Abandoned Homes: A Triptych

The government rests on the land. Literally of course, but also figuratively.

 
1. Rise

Abandoned houses everywhere.

The first house sits tucked into a cliff of sandstone, the charred ledge above acting as its roof, the one below its floor. It is more a complex than a single home, but the dwelling I am most focused on hides in the shade in the deepest part of the cave. The walls are made from the same material as the cliff they sit tucked into. It is hard not to compare this ancient building to the still-active avian homes that cling to the ceiling above: a small colony of cliff swallows. Organic. That’s the word. Though to the naked eye the rooms appear empty, the descendants of the people who lived here don’t like to think of these as ruins, and you can see why. It doesn’t require much imagination to picture living here. You can remember as much as picture it. Like something from a dream that slips away as you wake. But while their spirits may linger, people no longer inhabit this place, not for, what, perhaps 700 years, and it’s not just a few people who have left. A vast civilization, including one of the first great civilizations in North America, has disappeared from this part of the world. The terms and theories about this disappearance have changed in recent years, along with so much else, but the fact, and the mystery, remains.

About 2,000 miles to the east—2,134, to be exact— more abandoned homes, a row of them out on the wet sand of low tide, looking like they are intent on migrating out to sea. Up on stilted long legs, the house furthest out peers down into the water like a great blue heron. But it is a wing-clipped heron. The western wall is torn off and you can see a toilet and a still-made bed, as if, despite the disaster, the owners had left suddenly and might be coming back any minute. They won’t. Yellow warning tape flies off the house like the tail of a kite. The house is not where it should be; that is obvious. If you are old enough, something about it might remind you of a scene from a movie, the original Planet of the Apes, when the hero, played by Charlton Heston, comes upon the Statue of Liberty, buried up to her torso in sand. It is that incongruous, water lapping the house’s legs.

Finally, another empty home. This one much larger than the others.

Unlike the cliff house, it would not require carbon dating to discover when this house, now surrounded with emergency fencing and concertina wire, was built. That would be beginning in the year 1800. Like the cliff dwelling, it sits upon a hill, though the land it looms above is not dry and arid but naturally wet and swampy. Located 359 miles due north of the heron house, it is massive, chalk white, and domed, modelled on the architecture of another lost civilization.

For over 200 years this house has been the center of activity of the government that makes the laws for the land that the other houses occupy. But now it too is empty. No one home. Back in the desert the house with the cliff swallows assumed a naturally defensive posture, backed as it was into a sandstone wall. This house, too, is playing defense, though in an excessive fashion that suggests impending disaster. Entire city blocks around the house are encircled by emergency fencing topped with razor-sharp wire that glimmers in the sun. Hundreds of cops and soldiers stand guard. They do not smile. Army guards, toting machine guns, stroll behind the fencing. There is no way to get close to the protected house. All it needs is a moat.

These abandoned houses, woven together, tell a story. It is a story that is unlikely to have a happy ending. In fact, it is a story about endings. It is also a story, despite the one ancient home, for our time. And finally it is a story, for me at least, about language.

It is a month after the second impeachment trial as I stroll down the National Mall.

Capitol Hill, which shares its name with the building that rests on it, was once the geographic center of Washington, D.C. That made it the perfect place to build a structure where the legislative branch of the United States government, the Senate and the House of Representatives, would meet. In its first incarnation, the building lasted just 14 years before being destroyed in the burning of Washington by the British in the War of 1812, an act of retribution for the burning of both the governor’s house and the legislative hall in the Canadian capital of York (which had once been, and would later again be, Toronto). Only after it was rebuilt was its distinctive dome added.

It is March 13, 2021, when I walk up the National Mall toward the abandoned house on the hill. Approaching the building from the west end of the National Mall, I can maintain the illusion of normalcy for a while. At first I don’t see all the wire and walls and guns. The sun beams down on my face and people along the mall eat their lunches, throw Frisbees, read, talk, as if the world is still carrying on as it always has. My walk began at the mall’s other end, where I read Lincoln’s words carved into the walls, and now I’ve got a good sweat going. In my back pocket is a cheap paperback edition of Common Sense by Thomas Paine. I have been fairly obsessed with Paine since seeing the hearings in January. He has helped me to understand how language led this country, not a country yet, through a time of great crisis. I’ve come to think that Paine might come in handy at this moment. That we can learn something from him.

In the process of reading biographies about the man and reading his own work, I have so far learned that Thomas Paine was the bestselling writer of his century, the coiner of the name “The United States of America,” a founder of the French Revolution as well as the American, and the man who would also eventually give the time he lived in its name: “The Age of Reason.” Paine was a self-taught Englishman who hadn’t done much of anything before he wrote the pamphlet that set the colonies on fire. That pamphlet, a complex political document told in clear, simple, often-exhilarating prose, was more than any other written work the spark for the American Revolution. Published in late 1775, Common Sense sold out in two weeks, and soon there were over 150,000 copies in circulation. The colonies were abuzz with it. The pamphlet was a fierce denunciation not just of monarchs and the monarchy, but of the possibility of future despots and demagogues and the mobs they might inspire. Paine was not alone in his thinking; the framers of the Constitution all wrote defensively, anticipating the actions that might bring down the new and fragile political system known as democracy.

It is a month after the second impeachment trial as I stroll down the Mall. Yesterday I flew up to D.C., my first time in an airport since the pandemic struck. The combination of the 9/11 security measures, two decades old now, and the wearing of masks and enforced social distancing, lent a dystopian, nearly paranoid feel to the flight. Suffice it to say that breathing in your own stink from a mask while crowded shoulder to shoulder next to people you have been told you should keep your distance from does not make for a relaxed excursion. After I unpacked in my hotel, I walked out into the empty streets of a city on lockdown. My view of the heavily guarded White House was from almost as far back as the St. John’s Church, and all of Lafayette Park was walled off, as it has been since the summer protests. I tried but could not get anywhere close to the Ellipse, the park directly behind the White House where the former president had roused the rabble. And yet seeing this was not really preparation for the many square miles fenced off around the Capitol itself, and the army guards, toting machine guns, strolling behind the fencing.

But “today” is a flicker in time and there is no place where that is more apparent than right here where a thousand years is a dusty second.

Smells of piñon and sage. Gnarled junipers like arthritic hands. Aridity that sucks moisture out of your every pore.

My regular beat is an environmental one. There is plenty of doom to be found there, and I will get to that soon enough. But I have been thinking lately how inextricably tied the crisis of the land is to the crisis of government. This is nothing new in human history. Wandering the American Southwest in recent years, I can’t help but feel I am moving through not just an ancient past, but a possible future. This is not only due to the record heat, historic drought, and rampant fires. It is due to the gone civilization that is always present here.

It is already midday as I approach the ancient home, and to get there I must descend a canyon before ascending. Down the dusty trail marked by twisting junipers with fat blue berries, sage growing from the skull of a rock, prickly pear but also, as a reminder that I am not far from town, an abandoned shopping cart and broken Bud Light bottles on the ground, their shards mixed with the blue of the fallen juniper berries. Further down I enter a world of Gambel oak and cottonwood, and a trickle of reddish water that leads from here to Cottonwood Wash. As I climb I look up at the ancient dwelling, shaded under its ledge— for what, 2,000 years?—and I am greedy for that shade. It is not a long hike but I sweat hard in the July sun as I climb. Once there I head to the back of the cave. The coolest spot.

I am not alone. My guide on past trips, my companion on this one, Louis Williams is part Sioux and part Navajo. Louis has come to show me a place where other humans lived for a millennium. An archaeologist recently explained to me why the terms ruins and abandoned are no longer in favor here. The Native argument is that the spirit of the ancestors still dwells in these places. The argument of the archaeologist I spoke with was similar but more practical. The Ancient Puebloan people, who occupied this landscape beginning over 3,000 years ago, were a people on the move, and they would often leave their homes behind. But just as often they, or their ancestors, or other people, came back, sometimes hundreds of years later, adding a new layer of settlement atop the previous one. That is why the term depopulated is preferred to abandoned, the latter implying the people were gone forever. At first I questioned this but now I question my questioning. Is it so beyond belief that people will once again take up shelter in the safety of these cliffs? If they did it would look, with a long enough perspective, like just another gap between occupations.

Not long ago we would have called the people who lived here Anasazi, a Navajo name. The term is not acceptable today, which makes sense. But “today” is a flicker in time and there is no place where that is more apparent than right here where a thousand years is a dusty second.

Likely whatever I call these people may no longer be acceptable when you read this. But I will say this with some confidence: in this place that we now call Five Kivas, and behind these walls of red stone, humans lived and no longer live.

“Where exactly did they go, David?” Louis asks and his words echo in the cave.

For him at least it is not an entirely academic question.

The seas are rising you idiots. Retreat.

I live far from the desert on the edge of water and land in a region called the American Southeast. The air is different here, thicker, wetter, but we also have our share of empty homes. Not far north of my home is an island called Topsail, which is pronounced Topsil’. I travel there from time to time to take stock of the rising sea.

On Topsail I have seen an entire row of houses that looks like it has grown sick of land and begun a single-minded migration seaward. The sheer incongruity of those water houses is startling, and maybe a little thrilling. Walking over the sand toward and then under the buildings you get a sense of something massively out of place. Something awry.

