The Book of Lehi opens on the sea.
Not the warm and sheltered inland lake,
Not the river-crossing that the ape could free-
Wade at the shallows—but the opaque
And vast Pacific, the largest face
Of water on the earth, the hemisphere
Of ocean that no land-bridge could replace
With solid ground—and yet the frontier
Called, and they answered.
Sixteen thousand years
Before the common era, when the ice
Still locked the northern corridors, the shears
Of glacial cold had sealed the overland device
That later peoples would imagine—but the coast
Was open. The coast was always open.
The sea was lower then by sixty fathoms' post,
The continental shelves were wide and unbroken
Platforms of exposed and tidal land
Where the kelp beds thickened and the otter
And the seal and the shore-bird and the strand
Of the intertidal zone gave water
And food to anyone who knew the current.
And Lehi knew the current.
Not one man—
A people, a lineage, the recurrent
And patient maritime clan
Whose ancestors had fished the coasts of Asia,
Who had island-hopped from Japan
To Kamchatka, from Kamchatka to the stadia
Of the Aleutian chain—the span
Of stepping-stones that arced across the north
Pacific like a bridge of volcanic teeth—
And from there, southward, pouring forth
Along the coast, beneath
The glaciers' towering walls of blue
That calved their icebergs into the fjords,
Past Haida Gwaii and the rendezvous
Of current and of tide, the hoards
Of salmon running thick in every stream—
The maritime migration, the first
And oldest entry to the American dream,
If dream it was—the thirst
For the next headland, the next sheltered bay,
The next river-mouth where the fish were thick
And the shellfish lay in the intertidal clay
And the driftwood washed up, quick
And useful, for the fire and the frame
Of the temporary shelter on the beach.
They did not walk to America. They came
By boat—the humble craft whose reach
Was the greatest vehicle of the Pleistocene:
The skin-boat, the dugout, the sewn-plank
Canoe that hugged the coastline's evergreen
And kelp-draped shore—they drank
The coastal waters and they ate the sea's
Abundance: mussel, clam, and urchin,
Rockfish, halibut, the expertise
Of the tidal fisher and the searchin'
Eye that read the current and the swell.
No Bering bridge of dusty steppe—
The oldest Americans knew well
The ocean's rhythm, and their step
Was the paddle-stroke, their road the littoral,
Their compass the migration of the whale
Who followed the same coast, the literal
And ancient highway of the gray whale's trail
From Asia to America and back—
The whale had known this road for millions
Of years, and the human followed in the track
Of the leviathan's brilliant pavilions
Of breath along the kelp-highway's lane.
And the evidence? Monte Verde,
In southern Chile—fourteen thousand years' domain
Of human habitation, the sturdy
And undeniable proof that people lived
At the far end of the Americas
Before the inland ice-free corridor contrived
To open—which means the Americas'
First peoples came by sea.
The Channel Islands
Off California's coast preserve the bone
Of Arlington Springs Woman—the silence
Of thirteen thousand years, alone
On an island that could only be reached by boat.
Paisley Caves in Oregon, the coprolites
Of the first Americans—note by note
The evidence accumulates, the rights
Of the coastal theory vindicated
By the discipline of trowel and screen:
They came by water, and they populated
Both continents while the ice was keen
And the interior was locked.
And south they went—
Past California's golden kelp-forests,
Past Mexico's warm Pacific coast, the bent
And narrowing land of Central America's crests,
To Colombia and Ecuador and the long
Peruvian coast where the Humboldt Current fed
The richest fishery on earth—the song
Of the anchovy and the widespread
Upwelling of the cold and fertile deep.
And some turned inland—up the rivers,
Through the passes, into the sweep
Of the interior, the givers
Of new habitats: the grassland and the forest,
The mountain valley and the desert floor—
But the coast was first, the coast was the purest
And oldest road, and the shore
Was the mother-road of the Americas.
Honor Lehi—the first migrant,
The sea-road walker, whose dramas
Were the paddle and the elegant
And patient reading of the coast:
The one who did not wait for the ice to melt,
Who did not need the land-bridge's post
But took the ocean's hand, and felt
The kelp beneath the hull, the current's pull,
The whale's road opening ahead—
And followed it, faithful and dutiful,
To a world where no human foot had tread,
And made it home.
The Book of Lehi begins
Not with a land-bridge but a boat,
Not with a hunter's overland campaigns
But with a fisher's paddle-stroke, the note
Of the sea-bird's cry above the morning swell—
And the coastline, stretching south and south,
The longest road that any tongue would tell,
And the ocean's salt upon the mouth
Of the first American.