Getting Lost in the Lost City of Tryon

There’s a spot in the woods near here, where the adelgid seems to thrive. Those woolly little bastards munch and chew and suck the sap, until Proud Hemlocks die.

Still…

There’s beauty there, on that littlest of mountain peaks!

A bone-laden pellet dropped to the floor beneath the struggling trees means Brother Owl has had a feast!

And beneath the feathered canopy, Tall Hemlock’s babies cling to an eroding westward face.

The dirt there is full with needles and moss, and each stride feels soft as lace.

So place your boots between the dire tracks of Sisters Coyote and Deer and breath deep this treasured air, where wilderness feels so near!

Now you are standing in 2026, in secluded grove, surrounded by wetland, within a county park….

Hear the cars rolling by on the nearest road, hear dogs parking and people laughing one trail over.

But yet, you are half alone! Alone in space, but not alone in time!

For what older tracks lay buried here— beneath your modern, counted boot treads, between the uncounted steps of canines on the chase and beneath the hooved indents of deer in flight— on this little hill beneath the larger hills of the “Lost City of Tryon”?

For those failed white traders we’re not the first people to settle this area.

No.

This tract of earth stands along a portage in the homeland of The Seneca Nation.

And before the Seneca people lived here: megafauna fled Clovis hunters along the retreat of New York’s portion of the Laurentide ice sheet.

And the glaciers themselves, they left their own massive tracks…. The footprints of the last ice age!

And deeper still, even before Pangea, this land slept beneath a salty Silurian sea— and it was the trilobites who left their tracks all through the shale.

This hill may have been a piece of something much larger, covered in liquid water, then miles of ice, before it was all carved apart by time….

But today, it is a small thing— not so hard to climb.

Still, if you close your eyes and feel the wind this can be as the highest peak of all.

A land enchanted!

Both deep in the world and worlds apart.

Turtles in the water and cardinals in the air, all creatures here strive.

They continue to try!

As if they do not— or cannot— know that life just isn’t fair.

In this stretch of earth: beautiful Hemlocks are defeated by mere bugs!

And the land itself is set upon by advancing hordes— Autumn olives, invasive weeds, and shrubs….

But even these, in their turn, offer up their berries to the birds.

This little patch of planet my seem to teeter on the brink!

But the old world is still here, as it always will be, filtering up— up! through all the primordial layers, so let it sooth your modern frustrations.

And still it is there!

That constant thought: your taxes are building bombs, your taxes are launching those bombs at CHILDREN.

Even in this place, so remote and so removed, even in this place you are not free from that one, most hated thought.

For you are standing in the park, where you are employed.

And some of the money you made here, working on this ancient but modern tract of land— some of that money was taken to fund the murder of little girls in Iran.

But the soil of the old world is somewhere beneath your feet and it does not know the filth of the new!

But like the deer running from the coyote, who cannot know that life is not fair, the old world is blissfully unaware.

And isn’t it still here? The old world will never be beat— not by autumn weeds, nor adelgids, nor invasive human feet,

Nor by global terrorism under US flags, against which you have no power.

You are standing on a reminder of the old world, a reminder: of white thieves stealing land from the Senecas— of mastodons and of extinctions, of glaciers carving a vast regional landscape, of warm, shallow, salt water seas seeding this land with minerals which geologists can still find day!

You are standing on a reminder that nothing is permanent, and that this too shall pass.

No matter what “this” may be.

So walk on up that little hill and dream it is a mountain….

Submerge yourself in that cool air, as though it were a fountain!

Forget for a moment you’re living in a fascist state—

Forget for a moment how the economy excuses, even glories in cruelty and hate—

Forget for a moment that humanity is on fire and the world is full of smoke—

Because taking a second to shield your eyes and catch your breath?

That sort of survival might feel wrong, like the privilege of avoidance, but you must practice self-care! That doesn’t make you guilty.

And again these woods feel almost magic— as though here, for a moment, peace can perhaps be more than an illusion!

And if ever there were a fairytale-esque woodland sprite lurking in the wild loam and looking to grant a wish, this place would be as good as any for such a spirit to exist.

So go ahead:

Make that wish!

What have you got to lose?

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: wasted effort! Wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which fills up first.

Yeah, but humor me.

What if you could make a wish and have it granted?

And what if this magic had no limit, what would you request?

A set of a non-arthritic knees or a more capable brain? Hernia repair? A sexier body?

Or….

Why not wish for bliss?

Wouldn’t that be wise?

Everybody wants to be happy— you’re no better than the rest.

And a little ignorance could make happiness easy:

You have only to close your eyes—

But…

Can you?

If you were granted one wish only, would you really waste it on yourself?

No.

Shouldn’t you wish something for your kids?

Since you love them the most of all?

Maybe—

But—

Your love doesn’t actually make them special.

They’re no more deserving of peace than those schoolgirls killed by American missiles in Iran— or the poor children who were bought and sold on epstein’s island for the damned….

So WHAT are you supposed to wish for in a world run by evil men?

Divine fury?

That could make for a satisfying wish:

Lightning bolts from the sky, to destroy all abuses of power, especially the red, white, and blue ones!

Imagine the global relief, if the world’s most monstrous men were all struck dead as meat.

But would that be the best thing to wish, if the goal is to reduce the suffering of the poor?

If this magic had no limit, you could wish for an end to poverty or hunger or capitalism or war.

Maybe wishing away greed or fear could satisfy all these wishes and more.

…. But what mystical woodland sprite could wield the kind of power to grant that kind of wish?

God?

Are you, an agnostic, seriously offering up a prayer?

And an intercessory prayer at that?

Maybe.

Is that what this is?

When you climb this little hill, you do find it easier to fall into belief.

And why not pray? What harm can that do?

Or what good?