I first traveled to Topsail with Orrin Pilkey, the retired Duke professor whom I have become friends with since landing in the South. The first article I read about Orrin, before I even met him, described how he had thundered his message of sea level rise at the citizens of Topsail. During a town meeting he outlined the three basic choices for any beach community with eroding beaches (which is to say almost all beach communities) as being 1) Arming the beaches with seawalls and metal groins or jetties; 2) Dumping more sand on the beach; or, 3) Relocating the houses, that is, retreating. Orrin quickly made it clear what he thought of the first two options, which wasn’t much. According to him, seawalls, jetties, and groins didn’t work, ultimately destroying beaches, and so-called nourishment was equally ineffective, depending on hard-to-find, high-quality sand.

“I don’t believe your beach has a chance of lasting,” he said to the homeowners.

Orrin admitted that this was just his opinion, but then couldn’t help but add one more thing. “My opinion is better than any mathematical model.”

Reading about that meeting was enough to get me to pick up the phone and call Orrin. To my surprise I got right through without any machines interfering or the usual elaborate exchange of messages.

“Orrin Pilkey, world famous geologist,” he answered.

Though he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, he was generous with his time. We talked for close to an hour. Before we hung up, he invited me to drive up and continue our conversation at Duke.

Two weeks later he greeted me in his office in the Old Chemistry Building on the Duke campus. Orrin was bearded—a thick Santa Claus–style beard and moustache—and while he was short his stoutness made him appear strong and bearish. As time went by I would stop noticing his lack of height because his personality was so large. He had a deep, gruff voice and he liked to talk. We hit it off immediately.

Over the next 15 years we would take a series of trips to the Outer Banks, the Jersey Shore and, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, to New York City. He laughed a lot, despite the whole impending doom thing. And throughout it all he repeated the same message with the consistency and power of a battering ram. The seas are rising you idiots. Retreat.

The founders were aware, in ways we are not, of just how fragile a thing democracy is.

Sun glistens off the spiraling concertina wire atop the barricades as I approach the Capitol building.

I am in D.C. on other business, but what I really hoped to do while here was visit with Jamie Raskin. Today I learned, however, that he, like a lot of us, is working from home, and that the recently ransacked Capitol building is mostly empty. Earlier today he was gracious enough to speak to me on the phone, despite, well despite everything. Back during the first week of January, only two months ago, the news came that Jamie’s son Tommy had taken his own life. Tommy, who had been named after Thomas Paine, was only 25. He was buried on January 5. The next day the insurrectionists broke into the Capitol. Not much later Jamie was leading the impeachment trial.

I met Jamie when we were college freshmen in 1979. We were acquaintances, not friends. But in 2018 while working on a book about the conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, I sent him an email asking if I could stop by his congressional office in D.C. Jamie represented a district in Maryland that bordered Rock Creek Park, where Roosevelt liked to hike and swim while president, and I later learned that Jamie sometimes met his constituents at Rock Creek or nearby Sligo Creek. I would have regretted not choosing to meet outdoors if I had not gotten such a thrill out of being so close to the halls of Congress. I had never been to the Capitol offices before and I had never felt closer to what had been a formerly abstract notion, that of the U.S. government, than while sitting in his office. At the time, with the Democrats in the minority, Jamie felt on the fringes of government and clearly longed for more action. Little did he know.

This morning, when we spoke on the phone, our first subject wasn’t the fall of democracy or the prescience of the founders, but sleep.

Or rather the lack thereof.

“I look back on pictures of that week and I look like a zombie,” he said.

So how had he stayed so focused and seemingly alert during the hearings?

“Anger was part of it. We were all driven by passion and anger about January 6. We all could have died. Even Lindsey Graham said that before he flipped back to Trump. And there was anger at our colleagues too. That they could put the worship of Trump above their own lives and above the lives of the staff and all the people who work at the Capitol.”

By the time of my stroll down the National Mall some are already dismissing the notion that we almost lost our democracy as farfetched. Jamie Raskin is not one of those.

If Donald Trump had succeeded in overturning the election, our downfall would have happened almost exactly the way our founders feared it would. Luckily, because of their fear of this occurring, they wrote a document for the future, a tool that we could use in just such an instance. A kind of time machine fire extinguisher that said “Break in Case of Emergency” on its casing. Short of mentioning Donald Trump by name, they laid out exactly what happened on January 6, 2021.

Our founders, including Thomas Paine, were writers. The documents that guide us are part legalese, part literature. Luckily what a group of revolutionaries thought and then wrote nearly two and a half centuries ago still holds up, though this time around just barely. One distilled result of all this writing was the brilliantly defensive and anticipatory document we call the Constitution. The founders were aware, in ways we are not, of just how fragile a thing democracy is.

“I’ve got this nervous tic,” Jamie said. “I keep going back and reading The Federalist Papers. I did that as we were getting ready for the hearings. And it amazed me that right there in Federalist 1 Hamilton writes about the danger of demagogues.”

Jamie had quoted that line from Alexander Hamilton on the first day of the hearings: “The greatest danger to republics and the liberties of the people comes from political opportunists who began as demagogues and end as tyrants, and the people who are encouraged to follow them.”

The best years here must have been when the creek ran strong. That would not be this year.

We are standing up in the alcove now, among kivas that rise off the rock floor. The kivas form perfect circles in the dust. We face east, toward the canyon we just climbed out of and toward the sun. The people who lived here got to see the sun rise every day but also must have been relieved to have it blocked in the deep heat of desert afternoons. The edge that the kivas sit on juts out 60 feet from the cave in the back, putting anyone standing on its edge at eye level with the tops of the vibrant green cottonwoods that grow down in the wash. Westwater Creek, mostly dry now, sometimes runs down below.

It was and is a fine defensive position. You could and can see anyone approaching from the opposite ridge.

There are active homes below the overhang as well. Clay nests of swallows are plastered to the cave roof, their black entrance holes giving them the look of musical instruments—tiny bagpipes, perhaps. I count 24 of these homes. They fit into place perfectly, as do the human dwellings. This is not just a nature writer’s sentiment or a New Age sentiment or even a Native one. It is a human one. You can’t help but look at this place and say, “It fits.” It is of the place quite literally, made of the same stone. You could almost believe it grew here if it were not so clearly the work of artists and artisans.

This site is, by local standards, unspectacular. Even a millennium ago, Five Kivas was in the boonies. Today it sits right outside of the town of Blanding, by the juvenile prison, and perhaps a 20-minute drive from Louis’s house. Though it was likely first occupied a couple thousand years ago, it is so close to town that when he was growing up it became a playground for local kids in the summer and was lit up by the pulsing runway lights of the nearby airfield, leading them to name it “The Devil’s Heartbeat.”

Near the back of the cave is evidence of this more recent occupation. It isn’t just rock art you discover if you explore the Southwest but graffiti. We all want to make our mark. Written and even carved into the walls of Five Kivas you can find: Justin + Dianne and Pat Harnon Loves Coco. And back deep below the fire-charred roof deep in the cave, Frank, in an attempt at immortality, has chiseled his name.

When I ask Louis if he has been here before he says: “Nope. Like you, I’m exploring.”

This speaks not to a lack of awareness of his neighborhood but to the fact that in the area known as Bears Ears, just to our west, more than 120,000 ancient sites have been discovered. This is a startling thing to a born Easterner like me: sometimes you practically stumble across kivas and granaries and whole villages as you wander the desert.

And in a way the very commonness of these places ties in with a point Louis wants to make.

“This land holds important history,” he tells me. “Tribal elders tell many stories about this place. But not just history. Some see this as a park to visit, but to me it is a living landscape.”

As if to prove his point he picks up a piñon nut.

“One of my favorite foods. Delicious and addictive. You can eat it raw or roast it.”

I nod. A park you can eat.

“I was fortunate to have grandparents who taught me to appreciate the blessings of Mother Earth. My grandmother sang to the plants while she gathered them and sang to the land while she tilled. She taught me a lot.”

Louis walks to the edge of the cliff and points out the features of the place.

“The Abajo mountain waters run down this drainage and eventually into the San Juan Wash. Imagine people being here in, say, 1289, almost 200 years before Columbus, and listening to the ancestors of these swallows and watching the water below. Sitting up here in this alcove protected from the sun.”

The date he throws out is a random one and it is only now, looking back and typing this, that I realize it is smack in the middle of the so-called Great Drought, the megadrought that turned this already dry land to dust. In other words, this land has seen extreme climatic fluctuations before. Here everything hinges on water.

If you were to fly in a plane over the city where I live you would be struck by all the water. Not just the neighboring ocean or the Cape Fear River, which runs past downtown, but the fact that the whole place seems all but saturated, just a few inches above sea level. It isn’t hard to find evidence of climate change, and for some we are the poster child of global warming in the United States. But not for me. While that may be true in the near future, at this time we can’t claim that title. For the moment that belongs to the Desert Southwest, where climate change isn’t just present but has been going on for decades.

William deBuys, one of the most incisive observers of the region, writes in A Great Aridness: “In apocalyptic visions of global climate change, the North American Southwest makes an easy protagonist, the geographical equivalent of a stalled car on the railroad tracks with a speeding train approaching.” There are multiple reasons for this, he tells us, including “catastrophic fires, insect infestations, plant die-off, plant invasion,” but the core of it all is the feature that gives his book its title. I’ll take the word aridity over aridness but the point is dry, dry, dry. Bone dry. Dust dry.

