
Rebecca Gayle Howell (ed.)
et al.
Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
07 March 2023
Online ISBN:
9780813197418
Print ISBN:
9780813182438
Contents
Cite
McLarney, Rose, 'The Way Taken', in Rebecca Gayle Howell, Ashley M. Jones, and Emily J. Jalloul (eds), What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (Lexington, KY , 2023; online edn, Kentucky Scholarship Online, 18 May 2023), https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813182438.003.0117, accessed 14 May 2025.
Extract
A waterfall impedes travel, and a mountain slows.A straight line measure of mileage between points tellslittle of how a walker moved on land with such features.We are unable to fly. What humans can choose is notto cross streams or ridges in a straight shot, thoughthe distance would be lesser if swum or clambered.Usually, we go around, on the route at the hill’s feet,or that keeps our own dry. Follow least-cost pathways—archeologists’ term referring to where past pedestrians,accounting for terrain, are likeliest to have stepped.What is cost? In AD 1000, perhaps the peoplewho lived here preferred length of effort to force.Perhaps time rather than exertion was the currencywith which they, with their trails winding slowand level through the valleys and meadows, paid.*
What is we? Settlers who spoke of takingthe long, crooked road, migrating to the mountains,are the lineage I can come nearest to claiming.They picked dirt so rocky it bent tools, wouldn’t yieldfood. And stayed, as if to choose dramatic scenerywas to set beauty as the highest value. But hard laboris as central to their story. In which some estimationof profit led to plowing Native American mounds,in a few generations wearing them down to halfthe height they’d been for a thousand years.To displacements more terrible still. And to me,learning to take my first steps on disturbed ground,then pocketing pottery shards I found. To encounteragain later, opening boxes of childhood collectionsand questions about my and first, learn and get better.
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