The Grandmothers and the Grandsons

Which brings the whole line to a kitchen table near Nashville, and to two eleven-year-old boys who already had a name for the shaft they could feel closing around their generation. The Promethean fire of technology, placed in the hands of a sovereign grandmother, is being used for exactly what my grandfather's perpendicular walk out of the mine was for: to write the manual of escape, to heal the family, and — with the help of the native buffalo — to restore the land. My bloodline did not merely witness the physical and technological excellence of the last two centuries. They built its bones, survived its dark mines, held its silent frequencies, and preserved the enfolded code of its founding until someone rose in the dark to help them remember.