When we leave we descend the same trail we climbed. Dust kicks up. The grit of sand and pebbles below our feet. Flies buzz. Swallows chitter. We reach the mostly dry creek. The best years here must have been when the creek ran strong. That would not be this year.

The latest studies say that the current drought has surpassed the Great Drought and that the current climate is the driest and hottest in 1,200 years. Soil moisture deficit, as gauged by tree rings, surpassed even the civilization-ending droughts that were once held up as unsurpassable. Lack of rain is the obvious culprit but less obvious is that the hotter temperatures increase evaporation, leaving the soil and vegetation desiccated. During the 21st century, average temperatures have been 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were during the half-century before. It has grown worse in the early 2020s with the average temperature rise now 3 degrees higher, and the lack of rainfall still breaking historic records. And of course the obvious differences from megadroughts past: even the most cautious climate scientists, while citing the region’s historic variability, now admit that the drought is human-caused.

Historic dates and statistics can sometimes seem as dry as the Southwestern soil, but consider this: climate has always determined how people live in this region, and something happened between the megadroughts of the year 800 and the Great Drought. A climatic shift to cooler and wetter conditions, which archaeologist R. E. Burrillo calls “the roaring 1000s,” a time of “environmental lushness and plenty not matched before or since in Southwest climate records.” This new climate led not just to the growth of crops but to a complex, vibrant civilization. Where Louis and I walk today was the boonies, but 200 miles to our southeast, in what is now New Mexico, people gathered to create a place that would serve as the region’s capital. The center of that gone world, one of the first great civilizations on this continent and the hub of the desert West for 300 years, was Chaco Canyon.

That is where I am heading next.

The thing is that you can’t bargain with or threaten nature. It is no surprise when homes built so close to the water are wiped out.

In one place not enough water. In another too much.

“The seas are rising,” Orrin Pilkey told me the very first time we drove onto Topsail Island. “The time to abandon the coasts is now.”

Orrin’s predictions for sea level rise were once much higher than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Over the years the panel has been slowly playing catch-up, though they still lag cautiously behind.

“Seven feet,” Orrin said the day we first crossed the bridge to the island. “That’s not a prediction, mind you, but a working figure I’ve now arrived at. If I were in charge of things that is the figure I would use. I would expect the seas to rise seven feet by 2100.”

The problem is that that number, floating off in the abstract future, doesn’t seem to be able to frighten people into action. Which drives Orrin nuts.

“It’s such foolishness. The seas are rising and the storms getting bigger but rather than retreat we draw a line in the sand. The thing is that you can’t bargain with or threaten nature. It is no surprise when homes built so close to the water are wiped out. And then when they are rebuilt they are wiped out again. It is a pattern, and while the pattern is just beginning, all the good science says it will continue. So we keep throwing massive amounts of federal money at the problem, money that allows homeowners to rebuild so that their houses can be knocked down again by the next storm.”

Topsail Island is, in Orrin’s estimation, a particularly egregious example of this foolishness. As we drove along its coast we passed a huge apartment complex teetering over the beach just above the waves, and Orrin grunted as he pointed out the complex’s name: Atlantis.

What if, rather than divine right, societies could be founded on reason, balance, order?

Time repeats itself but we, caught in it, don’t notice. You have to go back to the end to find the beginning. This is how the Navajo people believe you should tell a story:

 

Start with the outer ring.

These days the past bumps into the present, knocking it like a cue ball into the future. Both the building and the name Capitol were conscious historical echoes. Even the architectural style is an echo, right there in the name: neoclassic. Thomas Jefferson, who had as much influence as anyone in designing the building that would hold the government’s legislative branch, believed that Roman architecture would set the right tone for the fledgling democracy and that the Capitol’s design should emulate “one of the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years.” Jefferson was also the one who coined the name “Capitol,” which was a word that, until then, did not refer to buildings housing the members of a government.

The word, like so much in the young city, was a reference to an ancient government, one that rose to prominence almost 2,000 years before. When Jefferson created this new name he did so instinctively, without much forethought: while looking over the original plans for the city, created by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, he crossed out the words “Congress House” and wrote in “Capitol.” In his History of the United States Capitol, William C. Allen writes:

This seemingly minor clarification was significant, for it spoke volumes of the administration’s aspirations for the Capitol and the nation it would serve. Instead of a mere house for Congress, the nation would have a capitol, a place of national purposes, a place with symbolic roots in the Roman Republic and steeped in its virtues of citizenship and ancient examples of self-government. The word was derived from capitolium, literally a city on a hill but more particularly associated with the great Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill.

The building then, like the government it housed, was about the attempt to recover the gone ideals of a dead civilization. Governments grow out of the land, out of climate, but also out of ideas. Of all the biographies and histories I read or skimmed in the month after the impeachment hearings, the one that spoke most directly to my interests was Craig Nelson’s Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations. Nelson sees Paine as an individual but also of his time, a product of the dazzling century before him, a century of social and intellectual change that overturned the verities of the world as it was known.

What had happened during that century? In short, everything. Perhaps its greatest figure, if we can sneak him into an epoch that was mainly 18th century, was Isaac Newton, whose discovery of gravity in the late 17th had repercussions far beyond the scientific. As Nelson writes of that discovery: “In its wake, a great many moderns would no longer believe in an Old Testament God, who was vengeful, mysterious, and inscrutable, but in a Newtonian First Being eminently visible in the glorious benevolence of nature and the astounding beauty of the cosmos.” Deism, the notion that God set the world in motion and then let it be, would rise during the next century and become all but the official religion of America’s founders. And if God could be questioned, why not kings? What if, rather than divine right, societies could be founded on reason, balance, order?

Meanwhile something not yet called science was on the rise, as was literacy, and the outrageous notion that all human beings had a right to pursue happiness. In café and pub society, and in the newly founded clubs that were growing like mushrooms, something called magazines, born of a revolution in printing, were everywhere, and popular essayists like Addison and Steele were giving many, even the previously non-elect, new notions about ways to spend their hours on earth, notions that life could be not just less miserable but elevated. A new idea was in the air, a preposterous idea, that people might be rewarded, not for the caste they were born into, but for doing their work well. This idea, which the founders embraced, was called meritocracy. Add to all this the fact that there was an enlivening new drug on the scene that made everything seem all the more inspiring. Among the fitting names not chosen for the time period was the Age of Coffee.

Nelson’s book does a fine job of describing the craze for all things ancient, particularly all things Roman, among the educated and self-educated of the 18th century, a craze that rose to the level of obsession among the founding fathers. They saw the ancient Romans as models for behavior—Virtue! was the watchword—and increasingly for a representative government. General Washington would be hailed as the American Cato (while also later railed against as the American Caesar).

All this was happening in a new language. The first true English novels were appearing. Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Swift Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, and Samuel Richardson Pamela in 1740. Henry Fielding made his name by mocking the last book on that list with Shamela in 1741 but then turned around and wrote something that reads a whole lot like a modern novel in Joseph Andrews. In early 1759 two remarkably similar works of short fiction appeared, Voltaire’s Candide and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Reading was no longer merely an exercise in deciphering rococo sentences and listening to endless throat clearing, but was full of life, humor, vigor. It would be Thomas Paine’s genius to yoke the ordered arguments of the much-admired Roman orators with this new language of life.

As unique as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense would be, it grew out of this larger literary and intellectual culture. This was a culture that valued complex thought simply and clearly put. The period is known variously as the “long 18th century,” encompassing the decades before and after that century, or the Age of Reason or, somewhat showily, the Enlightenment. Its writers, from Voltaire to Locke to Edmund Burke to Diderot to the Tory Samuel Johnson, were the literary forefathers of the framers of the Constitution—if not always politically then culturally and literarily—the great document in which the era culminated. It is impossible to generalize too much about a period of literature that included writers as diverse as the Marquis de Sade and Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, but the writing was often brisk, learned, energetic, and reasoned, a language that, like society itself, had begun to see more possibilities in the world, and in government, than previously imagined. They overthrew not just governments but the courtly, roundabout style of writing of the previous era. The new writing was utopian in its search for a better way of being on earth but it was also deeply realistic, aware of human foibles and human avarice. This was the language with which writers like Paine, and Jefferson and Franklin and Hamilton, began to imagine a new country and form of government.

The great houses are meticulously aligned with the sun and the moon, the skyline, and each other. Buildings like great sundials and lunar calendars.

Before the fall was the rise.

It is a cold day as I walk amid the great houses with Kialo Winters. Storm clouds bulk up in the west, and big winds and snow are predicted. And of course it is, as ever, dry. Snow, or any precipitation, would be welcome.

For a stretch of close to 300 years the place we are walking through, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, was the capital of this dry world.

“They worshipped the elements,” Kialo is telling me. “The big wind and the little wind that we breathe in, that plants also breathe. They had found a way and they believed the fate of the world depended on that way. They were searching for the center place, and they believed they had found it here in Chaco. In the center place they would marry the celestial to the landscape.”

Kialo Winters is Navajo and Zia Pueblo born, raised on the Navajo Nation reservation east of Chaco Canyon. Louis Williams put me in touch with Kialo, and I am very glad he did. Kialo speaks with the confidence of the teacher he was for over a decade. His knowledge of Chaco runs deep.

