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—Concerning Three Markers from the Zone of Forgotten Functions.

THE VISITORS NEVER LEFT

Three Artifacts from a Changed Landscape

Commentary by Eugene Bodeswell,
Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Ethnographer

The three markers above concern objects and institutions separated by thousands of years. One commemorates a fluted stone point. Another, a town bandstand. The third, a fraternal benefit society. At first glance, they appear unrelated. Yet all three raise the same question.

The Clovis flute helped a people cross a continent. Exactly how it helped remains uncertain.

The bandstand once gathered a community into a common place. The structure remains. The deeper function is less easily measured.

The Woodmen and similar organizations addressed needs that remain familiar: sickness, death, widowhood, loneliness, mutual obligation, and belonging. The lodge hall faded. The needs did not.

The common interpretation is that such things disappear because they are replaced by superior arrangements. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes it is not. More often, an older form vanishes after changes in the surrounding environment render it unnecessary, impractical, or invisible.

Occasionally, however, the environment itself is altered by the arrival of a new and powerful presence. The old forms do not fail. They simply find themselves inhabiting a different world.

The artifacts remain. The landscape remains. What changed is often harder to see.

This brings us to the old science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic.

In that story, mysterious Visitors alter the landscape. Humanity is left to wander among the artifacts, attempting to infer their purpose. The usual assumption is that the Visitors have long since departed.

The Council is not convinced.

The artifacts remain. The alterations remain. The habits of thought remain. The Visitors themselves may remain as well. They have simply become part of the landscape. The evidence is everywhere. The difficulty lies in noticing it.

A society rarely abandons a practice, institution, or custom without acquiring something in its place. Yet once the replacement becomes familiar, people cease to perceive it as a replacement at all. It becomes natural. Invisible. Self-evident.

The Clovis flute, the bandstand, and the Woodmen lodge remind us that what appears natural today may someday seem as strange and mysterious as a fluted point recovered from an ancient campsite. The point was abandoned. The band dispersed. The lodge closed.

The question remains.

—Eugene Bodeswell