on a peninsula of bluff above Brushy Creek. Deep, densely overgrown ravines plunge down to the creek, the water invisible in its thickets from the hill top. Beyond the creek, the land rises a little to a terrace on which there are some small cultivated fields and a lone house, white as bone, standing haggard and eyeless on the hillside. The white house seems tall and very old, with many rooms, but I didn’t see how it could be reached from here.

　

20.

We will never know what the people that we name as Adena and Hopewell called themselves. Perhaps, they named themselves after an animal like a bear or eagle or a god or constellation or legendary hero. Or, maybe, they called themselves by the name of a river or prominent hilltop that they regarded as central to their homeland. Most probably, I suppose, they knew themselves in their language as simply "the people" or the "true men" or the "noble ones" regarding their families and kin like all men and women throughout history as paragons of human virtue, valor, and culture.

At Chillicothe, Ohio in the Scioto river valley, the architect Benjamin Latrobe built a stately brick manor house for Thomas Worthington, a politician who later served as the sixth governor of Ohio. (In 1807, when the manor house was erected Chillicothe was the capitol of the State.) Worthington named his estate Adena. A large, shaggy Indian mound was located on his property. That mound was excavated and its grave goods looted. Worthington’s manor and estate have lent their name to a Native American culture that flourished in central Ohio and the Appalachian foothills in Kentucky for eight-hundred years – that is, from 1000 BC to 200 BC.

A little to the north and west of Chillicothe, a man named Hopewell owned a farm. His land was crisscrossed with great earthen embankments and dozens of oblong and conical mounds. This is the site now known as Mound City. The people who built these monuments are called by the name of the farmer who owned this property – the Hopewell people or, more accurately, the Hopewell material culture complex. These Indians were the successors to the Adena and their culture is viewed as a development and elaboration of Adena accomplishments. The Hopewell culture was centered in the Scioto river valley running from modern day Columbus to Portsmouth where the river flows into the Ohio. The Hopewell people left their mark across a vast territory – artifacts associated with them have been found as far south as Florida and north to Ontario. They lived between 200 BC and 500 AD. The latter date is their horizon and the end of the massive earthmoving projects that characterized their efflorescence.

In the historic period, the Shawnee lived in the river valley. Their people were famous for charismatic prophets. The relationship between the Shawnee and the Adena-Hopewell complex is unknown.

For perspective, Mississippian culture, culminating in large city at Cahokia across the river from modern-day St. Louis reached its height around 1100 A.D. At about the same time, the Chaco cultural complex in present New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona was erecting great cliff-dwellings, ceremonial sites, and fortified hilltop pueblos. The Fort Ancient people living where Cincinnati is now located were also dominant around 1000 AD.

　

21.

Gobekli Tepe ("pot-belly hill") is a Neolithic tell or mound located in central Anatolia. It is the most important discovery in archaeology in the last century. As the great archaologist, Ian Hodder, has said "Gobekli Tepe changes everything." It is a site that challenges many things that archaeologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have believed about human history. I mention this place because it poses questions that are similar to those raised by the enormous earthworks erected by the Adena-Hopewell people.

Gobekli Tepe is a ceremonial center consisting of large megaliths carved with relief sculptures of archaic elk and antelope and bison, insects, and supernatural fantasy creatures. Some of the megaliths simulate the human form in that their lower surfaces show chiseled bas relief legs. The pillars are mostly about 20 to 24 feet tall, limestone, and weigh as much as ten tons. These pillars, some of which are tee-shaped, are set into sockets hewn directly into the bedrock. There are said to be 200 such columnar megaliths on the mountain-top site.

No evidence of villages or, even, cemeteries exist at Gobekli Tepe. When the megaliths were quarried and transported, villages didn’t exist. The people roaming the area were hunter-gatherers without sedentary homes. They didn’t farm because farming hadn’t been invented. The wheel didn’t exist and, most remarkably, the people who raised these megaliths had no knowledge of pottery – they lived in what is called the pre-pottery Neolithic period, between 12000 and 8500 B.C.

It has long been thought that stone architecture and monumental ceremonial sites are evidence for an intensely stratified society. Someone, like a pharaoh, had to direct operations and marshal the labor to build such things. Therefore, these kinds of monuments are thought to be diagnostic of an agricultural, socially stratified, urban culture – people who lived in cities or, at least, large villages, farmed, and engaged in warfare with other fortified towns. Elites governed these people and supervised the erection of ceremonial structures and other monuments. As the story is told, nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, possibly led by "big men" (that is, proto-elites), invented agriculture, established fixed abodes in villages and, then, cities, and, ultimately, constructed irrigation for their fields, a communal venture that created an identity in the people, and, then, developed into the construction of ceremonial and mortuary sites. Gobekli Tepe’s existence challenges this hypothesis.