He picks up a stick and gets down on one knee and draws a map in the sand. First he makes two crossing lines, signifying the Four Corners. A small rock becomes Chaco, another the western edge of the Grand Canyon, another the Mogollon Rim, another Chimney Rock in Colorado, another Monticello, Utah. He encompasses all these in a great circle.

“One hundred and fifty miles in every direction. The Chaco world was not just the canyon itself. The Chaco world extended out. If an enemy approached the outlying great houses would know.”

Since the landscape here is dry to the point of crumbling, it seems at first a most unlikely place to put your center, but to stand in the middle of Pueblo Bonito, the massive hundred-room complex that once rose four stories high in the middle of the desert, is to know you are in the center of things. The great houses, the kivas, the high walls, the sprawl of the place. I use the present tense because it is still here, dusty but standing.

Most people don’t know that there was another capital in the land we happen to call the United States. True, they may know about Philadelphia, but few know about Chaco. Fewer still have walked among the ancient buildings and know that Pueblo Bonito, the central building of this capital, is comparable in size to the one in D.C.

From A.D. 950 to around 1250 B.C., Chaco Canyon was the center of a web of culture on the Colorado Plateau in the land some now call the Four Corners. Its vast network extended to Mesoamerica, as evinced by the goods that once filled the hundreds of rooms in Pueblo Bonito: turquoise, cocoa beans for chocolate (and caffeine!), and a room just for scarlet macaws. Pueblo Bonito is one of a dozen “great houses” that make up central Chaco, elaborate and meticulously planned structures that contained hundreds of rooms and multiple kivas, deep, circular rooms for ritual and worship and perhaps just plain hanging out. Like another city, Washington, D.C., this one was preplanned. The great houses are meticulously aligned with the sun and the moon, the skyline, and each other. Buildings like great sundials and lunar calendars.

“We are not at the center of the universe as a species,” Kialo continues. “As organisms we are very thin-skinned. Think of it. Our civilization was just brought to its knees by a tiny bug.”

He stresses how important humility, and understanding their place in the larger world of nature and the elements, was to these people. I nod in agreement. And I do agree philosophically and, with regard to the Chacoans, historically.

But I also have to believe something else was at play for a people that created something so obviously monumental, in many senses. There is a touch of arrogance to this center place that might feel a little familiar. It comes out in the origin story that Kialo tells me.

“The ancestors had found a way and the fate of the world depended on humans practicing the way. The ancestors searched for the center place and they found it here. The way would marry the celestial to the landscape and they would do it here. They traveled to many places and said, ‘This is not the place to execute the plan.’ Finally they arrived here and knew it was the place. Chaco was the place. The first people decided to execute their plan here but the apprentices said, ‘We are not sure we can do that here.’ What about food? What about water? The first people said, ‘We’ll figure that out later. We need to build here.’”

It was, in other words, a shining city on a hill. And like other cultures that deem themselves special, their confidence, bordering on arrogance, led to impressive feats.

What he could add, but didn’t, is that he had also become, despite a belief in uncertainty, a professional prophet.

We hope that our words can save us. Maybe sometimes they can. Orrin, for instance, has been shooting off sentences like a Gatling gun for decades now. Dozens of books, all with the same theme, the same warning. The seas are rising.

It would be tempting to say that Orrin’s language is habitually hyperbolic, but time may make a realist of him. He laughs at all the predictions for our future that end after fifty or a hundred years. As if the world will then stop.

He pounds home the same points, hoping someone will listen. He does this relentlessly but with a sense of humor. His is an aggressive and jocular science. He speaks loudly, to paraphrase Thoreau, so that the hard of hearing will understand.

Do they? Do they hear him? Sometimes.

Language, for Orrin, is how he has fought back against the idiocy. Sometimes he uses it as a bludgeon. Whatever works.

He once told me he had two basic goals as a writer: 1. Fame and glory (“Of course”), and 2. Having a cause.

I replied that I was down with the first goal, but not so much with the second. I added, perhaps a little pompously, that my goal as a writer was to present the messy complexity of what I see, not to offer answers.

Orrin didn’t think of writing like that. In fact, he no longer defined himself as a scientist.

“I’m a scientific advocate,” he said.

He pointed to James Hansen, who at the time was the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, as a model. Like Hansen, Orrin believed that it was now the scientist’s responsibility to speak out politically. Scientists weren’t “objective fact machines,” nor should they be. Most scientists, out of fear and caution and careerism, refuse to offer their opinions about the facts they uncover. But who better to offer opinions than those who spend their lives studying a thing?

Over the last 30 years scientists feared making bold statements about the climate crisis: make a big statement and you were sure to be met with scurrilous attacks. Orrin’s role, it seemed to me, was to do just that, be bold, without fear, and part of that role was acting as a sort of human shield for other coastal scientists. As he learned way back when he published his first book, he didn’t mind criticism. He could take it. Laugh it off. Even like it a little bit. He knew there were scientists doing more relevant, and perhaps better, work at the moment. But he was a bit like the coach who deflects criticism from his players.

Scientists are vital of course, and Orrin was a good one, but in this world where scientific truths are often ignored, someone needs to help make them heard. That’s Orrin’s new job. A kind of human bullhorn. It’s a job that requires a quick tongue and a thick skin. The toughness to sit in a town meeting where everyone is readying their torches, and the wit to appear on The Tonight Show if called upon.

What he could add, but didn’t, is that he had also become, despite a belief in uncertainty, a professional prophet.

Orrin is comfortable with his role as doomsayer in a way I am not. Over the last few years, almost despite myself, my subject as a writer has become the end of the world. I’ll admit that sometimes I find it a troubling beat. As a young man, I wanted to write novels and never imagined myself chronicling the story of the rising seas or the overheating earth. Maybe we’ll all eventually be forced out of our comfort zones, though many will cling to what was, an older vision.

I remember a strange moment, a decade old. I was walking out of a class at the southern university where I teach and eavesdropped on two young students having a laugh over the apocalypse. As I walked by the common area that served as a lounge for our students, this was what I heard:

“She really believes that the world’s going to end, that, like, the warming’s going to come and the water’s going to rise and drown us all or something.”

“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”

I was sure the latter comment was accompanied by an eye roll, and as I passed the two young women I indulged in the internal equivalent of the same. The fools! The nonbelievers!

I experienced a moment of happy superiority, followed by the spasm of frustration common to those who believe their great and obvious truths are being ignored, a feeling no doubt experienced by some of my fundamentalist or evangelical students when they regarded me, their godless Yankee professor.

The warming! I would snicker over that phrase later with my wife. But at the same time I thought I understood the young women, at least a little. There was in what they said, if not a grain of truth, then a grain of what is a common attitude toward any prediction of massive global change. This is an attitude, not just of skepticism, but of outright disbelief.

This is the way the world is, we think, the world we know, and this is the way the world will stay.

To say that most of us are a sort of climate change skeptic is not to say that most of us doubt the work of science. What we are perhaps truly doubtful of is the ability of our species to predict the future.

True skepticism, after all, is the bread and butter of both Orrin’s profession and mine. Scientist and essayist.

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with: How to reconcile apocalypticism with skepticism?

From the beginning the language of liberty was the language of struggle. It was never going to be easy to keep the flame alive.

There is a sort of craving that you don’t know exists until it is sated, one where you are not quite aware of what you needed. I hadn’t understood, until that moment back in the second impeachment hearings in February, how hungry I was for sentences. Balanced sentences, packed sentences, sentences spoken by someone who wasn’t ashamed of having read a book every now and then, sentences, though it didn’t occur to me immediately, like those written by the founders of this country.

It might have started when he quoted Voltaire. Or maybe Thomas Paine. Not the famous “summer soldier” speech that he concluded with, but an earlier mention, one that I haven’t yet found in the congressional transcripts, but that I’m sure is there. It wasn’t so much that he was referencing Enlightenment thinkers—that’s a fairly pat move for politicians—but how he did it. He didn’t appear to be reading the quotations off a teleprompter, but rather seemed to be summoning them from memory for the occasion, for the moment, and did so casually, offhandedly, and with a deep familiarity with the words, just like the college professor he had been for a quarter century. It felt like what it was: an intelligent person talking to us like we were intelligent people.

And here is what I felt, watching Jamie Raskin at home on my TV: a profound sense of relief. Not that I thought that our fractured country would suddenly be healed or that the Republican senators would actually vote their consciences. No, I wasn’t delusional; that is not what left me feeling relieved. It was the words themselves. The sentences. I realized how hungry I had been during the Trump years, starved really, for balanced sentences and distilled thought. Not grunts and groans and bullying repetition and ad hominem attacks but well-crafted phrases and seamless references to, and quoting of, thinkers from a time before ours, thinkers who had created this country and who it turned out had handed down the exact tools we needed at the moment.

In that instant I saw the impeachment hearings in a new way. Not just as a response to an attack on the Capitol, or even an attack on the Constitution, the very document that was meant to guide the January 6 confirmation of the Electoral College vote. As Jamie Raskin and his team made clear, it had also been an attack on the ideals, and thoughts, of the founding fathers, who feared nothing more than a mob led by a demagogue, a new self-proclaimed king. But it was also, perhaps less obviously, an attack on language itself. On the words and sentences that the founders set down almost two and a half centuries ago, words and sentences that reflected the Enlightenment values of those who wrote them, words and sentences that were meant to light the way of those of us who came after.

