People(s) of the Creek I

Anthropocentrism makes no sense in a centerless world. So why center this post around people? Because our species loves reading about itself -- and  readers are wanted here. 

Evidence of past humans appears all around our farm on Potomac Creek. What people have left behind, I think, is more suggestive of itinerant than of fixed or stable lives. Accepting this human transience nudges us a bit closer towards seeing the Creek on its own terms.

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Of course, itinerant "come heres" still arrive in Stafford County every day. The road in front of the farm was recently widened to handle the rising traffic. That's when my older son discovered this gleaming quartz arrowhead.  He spotted the artifact -- snapped in half, but still finely detailed -- in the bulldozer's scrape. Such artifacts often rise to the surface of local fields and creek beds. Most "arrowheads" like this one are actually knife blades, scrapers, or spear tips, since bow and arrow technology appeared relatively late in Native American history. This broken point, of a type called "notched Kirk," dates back seven to nine thousand years -- at least two millennia before the Great Pyramid of Egypt.  That means the person who knapped it lived here many ages before it became possible to meet a Patawomeck Indian, the Algonquin-speaking tribe present when John Smith arrived in 1608, and after whom the English named the river and its tributary creek. 

It's impossible not to wonder how this point was damaged. In my own childhood, such evocative questions often occupied my mind. Was it snapped in half by a modern bulldozer, or perhaps a 19th century farmer's plow? Did it break against a prehistoric tree trunk? On the heavy jawbone of a long-extinct animal?  And, of course: Was it used to murder someone -- maybe an unwelcome "come here?"

Another picture, this time of the farm's red barn.  This tall, airy structure overlooks the cattails of the north pasture, a wetland-in-the-making. There are goat bones hidden within the thick pasture grasses below.

When our family came here from other places, the barn sheltered an idled wooden oyster boat, remnant of an extinct economy. The barn-boat became our plaything in the Watergate years. The region's public fishing industry collapsed by the early 1960s, and one can still find tins of locally harvested oysters in area antique stores. How did the watermen living here make sense of this loss? Did they stow the boat expecting to return to the river one day? 

This 19th century log cabin stands at the center of the farm. It provides another portal to the human past of this property and of Virginia itself. Local lore says the cabin was built in the 1820s. We found only hay and a mummified chicken inside it in 1972. After some renovation, in the 1980s my newlywed brother brought his Indian wife to the cabin to live, soon to be joined by their child. All three have since moved on to Montreal, Zagreb, and elsewhere. Eventually, my German aunt took up residence. She wrote fiction and died in the cabin in 2006. 

Who laid its sandstone foundation and cut its thick timbers? Was the cabin an innocuous corn crib, or a home to enslaved Africans? People tell us different stories. The only way to know, a local historic preservationist recently told me, is to cut through the fifty-year-old drywall and peer into its hidden architecture.

One more picture. A grave marker in the orchard, recently restored by the family that lived here before us. Was he a carpetbagger? That "Peleg" appears to mean "little river" or "brook" in Hebrew is, one has to think, playfully coincidental.  Rest in peace, Little River;  I'm glad you fought for the abolitionist side.

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Cemeteries of all kinds abound along Potomac Creek. Despite the prolonged presence of indigenous peoples, the farm's artifacts show that no people have proven to be reliable inhabitants of Potomac Creek. Like many other species, we appear and are apt to vanish. One might argue it's only the Creek itself that confers continuity. I disagree -- but more on that in later posts.

What's unquestionable is that the power of land itself endures, a metaphysical yet hard-wearing artifact of peoples now mineralized in the Creek's muddy bed. In They Called Stafford Home, local historian Jerrilyn Eby writes that every southerner had to learn that "Land could make him rich or it could make him poor, but without land he was nothing." 

The innumerable men, women, and children who've known this Creek all left traces -- however faint -- of their existence, as we do now. Potomac Creek is our mystical timeshare. Does that make one "people" of those who have passed through this place? Probably not. But these artifacts clearly tell us that we are never here without each other.

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Coda: A few years ago, my youngest (then 9-years-old) went through a flint-knapping stage. He became quite good at it. Can you tell which point below he made in 2019, and which is an actual artifact found on Potomac Creek? 

If I've identified the original correctly, it's nine to ten thousand years old. Of course, much more than millennia separate my son and the indigenous person who knapped it. But these two artisans have shared this knowledge, creating a fellowship across time every bit as real as the cabin or barn we still share with peoples of the Creek.