In fact, Gobekli Tepe suggests that, on some fundamental level, archaeologists have misunderstood the role of ceremony and mortuary practices in human history. In Anatolia, the first towns (such as Catalhoyuk excavated by Ian Hodder) seem to have arisen as a result of people congregating on an annual basis for religious ceremonies. Gobekli Tepe, obviously the work of thousands of people, was made by nomads who didn’t have agriculture and didn’t live in villages. Apparently, these groups of wandering hunter-gatherers congregated seasonally, possibly to celebrate some kind of astronomically inflected, skull-cult. (The first towns in the Middle East such as Jericho are characterized by human skulls that seem to have been painted with ocher or cinnabar, plastered to a semblance of faces, and, then, kept in people’s houses.) Much of this is conjecture – we don’t know what sorts of rituals were celebrated at Gobekli Tepe, but sheer size of the place, a Neolithic cathedral, suggests that something powerful and impressive took place there for thousands of years.

The Adena-Hopewell complex of people moved millions of tons of earth to make enormous embankments, ramps, and mounds. But they didn’t have villages, instead living in small family or clan groups. A Hopewell settlement consisted of four or five wigwam-like structures built from bent poles that were, then, woven with twigs and branches to create a shelter. The people living in those wigwams had only the most limited agriculture – they cultivated tiny gardens of pumpkin, squash, and sunflowers. They didn’t have corn and their diet consisted mostly of small mammals like rabbits and rodents as well as edible seeds that they gathered. They used elegantly knapped stone-points to hunt larger animals like bear and deer – but this kind of meat seems to have been luxury. Estimates vary but, at the height of their building activity, the Hopewell population, spread across thousands of square miles in central Ohio and northern Kentucky never exceeded 40,000 souls. So how did they manage to build the great monuments that still exist more than 1500 years after the decline of their culture?

21

Good intentions may have motivated those who taught me that the upper Mississippi burial mounds were paltry affairs, a few wretched skeletons flexed into fetal positions and inserted in big heaps of dirt. Viewed charitably, one might suppose educators wanted to avoid looting or vandalism and, further, there was, probably, a racist sub-text: the ancestors of the Native-Americans weren’t gifted with respect to arts and crafts – they devoted their time to hunting and collecting scalps. But this is untrue, a calumny.

When Howard Carter first peeped through a fissure into King Tutankhamun’s tomb, he was asked what if he could see anything. Carter was stunned and was only able to whisper: "Yes, wonderful things." It is not an exaggeration to say that Adena-Hopewell mound-burials were also deposits full of wonderful things. Their tombs are full of shield-like copper plates from the upper peninsula of Michigan, exquisitely carved Catlinite pipes dug from pits in southwest Minnesota and shaped to depict bears and vultures and little dwarf-like shamans, flat black stones worked to a high polish and incised with abstract patterns, six-inch long obsidian knives quarried in the upper Yellowstone country, necklaces made of pearl and semi-precious stones, silver headdresses and skull-caps, mosaics made from innumerable bits of mica, bear claws both real and made from silver or copper, carved antlers, human bones hollowed into flutes, intricately sheared plates of beaten silver cut into the shapes of ravens and other winged beings, and, in one mound, more than 30 shark teeth apparently from the Gulf of Mexico together with a razor-sharp and four-inch long incisor from a great white shark. In one mound, headless corpses were set on a bed of mica flakes eight feet long simulating a raven with a fourteen-foot wing-span. The skeletons were set one to a wing, as if to borne aloft by the great bird, their skulls neatly inserted between their ankles. In many of the mounds, looters found beautifully formed silver and copper hands, some of them with eyes represented in their palms. No one knows whether the Hopewell traded for these things or sent expeditions to the Gulf of Mexico or the Rocky Mountains to collect the precious goods buried with their dead. But the sheer abundance of artifacts and their exotic nature testifies to a cosmopolitan mercantile culture – and, yet, the Hopewell were people, it must be remembered, who didn’t live in cities or, even, villages, had no domestic animals except dogs, and subsided by hunting and gathering with only the most rudimentary agriculture.

The people buried in these mounds must have been prophets or war-chiefs or, possibly, great magicians – perhaps, they could cause miscarriages in women and dogs, make the stars fall from the sky, summon lightning, and raise the dead. There is evidence of human sacrifice, skeletons with their skulls stove in and, then, buried flanking the graves of the great men. As in many cultures, the thing most pleasing to the gods, the rarest of liqueurs, was human blood. Clearly, some kind of elite existed but we don’t know what they did or how they proved their superiority. And, so, mysteries abound.

　

　

22

They had put my dead brother in a box and shipped him in the belly of a jet to Omaha. He was cargo like a crate of peaches. A hearse carried the box to Albion. The local mortician did some restorative work, correcting insults inflicted by the long trip. Then, my brother’s box, the dull, industrial color of gun-metal, was taken to the Congregational church, the lid opened, and the corpse put on display. The casket was located just inside the door to the church so that an encounter with my dead brother was inevitable and could not be avoided.

The corpse looked just enough like Christopher to make the display uncanny and disturbing. My dead brother’s head seemed to have been carved ineptly from a block of pale, soft wood. The body’s jaw was long and brutish and its face gaunt. The lips were twisted into an asymmetrical grimace. It was a grim, uncompromising cadaver, not merely inert but repulsively dead. My eyes couldn’t blur this savage caricature into any semblance of my brother as he had been alive. The shock of hair and raw cheek-bones under sunken eyes made the thing look like something from a zombie film, like the first reanimated corpse that appears in the dim graveyard at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead.

My mother stroked the corpse’s hair and, then, staggered a little, calling to the female mortician. She said that she didn’t want to witness the casket lid being closed. "No, no, no," the mortician said.