From the beginning the language of liberty was the language of struggle. It was never going to be easy to keep the flame alive. Fittingly, Jamie Raskin concluded his closing speech at the impeachment hearings by quoting Thomas Paine. After amending the first line at the suggestion of Nancy Pelosi—“These are the times that try men and women’s souls”—he launched into the sentences that Paine had written in The Crisis, when the revolution looked hopeless.

“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink at this moment from the service of their cause and their country; but everyone who stands with us now will win the love and the favor and affection of every man and every woman for all time. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; but we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory.”

The hearings sparked my own mini-obsession with Thomas Paine. I learned that Paine has been the most overlooked of founding fathers, but at the moment of the publication of Common Sense there was no more celebrated man in the colonies. Everyone was suddenly talking about the pamphlet, even its detractors like John Adams, and it is generally considered the nudge that was needed for the United States declaring itself an independent country. Thomas Jefferson said it most simply: “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” The introductory paragraph alone, penned a few months after the original had already sold thousands of copies and been reprinted, announces not just the birth of a country but of a writer with voice, a voice that is like the one that Philip Roth described in The Ghost Writer, the kind “that begins at about the back of the knees and reaches well above the head.”

Paine writes: “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

There are scholars who look at the Declaration of Independence as simply a more formal retelling of Common Sense. Some of Paine’s biographers argue that he merely caught the wave of revolution when he published his famous pamphlet in December of 1775. Others argue he created it. Whatever the case, it helped move the idea of war with England from something almost incomprehensible to something inevitable. Reading it now you can, if you extend some historical empathy, still see it, still feel it. The writing is modern and direct, particularly when it comes to ridiculing the idea of hereditary monarchy. He made the whole notion of kings, then considered divine and the embodiment of nations, seem ridiculous, dethroning them with vigorous prose: “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are easily poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.” Kings as ignorant! Imagine the shock of his excited readers. And notice the combination that was his trademark: the balanced phrases and plain language. (Paine’s original title for the pamphlet was Plain Truth.)

Common Sense is one of the preeminent examples of written language changing history. It is a great distillation of Enlightenment thought that focuses on the taking down of kings, the lifting of the common people and their right to pursue liberty and happiness, all mixed with some very practical suggestions about creating a government and the need to declare independence. Many of these Enlightenment ideals had been building for a century, but they had never been put this way before. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once criticized what he called “inert ideas.” Paine’s ideas were anything but inert. They were put forth with panache, grit, energy. They were alive. They fired people up. They changed things.

Is such a thing still possible?

Standing in the bone-dry basin of Chaco another mystery comes to mind. Why here?

It wasn’t just drought that did in Chaco. Societal disintegration and disease helped too, and the people’s proclivity toward movement and migration. But as old theories replace new, as they always will, it is best not to throw out the drought with the bathwater.

To stand inside Pueblo Bonito is to see civilization in the past tense. It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to bring it alive again and picture yourself back at the center of things. All of the rooms that spread out before you are massively and monumentally impressive. If you explore cliff dwellings in the Southwest, one of the pleasures is the way they hide from you, tucked into crevices. This place hides from no one and is tucked into nothing. It is not small or simple, hidden in the rocks, but something that stands out. Something that was meant to stand out.

One of the several mysteries of Chaco is the question of what the hell was going on here. My friend Craig Childs, whose groundbreaking book House of Rain tackles this and other questions, writes: “The evidence gathered from a century of digging and mapping can support almost any speculation thrown at Chaco Canyon: religious center, military center, government center, ceremonial center—the list is extensive.” He goes on to say that he has heard some call it “an ancient Las Vegas, an isolated strip of grandiose architecture in an ill-watered desert where people came from all directions to participate in flashy ceremonies and where they left all their wealth before heading home.” But if it was Vegas, it was also D.C. and New York. (Our history books claim that the first four-story buildings on this continent were in New York City, then Chicago. Our history books are wrong.) All roads led to Chaco, and these were real and well-tended roads, spreading out in all directions and all the way out to places as far away as Five Kivas. Outliers likely paid homage, and taxes, to Chaco.

Standing in the bone-dry basin of Chaco another mystery comes to mind. Why here? Though a wash runs through it the wash too is dry, as is the rest of the place to the point of desiccation, and the buildings sit out in the open in a landscape where little but sage and rabbitbrush grow. Part of the answer is that it hasn’t always looked like this. This is important. Like the United States itself, Chaco had the good luck of early abundance, its development growing out of a quirk of climate that tree rings reveal, that string of good days and months and years that led to an abundance of crops in 950, which in turn led to a surplus and the creation of the complex of kivas and great houses. Back then the dry wash I am staring down at ran wet. It was this stroke of good elemental fortune that allowed for what came next. For the more than 250 years Chaco ruled.

During that golden period, this truly was the center place.
 

 
II. Fall

As well as being where our laws come from and a neoclassic building constructed in 1800, the Capitol building is where Jamie Raskin goes to work.

Jamie could have been forgiven if he played hooky on the morning of January 6. On any other morning that would have been a laughable notion. This was a man who, for the better part of four decades, talked about constitutional law and politics the way other men talk about their beloved sports teams, a man who was weaned on politics by his activist father, Marcus, a member of the Kennedy administration and the founder of the country’s most influential progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Jamie followed his father’s political lead, fighting against the Reagan administration’s interference in Central America as an activist Harvard student in the early 80s, becoming an editor of the Harvard Law Review at Harvard Law School, teaching as a constitutional law professor at American University, serving as a state rep in Maryland for two terms, and, finally, winning a seat as the Democratic representative of Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in 2016.

On the same day that Jamie became a congressman, another  man, who knew somewhat less about the Constitution, was also elected. The day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States was one of the few days in Jamie’s life when he actually did play hooky. Instead of driving into Washington he led a hike of his new Eighth District constituents down a winding trail along Rock Creek in Rock Creek Park, taking, as he put it, “the idea of Democrats in the wilderness to a whole new level.” That had been a protest, a form of political expression deeply familiar to Jamie. The morning of January 6, 2021, was different. That morning, under the powers of the Constitution he had so long studied and loved, Jamie would cast one of the votes certifying the results of the Electoral College, results that would end the reign of a man whom he regarded as a stain on Ameri- can democracy. In other words, he would use the document he revered and had spent his life studying to evict the man who he believed had spat on that document.

So of course he would go. Of course he would cast his vote. The reason that it might have even occurred to him not to was that this day, which would prove one of the most tragic and powerful and overwhelming of his life, directly followed a day that was even more tragic and powerful and overwhelming. The day before, he had buried his beloved Tommy. Tommy, his beautiful 25-year-old son, who had followed him to Harvard Law School, and into activism and politics, and who seemed to light up the world and inspire everyone he encountered. Tommy, who loved his parents and sisters so ferociously and who always made them laugh and who had vowed to fight for the poor and for the rights of animals and who to his father was not just a wonderful son but a political visionary who “was 10,000 years ahead of his time,” but who also, suffering from depression, “felt every bit of pain and injustice in the world.” On New Year’s Eve, not a week before the historic Electoral College vote, Tommy had taken his own life. He left a note that said: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”

For Jamie the pain was piercing at times, foglike at others. He couldn’t sleep. People sometimes call suicide a selfish act, but Tommy’s sister Tabitha said that the pain of depression must have been so great that it even outweighed the pain Tommy knew he would cause his family, and that if he was being selfish, “it was the one selfish act of his life.”

Tommy had not just been named after Thomas Paine. He embodied the same utopian spirit, the same vision of a better world, as his namesake, and, as it happened, the same proclivity for depression. Tommy the activist might have described himself just the way his father did in notes for his 25th college reunion, as an “unreconstructed Enlightenment liberal.”

It was Jamie’s idea that Tabitha would also come into the Capitol on January 6. The night before, she had said: “Don’t go to work tomorrow.”

“I’ve got to go,” Jamie replied. “Why don’t you come?” In a speech a month later on the first day of the impeachment trial, Jamie Raskin would explain why he had invited Tabitha and Hank Kronick, his son-in-law, who was married to Tabitha’s older sister. Hank had never been to the Capitol. Jamie’s reasons for inviting them were high-minded: they would join him to “witness this historic event, the peaceful transfer of power in America.” But something simpler must have also been at work. Tabitha must have wanted to support her devastated father. She and Hank wanted to be with him on the day after he had put his only son in the ground.

That morning Tabitha wondered aloud about the rumors of violence by Trump supporters.

“Will it be safe?” she asked.

“Of course it will be safe,” Jamie replied. “This is the Capitol.”

Beginnings are times of excitement. Endings are something different.

Over the years, Orrin and I began to travel farther afield. Everywhere we went we would see what I first saw on Topsail repeated on other islands, most prominently on the Outer Banks. Everywhere massive development coupled with rising seas and dangerous storms.

Once in the town of Nags Head we pulled over at a spot Orrin knew, a spot that showed just how little respect the ocean had for all the building that was going on.