Pray in one hand… shit in the other.

If God doesn’t exist you might as well wish upon the wind.

If God does exist, She doesn’t need you to tell her about evil. If God exists, She must already know more and better than you.

So is all that evil purposed? Or are there simply limits to God’s power?

Perhaps omnipotence has always been a myth, perhaps the Creator, if She exists, must follow the same Universal Laws that all of Creation is bound to obey:

Physics.

If God exists at all, then She must have limits, what else could explain Her apparent absence?

Maybe God isn’t smiting the earth’s rapists and murderers and all those other human demons, because She literally cannot.

Maybe God isn’t producing the cure for cancer and the solution to famine like a rabbit from a hat, because She isn’t a damn magician.

And that’s as good as the truth, for you know that no amount of faith will move this littlest of mountains that you now stand upon— and this little mountain is just pile of bunch of ancient, glacial, non-magical dirt!

There will be no divine intervention— neither rescue nor rage.

Mercies and salvation will only ever come through human hands— but maybe that’s where God holds Her power after all: in moving human hearts so the people who honor their hearts can move their fucking hands!

So if you wish pray for anything at all, pray for something possible: change!

But DON’T beg for any change that would demand a magic trick!

Neither should you beg for any change, that you’re not willing to sacrifice for, because effort is what makes change stick.

Prayer has the power, to change only one person: the person doing the praying.

So pray.

It doesn’t matter if you believe, pray anyway: for enough growth and courage to do the right thing, even when progress seems like a

….dream.

To the planet and to humanity you are powerless and small.

But to yourself?

Hobble back on down the slope!

And when you re-enter the world— remember you are not powerless in matters of self.

Your sphere maybe small, but that’s no excuse for inaction.

You have to admit: if God won’t fix everything then human hands must strive for some small difference. You must not forget that you have a pair, so you have an obligation to use them!

Carry with you a dash of hope, like dust or pollen from the magic wind on this little mountain.

Because when it comes to your responsibility to serve:

Some small foolish hope is better than none at all.

And God doesn’t even need to exist, to grant that prayer!

A heavenly placebo may be all you need to get moving again— to keep trying.

And… if (the idea of) God is willing to help you become less paralyzed: you should let Her.

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Author’s note:

If this feels a little rhyme-schemey/ rhythmic, that’s because it started as a poem.

I wrote most of this in my head while I was hiking around the park where I work, back in mid-March.

There’s a little hill that has always felt sufficiently removed from the world to allow me to meditate, in an almost spiritual way despite being a bit of a mostly-non-believer.

Anyway, I drafted it down once I took my break at work and it felt too long for a poem, so I spent a couple hours here and there trying to trim it down— then I realized it didn’t need to be a poem and I rewrote the whole thing, fleshing it out as fully as I wanted, for the “Small Win” vocal challenge, which prompted all us Vocal writers to share a “small, everyday victory which ends up meaning more than expected.”

For me the small victory is literally just feeling a little hope!

And I’m really not typically one to write anything motivational. Perhaps this sort of personal victory is too small to be relatable to others?

But the way I see it: the world’s pretty dire, such that most of the time I’m caught between tears and unhinged laughter over how absurd all this shit is.

Case in point: hegseth! Right after finalizing this story I saw the news that hegseth, one of the unforgivable, white supremacist scum bags responsible for the war of escalation and aggression in Iran, just quoted a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction in a public prayer at the motherfucking pentagon.

We’re being lead by trigger happy clowns! and they’re wielding “prayer” and religion in the most malignant way imaginable: to justify unhinged violence.

I truly wish God had the power to vaporize that kind of shit, but since I don’t believe God has that power at all I hope that believers and non believers alike can continue to resist the madness.

Also: my most recent revisions to this piece collected some thoughts I had after a very recent conversation over lunch with a woman I’m growing to admire!

I mentioned: when it comes to politics, I can’t look away, because then I’ll feel guilty/ avoidant…. and she kinda gave me permission to take a break, look away, and not beat myself up for that.

I’ve heard the same message from others, I’ve even people similar advice— but this was my first time hearing it from someone who doesn’t seem to shy away from the truth at all— in every sense she seemed more informed than me, so her willingness to take a break from the bad things didn’t look anything like apathy.

Anyway her kindness and wisdom definitely soothed some of the pain I’m feeling about the world.

She also mentioned the problem of evil from a believer’s standpoint, and while I didn’t have an answer at the time, some of my philosophy around this came through in the writing.

Again things are dire, but I’m grateful to have had these moments: peace in the woods… and much later— commiseration and a chance to learn from someone who seems to be handling the stress of awareness and empathy with grace, and patience towards herself.

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Sources:

Skip to page 7 for Some reading on the “Lost city of Tryon” (it was never an actual city, so “failed city” would be a more accurate descriptor):

A starting point for reading about the Seneca people, for who’s ancestral homelands encompass the modern Rochester, NY along with much of the Western portion of the state:

Some info about the archeological study of prehistoric Clovis populations in Central and Western NY:

https://nysm.nysed.gov/research-collections/archaeology/native-american-archaeology/research/new-york-paleoindian-database

And a leaflet on the megafauna that might have walked this area, especially before the arrival of humans:

And a write up about the deeper geological history of the landmass that is now New York:

One recent example of the evil that human monsters do:

Information about tomahawk missiles, including their cost:

Some reporting on the proportions of impact regarding our tax dollars (in the United States):

Some research on the powerlessness of intercessory prayer:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16569567/

Some research on the power of meditative prayer:

And through all this, I remain agnostic, but I admit some forms of prayer do seem to make a difference. If and when I fall into prayer again, I’ll strive to be meditative and open to the changes I’d wish to see in myself, with the reminder that a little hope is better than none at all.