We went to a pew and sat in the humid warmth of the church while the organist played variations on the Shaker hymn " ‘Tis a gift to be simple." The old congregational church was crumbling – great House-of-Usher cracks zigzagging through the plaster overhead. The organ sometimes roared like a wild beast and I thought that the ceiling was reverberating and might give way and bury us all in the pews. My mother began to shudder and sob. Her distress caused my wife to cry. I squared my shoulders in defiance but all the strength drained out of me until I felt empty and weak.

After the service, they rolled the casket away on a wheeled cart out to the waiting hearse. The sky was grey with smoky-looking standing columns of dark cloud. Before the service, the mortician asked my mother again if she wanted the men to act as pall-bearers. But the front steps to the church were old and steep and, underfoot, they felt swampy to me. It would be hard to navigate those steps with the casket and it looked immensely heavy to me.



23

In better times, when I was younger and my children were small, we drove across Nebraska along State Highway 20. This roads runs east-west about thirty or forty miles south of the South Dakota border and crosses the Sand Hills, a vast uninhabited grassland in the center of the State. Albion bills itself as the Gateway to the Sand Hills. On this occasion years ago, we visited the family graves at the Rose Hill cemetery and, then, drove west on 91 to where the road reaches a tee-intersection with 281 and jogs straight north for a few miles. Where 91 stops at the north-south highway, there is a very fine vista of the Sand Hills. It was a perspective that my father particularly admired, a barren ridge offering a vast and panoramic view of the Hills, ancient sand dunes now sparsely overgrown with grass.

On that morning, during better days, we came to the vista and I pulled across the north-south highway, as stark and straight as ab airport runway, to take some pictures of the Hills. From my father, I inherit pleasure in seeing a place like this – the wild, vast terrain is beautiful to me. The kids were little and it was hot and we were heading toward the cool, high mountains in Colorado and so they didn’t have much patience for my admiration of the enormous, treeless expanse. But it had recently rained and, indeed, the vista was very beautiful – the hills were all lapped together like the waves in a motionless grassy sea, a crumpled, toppled chaos of small knolls, all of them treeless, but green in the foreground and, then, blue at the horizon, clouds chasing one another overhead and dragging their shadows over the landscape, darkening the pale green to an umbral blue-green rolling across the broken and choppy terrain. Here and there, erosion had frayed the edges of one of the hills and, in those places, the sand shone golden-yellow. In the hollows, a few evergreens marked places where water was near the surface and, in the deep places between knolls, water was cupped to reflect the sky. I took some pictures, but the photographs don’t contain the wind and the grass surging and falling with the breeze and the ripples in the little pools and the motion of the shadows herded across the landscape.

After we arrived in Albion for my brother’s funeral, I drove out on Highway 91, through Spalding to the viewpoint over the Hills. On the way to the vista, I saw places where the hills had encroached between fields where endless palisades of corn grew – the hills were cut with ravines and leaking sand into their gullies. At the viewpoint, the sky was lead-grey, the color of the metal casket in which my brother would be buried, and the Hills were monochrome, grey also, marching out to a stormy horizon.

24.

In Ohio, I found the intersection in an abandoned section of the county. Then, I turned and went northeast toward Chillicothe. The two-lane highway bent through a hundred blind curves to come across the hills toward Paint Creek, tributary of the Scioto River. At a hamlet called Sinking Springs, I bought gas at a BP coop. Next to the gas station, there was a grassy prominence where a strange octagonal building stood. The structure was made of old brick and had a zinc roof and flew the American flag. The scarcely perceptible hill on which the building was erected seemed to be some kind of park. A carved boulder stood in front of the octagon with letters chiseled into its sides.

There was a slight contretemps with the clerk in the BP station. Something had disabled my credit card. (I supposed it was the breath of the great serpent.) As I paid with cash, I asked the woman about the octagonal structure. The woman was about forty with hair dyed so blonde as to be white. She said: "You know, I’ve lived here thirty years and I don’t know what that thing is." The town was three-blocks long with shuttered stores, an abandoned bank with a formidable, lowering brick cornice, and some trailer houses drawn up at the edges of the village. A church with a peculiar swollen-looking steeple stood over the fractured and desolate sidewalk. It looked like the kind of place where people spoke in tongues and handled rattlesnakes for communion.

　

25.

From the highway, I saw the Seip Mound standing stark and enormous, bigger than a barn in the middle of a long wet pasture. A little pull-off allowed parking in front of some National Park Service signs describing the site. (There are five mound and embankment sites, spread across the country around Chillicothe, and all administered as the Hopewell National Historic Park.)

The mound was a quarter mile away, situated more or less in the middle of the Paint Creek river bottoms. Impressive and steep wooded hills rose on both sides of the valley and some dull, grey cliffs were visible overhung with vines and brush dangling down over the precipice. The meadow was very wet with dew and my feet were soaked before I reached the mound.

