by Mike Bendzela
Tending to a partner who manages a chronic illness means I don’t travel much. Luckily, he has been stable for some time now, meaning he continues to jack up portions of the farmhouse to replace rotted sill timbers, lay pine board flooring in the kitchen, and repair chairs, doors, and woodwork throughout the place. Even so, aside from the odd banjo camp or old time music festival, I usually stay at home. That’s fine with me as most of the notable sites in the US — even the world — have become traffic shit-holes anyhow.
What I would most like to do is stand in the presence of old things, especially ancient ones. Granted, living in an 18th century farmhouse on a country road is a one such gift, but there is architecture from earlier periods I would like to experience; also museum exhibits and archeological sites; stupendous paleontological finds and geological formations. It would be nice to stroll through Cahokia, Göbekli Tepe and Jericho; to view in person the existing cave paintings and petroglyphs that have not been closed off to the teeming masses; to smell the fumaroles in the volcanic field of Campi Flegrei and marvel that hundreds of thousands call the place home.†
One may have ersatz experiences of such things on the internet, and with the launching of artificial intelligence, artificial experience will likely be heightened by orders of magnitude, but so what? This is as ephemeral as the fossil energy sources used to conjure it. And the totalitarian implications of such tricks seem reason enough to stay at home, offline, tending one’s flock of actual hens.
Then, on May 11, something remarkable happened, which only struck me as profound in retrospect. Coming after nearly a solid week of rain and fog, a brilliant full moon rose in clear skies over the woods directly beyond an adjoining open field. Said shiny object nested in the top of a huge pine tree nearby while I closed and latched the chicken house door for the night. Meanwhile, the little pond close by and the surrounding hardwood trees virtually shrieked with spring peepers and tree frogs.
I paused for a minute to take in the spectacle. That rising stone was so luminous the field of stars it floated in was reduced to only the most high-magnitude objects, such as Spica and Arcturus. I marked the stark shadows of tree trunks sprawled on the grass and felt the cool, moist air that might be described as buffered by satiny light.
The stimulated amphibians peeped and trilled with fervor, not a single one of them within sight. Their noise was a cacophony, shrill in its overall effect, but still a fitting accompaniment to the soundless and imperceptible flight of the moon through the stars and trees.
I tried to take a short video with my phone, but it turned out to be a dud. The sound of the frogs’ racket was fair, due to the surprising lack of road noise all of a sudden.
Only on my way back to the house did I realize I had just witnessed a most ancient spectacle, available to our species since primordial times. That scene, full moon and stars in pine tree with amphibian accompaniment, predates Göbekli Tepe (± 12,000 years), Chauvet Cave’s lioness paintings (± 36,000 years), and even Campi Flegrei’s caldera (earliest volcanic ash dates to around 109,000 years ago). It predates even us hominins, who have been around for a mere 5 million years.
Full moon and stars with amphibian accompaniment predates the pine tree, which has been around for about 130 million years. Full moon and stars predates the amphibians, who joined in around 370 million years old. Moon has been around for over 4.5 billion years, and who knows about those stars?
Nature, the portal through which we have entered into the domesticated present, forever harbors our wild past. Turning about, we may briefly take stock of what was lost from our animal origins. As poet Walt Whitman says of the other animals,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
How far we have fallen in a few million years! This essay may be filed under the “sweat and whine about their condition” category.
It did not take long for the novel aspects of modern-day life to reassert themselves and ruin my reverie. The rush of traffic on the local road, along with roaring truck engines on a highway a mile away, drowned out the frogs’ voices and shattered the effect. It was as if the light had suddenly gone out.
It’s always a shock for me to realize such disruptions will never cease. The din of civilization is relentless, and there is nothing we can do about it. A core paradox of modern existence is that the benefits of technology come with deplorable costs, benefits such as cell phones to take failed videos of the moon, medical devices to keep one’s partner alive, and computers on which to type online essays. The least of the costs is the obliteration of peace and quiet, the worst the depletion of the materials and energy used to make up and power that technology, decimating the biosphere in the process.
Contemplating all this is rather overwhelming, so it comes as a sort of salve to discover one does not have to leave home to launch oneself into deepest history. It is right here, right now, free for the taking, no technological interventions needed. Incarnations of ancient things exist all around us, like remembered ancestors.
†News of Campi Flegrei’s recent activity came as I was writing this.
Image
“Full Moon Crouching In Shadow, 03/14/25”. Photograph by the author.
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