Cherry Potts
You stand at the crossroads, or what was once a crossroads, before roads got too dangerous and complicated to cross, requiring roundabouts and underpasses, and you step aside, overwhelmed by the lights and the arrows and the sheer number of speeding metal death machines and retreat to the wall that overlooks the river. You stare at the grey metallic water, splashing gently in the wake of some boat that is already out of sight, beyond the bridge that you could walk across if you wanted to cross the river, but you don’t want to cross, you want to get across the mouth of the bridge and continue beside the water. There is an underpass somewhere, but you have yet to find it.
Somewhere, in the silt and debris at the edge of this river there is the print of the foot of the first woman who stepped into the waters and judged it shallow enough to ford, long before the river was squashed into this narrow, deep, rapid course. And somewhere, in crossing the broad shallows, she looked up and caught the glimmer of the tributary stream, and the sweet fold of the hill, the shaded slope and the open beach ahead, and thought – this is my place.
If you stand on this bridge at dawn on the longest day of the year when sun up and morning chorus and a soft breeze can still filter through the smog and noise, when the passing cars are rare and the hum of air-conditioning is momentarily unnecessary, you can catch what she saw.
You can imagine her putting down her walking staff and gathering her family, her clan, her tribe, and saying here is our place. No need to wander further, here is beauty, here is everything we need, here is defensible.
And because they stopped, and put up fences and then buildings, others, passing, also stopped. A pause to talk became a stop to trade, became a plan to stay with friends, became never leaving, building – and sometimes that defensible was put to the test as others came to steal and rape and destroy. Through those meetings and destructions and rebuildings their place grew, and over millennia it grew to this, the crossroads where you paused a year ago, a decade ago, longer, and thought, my place, and put down your walking staff and stopped to talk, to trade, gradually gathering a family, a clan, a tribe, saying our place, and building, and welcoming strangers like me, willing to share.
And that defensible sticks in our craw, and we regret that we still think it, all these millennia later. Sometimes you forget that you have not always lived here. Sometimes you need to step into the footprint of the first woman, and see this place, our place, anew, and put aside defence for the openness she saw on that opposite shore.