A dozen or so houses stood out on the flat, low-tide sand. If not for the fact they were on stilts, some of the rooms would have been in the water at high tide. The signs of desperate self-defense were evident in piled sandbags, but the bags were obviously long past usefulness, shining green with algae and half underwater. Useless electrical wires and pink insulation hung limp from the undersides of the houses. The houses themselves, stranded out on the low-tide beach, distanced from their usual surroundings of roads and neighboring homes and telephone wires, had the look of sci-fi space stations floating far away from earth. Stairs ran down off the houses and hung in the air, hovering above the water, and “Condemned: Do Not Enter” signs shone orange in the windows. It was a truly wild sight, no less wild for the fact that the structures were manmade.

We walked below them, staring up at old rusted doors that opened out to nothing and stairs that dangled in the air. Many of the abandoned houses were lopsided, or tilting backward as if popping wheelies, and some looked ready to take their final stagger and lurch into the water.

“When they fall there will be rubbish and insulation all over the beach,” Orrin said. “Nobody cleans it. The insurance companies won’t go near them until they are declared officially ruined.” Not 50 feet back from the ocean we came upon a concrete septic tank half buried in the sand, a great square sepulchral tomb of shit. Orrin kicked it. Then he pointed back at the houses and explained that they were the third generation of homes to have ambled off into the sea. Of course new homes were still being built. The next group of water marchers.

Standing in a small stone room that has withstood centuries of sun, wind, and even occasional rain, you can think about time.

Beginnings are times of excitement. Endings are something different.

If you want to contemplate endings, and to see things from a distance in dry air, this is your place. If it is hard to imagine time on a larger scale, Chaco helps.

Still, we don’t like to think about endings, about doom, about things falling apart, and I get that. “What are you avoiding?” any good psychologist will ask. What we, the people, are avoiding is where we are so obviously hurtling toward. Those signs of our institutions breaking down just as the physical world seems to be turning on us. And there are plenty of good reasons to avoid this. I, for one, am not by nature an apocalyptic thinker, and would prefer to consider the score of last night’s Celtics game or what I’m having for lunch. But even I can see it.

Let’s say for a minute that you wanted to contemplate the fact that it could really happen. That our civilization, along with our country’s government, could fall apart, just as every civilization has fallen apart throughout history. If so, you could do worse than coming to this corner of the Desert Southwest. Here you can see and think about a civilization that has gone away due to climate, yes, but also due to a breakdown of institutions, infighting, and war. I said a civilization, not a people. The people migrated and evolved and are still here in the form of their descendants. That is why the Chacoans are currently referred to as Ancestral Puebloans, and the culture continues in some form. But the civilization that was is gone.

Standing in a small stone room that has withstood centuries of sun, wind, and even occasional rain, you can think about time. As you study the red stone that was first piled up centuries ago, a raven breaks the silence. It feels like there is nobody else but us around for miles. Here you can see time entombed.

I try to work my way back, to imagine the place when it was the center of its world.

As with the young United States, ideals prevailed at Chaco.

But as with the United States, these ideals did not apply to all.

Wealth inequity, Kialo Winters explains to me, is nothing new. As we walk along the beautiful sandstone walls of Una Vida, the earliest of the great houses at Chaco, he describes an archaeological dig here in the early 20th century where the scientists hired on local Navajo workers to do the digging.

“What happened at Chaco has been in our stories, our oral tradition, over the millennium,” he says. “Science never asked locals what happened here.”

But one day during lunch break sometime in the early 20th century, one curious archeologist did.

“Lunch break that day lasted a lot longer,” Kialo says.

One of the things that the workers already knew, but that would take a while for science to figure out, was that a caste system prevailed at Chaco, with the equivalent of lords and ladies ruling over the equivalent of peasants or perhaps slaves. How did scientists confirm this? The skeletons inside the rooms of the great houses were taller and buried with many relics, those outside smaller and buried without.

The stories got there first. Kialo tells me the story of the Gambler, named Naahwillbiihi (“winner of the people”) or Noqoilpi (“he who wins men at play”). The Gambler came to Chaco from the south and soon was besting the locals at many games of chance, including dice and games of skill, like footraces. Once he had taken everything else, he would always make one final bet and take their souls. What did he do once he had their souls? Perhaps force them to labor as slaves in the creation of the monumental architecture that abounds at Chaco.

The story continues that the Gambler himself was finally beaten by a Navajo shaman, who exiled him to the south.

We are told we are now in the midst of a crisis of climate, but it is more than that. It isn’t hard to connect this to a crisis of government or to imagine how the two crises, working in concert, might play out. All you have to do is look backward.

While our Gambler rests up down in Mar-a-Lago, we await what comes next.

Once they were inside, Jason said to them: “I’m going to lock you in here.” He didn’t tell them why.

Jamie’s son-in-law Hank would have a front row seat at the chaos. That morning Hank was excited to walk the marble hallways of a place he had only read about or seen on TV. The 15-minute drive from the hotel where they had stayed took about an hour due to the barricades and hordes of protesters, who, Hank noted, did not wear masks. Even the most cynical of us can experience a thrill at being in the citadel of democracy, and despite the threat of the mob, Hank was caught up in it all. He, Jamie, and Tabitha headed up to the fifth-floor office of Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. If anything had been bipartisan in this most partisan of times it was the outpouring of sympathy over Tommy’s death, and colleagues from both sides of the aisle dropped by to offer their condolences. Jamie finally had to close the door to Hoyer’s office to finish a speech on unity he was about to give on the House floor. Tabitha, looking over a hard copy, crossed out a few lines, saying they were “too divisive.”

When it was time for Jamie to head down to the House floor for the vote, he hugged Tabitha and Hank goodbye. They stayed behind with Julie Tagen, Jamie’s chief of staff, who was growing increasingly nervous as she glanced out the window at the gathering protestors. Tabitha and Hank joined her and as they watched the mob grow larger, climbing up the steps and then up the inauguration scaffolding, they debated whether or not to just go home. Hank would later write: “After a week of grieving, we were not well equipped to deal with fear or uncertainty. We were constantly reminded that we were in ‘the safest building in the country’ and that it would be more dangerous to go outside. After all, the vice president was right down the hall from us. This gave us peace of mind; the idea of members of the mob getting inside was unfathomable.”

When they headed down to the gallery to watch Jamie’s speech, they were escorted by Jason, a plainclothes security detail. In the chamber Jamie stood to speak and was greeted by a standing ovation from the entire House. After the speech, Tabitha, Hank, and Julie headed back to the majority leader’s office. Once they were inside, Jason said to them: “I’m going to lock you in here.” He didn’t tell them why.

But both the window and the TV revealed the same scene. Hordes of angry protesters were now yelling, “Stop the steal!” and trying to break in to the Capitol. Rioters were literally climbing the walls. Right before the TV went dark, the power having been cut, Julie, Tabitha, and Hank saw that the building had been breached, and moments later they heard the intruders rumbling down the hallways inside the building. Hank remembers going into survival mode:

Do we try to escape? I checked the bulletproof glass windows and realized they were sealed shut. We were stuck with no way out.

Do we fight back? I glanced over at a fireplace poker, briefly envisioning myself as the hero taking on the mob head-on before realizing this would be a foolish fight against the hundreds of angry men and women right outside our door.

Do we hide? This seemed like our only option. Praying that if we stayed hidden and silent, the intruders would open the door and leave.

Orrin was living the last years of his life inside the predictions he had made.

“You’re about to officially become a climate refugee,” Orrin said when I called to tell him I was evacuating with my family during Hurricane Florence. Hurricanes were the one time the name of our town appeared in the national news, and for the previous week the only place names on the weather maps had been Bermuda and Wilmington, my town. It was coming straight for us.

While I was evacuated during Florence up in Durham, I visited Orrin. It just so happened it was his birthday.

“Not every day you turn 85,” I said, going by what Wikipedia was telling me.

“Hey, 84, 84!”

“Okay.”

“One resource the world is not running out of is old people,” he said.

I picked him up at the retirement home. It’s like college, he told me. You’ve got the popular kids. The loners. The cliques.

I took Orrin out for a birthday lunch at an Italian place down the street. The sausage sandwiches were a revelation.

“Hey, I’ve only come here for dinner,” he said. “Now I’m going to start coming for lunch.”

Over lunch we talked about the damage done by Florence. “The Outer Banks seem to have survived,” he said. “For now.”

I asked him about the term “climate refugee,” which was still relatively new back then.

“It refers to those who leave and don’t come back,” he said. “Like the 250,000 people who left New Orleans during and just after Katrina. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, 20,000 of those Louisiana refugees were still there. Homeless again.”

I thought how Western fires have done this even more effectively than Southern storms. Entire towns erased from the map. Orrin predicted that in the coming years two million climate refugees will come from the Mississippi Delta and four to six million will come from South Florida. Also a couple hundred thousand from the outer and inner banks of North Carolina. “These are the three areas that will flood most quickly,” he said, “at least here in the United States.”

Orrin was encouraged by some examples of increased awareness since our last trip up the coast together. In Norfolk, where flooding is so frequent, they had begun to list the tides in the church programs. In New Jersey, the state was purchasing at-risk coastal homes, demolishing them, and making the land public property. In Charleston and Manhattan, they were building seawalls.

“I thought you hated seawalls,” I said.

“I hate the ones that destroy beaches. It’s okay for Charleston and New York and Boston to build seawalls because there’s no beach there to worry about. So you don’t have to worry about the question of which is more valuable, buildings or beaches.”

I mentioned Miami, which seemed to have dodged a bullet again this year.

