Suburbs of Scutchalo (eBook)

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Eastern Siberia

Near twelve thousand years ago

It happens more often than they care to admit, probably.

A great many old people, seasoned old people, tell stories of setting off for someplace noteworthy, only to come up against an unkind set of hiccups doing its best to choke off momentum. Listeners almost feel the letdown that comes with it. They know a sudden case of jerks and spasms around a supper table can be entertaining, even approaching hilarity in the right company. Playfulness is lost when people of a forward-thinking spirit, our guiding lights, make ready to move ahead toward a few goals and are stymied by barrages of hitches, glitches, and setbacks. Everything turns into a roadblock. Let hiccups drive decision-making and we may as well plant the goodbye kiss full across the lips of evolution. We’ll stand flat-footed and watch one last fleeting glimpse of progress fade in distant sunset behind a bank of mastodon compost.

A little time spent in the study of old experts lets us come away scientifically satisfied that humans have long enjoyed the capacity to alter the natural world, to bend it to our needs. Bits and pieces of expanded history pass down told and retold through the ages, well-polished. They mostly focus on stories of opportunity, of how sweet opportunity creates and throws open one of its highly regarded windows and takes three generous steps to the side. Offered that way, without obstacles, the gateway to progress stands ready for dedicated trendsetters to dash about visiting—and altering.

We can’t help but see it as the way things get done.

News of an upcoming move forward arrives all syrupy and sweet, so full and gushy with promise, until the big moment arrives. The crucial call goes out for travelers to pick up the pace, and we come upon them locked in place, unmoving, lost in consideration of the spaces between their toes? Nothing so disappoints, so unravels perfectly charming prospects as last-minute fits of wavering.

This is where searching out prehistory’s cave-daubed depictions of disappointment proves wise. Experts first encounter cave art and shortly announce, “Language doesn’t fossilize. Therefore, we must assume these paintings are abstract symbols of tongues speaking and passing on the day-to-day activities of a frosty world.” Look closely and we might spot ourselves, seated in an abstraction of a comfortable rocking chair on the abstraction of the front porch, waiting, and symbolized as verging on totally flustered. Leaning, expectant, in mostly red and black and smoke-streaked hues, we appear to watch the rest of our delegation collected down the street, earnestly attempting a ride on both sides of a predominantly red and black fence. Faces turned, leaning, expectant, they clearly symbolize wondering when we’ll be along to Grand Marshal the parade.

Reach back and imagine ourselves dropped into such confusion. Take a seat at the kitchen table with a long-ago family we’ve come to know as Clovis, called together over coffee mug-high stacks of glossy travel brochures.

Supper dishes are cleared. Emotions take a roller-coaster ride. Debate bravely carries to the vote.

The decision, unanimous, comes fast and firm. Nothing will do but to pack the Winnebago and go spend the winter in Florida. Leave off the heart-ripping backward glances. Enough with endless getting ready to get ready. Just pile on board and quit this ice, this infernal, stygian ice.

We need to see this today as the sort of backdrop confirmed by incisive assistant professors sifting, cataloguing, and interpreting petrified contents of trash barrels, dumpsters, and privies unearthed at scenic overlooks and fast-food stops all along ancient excursion routes. Evidence leans toward a series of weather episodes furnishing an opportunity for long overdue family getaways. Fun-seekers and pioneers alike, eager to try something fresh, will seize the moment and race ahead.

On the way out, we’ll have them stop long enough to pay attention to a few windows and step away reminded how those handiworks have long been celebrated for sliding both ways. Then take notice of extra traffic lanes, so long ago added to the span across a congested Bering Strait, fast melting back below water. The best our vacationers can do is waste no time getting there. It becomes increasingly clear this balmy phase may well douse any likelihood of a vacant motel room on the wide beaches beyond those ranks of eye-catching Florida hills stretching away to the south of Panama City and Pensacola.

