We started where the granite falls,
flipping ties above Yosemite’s walls,
and something in the blood said go,
not fast, not straight, but north and slow.
To Jenner where the river drowns,
we pulled the old barns to the ground,
then east through Colusa’s heat
to lay the prunes and walnuts sweet
in rows that dried beneath the sun,
work for winter, never done.
Up the Sierra’s golden seams
we panned the creeks and cut the means,
built the roads that let men pass,
then doubled back toward Pacific glass.
A zigzag stitch across the map,
but every loop drew north a lap.
On Airport Road the spruce came down,
Port Orford cedar, pale as the crown
of morning, honey-grained and light,
we traded straight for valley right,
for fruit and nut and earth to own.
The buyer drowned it under cranberry alone.
Alpine waited, in between,
too young to log, too spent to clean,
worn thin by hands that came before.
But we could read what it was for.
The lesson there ran deep and true,
the land remembers what you do.
And every generation hands
the work, the wager, and the lands
to those who come behind the plow,
some clumsy, some who keep the vow.
The teaching passed from kin to kin
was how to tend, to heal, to mend again,
to read the soil and know its worth,
to give back more than we took from earth.
We learned the names of what is rare,
the things that live almost nowhere,
the Fender’s blue on lupine wing,
the Kincaid’s bloom, the small soft things,
the daisy, larkspur, checkermallow,
roots that hold the wet and fallow.
We kept it. Kept on climbing too,
till the green Willamette opened through.
Here the white oaks hold their ground,
a hundred winters, two, around
the camas fields our oldest kin
laid down before the world grew thin,
ten thousand springs of patient hands
who burned and tended, read the land.
So this is where the migration ends,
where root and labor finally blends:
the oak stands guard, the elk move slow,
the bees go where the blue blooms grow,
and one late monarch, fourth of its line,
rides the long migration home.