Ghosts

In the spring I went to see some petroglyphs. Rock art. It was about a three hour drive, up into the mountains, out into the high desert. Like a lot of the most beautiful things you can see in California, it was a three hour drive through a bunch of nowhere. No real towns and I saw more wild horses than people.

The petroglyphs were outside of Tulelake, which consisted of a main street with about half a grocery store and a saloon and enough electric poles and new cars to know the surrounding houses had people in them. They may have had a shuttered movie theater and a pool hall that was probably run by a guy who lived around the corner and only opened it up for old-timer social events, if at all. Maybe not. May as well have. It wasn’t a ghost town and this made it much lonelier than a ghost town, because in ghost towns you can buy a T-shirt. 

At the site, there was an infinite sprawl of nothing (I feel like I’ve written that sentence before and now I wonder why I keep winding up in places like that). It used to be a lakebed and you could feel it. I’m pretty sure that in a subconscious, primal way, you can just tell when a place used to have water and the water dried up. You can tell something was there. It always calls to mind that Wendell Berry line. “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Once you tune to that frequency, the feeling can hit you anywhere. That time, life, death, they’re beyond our power to comprehend. We can try, but we’ll never get the answer. We can only be ready for the answer. 

I approached the big rocks in the middle of the nothing. Started walking toward them. A few other people may have been there. It was cold and threatening to rain but it didn’t quite. There was no real indication that the rocks were worth a damn. There was a little rope and a little sign so I knew I was in the right place but it was exactly the opposite of the tourist center at the Grand Canyon.

When I was close enough to see the details on the rocks, I began to notice intentional markings. Usually it was dots and lines, just deliberate enough to know it was the work of humans. As I quieted my head and expectations I started seeing a few more, a few more, then a zillion more. Outlines of people and animals all over the place. 

They didn’t aspire to grandeur and weren’t meant to be seen by many people, which didn’t make them feel disappointing, but instead made them feel intimate. They were between 2,500 and 5,000 years old. It gave me pause to think people have been in California that long, that they fished and hunted out here and took little boats out to these rocks to chisel art on them. And here I was, Jesus Christ and a few millennia later, all those people dead, all the people who understood what I was seeing, just staring, trying to make sense of all this design. All these hours spent in a deliberate act of creation. It was unspeakably beautiful and explaining it with words is obscene.

They were annoyingly mysterious too, because it was obvious that all these symbols, the work of so many tired guys on boats, had concrete and often practical meaning. Sure, you can get all mystical and dwell on the assumed ritual elements, but damn it if it didn’t look like there were maps, directions, data, signposts, the specifics just out of reach and permanently lost.

But some sort of communication was happening and I could feel it. The fundamental connection of one human being intercepting a signal from another human being, making one tiny precision cut through the veil of time. It’s not so much what the cut signifies, but that the cut was there at all. 

It’s fall and night is coming earlier and it’s still a billion degrees outside but the autumn thoughts are creeping in anyway. A while back there was this prompt on Twitter. What’s your most woo woo belief? I know. A prompt. Low hanging fruit. But let’s not pretend we always have something better to do. There’s no way. I’ve seen the TV shows you people are watching. 

I thought I didn’t have an answer but then one darted into my head immediately, and I don’t care about coming off cool because you don’t get paid for it. My answer was that ghosts are real, but not in a way we’ll ever understand, and not in a way western religion or storytelling even helps explain. I stand by it. There’s some sort of connective tissue threaded through the entire history of humanity. No idea what it is or how it works. It’s beyond the thing that we are.

I had this dream one night, that my grandpa was unloading his barn and packing it up in his truck. I helped him haul a few boxes and he drove off without saying anything. When I woke up I learned he had just died. Is that the same thing as a ghost? Don’t know. But the feeling was the same one I had seeing those petroglyphs. It was the same connective tissue and that’s all I care about and I don’t need to convince anybody. But I’ll say ghost because that’s only five letters.

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