They’ll get underway listening to plenty of warnings, free and high-volume. Stay watchful for hurdles, they’ll hear, plenty of hurdles. There are tolls to pay, and no tow-truck stands by to yank them from the ditch. There’s no map to argue over, no signpost to misread, and no pesky rumble strip, sleepy-bumps, rough at the edge of the road. Those experienced old naysayers may well know of what they speak. Travelers mustn’t count on anything for reinforcement beyond the warm taste of hope, and a refusal to frolic in this winter wonderland another forty thousand years.

For sure, no one needs to remind them of the headaches involved in road trips with extended family. We already know what mixing sisters and brothers with in-laws from both sides brings. We’ve seen it. Most likely we’ve done it. Throw in assorted hunting dogs, nieces, nephews, a neighbor or two, an occasional overcharged ego, and beg for complications.

The only undeniable certainty is that nobody will make it across the street, let alone anywhere else, by themselves.

And headstrong men entertain no doubts about who leads the group, but nonetheless insist she hear their every opinion, which irks her no end, before they cave to the inevitable. We’ll assume Mama Clovis, if things go sour and come apart all around her, will feel no compunction at setting down her suitcase—and her foot—and making the tough calls.

Keep in mind that what little we know of her travels is open only to speculation, to educated head-scratching. Underway, and solidly absorbed in the craze for conservation and recycling sweeping her day, she’ll play stingy with clues. The bulk of their furnishings, be it fad or fashion, are contrived of throwaway material and leave no evidence of the family’s visit. Familiar shoebox collections of ticket stubs, catchy postcards, and commemorative cups directing light toward side sprees at tourist traps and theme parks are missing.

Come down to it and have it pointed out how educated head-scratching always falls back to the dispensing of varying sizes and shapes of heads. Differing styles of scratching turn up wildly disparate assumptions. The only harmony we find among scholars is in their agreement that bands of gutsy rovers decide to see what’s over the next, and the next, and then another hill, and end up touring most of the North and South American continents at the very tail end of our Last Ice Age.

Only as we occasion to pick up a fossilized bone, nicked and uniquely marked by a splinter of altered flint, do we recognize her signature on a dinner receipt. Come across an intricately knapped piece of chert, or of obsidian, that blackish volcanic glass, broken, or dulled and re-sharpened to exhaustion. Found thrown aside in a pile of bones, it suggests a credit card, an expiration date, and a replacement with the latest upgrade. Shifting constantly from meal to meal, bone pile to bone pile, berry patch to plum thicket, her clan pauses only long enough to convert food wrappers into portable shelter and warm clothing—with no thought to hanging curtains. Backtracking to last night’s supper table and stale leftovers, when cuisine hereabout runs faster than her buying power, is never out of the question. Any way we look at it, headway can only prove hard-gained and miserably slow. They knew, going in, it could be more than a little discouraging.

Delay follows delay and builds on itself.

No matter their excuse, forgivable or otherwise, a potential Mississippi River crossing just below today’s Vicksburg, Mississippi, isn’t in sight until yet another vacation season is all but gone.

North to south, for hundreds of miles, the river at hand is a series of sediment-burdened channels separated by shifting islands of gravel, chocolate pudding-ooze, and sequoia-sized driftwood. On steadily rising temperatures, the leading edge of a continent-crushing glacial wall is drawing back. Rushes of chilly meltwater offer anything not pegged solidly down an abrupt departure for the Gulf of Mexico.

Rafts of ice, like so many racing dump-trucks, haul rocks, gravel, and sand for delivery to a warm eddy. Masses of floating waste, punctuated here and there by sets of skyward reaching hooves, tusks, or a bloated belly, throw up caution signs and flashing lights. She sees no sense risking anyone being sucked under on a mud-flat or becoming a bobbing pair of legs in a logjam. Mother Clovis finds no alternative but to lobby for one of her votes. She pulls aside at a Louisiana RV plaza, with adjacent well-stocked food court, to settle in while winter pauses the melt, slows the current, and freezes them a bridge.

Biding time, she’ll study distant yellowish cliffs and wooded dunes where daybreak forces its way through a pinhole and pinkens the sky. They’re different somehow....