Excerpt from American Canyon
History was unearthed in Southampton. Sitting on the crests of hills northeast
of old town Benicia, the tract homes stretch from the straits up past our house
to Lake Herman. Along Rose Drive, vents of methane gas jetted out of cracks in the
dirt. The air clung to swing sets like the spindly whites of old eggs. The earth opened
up and swallowed entire backyards into its mouth. Foundations we never had cause
to question were now cleaved and splintered. My friend, who had grown up in an
old Victorian down by the waterfront, laughed and said, we all knew that there was a
landfill there. I dumped stuff there with my dad once or twice. The developers covered it
up with dirt and built on top of it.
Inside our homes there was no need to look beyond the milky counter top and the
newly installed beige carpet. It softens to our touch. When you do look at what
formed the stratas beneath, you may be able to find a record of three hundred years.
In those layers lie plague and smallpox. Tule thatch and acorn. Upon the rolling hills
towards Lake Herman Spaniards and the People of the West Wind had made war. The
Spaniards pushed them back to where the city of Suisun is today. They retreated to
the rush huts of their village. Enclosed by willow saplings and tall grasses of the marsh
they used to create their homes, families chose to die rather than become slaves to
the missionaries. They lit their walls on fire and let it be carried by the wind. Their
ceremonial song, sung at the moment of death, rose into the air.
I told my mother, they had lived here. They had left mounds of discarded shells along
the shores of the straits, but they were ground under waterfront developments made
of sails and yachts, Styrofoam swordfish, brick walkways and white paint. They
buried their dead, wrapped in bear hide, under these homes. They wound it round
and round with rope. They dug with sticks. When a bird stopped at the lake’s edge,
they shot it and ate it with fish. I told her all of this could be made up—the figment
of an anthropologist’s imagination. Certainty died in the fire. Beneath our carpet,
under the grey cement foundation, beneath a layer of trash, under thousands of years
of historical conjecture, could be the bones of a Patwin. They were southern Wintun,
neighbors with the Maidu.
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