Reading Herodotus at Deep Springs

 Photo courtesy of Pablo Uribe

I’m standing outside my house, where a sandy two-track truck path begins a gradual descent toward the southern end of the Deep Springs basin. The ranch lies ahead of me, cottonwoods casting sporadic shade on a few houses and outbuildings while the paddocks and barn etch sharp shadows. The valley sinks toward a whitish disappearing point before brown hills interrupt and rise, piling atop one another like boulders. Farther still the jagged crest of the Sierra Mountains raises its icy palisade to scratch the sky.

Sage fills my nostrils. Salt bush and ephedra tinkle drily. I toe a petrified cow pie from the edge of the track and boot it with a soft thud into the grass. Cows lumber in slow motion around the field. A snort punctuates the stillness.

This place – Deep Springs Valley – felt written for Herodotus. Or made for him. I came to this place and was overtaken with wonder, that almost erotic curiosity and interest which Socrates referred to as the starting point of philosophy and Aristotle called “the desire to know.” I discovered stories and traditions in the place that Herodotus would have loved. Lore of a lost students who still haunted the hills. Scattered monuments – an old green truck, a cabin built above the scree behind campus, the “tree of solitude.” A Druid-like stone monument that arrested your gaze all around campus. Trails crisscrossed the hills shouldering the valley floor, but no book or map described them. Among crusty work gloves and twists of wire lay a ream of photocopied pages labeled “The Horse Book.” Inside, photocopied sections of topo maps with hand-annotations instructed you where to find trilobites or rock crystals or abandoned mine shafts that ended in wormhole darkness. 

Stories we tell come from listening to others. The legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapunsckinki evokes this when he writes that he learned the art of reportage from Herodotus, how Herodotus illustrates that everything we know comes from someone who lives somewhere. Wikipedia’s layers of reader contributions and editorial suggestions give some sense of this, but most information we encounter today suffers from radical decontextualization. We don’t know who saw what’s being reported, who wrote it down, who interpreted it and put it into a story. We don’t know what the reporter ate for breakfast or what’s inside the top drawer of her nightstand. Herodotus loves these details: the oracles and how people interpret them to suit their tendentious predilections; the daughter who hides to observe her father and then reveals herself when she blurts out her distrust of the advice he’s receiving; the goats that graze backwards lest their horns catch in the turf; the foolish myths as well as the wise ones.

In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus describes how the king of the Persians, Cambyses, decides to invade Egypt. Before recounting the fate of this expedition, Herodotus pauses to examine the history and customs of the Egyptians. A massive excursus follows. He relates his own explorations of the Nile’s origin as well as his speculations about why it floods. He tells the story of how an early king of Egypt, Psammetichus, sought to establish if the Egyptians were the earliest human beings on earth by isolating a child from language until it spoke its first word, which would ostensibly indicate the original human language. (The word was bekos, a Phrygian word for bread, which belied the widespread belief in the Egyptians’ being first among all civilizations.) Herodotus talks of the phoenix, which immolates itself only to be reborn from its ashes, as well as crocodiles and the special burials Egyptians give to their victims. He relates his conversations with priests and the chronology of kings he could see from the statues lining their temples.

All this, the longest section of the entire Histories, numbering around seventy-five pages in most English translations, is preparation for the invasion that Herodotus later describes with much more brevity. Why the digression? Scholars have lucubrated. One point, in my view, is how Herodotus learns what he tells. Herodotus looks for himself, counting the statues one by one, or he retells what he’s heard, attributing his sources and the stories they give him. The knowledge and content of the Histories depend on Herodotus’ own inquiries and on the relationships he forms while pursuing them. They depend on conversations with himself and with others.

A few years into my tenure at Deep Springs, I proposed a course on Herodotus and his Histories. My idea was that pursuing a Herodotean inquiry in the valley would yield fascinating results, revealing, for example, the often overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories that shapeshifted among us. The stories we tell are not just garments we wear or hang in the closet, depending on our mood. The stories we tell are like the air we breathe, the water in which we swim. They form the flesh of the world, the substance of what sustains and connects us. My hope was that reading Herodotus and bringing his form of inquiry to the Deep Springs community could illuminate some part of the social body – an arm here, a foot there – and thus our contributions to it, how we kept the collective alive.

