14.

Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia.

The Forward Scout

When, after millennia of slow construction of a stable proto-society, the tribes began to move out in all directions from central Africa, the need for a new, highly specialized role became quickly apparent, that of the forward scout.

Who knew what undreamt of beasts, what new quagmires might lie in the next forest or beyond the next hills? Someone had to be sent ahead, someone fast on foot and with sharp vision, to see if the path ahead was safe for the whole group.

More often than not, the scout would return with good news: Press on, for the way contains no new dangers, no surprises.

And on they would go, finding perhaps new fields, new fruits, new prey.

The tribes spread, and spread, and spread. Although many eventually chose to stop and stay, finding life in a familiar, known place better than the seemingly endless unknown beyond the horizon, many, for various reasons, kept on.

For those, the reports of the forward scouts were always eagerly awaited, carefully listened to, and cautiously judged.

The running, returning figure would appear. All would gather around, and listen. Even sights for which the tribe hardly had words—great rivers, vast oceans, white hills that reached the sky—were accepted and somehow worked into the body of knowledge the tribe was slowly and at such great cost accumulating.

Uncountable years brought them finally to a halt. Water on one side, land that they knew on the other. There was nowhere left to go, nothing left to do but settle and live.

So live they did, but what of the ancient and venerable tradition, this critical role, the person who at risk went on ahead, stood on whatever the next prominence was, looked about, and returned to tell what was to be seen?

What good was a forward scout, no matter how keen the scout’s vision, if there were no new worlds ahead?

Vision turned inward where, mixing the shards of memory (we came from there and there, and this and this happened) with the phantasmagoria of dreams and clever bits of wakeful imaginings, the forward scouts and their progeny sat, thought, and spun tales of hope and beauty and pain and death and failure and triumph and even—they were after all still forward scouts—of the unseeable future which it became their new role to descry and describe. Some, alas, mistook the past for the future, while other mistook their navel for the world. Others, nearsighted and far sighted, looked and looked, and only rarely blinked.

That one lone figure, the runner who had gone ahead, morphed and morphed again, becoming prophet, poet, artist, and singer, who, best when ego-less, cared not a whit whether these new, often puzzling and troubling reports were believed, knowing one role and one role only. Not to bemuse, not merely to entertain, not to frighten, not to give false hope, but only to go stand on the next prominence, to look, and come back with a report: This I saw.

The Peaks of Otter continues >>

Back to Magellan's Log 105

Magellan's Log front page

Send this page to a friend.

We love to get mail from our readers!