Time in this space-the lands among the rivers of eastern Virginia-grows deeper and more fluid than I have ever known. It is a challenge to the imagination as well as my skills in research.

All I have to do is dig a bit-in the soil and in ancient records. Not very far away, perhaps a mile as the crow flies, is the likely site of Werowocomoco, a central town and perhaps a spiritual center of the Algonquin Powhatan Confederacy in the early 1600s. It is here where Captain John Smith was adopted as an Indian called Nantaquod after Pocahontas symbolically "saved" him. (One must dig hard under English presumptions to find the Indian truth of that famed encounter.)

Evidently the Indians were on our marsh creek, as on many others, finding food, setting up homes, and perhaps trading. My neighbor has a collection of broken clay pipes and arrowheads which surfaced in his efforts to garden. All I have found in the sandy soil are shells, memories of an older time when this land was part of the Chesapeake Bay. I wonder--with melting glaciers and warming climate, will the water be returning to flood the land and not just the marsh?

What was this marsh like for the Indians? Surely its curves were shifted, as they continue to move restlessly today, so my pier testifies, magically creeping into the middle of the creek. The creek shows few other marks of human intervention, although the fish and crabs coming with the eternal tides are surely affected. Of course, there were no piers stretching to the water then, or motor boats besides them.

The deer, raccoons, muskrats, eagles, fish, and crabs here today must have been their neighbors too. Surely there were also creatures now gone, or swiftly leaving these marshy lands-otters, bobcats, bears, even wolves and birds now extinct, like the Carolina parakeet. But several years ago a neighbor reported a bear eating from her dog's dish, another saw a bobcat moving quickly in the twilight, and I watched two otters playing before a trapper was reputed to be at work. The turkeys crossing our road this morning still flaunt the coppery feathers the Indians loved to wear.

The forest across the marsh looks old, but it is not, being harvested periodically by a group of investors in northern Virginia. The ground beneath the trees has been repeatedly pushed into rough ridges and ditches by huge machines, making for tough hiking. No forest primeval here, and the wildlife is on the run with each harvesting. But at least the trees close to the marsh are now spared.

Downstream, near the Werowocomoco site, is Purtan Bay. Marked on Captain Smith's map as Poetan Bay, this place runs deep for me. A bit more than fifty years after one Captain John Smith 'became' Indian here, nearby another John Smith was born to a Major John Smith in 1662, the first English child born north of the York River. The small bay was renamed for Purtan, the English village either Smith or his wife Anna Bernard (perhaps both) had emigrated from, not too far from Stonehenge.

The Indians had retreated from some of the Middle Peninsula at that time, although shortly before they had been promised that land as their "reservation." The Major does not seem to have literally pushed them from his land, though he was quick to take it over as they went looking for hunting grounds not yet claimed by land-hungry Englishmen.

That John Smith was one of my ancestors, ten generations removed. My parents came from Oklahoma and Texas; undoubtedly there are a multitude of Americans with some ancestral roots in the sandy soil of Virginia, whether of Indian, African, English, or-most likely-highly mixed blood. We would do well to consider anyone we meet a possible "cousin."

So one effect of such time travel, I find, is a radical shift of pronouns, from "they" to "we." Here I feel a web of connections to those who have been on this land and creek for centuries before, leaving relatively few traces.

Our descendants, should they learn to look, are likely to see far more harmful repercussions from human residence, and may be too busy to see connections to nature. That is a world I wish I could not imagine. Meanwhile, I'll make sure that my grandchildren do learn to look-and look to learn-on their excursions here, and to find that no matter where they go, this land is a home for them.

Pleasant Living Magazine, November/December 2006