But, if you can walk, you should – as I hiked over the spongy ground, wet to the knees from the dew, I thought of my brother and how he was paralyzed and how he cried out in the middle of the night because his back or hips were hurting him and he had to be turned over in his hospital bed, something that he couldn’t accomplish on his own. I thought of the darkness and how Bonnie had to help him and, then, the black fear of death came upon me and I groaned myself a little as I walked toward the huge oblong mound, a hill that was thirty-five high and, at least, eighty feet long, featureless, a brooding grass monad in the center of the wet, flower-sprinkled meadow. To reach the mound, you have to pass through a kind of gate made from low embankments, reduced by a thousand years to only four or five feet high, curling like parentheses that open toward four pits, the remains of recent excavations that determined that just inside the embankments surrounding the mound there were buildings, apparently mortuaries where corpses were prepared, big wooden huts built from bent-poles as tall as young trees and covered with wicker thatching.

At first, on the site of the mound, small huts had been built in which immensely hot fires blazed. The huts were used as crematoriums and the bodies were burnt to calcined bone and ash. Then, the bone-clogged white dust was enclosed in log crypts constructed over the place where the corpses had been cremated. Grave goods including mica and exotic gems as well as finely decorated pottery and burnished coppers were put in the crypts and a low hillock was raised over the burials. Over the course of several hundred years, more dirt was dragged onto the mound and it was raised in two stages to its final height, probably fifteen feet taller than what we see today.

A trail led to the river. It was a long hot way, but I was happy to be able to walk. On the stroll, I thought about Christopher and, how, perhaps, I had failed him. There was nothing to see on the walk. The trail crossed open fields where the prairie grass was tall as my heart and I could see the grey, sheer cliffs where the bluff dropped away toward the river bottom. As I approached the dense woods surrounding the creek, I could no longer see the cliffs. The trail dead-ended at a vantage over the muddy flood of the creek, a swift stream about fifty-feet wide that was the color of caramel fizzy with root beer. The creek rushed by, whispering as it passed. A National Park Service sign said that the ancient Indians had lived in family groups along this river and that the post-holes from some of their wigwams had been found near here. Someone had placed two beautifully tinted clam-shells, open like hands, atop the plaque. Another natural history marker said that the creek was the home of the largest salamander in the world, the Hellbender, but that this beast, 27 inches long and half-blind with little button eyes and bearded with barbels like a catfish, was now endangered and, indeed, almost extinct.

The way back to the parking lot was long and uninteresting. In one place, the trail crossed through someone’s soybeans. All the way back I could hear cars and trucks on the highway hurrying to Chillicothe. My feet were soaked for the rest of the day – but I will say again: if you can walk, you should walk.

　

26.

Christopher told me that hiked cross-country in Yosemite, starting in Toulumne Meadows. He said that he had overestimated his stamina and that, as he walked, he divested himself of camping gear. My brother purchased nothing but the finest – this was his hallmark throughout his life. Accordingly, he said ruefully that he abandoned several thousand dollars of the best backpacking equipment in the world in the bushes of the Sierra High Country. Christopher told me that Yosemite was fantastically beautiful and that the landscapes looked like something "from the Lord of the Rings."

He owned a jeep and drove into the mountains to take pictures. His landscape photographs were beautiful and he had a keen eye for the wilderness. When I thought of him during the long years that he lived in California and had little contact with the rest of the family, I imagined him like an eagle, perched on a high and remote peak focusing his camera. I imagined the camera on a tripod and pictured the peaks as being great, bluish granite domes. His eyrie was atop a huge boulder glittering with quartz and the jeep was nearby, glistening the way that vehicles do in TV ads.

Once, when I was in California, I asked Christopher about Death Valley. "It’s just desert," he said. I asked him if it was worth seeing. "Stay out of those places," he told me. "They will age you before your time."

He loved to see fields of tall sunflowers bowing their heads together in the breeze. On his funeral brochure, there is a picture of a field of sunflowers, great stately plants all of them turned against the camera except for a single blossom in the foreground, a bright ring of yellow petals arrayed around a red orb. At the funeral, blinded by emotion, I didn’t notice that only one of the hundreds and hundreds of flowers shown in the picture is facing the camera – all of the rest, as if shy, have turned their heavy heads away and look toward a horizon where some dark trees divide the green field from a grey and foreboding sky. The single blossom gazes at us with its open eye, indomitable and fierce.

　

28.

Two cigar-sized caterpillars, fat and green, fell from trees where my sister, Celeste, lives in Northfield. She picked them up and put them on milkweed leaves in her home. The caterpillars embedded their blind heads in the milkweed and each hardened into a harp-shaped chrysalis.

Some days passed and a brilliant orange and black Monarch butterfly with wings like stained glass emerged from one of the chrysalises.

My sister thought that Christopher had died in such a way that, perhaps, his spirit was confused. She told us to keep praying for him even after he was gone. It was important that his soul emerge into the light.

　

29.

Chillicothe is a little more prosperous than its environs. But this is because the town is home to two huge prisons. No town really prospers from a prison. Prison-wages are tainted.

On the outskirts of the town, on a river flat between the fences and guard towers of the two prisons, the National Park Service protects a large Hopewell site called Mound City. Beyond the parking lot discretely enclosed by trees, there’s a small, but extravagantly endowed, museum annexed to a visitor center where you can watch an interesting video presentation on the Hopewell people. Behind the visitor center, a sidewalk leads to a clearing blistered with grassy mounds. Embankments hedge the array of mounds and there are informative markers posted among the earthworks. Here, the dew has dried and the sun is hot, but the humidity remains close and intimidating.

