Just then, I looked at her and thought it seemed less that things had been lost than that they were being found, over and over again.
• • •
Before the forty-niners, in California, were the twenty-niners, in Georgia. They stole the land first from the Cherokee Nation, and then they stole and stole the gold until it was nearly all tapped. And then, after the Cherokee had been forced out, after home itself was purloined, many of those twenty-niners caught wind of Sam Brannan’s call and went West. It was that loud: Gold, gold, gold in the American River! It was the same call my parents heard across oceans, over a century later; the same one Prachi followed to her Victorian on Alamo Square; the same one that had made me both at home in this country and responsible for a great evil.
The morning after the wedding, I had a few precious hours, and a small pilgrimage to make. I gunned my mother’s car north toward Lumpkin County, and pulled over at a diner near the Dahlonega public square. I ordered sweet tea and a cinnamon roll, and I took out my notebook. I began writing a letter, the kind Wang had told me about. To: Shruti Patel, 2007. I remembered Ramesh Uncle’s philosophy—eternalism. That the past lies just around every bend in the mountain highway. That you can spy it from the right summits. That if the fog lifts without warning, you might find yourself face-to-face with its most vivid outline in the sudden sunshine. That if you kneel by the right stretch of land under the right constellations, it might even rise from a river and acknowledge you.
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
