To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I wrote to her, as I always do, about the day-to-day rhythms of my life at a given moment. I write until it leads back to her, as it always does. I told her I was sitting in North Georgia, near the place where she and I had been on a field trip during her first years in America. I told her about Prachi’s wedding, about Manu leaving California to try to make Georgia a better home, about how little Anita and I still understood about how to make use of all we’d taken, but about how we were trying to figure that out these days. About how it seemed the most important question we could set our minds to.
I told her she would have been good at journalism, which was still new and intimidating to me, or at coding, which stumped Anita every day. I wrote to her about how the hardest thing about adulthood, for her, would not have been work, or money, or even making friends, or finding love—she would have met her tribe in college or graduate school, I was sure. You would have had to forgive people, if you’d gone on, I wrote. You would have had to believe that idiots grow up and change. You would have had to be big enough to accept that, or the bitterness might have eroded you. But you would have. You would have found a way to be generous to everyone who was never generous to you. You would have figured out that thing historians and politicians and all the world today is struggling with—the moral weight of the past, how to hold it.
I finished, signing as I always do: I’m sorry, still sorry, will never not be sorry, your friend, Neil.
I shut the notebook and got back in the car.
The historic downtown area was all kitsch and crowds. Pink-skinned people, turkey legs in hand; children on parents’ shoulders, faces painted and stickered. All around, the jangling sounds of the Dahlonega Gold Festival, and the burst of the summer green foliage.
A man on a stage in high boots and Levi’s was narrating a drama. “That gold fever, kids,” he was telling his audience of openmouthed children, “it just gets into ya and it won’t leave ya. It’s always there.” A family band strummed banjos. People were clapping and dancing beneath the early June sunshine, elbows linking elbows. A few women in laced faux corsets and men in panners’ trousers meandered, passing out brochures for gold hikes and ghost tours. The day, terribly easy. History on everyone like a shrugged-on costume.
Peals of children’s laughter behind me, as an older sister chased her brother. He toppled, and a decked-out miner raced to help him up, offering the handle of his pick, and life persisted like this, blithe.
I drove northwest from the square, tailing a station wagon with two bicycles affixed to the top. At some point the wagon pulled off and I followed signs to a trailhead. I set out, hands in pockets. The path was deserted but for a few runners and one old woman walking her regal husky.
Above, a flutter of warbling birds flapped together, then suddenly split apart, disturbed by something I couldn’t discern. The husky barked. And soon, I found myself on a ridge overlooking the splay of the North Georgia mountains, those rich evergreen summits that rolled out into distant blue shapes just shades away from the sky. Runners’ voices echoed behind me, but I couldn’t make out their words. Cotton ball clouds ringed the higher peaks.
Below plunged the valley, the state sinking low and deep. Through the trees came an interrupting vein of murky water. A river—perhaps one where, as in the American and the Yuba, someone waded two hundred years ago, caught a bounty in his hands, shouted, Gold, gold, gold in the river, shouted something about the American promise, and intoxicated the world.
I squatted low on the trail so that the river bled out of view, becoming just a ropy shape hanging between the trees. I knelt, teetering on the precipice, gravity threatening, and dropped my head as in accidental prayer. My vision was filled half by the dimming blue sky and half by the trees blooming verdant before autumn’s hot flare-ups, before winter’s dulling.
I still want, sometimes, to stand in front of time, to dam it up, halt or reroute its current. But as I pressed myself to that earth, I thought about Anjali Joshi shrinking under the weight of time and Anita beginning to grow larger in it and me, about to take some important strides toward a tomorrow that had long seemed elusive, and I thought that perhaps all this was good, or at least natural. Because I suspect that if I were to change the past, I would have to trace its river back to its primordial estuaries, to some place where all desire began, to the universe before neutron stars rained gold onto Earth. I don’t think I would find, even in those elemental waters, the pure beginning of history, but instead the future already rising up, silt and gold and sweat, slicking across the surface of the water like oil and then drifting on.