He shrugged.

“Not much you can do there. Miami is doomed.”

On the way back to his place we stopped at the Eno River and watched the rising water. All around the state the waters were still rising and my route home was impassable. In the end, flooding would kill more people than the storm itself.

Orrin was living the last years of his life inside the predictions he had made.

Climate gives and climate takes. Chaco was the closest thing to the Rome of the Southwest for hundreds of years.

The government rests on the land. Literally of course, but also figuratively. It has always been so. Since our beginnings as a species.

Here is how the archaeologist R. E. Burrillo describes Chaco:

A massive rapid civilization development. Suddenly you’ve got big buildings, big communities, roads that extend for miles, a trade network that extends to Mesoamerica, and all that in a relatively short period of time. Which correlates with at least one environmental phenomenon, which is the extremely rainy period around A.D. 1000.

Climate gives and climate takes. Chaco was the closest thing to the Rome of the Southwest for hundreds of years, and while drought was long thought to be the chief culprit in this Rome’s fall, other contenders have emerged. Like Rome, this capital had vast cultural and religious influence on the outlying settlements, and like the famous peace of the Roman Empire—Pax Romana—the period when Chaco thrived was a relatively stable and peaceful one. It didn’t last. R. E. Burrillo writes in his book, Behind the Bears Ears, that “the so-called Pax Chaco disappeared in a hurry. Archaeological evidence from this period indicates an extreme uptick of interpersonal violence throughout the region that’s almost undoubtedly associated with a major breakdown of social influence or control.”

Not far away a police officer was being pummeled with an American flag.

Tabitha was the one who leaned the chair against the door’s handle, though it didn’t seem like much of a defense as the forces of chaos gathered outside. She huddled with Hank under House Speaker Hoyer’s desk. They held hands. The noises in the hall grew louder. They began to think they might die. Hank texted “I love you” to his parents. The door shook as someone tried to open it. That was the worst moment in a night of worst moments. Julie, Jamie’s chief of staff who was trapped with them, turned fierce and protective. She grabbed a fire poker and said, “I’m not letting these motherfuckers get away with this.”

Meanwhile, back on the House floor, Jamie heard a noise he would never forget. It was a blasting sound, a pounding on the House chamber doors like “a battering ram.” Jamie was frightened for his own safety but couldn’t stop thinking of Tabitha and Hank. Having lost his son, would he lose his daughter and son-in-law? The night before, disconsolate after the funeral, Jamie had slumped in a chair and told Hank: “You’re the only son I have now.”

Not far away a police officer was being pummeled with an American flag.

The heroes of the Age of Reason looked down on such primitive doings. Though not always.

As might be apparent by now, I like to jump around. Not just as a writer but as a reader. Lately, for instance, I have been dividing my time between books on Chacoan history, Thomas Paine, and the architecture of the Capitol. It’s always a strange pleasure when diverse things intersect. This morning, reading Mr. Burrillo’s book, I learned that in Chaco societal breakdown was likely marked by vicious infighting in the great houses, with the capital eventually moving sixty miles north to Aztec.

Then I read this:

A fair-to-decent comparison would be when the British burned the United States Capitol building in Washington during the second year of the War of 1812 after which a new capitol was built to the north in Philadelphia under the direction of a nervously and aggressively galvanized leadership that took a more iron-fisted approach to foreign and domestic policy than its swampy predecessor had. This didn’t really happen of course—although it almost did.

Some of the intersections are even more unlikely.

Many of the rooms at Chaco were eventually used as tombs for the leaders, filled with thousands of so-called grave goods, including precious turquoise, macaw feathers, and pottery. In one small room, thought to rival the tombs of Egypt in terms of pure wealth, 14 people were buried vertically along with tens of thousands of precious relics. It turns out that this game of intergenerational piggyback included seven men and seven women and spanned 330 years.

The heroes of the Age of Reason looked down on such primitive doings. Though not always. Take the Capitol building itself. Yes, the architecture is neoclassic and the thinking behind the building that of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. But something darker lurks below. A crypt built for our first president lies directly beneath the Capitol Rotunda, which 40 Doric columns support. This is where the remains of Washington would have decayed, had his son not scotched those plans and insisted his father be buried back home at Mount Vernon.

He was trapped by the mob not for minutes but for hours, and there was plenty of time for his mind to roam.

Is it farfetched to think that Thomas Paine was already on Jamie Raskin’s mind not just when he composed his arguments for the impeachment trial but while he was under assault in the Capitol building on January 6?

Maybe. Maybe his thoughts were focused solely on survival. Survival not just for himself but for Tabitha and Hank. But he was trapped by the mob not for minutes but for hours, and there was plenty of time for his mind to roam. And if it had roamed, it would have roamed to thoughts of Tommy. It had only been six days at that point. Tommy had taken his life the Thursday before, New Year’s Eve, and it was just Wednesday now. Only yesterday they had buried him.

For 45 minutes Tabitha, Hank, and Julie stayed hidden as the noises outside the door grew louder, then subsided. Then came a knock on the door. Someone identified himself as being from the Capitol police. They had to decide if it was ruse, if these were really members of the mob trying to lure them out. After ten minutes they cautiously opened the door and found three officers standing there. The officers escorted them through the halls of the Capitol to the safety of a ballroom turned shelter where Jamie and others were waiting. They raced toward each other and hugged and then Tabitha said the words to Jamie that he would quote a month later at the impeachment hearings: “I never want to come back to the Capitol.” That was the quote, but what she really called it was “this place.”

“That day I learned how personal democracy is,” Jamie would say in the same speech. “And how personal the loss of democracy is, too.”

 

One mystery of Chaco was why all the wood in the abandoned buildings was charred. Kialo explains that when the people left they “closed up” Chaco, ritualistically caving in the roofs of kivas and burning the great houses. There are other explanations, but I like that one.

During our time together, I learn that Kialo and I share a peculiar obsession. We are both deeply interested in how long various civilizations have lasted.

He points out that Rome was the sole capital of its empire from 27 B.C. to A.D. 286, which is 313 years.

Chaco had a similar run from 900 to 1150 A.D. Two hundred fifty years.

Washington, D.C., became the capital of the United States in 1800. Two hundred twenty-one years as of this writing.

“Maybe our number’s up,” I say when he lists these dates. He laughs.

If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts we can expect an 11-foot rise, if the Greenland ice cap goes, 13 feet, and if all of Antarctica were to melt, the global seas would rise 170 feet.

Washington, D.C., the city, was famously low and swampy and may be so again. The working figure for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for sea level rise by 2100 is one to three feet. Many, including Orrin Pilkey, believe that number is far too conservative, not taking into account the possible melting of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. Many more sober-minded scientists have argued that the melting of the ice sheet would be unlikely. Until this year.

When I first started traveling with Orrin I fact-checked his sea level prediction of seven feet by the end of the century by calling James Hansen at NASA. Hansen assured me that seven feet was a “good working number” as we prepared for what was to come. And that was over a decade ago, before anyone really believed Antarctica was truly vulnerable.

“The glaciers are the key,” Hansen said.

Orrin is in the habit of rattling off scary numbers. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts we can expect an 11-foot rise, if the Greenland ice cap goes, 13 feet, and if all of Antarctica were to melt, the global seas would rise 170 feet.

If this last were to happen you could kiss the White House, at an elevation of 59 feet, and the Pentagon, at 71, goodbye. Also, all major East Coast cities.

The Capitol building, at an elevation of 288 feet, would manage to keep its head above water.

It would sit up on its hill like an island.

There was always the possibility that the president would declare martial law in the chaos he had created.

Unbelievably, even after his reunion with his daughter, the day was just beginning for Jamie Raskin. Members of Congress, vowing to not let the insurrectionists stop the vote, reconvened at eight that night. Seven senators, including Ted Cruz, still objected to the certification, which did not pass until three that morning. As a constitutional scholar, Jamie knew better than almost anyone else in that room how precariously close we had come that day to losing American democracy. There was always the possibility that the president would declare martial law in the chaos he had created.

The final electoral vote took place on the one-week anniversary of Tommy’s death.

Jamie did not get home that night until 4 a.m. but he was up again at 8. He had already been drafting the legislation to invoke the 25th amendment and now he set to work on drafting the article of impeachment. The next week Nancy Pelosi would ask him to lead the House’s impeachment team, and he could not say no. Though he was still barely sleeping he felt Tommy with him, “his presence, his strengths, his beliefs.”

It was as if Jamie had been built for exactly this occasion; it was what he had trained for, and even by the end of that first day it must have occurred to him, despite the chaos, the sadness, the tragedy, that what he had witnessed was not just an assault on the Capitol but on the Constitution itself, the very document that he had devoted his life to studying.

For the time being that document, written 233 years ago, has proven sturdy enough. But for how long?

Stuck in our virtual present we lack a historic imagination. It can’t happen, we insist. But it has happened already.

For anyone paying attention, the past has begun to feel very present and has maybe even begun to feel a little like the future. Here, in this land of the great houses and cliff dwellings, aridity is still the theme played year round except for the brief bursts during monsoon season that flood this dry land. Wallace Stegner wrote: “Aridity, more than anything else, gives the Western landscape its character.” In the Desert Southwest the rising of the sun has long been both worshipped and regarded with a well- earned nervousness, its ascension marking both the beginning and end of something. The oppressive heat that other parts of the country has felt recently has long been felt here. And if this extreme place becomes even more extreme? When temperatures hit 120? 130? Can human beings really continue to live here? They have left before.

