Talked to a surveyor at a dig site in New Mexico and he changed how I look at old roads

I was volunteering at this small excavation outside Santa Fe, just sifting dirt for pottery shards. This old surveyor named Frank walks up and points at this faint dip in the ground I thought was nothing. He said "that's a wagon trail from 1840, you can tell by the width and the way it curves around that rock." I stood there looking at this barely visible line in the dirt and realized he was reading the landscape like a book. He spent 20 minutes showing me how drainages, fence lines, and even tree growth patterns all tell a story about who used the land before us. Now I can't drive anywhere without noticing old road beds and thinking about the people who walked them. Anyone else have a random expert drop knowledge that changed how you see the world?

2 comments

2 Comments

paige8703d ago

The really wild part is how animals use those same paths long after people are gone. I noticed that deer and coyotes around here follow old stagecoach routes through the woods because the ground is still more packed down and easier to walk on than the brush around it. So generations later, wildlife is still traveling the same lines that some trader or wagon driver picked out 150 years ago. Makes you realize how much the land remembers even when we forget.

troy9963d ago

Exactly what you said about the land remembering is something I notice all the time. There's an old logging road behind my place that's been closed for decades, but the deer still follow it like clockwork. Even the turkey vultures seem to ride the same thermals over that path every afternoon. It's weird to think that those animals are basically using the same GPS as some lumberjack from 1908 without knowing it. The ground holds that memory in the packed dirt and the way the trees grew back around it. Really makes you wonder what other invisible lines we're walking on without noticing.