A riding lawn mower chugs around the periphery of the grassy hillocks – there are a dozen or more of them and, so, the place has been named Mound City. But this is not a city, rather a necropolis and ceremonial center – no evidence of permanent dwellings has been found here. The mounds are various shapes – long slender ridges, pyramidal cones, oblongs, and double mounds, conjoined like two fists resting side-by-side in the turf.

The film in the Visitor Center shows that there is much more here than meets the eye. The Hopewell built two types of earthworks: long embankments running around the crests of hilltops, enclosing ceremonial circles and limestone-faced alignments, and river bottom cemeteries. The river bottom sites are enclosed by earth ramparts that follow a strict formula – there is a square encompassing 27 acres, a small circle, perhaps, about 100 yards in diameter and, then, an adjacent great circle. The great circle also defines an enclosure of about 27 acres. In fact, the measurements are so exact that the circle can be inserted within the square earthworks. Clearly, some unit of measure was at work here since all the major sites display this geometry. And it is obvious that the configuration of the earthen embankments and the mounds is not helter-skelter but the result of a consciously applied design. Small causeways link the great circle, the small circle, and the 27 acre square. Burial mounds have been raised within both the large square and the great circle. The mounds cover log crypts containing human remains, either cremated or skeletons buried supine with exotic and beautifully crafted grave goods. It was at Mound City that a cache of 200 calumets or ceremonial effigy pipes was discovered, each Catlinite pipe damaged in some way so as to be killed or deactivated. Some graves contained large, mirror-like sheets of mica, silver and copper cut-outs, as well as lethal-looking obsidian blades six-inches long. In one grave, more than a thousand gem-like beads were found.

The small museum contains about a half-dozen of the most famous masterpieces of Hopewell art. These include some exquisite effigy pipes, the silver raven often portrayed in books about American Indian art, and several of the enigmatic hands made from plates of beaten silver. Human bones fashioned into flutes or ceremonial wands are displayed in the cases and there are informative touch-screen programs that provide in-depth detail about the exhibits. Although the museum is only a single L-shaped gallery, it is excellent and so thought-provoking as to be actually exciting. Most of the visitors to this place, which is free, glance at the explanatory NPS sign next to the parking lot, walk to the back veranda to gaze at the field of mounds, and, then, buy a post-card in the gift shop. Only a couple of people wandered out to stroll among the big mounds, warm and breathing like great animals in the hot sun. No one at all joined me in the museum.

Two-thousand years ago, a procession of majestic earthworks lined the Scioto River. Fortification-like embankments on the tops of the hills were encrusted with shield-like displays of white lime. Archaeologist have found fire-pits at intervals overlooking the valley. Bonfires were lit in in the ceremonial circles and the flames were so intense that they melted the soil to glass-like silica. At certain times of the year, rituals were conducted within the huge embankments in the river-valley, earth walls sometimes raised to the height of 30 feet and, at night, streamers of fire on the bluffs rose skyward, punctuating the darkness at regular intervals and spitting sparks into the constellations rotating above.

　

30.

My sister, Melissa, the baby of our family, carried three plastic soldiers to the funeral. When we were children, we called the plastic soldiers "little men." They were khaki-green, one of them squatting to fire his rifle, another prone on his belly and, also, aiming his gun at some invisible opponent, the third little man held a grenade in his right hand, signaling to his comrades to advance bravely toward the enemy. When he was a small child, Christopher liked to play with the "little men" soldiers. He would make battle sounds with his lips and tongue, simulating the rattle of machine gun fire or the guttural thud of artillery shells. When a "little man" was killed, he was tipped over to lie on his side, Christopher sometimes making a little squeaking cry to signify the man’s death. The riflemen firing from a prone position were rolled-over belly-up to show that they had been killed in action. Christopher had a hundred or so green plastic soldiers, all of them the size of a chess piece. The tiny warriors were indomitable and immortal; after being killed, they could be set back up on the flat plastic base extruded under their boots to fight once more. Sometimes, the little men battled in mountainous terrain made from blankets and bed sheets. On other occasions, they ambushed one another in narrow defiles formed by stacked books or fought hand-to-hand on the tiles in the basement. To best imagine their martial encounters, one had to lie on the floor and scrutinize them at their eye-level.

Melissa slipped the three plastic men into the casket. They would go with Christopher into the earth and accompany him wherever else he went.



31.

The lady-pastor at Christopher’s funeral served several congregations, all of them dying. She lived in Neligh. When we were children, my father took us to Estes Park in Colorado. We went there several times, driving north of Albion through Neligh. Once, there had been a Lutheran Bible Camp at Estes Park and my father had been taken there by my grandfather, the pastor. The way that his family traveled to Estes Park was the north route across Nebraska, through the Sand Hills, on Highway 20.

Between Petersberg and Neligh, on the east side of the road, a granite headstone marked the place where Logan Fontanelle had been killed. Fontanelle was a fur trader, half Omaha Indian and half French. He straddled both the White and Native American worlds but, ultimately, opted for the native side. He rose to prominence among the Omaha, traveled to Washington D.C. to negotiate treaties for his people, and became a chief. While hunting buffalo in 1855, Fontanelle’s party was ambushed by the Dakota. They fought well but were all killed. The marker showed the place where Logan Fontanelle had died, or, perhaps, been buried, a nondescript ditch along the state highway.