My students took up this challenge with characteristic gusto. Tanner wrote about Nietzsche as a formative figure among the century of Deep Springs curricula. Nathan spoke with alumni about re-invitation, the process by which second year students evaluated first years and decided whether or not to “re-invite” them to continue their education. Jackson focused on the Main Circle, the lawn around which the primary buildings of the college were clustered. Each of these inquiries brought the inquirers, my students, into new relationships: manila folders stuffed with stapled Xeroxes of course syllabi; vociferous alumni who still held grudges against their classmates – or had forgiven and befriended them; yellowed photographs of the early days in the valley when no trees canopied the campus and dust from the road hovered like pollen in the air.

Pablo took the example of Herodotus even farther. He left the valley and drove to the Inyo County Courthouse to visit a tiny archive there. He wanted stories that weren’t circulating already in the valley, stories that would let him look from the outside in. Deep Springs, like any other place, had constitutive outsiders whose traces you could still find if you looked for them. Pablo discovered a sad yet unsurprising history of omission, negligence, and violence, of ways that the coherent inside of the Deep Springs community rested on a forcible removal of what did not comport. The Paiutes were remembered by their petroglyphs, but the pedagogy of the land they followed was forgotten.


Herodotus refers to the “inhabited land” as that which he could know something about, be it by traveling there or by hearing information from reliable sources. The inhabited land is the knowable land; outside of it mystery reigns. The edges of the earth are places of extremes – extreme animals like griffins and dragons and extreme climates like the frigid regions he calls Hyperborean. Think of the maps of early European explorers with sea serpents and monstrous whirlpools around the central European landmass.

Herodotus’ inquiry names these boundaries as the limits of what he knows and he treats these unknown places as worthy of further investigating. They elicit wonder rather than fear or disregard. They may offer different vantage points, much as Egypt does. Greece appears young and impetuous to the Egyptians and Herodotus retells their judgment without comment. Different perspectives availed much the same for Deep Springs: It appeared both like a precious emerald, saved from the blessings of civilization, and as a blood diamond ripped by settler colonialists from the innocent hands of its original inhabitants.

Both stories are true. Both are stories that need telling.

Pablo’s inquiries discovered many things, but one in particular stayed with me. Here I recount what Pablo wrote up in his own historia. In the spring of 1862, the Paiutes living in the area around Deep Springs asked the settlers to leave. The incursions of miners and other settlers had grown insupportable. Deep Springs Valley Paiute Chief Joe Bowers declared that this was their territory and advised that the settlers depart before tensions grew out of hand. Many settlers heeded the warning, but bloodshed was not averted. For six years, settlers and indigenous people fought, mostly in the Owens Valley just west of Deep Springs but also in Deep Springs Valley itself. During these battles, Chief Bowers heard that Captain Moses McLaughlin of the United States Army intended to storm the valley and kill all Indigenous people residing there. The Deep Springs Paiutes resolved to hide. They fled to a small cave on the mountainside above Deep Springs Lake. From there they watched soldiers pick over their abandoned settlement before marching back to camp empty-handed.

 The Paiutes escaped annihilation then but within a few years Chief Bowers was run off the land. The Deep Springs Paiute population fell below one hundred and soon dwindled to nothing. No Paiutes now inhabit Deep Springs Valley, although they continue to live in the Owens Valley and fight to regain ownership of their stolen lands.

Herodotus writes of a similar moment during the war between the Greeks and the Persians, but his story has a different ending. The Persians were the invading colonists; they sought to subdue and control the self-governing Greeks and to steal the fruits of their lands. When the Greek forces fell back in the face of a numerous Persian force, the Athenians were forced to retreat. They conveyed all women and children to the islands outside Athens, relinquishing the city itself to the invaders. Everything was evacuated with the exception of a priest and attendants in the sacred temple of Athena on the Acropolis. The Persians entered and destroyed the countryside around Athens before taking the city itself, plundering the treasures of the Acropolis and setting fire to its temples. They murdered the suppliants who remained.

News of the ruin of Athens alarmed the Athenians who had fled. Under the leadership of Themistocles, they gathered a council for war. Themistocles persuaded the other Greeks to remain and fight with them. Omens spoke in their favor, exciting the sailors and soldiers to believe in the possibility of their victory. When the battle came, they triumphed.
 
Before the culminating victory at what became known as the Battle of Salamis, exiled Athenians enlisted by the king of the Persians to assist his conquest returned to the smoking ruins of the Acropolis. There they discovered a fresh olive shoot rising from the ashes of the temple dedicated to Erectheus, the legendary progenitor of the Athenian people. The fresh growth had sprouted from the stump of the olive tree that had once thrived there and was already one and a half feet tall.

Where is the olive shoot rising for the Paiute? What future does it foretell? We need a Herodotus for the twenty-first century.


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