The World according to me, a hillbilly, includes a perspective liberated from fact, being that fact is stranger than fiction in that the facts are in a steady state of flex (fact changes all the time) and so why bother. Besides, hillbillys revel in stretching the truth (that’s called story telling); don’t make the mistake of taking all this to be truth especially when gambling, lest your pistol is securely tucked under the tavern table.
The original hillbilly roamed these parts some 15,500yrs ago, (some say as much as twenty thousand years ago) there is little consensus since the “facts” keep changing. Just as continental drift and tectonics created the Appalachian range some 4.5million years ago, or a billion or more or less depending on your sources, and the last ice age occurred around 11,000yrs ago, or between 10 and 12 thousand years more or less, (or somewhere in that range).
Until about 1970 or so the accepted earliest human habitation on this particular continent began around 11,000yrs ago (thereabouts) coinciding closely with the ice age - the Clovis horizon. After 1970 or so it became the pre-Clovis period setting the date back a couple/few thousand years. And where exactly folks migrated from and how we got here is hotly debated. A benevolent creator responsible for all matters in a brief and certain history would be much less complicated and more comforting.
We are no less here.
Geology is a wonderful science filled with wonderful words and grandfather to geography, also filled with wonderful words and names for the geological features, (mother to us all) and language keeps everything neat and tidy.
In terms of a truth - we’re on very unstable ground. But it’s fun to explore.
Science could be described as a search for truth based on facts arrived at through objectivity and experimentation, questioning everything along the way, a contradiction of terms. Repeatability is the measure of fact when in reality the only repeatability lies in change. Contradiction is the rule and the fact (and necessary).
Freedom from the constraints of truth is a freedom much older than science, luxury for the ancient mind and creation writ large.
To name a thing is to make it so.
Let’s go on with it. Playing in a timeless space is freedom, that my dear reader, is very near a truth.
Growing up near the southern-most reaches of the last ice age had some endearing qualities: the Mastodon, Woolly Mammoth, Saber Tooth among a plethora of megafauna who ranged here for eons until their extinction, (no one knows why) not least of which include the Great Sloths who roamed and of whom Ai is the namesake. Yes, the real hillbilly hunted and thrived here at the margins of the Great Ice and among the valleys and grasslands of a shrinking mountain range once greater than the Himalayas. Pre-Clovis and eventual innovator of the fluted Clovis point, the holy grail of projectiles and the reason we are here still. That is our legacy, if any at all. To Pierce.
Among the fields and farms of my youth were everywhere smooth, rounded gargantuan boulders called erratics, since they were quite simply, erratic. Having walked among the boundaries of an ice age, here in Pennsylvania we have everyone’s rocks, from the Northern Pole to the Arctic Tundra, Canada to The Hudson, Great Lakes Region and of course Appalachia; all deposited by the ice flowing south then receding north again. Great monoliths of stone rolled and polished under millions of tons of pressure then finally dropped willy nilly on the ground to spawn the imagination with figures of monstrous dinosaurs and shadowy mammals; we lived among the Pleistocene, 2.6 million years of history. Speak to anyone walking these ridges and they will speak only of stone. Dig yourself a cellar and you will likely encounter a giant immoveable beast of your very own, nestled quietly beneath the surface.
Twenty thousand years of trial and error later, where will your tools be? Will your smart phone be unearthed eons from now, as useful as the day it was made?
All the living creatures here are carbon based, if there is a truth it lies in the stone, and The Stoneman holds his secrets close. But his language is all around you.
Pictured above is a willow leaf, inspiration for the greatest tool/weapon ever created by the hand of man.
It should be said that all these souls who know their primitive nature are free from the bonds of time. To imagine they will suddenly trend toward conformity is below commentary.