R.E. Burrillo writes of the end of Chaco: “That decline co-occurred with a climatic plunge, during which local and far-flung residents lost faith in the established sociopolitical system.”

He adds: “It wasn’t pleasant.”

Here at Chaco the past suggests a possible future. Not that we will listen. Stuck in our virtual present we lack a historic imagination. It can’t happen, we insist. But it has happened already. In this place, and all over the world. Why would we consider ourselves exempt from ending? Because of all our modern stuff? Please. We think of time as an arrow not a circle, but take a look around and you’ll see us circling back.

I am in no way predicting how we the people will come to ruin. I am predicting nothing.

But without pushing it too hard you can see hints here in Chaco. And parallels. As I walk over the dusty ground through Pueblo Bonito, a structure that was once four stories high, the word monumental comes to mind. I think again: this is not the work of a humble people. In fact, I am getting a little Masters of the Universe vibe. This is the work of people who wanted to be known, who wanted to be remembered.

Rina Swentzell, who grew up in Santa Clara Pueblo and has a master’s degree in architecture and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, has written an essay that gets at just this. The essay, “A Pueblo Woman’s Perspective on Chaco Canyon,” is collected in the book In Search of Chaco, edited by David Grant Noble. In it Swentzell writes of her first encounter with Chaco at the age of 28:

Even then my response to the canyon was that some sensibility other than my Pueblo ancestors had worked on the Chaco great houses. There were the familiar elements such as nansipu (the symbolic opening into the underworlds), kivas, plazas, and earth materials, but they were overlain by a strictness and precision of design that was unfamiliar, not just to me but to other sites of the Southwest. It was clear that the purpose of these great villages was not to restate their oneness with the earth but to show the power and specialness of humans. For me, they represented a desire to control human and natural resources. They were not about the Pueblo belief in the capability of everyone, including children, to participate in daily activities, such that the process is more important than the end product. The Chaco great houses projected a different sensibility. The finished product was very important. Skill and specialization were needed to do the fine stonework and lay the sharp-edged walls. I concluded that the structures had been built in the prime of life with a vision of something beyond daily life and the present moment. They were men who embraced a social-political religious hierarchy and envisioned control and power over place, resources, and people.

The preferred theory these days for the so-called disappearance of Chaco is contained in the current name for these people, the Ancestral Puebloans. The idea is that these people did not disappear but migrated and are still among us, part of today’s Indigenous population. But Swentzell suggests not mere continuance, but evolution and even rebellion against the ideals of Chaco.

Here is how R. E. Burrillo put it when I asked him about what happened:

Societies don’t simply collapse. They change. They alter. They might not take on the same shape forever. So you can point at them and say yes they are still here. And at the same time they are gone. Chaco is a good example of that. A lot of the same folks I’ve been leaning on say that much of what we see in “pueblo” cultures, Hopi in particular, seems like not so much a continuation of Chaco as a reaction against it. The arrogance of Chaco, the class system. You see the same thing among the Maya. The great city-states went away and the Maya essentially said “fuck it.”

In other words, they had achieved the heights and made that achievement their way of being, and those who followed said, “Um, excuse me, there is another way. Yours is not the only way to be on earth. It might even not be, sacrilegious as it is to say, the best way.”

This, too, could be more than a little applicable to coming times. What happens in the wake of an arrogant overweening civilization? People do not simply disappear. But they do, in all likelihood, change. As they always have.

The people still living here hold another secret. On these Native lands, adjacent to the largest reservation both in the country and the world, they understand how it feels to come out on the other side of an apocalypse. It won’t do to romanticize a people who have endured so much, so I won’t. But I will say that, for what it’s worth, they know a little about something that all of our children, or our children’s children, might have to learn.

That is, they know what it is like to live after.

It is easy to fall for the trap of thinking the fall will lead to a depeopled world, like Will Smith having New York City to himself in I Am Legend. But Italy isn’t empty because Rome fell thousands of years ago, and villagers still have the blood of ancient senators in their veins. So too, modern Puebloan and Zuni and Hopi and Navajo people. They are still here, but have been through their own brand of apocalypse, one that began 200 years after the fall of Chaco. War, displacement, disease, genocide. A people bludgeoned by fate. If we are worried about what is coming, we only need to look and see what has been.

In the course of less than a year the country has experienced 18 individual climate disasters—fires, storms, floods—that cost over a billion dollars each.

These days Orrin’s language has begun to seem less hyperbolic. In the fall of 2021 the United States Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Security Council issued separate reports on climate and its effect on this country’s security. Taken together, the picture these reports painted was grim. Heightened military tension. Massive dislocation of tens of millions of people. Fights over scarce resources. Water. Food. Potential economic collapse. In the course of less than a year the country has experienced 18 individual climate disasters—fires, storms, floods—that cost over a billion dollars each.

The year 2021 saw historic fires in the West, a massive hurricane that ripped through New Orleans and flooded New Jersey and New York, the earliest tropical storm, the latest first snow on Colorado’s front range, melting chunks of glacier in Antarctica, cyclones in December in the Midwest, 60-degree days in Alaska in January.

Trying to retain hope and optimism is one thing. Seeing clearly is another.

If you have not been directly affected, you know someone who has.

And we are just getting warmed up.

His question is still our question: How to make people understand that that sort of brute thinking is, at root, antidemocratic?

It would be nice if Thomas Paine’s story had ended with victory. But having been a founder and a witness of the French Revolution, and having waited in a jail cell condemned to death for treason by the French in 1793, Paine would come to understand the ways in which the word freedom could be usurped by the mob. His question is still our question: How to make people understand that that sort of brute thinking is, at root, antidemocratic? That freedom is not a slogan but something that is hard-won and that the winning of it comes through tough-minded thinking and discipline. Something worked toward until one gets it right or close to right. The founders got it right enough that the documents they created still work today.

As Jamie Raskin put it at the hearings: “Donald Trump doesn’t know a lot about the founders but they sure knew about him.”

The documents the founders handed down to us, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are imperfect in ways that are obvious now, starting with the fact that the “all” who were created equal were a limited group. Tom Paine, one of the few founders who never owned a slave, fought aggressively against that so-called institution all his life. “A slave republic” is what Jamie called the United States in his closing remarks. But the basic thinking, and the writing, of the founders is solid and self-corrective enough to still guide us, and can possibly still light our way. Those words were the ones that Frederick Douglass used to argue against slavery and the ones that Lincoln built on in the Gettysburg Address, and the ones Martin Luther King used as the beginnings of his cries for freedom. Flawed, yes, but prescient in ways we, ingrown and blinded by our moment, can barely imagine. Prescient enough to anticipate a Trump and prescient enough to allow for their own evolution. As Jamie Raskin said in closing:

However flawed the founders were as men in their times, they inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution all the beautiful principles that we needed to open America up to successive waves of political struggle and constitutional change and transformation in the country so we really would become something much more like Lincoln’s beautiful vision of government of the people, by the people, and for the people—the world’s greatest multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic constitutional democracy, the envy of the world.

Tom Paine said the United States was “an asylum for humanity” where people would come. Think about the Preamble, those first three words pregnant with such meaning: “We the People” and then all of the purposes of our government put into that one action-packed sentence: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and preserve to ourselves and our posterity, the blessings of liberty do hereby ordain and establish this Constitution….”

What Jamie was suggesting was yet another evolution of our original thought. This was reflected in his own multiracial team of men and women, the House managers who came together to fight against just the sort of threat, just the sort of tyranny, that the founders had warned us about.

I end by circling back to language itself. At the key crisis points in our country’s history, at its birth and when the country split in two, words have come to the rescue. It is language and those who wield language that have saved us. From Paine to Hamilton to Jefferson to Lincoln to King to Obama, our leaders have been writers. This makes sense. The way we write is the way we think. The way we think influences how we act. Therefore it is a matter of immense importance to put things as well, and clearly, as one possibly can. If the founders had not done so we would not be living in a democracy.

Whether language can sustain us going forward is another question.

The truth is we will only know where we are going when we get there. Predictions are mere guesses.

Three houses, all abandoned.

A house walking out to sea. A house tucked in a cliff. A house where the laws of our land are made.

Three houses, three languages, three stories.

Three tragedies—though, amid the rubble, you can also, if you are so inclined, find three traditions. A scientific tradition that insists we see the empirical truths of cause and effect. A Native tradition that sees beyond the merely human and treats the land as sacred. A shopworn but still-living political tradition of celebrating Enlightenment values, truths of liberty and freedom, not caricatures of them.

We will need them all, fully braided, in the times ahead. But that is too hopeful a sentence for an elegy.

The truth is we will only know where we are going when we get there. Predictions are mere guesses. A man did not walk out of his stone home in Chaco, stretch his arms above his head, yawn, and think: “This civilization is about to end.” He thought about his crops, his family, about gambling on a friendly game of bone dice on the Chacoan equivalent of next Thursday night. The language of beginnings is intoxication. That of endings is naturally more sober, even somber. We try to rekindle what we once had. Sometimes we succeed. Mostly we don’t.

“The prophecy for the Navajo is that the world will end in fire,” Kialo tells me.