When passing along this way, we used to stop by the marker and read the words inscribed in the stone. Albion was not the West. It was still an eastern town surrounded by corn fields and soy beans with a rickety grain elevator and steel bins standing like truncated organ pipes along the highways leading to the village. The people in Albion weren’t ranchers or cowboys, although there were black Angus cattle grazing a dozen miles away on the edges of the Sand Hills. Hog barns stood in the river bottoms and the towns, although small were spaced closely enough that, during the last century, a woman visiting kin could walk from one hamlet to the next, spend a couple of hours with her people, and, then, walk back home again all in one day. The memorial to Logan Fontanelle was where the storied and golden West began, the land of the high snowy mountains, gunfighters and Indians, deserts and mines full of Spanish treasure all bathed in the funereal light of the setting sun.

　

32.

Before my flight, I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, a big building with the portico of a Greek temple mounted on an acropolis above the old German ghetto, a neighborhood called "Over the Rhine." I wanted to see if the museum had Hopewell or Adena artifacts, but my time was short and I never reached those galleries if, in fact, they existed.

Like many big regional museums, the Cincinnati collection is congested with spurious-looking Old Master paintings collected by local robber barons and, then, bestowed upon the institution in some gesture of reparation or specious philanthropy. Every museum of this sort has an elder Cranach panel showing a vulpine and pale nude lady who seems naked even if she is clothed. These paintings merely establish that Cranach the Elder had a particularly thriving studio or that his signature subject is easily forged. Cincinnati owns an enormous Anselm Kiefer canvas "Montsalvat", also I think the product of factory-like production, and a truly hideous work said to be painted by Tiepolo, an obscure saint (Charles Borromeo) portrayed in bizarre foreshortening, a perspective that elongates the snout of the holy man so that he looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The more interesting aspects of this collection involve the American paintings, some of which are significant. George Inness’ "Near the Village: October" is a typical late-style work by this landscape artist influenced by Swedenborg’s mystical writings – the paint is a glaze on the canvas, almost like ceramic, browns and yellows and faded greens applied densely to show a meadow where a solitary shepherd stands, a white apparition against a tree, and, in the remote background, several pale houses under a bank of faintly glowintg cloud. Another notable painting is Robert Duncanson’s wild "The Blue Hole, Flood Waters, the Little Miami River", a canvas with some tiny figures fishing in the foreground in a river lagoon rimmed by shaggy, primeval forests – the treetops are arranged to make a cup-shaped void filled with creamy light and a naked, storm-ravaged tree, stripped of its bark and ghost-white points an accusing finger at the heavens in the very center of the picture. Duncanson is an interesting figure, an African-American painter born a free man in New York. Duncanson was trained as a house-painter but taught himself the skills of a professional artist of the time and made some notable pictures – he moved to Cincinnati, then regarded as a "southern City but free", and became famous for a canvas illustrating the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, "Little Eva and Uncle Tom." Abolitionists admired the painting and it toured extensively in the decade before the Civil War. At that time, Duncanson partnered with James Presley Ball, a White man and early Daguerrotypist to produce a 600 yard panorama entitled "Grand Panorama with Incidents of Slave Trade in the United States". This huge abolitionist work toured throughout the North to great acclaim. In 1862, Duncanson was in Minnesota where he painted a small, lapidary canvas showing Minneopa Falls near Mankato. The violence in the country then riven by the Civil War appalled him and he went into self-exile in Scotland, painting there scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s novels. He returned to Detroit in 1872 and was mounting an exhibition in that city when he died.

I looked at Duncanson’s painting of the Minneopa Falls and admired the translucent paint depicting the delicate veils of falling water. At first, I thought the image showed Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis – the principal waterfall has the same delicate profile. But the label to the painting told me that the falls were at Mankato. It was odd to see a reference to this place, not well-known even to most people in Minnesota in an art museum in Cincinnati.

Curiously, the Cincinnati Art Museum holds a prominent anti-slavery painting showing the Underground Railway, a ragged-looking family of enslaved people trudging through the snow toward a torch lit porch where some White folks are waiting for them, as well as a virulent pro-slavery picture, the large and impressive "General Order No. 11" by George Caleb Bingham. That picture depicts an apocalyptic landscape in which a dozen burning farmsteads cast lurid pillars of smoke into the sky. The white-haired and bearded patriarch of a family is defying Federal troops who have just shot down his son in cold blood. The young man lies outstretched on the ground in a pool of blood with his wife throwing her arms over the dying man. In the background, blue-coated Union troops are looting the family’s house which burns with a eerie red glow. At the lower left hand of the painting, a shabbily dressed Black man covers his face with horror and walks away from the lurid scene while his little boy stares back at the dying youth transfixed in horror. General Order 11 (August 1863) was a Federal directive that expelled slaveholders from the Missouri border with Kansas. The order led to depredations in four rural counties in western Missouri with raids and counter-raids by armed militias, the Jayhawkers and their pro-South adversaries, the Bushwhackers. (This contested territory spawned four generations of western outlaws from Jesse James through the Dalton gang to "Ma" Barker.)

