On Dec. 19, 1995, The New York Times reported the discovery of a man's remains, found “face down in a slushy pocket of glacier” in the Italian Alps, along a path where local shepherds still guide their sheep. The German hikers thought they had discovered someone recently lost. In fact, scientists estimate the corpse had abided in the alpine landscape for 5,300 years.
Since the, this Iceman has resided, among other places, in my imagination.
The miracle of his second coming accompanied me as I moved from my parents house near Philadelphia to Williamstown, Mass., to apprentice on an organic farm for a growing season, before moving back to my parent's house briefly, and then on to a stint at a convent in north-central Pennsylvania to work as their gardener; and from the convent I pursued a series of farm jobs in upstate New York, southern Vermont, each move one step more north, until I paused for a breather in a valley town in Northern Vermont for five years, shuffling through umpteen employments and identities, baking biscotti, clerking a bookstore, filing medical records, landscaping, bar tending, waitressing, cleaning dairy barns, tutoring, until eventually I moved to a small house on a small piece of land and began my project of Dwelling, where I've lived and farmed for the past seven years.
Now, on my frequent walks along the dusty Creek Road to pick up mail in the village two miles away, I think of how the Iceman or Otzi as scientists named him, was entirely indigenous to his environment. He was found with a grass cape and a copper axe, smelted from local malachite; his lungs hosted a fungus called aspergillus; a wheat seed was extracted from his digestive tract; whipworm eggs lurked in his colon: he was the motherland, after life in the motherland, a country within a country.
According to Graham Robb, author of The Discovery of France, French church bells were often made of metal pieces, donated plates and old pitchers brought by the villagers to be smelted into their bell, where the size of one's community was equivalent to the peal's audibility; if you heard it, it was tolling for you. For many peasants the known universe had a radius of less than 15 miles and a population that could easily fit in a small barn.
Here in Craftsbury, maps from the 1850s show schoolhouses situated strategically so no child ever had to walk more than two miles to reach their one room beneath the bell tower. Perhaps the Iceman's mobility and district were not egregiously different than that of the French peasants or the Whitney Family, who built the house I live in, whose children perhaps ambled to the schoolhouse, and who probably planted the red oak in our yard.
From its dismissible single seed started over 125 years ago, an enormous tree, having pulled its entire livelihood out of the ground, hoisting itself aloft, fountaining limbs, has never lived anywhere else but right here. And my steer, born in the near pasture, fed on the lawn and with these baled fields, then slaughtered 20 yards from his beginning, he too can claim the kind of indigenousness I'll never earn, no matter how long or deeply I stay. Like the Iceman, the steer is inherent for having grown from this land, and returned to it, via the compost pile, while part of him continues as a source of nourishment, steak, spare ribs, hamburger meat.
But even these beings defy the purest forms native-ness for having first originated elsewhere: the Whitneys came from England, by way of Connecticut, where they scooped up the red oak acorn and brought it north. The steer - he was also a newcomer compared to the moose and deer here.
The Iceman, the ideal I'll never attain, Mr. Unimpeachably Local, well, maybe was also an Otzi-come-lately to the highlands, more immigrant than inherent. And even while I try feeding my longing to belong by eating what ever I can reap from this piece of earth, the man born in 3000 B.C. has become a global citizen. Within months of his discovery, parts of him were examined in San Louis Obisbo, England and Vienna.
Perhaps it's exactly his multi-nationalization that assured him a permanent home in my mind. It's his dispersal, his ricochets around the scientific community that bear some resemblance to my veering around the northeast, with my laptop crafted from smelted metals of Africa, and a grain of Chinese rice riding my intestines, not completely a part of one place, an un-naturalized citizen of everywhere.
And yet I think the final reason why I've lugged this fantastic man, from farm to farm, for more than 15 years now, my whole young adulthood, is because he symbolizes the promise of pleasant surprise. For most of the development of human civilization, from his first life, dawning with the invention of the wheeled cart, walk behind plough, and domesticated sheep, until the 1990s, when he remerged in the a world with the dawning of Internet, the Hubble Telescope, and the project to clone a sheep well underway, he remained within shouting distance of the shepherds, undetected.
When asked, present day shepherds of the region will tell you where the Iceman was headed, why he was passing through the Otzal Alps: They think he was headed toward the valley, “To his house.” Maybe he too was longing for home when he expired. Then one day he rose through the slush into our consciousness and became, for a time, the oldest intact human ever found. This possibility of something undiscovered, existing on the ordinary thoroughfare, one day revealing itself, this is what I think about on my walk back from town with the mail.