A continent of genealogy bears us toward the future. High cliffs above beaches in Southern California plow toward the Pacific horizon. Twenty miles distant, the arc of the ocean hints of earth's sphere. Sea grass tenses with the tectonic thrust of the American plate on its inevitably slow journey north by west. Sun dazzles off the salt water. Blind we peer into the blue for a glimpse of eternity. Unimaginably unseen, fathom-deep genealogical geology rises, shudders through strata of encounter, family, reproduction. Lines of kinship rise in trace work fracturing toward the surface. We feel inertia uplift our weight; we gasp, we are moving forward.

We were fishermen first. We fished in Long Island Sound before the Pilgrims came.* We sailed in circles, England to America to England, following fish, buoyant on the swirling eddies of the Gulf Stream. North America loomed in front, above, beside our tiny ships, unsurmountable barrier, yet bearer of our destiny. The land called us. Behind New England's fragile fishing villages, we tentatively farmed. Poor harvests compensated poor catches.

We built lines of descent on Massachusetts Bay farms like ragged stone walls subdividing our fields. Spring frost pushes stones through the thin glacial soil. We accept the stones with annual resignation like children. We clear the fields, pulling the rocks loose with horses, prying with borrowed cant dogs. We pile up walls. A neighbor later said to us, we were the land's before the land was ours. The land was never ours, it sponsors us always.

Hay meadows, pretty to view from across the valleys, patchwork the hills. Genealogy reveals the fruits of our labor. Large families. The strength of the women takes our breath away. Ten, twelve, fourteen children—labor within labor. Widows married again. More children. How could blind geology produce such women?

New England history weathered the New England land. It civilized and civilizes us. Wind of religion and politics shaped communities like inexplicable earth mounds, snow drifts in forest clearings, dunes in the Cape sands, our inevitable plots in cemeteries. It eroded community, too. It urged us north and west deeper into New England. We were Quakers. We fled persecution to the lesser opportunities of Maine. We sought strength with this Abenaki Quaker woman. A long moment of stillness in the earth's westering, Plymouth cupped us, a valley, a confluence of rivers, a pause in the slow buildup of lowlands by New Hampshire's White Mountains. She brought us here. How did she know we needed a moment to catch our breath?

A century and a half, four generations in one village. There a farm, again. Then World War two, history's volcanic explosion. The farm sold. Lucknow purchased. Nana at Lucknow, our matriarchal point of reference at our world center. For our parents, there was a farm in a long line of farms. For us, there is the castle and the forest, and Nana reigning from the demesne.

Women made our family an idea, made family more than a name, and passed it from generation to generation, each mother-grandmother holding it together in her turn. History became an alpha wave vibrating the ground. Fred and Susan's children—her children, our parents—floated the alpha waves away, returning for family reunions, borne again away, and so to this very day.

War and after-war paths of employment, career, opportunity, and places of duty: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Texas, Vermont, Washington D.C. Everywhere we meet unfamiliar geography. Everywhere New England's homeland haunts us.

The long low whistle of the tall grass plains hushes dramatically in the Rockies. Some lines of descent terminate in high mountain box canyons with abandoned wood corrals. Other kin procreate and race on like rivers in Colorado chasms. Still other kin conquer floodlands, lowlands, tablelands. They dense the landscape with habitation, anchoring their tents with pegs and lanyards. Their sails tense in the wind, foresheets and sternsheets straining.

We are pushed up against the Pacific Ocean. We float in the eddy again. It stays us. It questions us. The North American land shelf rises up, around, and behind. The land calls us. Where will the land take us?