Two notable murals decorate corridors at the Cincinnati Museum. One of them is by Leo Steinberg and shows impish caricatures of buildings and people in the Queen City. The mural once occupied a wall in the dining room of a prominent hotel in town and, at its center, Steinberg has sketched the downtown fountain on which the severe goddess stands attended by the two waterfalls draining through her hands. The other mural, also from a luxury hotel now demolished, is by Joan Miro, the Catalan surrealist. Miro has painted the big mural in a beautiful, transfixing blue, the depths of infinitely deep sky in which big, balloon-like monsters hover like blimps.

33.

Driving back from Chillicothe, I saw an exit to the well-known archaeological site, Fort Ancient. I hesitated a moment before exiting to see the place. In fact, I’m now glad that I stopped and spent a couple hours at Fort Ancient – it is wonderfully fascinating.

Fort Ancient is a hilltop enclosed with high earthen embankments made about 2000 years ago. This site represents the most massive earthmoving project in North America preceding the industrial revolution. In fact, I would wager that the amount of soil shifted to build the 30 foot high ramparts along the rim of these bluffs exceeds any architectural endeavor preceding the deposit of the debris of old, fire-ravaged Chicago into the lakefront of the new, gleaming Chicago rebuilt after the catastrophic blaze in 1871. Two millenia have eroded the great ramparts of Fort Ancient, but, in some places, they remain 23 feet high.

The pioneers that discovered this place thought that the vast linear mounds twisting along the edge of bluffs were fortifications, hence, the site’s name. But, if fortifications, what was being protected by the massive walls? No town was found within the great enclosure, only dozens of mounds, some of them faced with pale limestone as well as enigmatic circles of stone inset in the meadows. The space within the enclosure was densely wooded, overgrown after two-thousand years, and old-growth oak and elm were rooted in the ramparts. The significance of the 3 ½ mile circuit of walls was unclear – eighty-two portals pierced the ramparts offering access to the interior space that had once been laboriously cleared on the hilltop 260 feet above the Little Miami River. (For the astronomical alignments marked by site features to be visible, the forest had to be cleared.)

For decades, looters slashed trenches through mounds seeking treasure. A number of burials of skeletons in flexed position were found in the top layers of the huge linear enclosure mound. Relatively humble grave goods identified these burials as from a cultural group dubbed Fort Ancient, people who lived in the area just before Columbus’ ships blundered into the West Indies. Accordingly, the Fort Ancient people were erroneosly credited with construction of the site. Later, studies showed that the Fort Ancient burials were opportunistic, so-called "intrusive" burials in pre-existing Hopewell Mounds. Beyond any doubt, the hilltop enclosure was raised by the Hopewell people dating the embankments back to the time of Christ.

Recent surveys and soil sampling proves that the Hopewell not only raised the vast embankment wall, but also cleared and leveled the enclosed bluff-top. Thousands of big trees where chopped down using stone tools to clear the enclosure and three massive ravines transecting the hilltop were filled with millions of square yards of tamped dirt. South-eastern Ohio is rainy and the architects used the pits from which they hauled dirt for the rammed earthen embankments to create water-features – these are moat-like indentations where water ponds along the inside of the ramparts. Many of these water features remain today and it is evident that they are intentional elements of the building program. Copper plates and other silver objects have been found buried in the silt at the bottom of these impound-ponds and, so, it seems apparent, that sacrifices were made in these pools. Scholars now speculate that the ponds were places where the antler-horned underwater panther was worshiped. Further, many of the ponds were once ringed with limestone pavement. Limestone flagstones defined the sacrificial pools and made pathways between the ceremonial mounds. At the south entrance to the enclosure, a long stair-like ramp descended from the hilltop to the Little Miami River. The ramp was edged with embankments faced with burned limestone and, at its top, the entrance into the enclosure was flanked by two high conical mounds, also covered with gleaming inset limestone.

A paved path bisects the irregularly shaped enclosure – the ramparts wall two lobes of high hilltop. This path seems some sort via sacrum used for ceremonial processions. The sacred way ends at the place where summer solstice bonfires seem to have burned for five-hundred years. For a century, an exactly measured circle comprised of upright wooden posts enclosed the bonfire. The wooden posts were set to mark various astronomical alignments. The posts were, in fact, massive pillars of wood, 16 foot-tall tree trunks with the bark shaved to make them gleam bone-white in the sun or reflect orange and blood-red when the huge bonfires were burning. At the center of this woodhenge (or ceremonial circle), ground-penetrating radar detected a perfect round anomaly. A core-sample was extracted from this soil anomaly and the boring tube was found to be full of bright-red, ketchup-colored clay. Clearly, the clay was transported from a great distance to this site, possibly from Arizona’s painted desert or the badlands of South Dakota. Even more puzzling, the woodhenge was carefully dismantled and its post-holes (and clay navel) buried under a stone circle about 150 A. D. (This is more than 800 years before the Mississippian peoples built their woodhenge in the ceremonial center of their great city that we now call Cahokia, City of the Sun.)

