Tom’s Dream

This was Tom’s dream:

It was an ambitious project, but Talking There and Walking There had gotten all the requisite permissions and even secured a bit of funding for the their most recent endeavor: an entertainment experience unlike any their people had ever seen.

The brothers were not twins but could have been. Walking There was a year and half older than Talking There but since he’d been born, they had never spent ten minutes more than twenty feet apart. Others mostly couldn’t tell them apart: Talking did the talking, Walking did some of the walking but mostly let Talking There be creative director. To be clear Walking There was definitely a big part of this project — really jazzed about the whole thing and even had had some great ideas for the middle panel section. It had been a collaborative process.

The concept, as Talking There would say, was the history and the future. He’d say this with wide arms in front of the elders; past to the left and future to the right as was the convention and probably always has been for some reason buried in our brain stem. A few steps to left would show how The People got to the Very Long Valley, coming back to the right is the Great Hunt of Ten Seasons Ago (almost eleven now) and then, the incursion of the Flat People back a few seasons. To the right, the future, the incredible harvest of the next few seasons, the growth and eventual migration of The People, and something else which Talking There would not yet reveal to anyone but Walking There.

It would be, Talking There would say, the greatest and most important project the tribe would ever undertake. And so it was decided that this Very Long Valley would tell the story of The People. But it would take work. Lots of work. For the greater part of a year, Walking There, Talking There and their handpicked team of the tribe’s greatest artists, best chiselers, and most sagacious historians worked their way painstakingly from one of the valley to other, referring back again and again to the vision of Talking There whose plan seemed to change ever-so-slightly every time he redrew it in the loose gravel that lined the Very Long Valley.

And yet, as the neared the end of the great carving, with history etched now for miles into the rock behind them, the team of dreamers felt a growing, building excitement. The People all felt it too, and some had visited the beginning of the exhibition and returned raving to the others. And finally, after many months, the last design was chiseled in its perfectly pre-ordained location among the crevices and panels of the now-decorated valley, and it was ready.

It took three days to walk the entire valley, making all the stops and short climbs to see each drawing — each event, each birth and death and war and drought and resettlement — in the Very Long Valley. At the debut of the project, a huge feast was thrown and families gathered traveling packs. For a week, a continuous stream of wide-eyed People made their way slowly through the entire story of everyone and everything they had ever known. The spectacle attracted even those from nearby tribes, and for another additional week then the fires stayed lit from the foot to the tail of Very Long Valley, and the flickerings made those pictures dance at dusk and really, as Talking There had predicted, added to the whole experience.

Talking There and Walking There, however, never got to see their work in its glorious completion. They had waited, purposefully, until the crowds had gone and the valley had, after many weeks, returned to its mostly empty state with only a few stragglers camping their way through The People’s history. Setting out from a deserted feastgrounds, they disappeared into the valley to revel in their own triumph, and they were never seen again.

Tom viewed the entire scene from above, knowing that Walking There and Talking There were setting off into oblivion. As they passed the first bend and went out of view, time accelerated. Seasons passed in the valley in microseconds. Thousands of years elapsed as he watched the carefully carven panels fall to pieces in most places, or scribbled over by whoever or whatever came after, or hidden forever by rockfall. An entire history — the great record of The People — would be no more than scattered, pockmarked, washed-out petroglyphs.

Time slowed and an archaic pickup truck traveled alone down the canyon road kicking up a bell curve of dust. The insignia on the doors identified them as some sort of park rangers. The pickup approached an extant, particularly beautiful set of carvings. Two lanky, dusky men clambered out of the vehicle and picked their way up a short embankment to the picture.

“You know Earl, this is what I mean. Whut nature hath wrought, ain’t it? Whut’s wrong with that? Why can’t we just enjoy that for whut it is, don’t have to scratching and marking it all up?”

“Wyatt, you ask a lot of questions you don’t want answers to.”

“Lookit here: bullet marks. Now tell me whut’s the point — the doggamn point! — of shooting a bullet a cliff face! Nobody’s gonna win there! I tell ya.”

“Well Wyatt, judging by these marks,” he brushed his fingers lightly over the chipped surface, “I’d say a shotgun. Inconsistent, so old. Late 1800’s, maybe.”

Crouching down, Wyatt picked out a year scratched into the corner of the face, partially obscured by pile of shattered green glass. “Ah, here, 1878. Told ya.”

“Leggo then!” And Earl and Wyatt sauntered back down to the pickup, slammed the heavy doors. Earl turned the key in the ignition and Tom saw once again time fluttering by at ten times its speed: but backwards this time.

The engine turned over once, Earl turned the key back towards him, and time stopped. The carving had returned to much of its former glory, though the natural ravages of plain old erosion could never have been avoided. They sat in the car in 1878 for a few minutes before a young man on a horse appeared, shotgun oracularly slung across his back.

Wyatt excited the car in a frenzy, “Shoo! Shoo, you! Git on outta here and take your cloppity horse and your damn peashooter with you!”

The young man was terrified, first by the strange automobile and second by the tall man screaming towards him in a dusty blaze. His horse reared; he turned and fled.

Wyatt brushed himself off in futility, the fine sand gathered everywhere and stuck to everything. He walked back to the carving where Earl stood admiring.

“There we go,” said Earl, “right on time.”

And Tom woke up. At breakfast it took all of us twenty minutes to confirm it was the fourth day of our trip while Tom insisted it was the fifth.