At the edge of a tract of low mounds paved with limestone flagstones, there is a museum. It’s large and ambitious, tracing the history of Native Americans in Ohio from their arrival from the Bering Strait to today. The museum is staffed by old women who have volunteered to manage the place. Several interesting videos describe the features of Fort Ancient. I drove on a winding lane along the huge embankment wall, a sinuous ridge now studded with trees dipping at intervals to swales serving as gateways into the big enclosure. Most of the tract of land enclosed is now densely forested again, although some of the acreage has been cleared to reveal mounds, vestiges of walkways, and circles of stone embedded in the black dirt. Foot trails braid their way through the woods passing up and over the ramparts. The little lagoons impounded by the earthen embankments seem to slouch languidly against the dam-like rampart, shimmering water dusted with fallen leaves.

At an overlook, I could see down to a bend in the Little Miami River. A bridge crossed the river, but the road deck had been removed for repairs and the span was breached – I saw the concrete piers set enigmatically in the flood of brown, limpid water. Beyond the dismantled bridge, a very old three-story house stood in a copse of trees on a leaf-strewn lawn above a still lagoon that curved into the river-bank. This was the Crossed Keys Tavern, a historic site across the Little Miami from the abandoned town-site of a village once called Fort Ancient. The tavern was built with field stone, flat slabs of white limestone intermingled with pale ocher-colored rock. The effect was that the tavern shone white as a cloud in its grove of old trees, a pale ghost reflected in the still waters of the lagoon. There was no direct way to reach the old tavern with its many mansions. The bridge was down and it was late in the day and there were no workmen anywhere laboring on the concrete piers or the iron girders stretching across the river. The cicadas whirred mechanically in the tall trees and the big embankment stretched endlessly across the hilltop, vanishing in the green shadows of the forest, and a great stillness abided over all the land.

　

34.

So, in the end, what is this all about? These processions of red Indians, their mounds, their silver gorgets and ear spools, and effigy pipes burning sacred leaves, headdresses made from beaten silver and copper – isn’t this all a willful change in the subject matter? Isn’t it the substitution of one sort of mystery for another? In the second watch of the night, at the hour of the wolf when children are born and old men die, every thought is morbid, inflected by the fear of death, and the darkness seems eternal, implacable, and terrifying. Then, it is a comfort to think about the ancient people in their multitudes gone into the darkness before us, but not without leaving splendid traces of their existence. It’s a specious consolation but, nonetheless, a refuge to which I flee. When this writing is done, then, what will I have to comfort me?

　

35.

At Serpent Mound, markers said that the effigy was created by the Fort Ancient People. But this is incorrect. The Fort Ancient culture, people living a thousand years ago, dug shallow graves in the Hopewell mounds and put their dead in them, but they didn’t actually build the Serpent Mound embankment.

So is the Serpent Mound a Hopewell monument? This also seems unlikely. The Hopewell didn’t make effigy mounds – they built enclosures with huge dirt ramparts according to a strict geometric code, but didn’t use mounds to simulate animals or people. Of course, there are effigy mounds in northeastern Iowa, southeastern Minnesota, and western Wisconsin along the Mississippi river bluffs. Those mounds are much smaller and less spectacular than the 1100 foot great serpent. And we know the effigy mounds on Mississippi islands and high points overlooking the river were built between 800 and 1250 A.D. – that is, about a thousand years after the Hopewell complex.

So the question remains: who built the great Serpent Mound?

　

36.

Charles de Gaulle’s daughter, Anne, had Down Syndrome. She was born in Trier when de Gaulle was the general of the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland. She was the light of her father’s life. People reported that the dignified senior officer sometimes danced like a bear or a monkey to amuse her. Anne died of pneumonia when she was twenty. De Gaulle was prostrate with grief. At her funeral, he said to his wife: Maintenant, elle est comme les autres – that is, "now, she is like the others."

　

37.

The Pastor at Christopher’s funeral said: "During the last seven months of his life, Christopher didn’t leave his bedroom."

Then, she read a verse that my mother had selected for the service, 2 Samuel 22:20 – "He brought me out into a broad place: he delivered me, because he delighted in me.

38.

About ten years before my brother died, my wife and I traveled with my mother to Turkey. Christopher accompanied us and served as my mother’s escort.

On the last night that we were in Turkey, we took a cab down to an expensive sea-food restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. The restaurant was sumptuous with exquisitely woven kilim on the walls and great windows that overlooked the strait where sea-going vessels were laboring against currents in the channel between the continents. Wonderful bridges spanned the strait, twinkling with the lights of cars coming and going, and mosques with gleaming domes and lance-like towers were silhouetted against the sunset.

It was a very beautiful place to enjoy a meal. Christopher bought expensive wine and we feasted on fresh fish.

My memories of that night are enveloped in a nostalgic glow, a halo of mellow golden light. As the sun set, the sea darkened to a purplish streak where the ships and barges shone their beacons across the water unscrolling ahead and behind them. The hills of Asia shone briefly in the last sun and, then, the lights of the white high rises appeared, glittering in ladders leading up to the faint stars.

I don’t know the name of that restaurant any more, although I have notebooks and, even, an essay that I wrote that probably provides details much more intricate than I am able to give today. It is best, I think, to be not too exact about our fond memories and the pleasures that they afford us.

　

August 16 - August 21, 2018

　

John S. Beckmann