From desert to desert

Three decades ago I was sitting on the beach, drink in hand, listening to the crash of the waves on the shore, as the sun sank slowly into the Pacific.

That afternoon I had been listening to the Eagle’s song, The Last Resort, on my rental car’s radio. The song describes a young woman who left the city of Providence on the east coast of America to find her hopes and dreams in the golden state of California. She ended up at the coast in Malibu.

And there I was too – contemplating the vastness of it all. The song set me thinking that although she had come from the east coast and her father had come across the Atlantic, the journey had begun centuries beforehand – perhaps as far back as when we shared the lands of our friendly cousins the bonobo, in today’s Congo, tens of thousands of years ago.

Or perhaps our story began more fittingly at the first civilization. Over seven thousand years ago, where the Tigris and Euphrates flowed together and entered the sea, the Sumerians built their civilization. The Sumerians tilled the land permanently and in so doing required order and record keeping. They invented writing, the wheel and the seven day week, the twenty four hours of a day and the sixty minutes of an hour. Because they worked so hard, they decided to rest on the Sunday and their God thought it would be a good idea too. This Sumerian idea survives through to today.

Although they were the first, the Sumerians were surpassed by other civilizations. Their successors have generally been to the west. First the Mesopotamians followed by the Babylonians and the Assyrians; the Egyptians and the Phoenicians – who gave us our alphabet. Later, of course, the Greeks and the Carthaginians and the Roman Empire. With their collapse the mantle passed to the Arabs and Berbers, who by the tenth century had made Cordoba in Spain the cultural centre of Europe.

The knowledge learnt from Al Andalus set off the renaissance in Italy. Trade and industry moved slowly north via Champagne, Burgundy and Swabia to the Paris basin and Flanders.

By the sixteenth century the Dutch were the centre of all that was new, bold and impressive and by the end of the seventeenth century the move was again west to the English. With English, later the British, the move continued north and west as the industrial revolution saw the growth of Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. Britain maintained world dominance until around 1922 naval Treaty of London when, with the westward migrations providing workers for the open lands of the Midwest, American industrial power became overwhelming.

The westward movement continued across the prairies and the great divide until California became the most populous state in America.

All that movement of peoples, all that energy and effort, all that ranching, farmsteading and building until, apart from deserts, every piece of land belonged to somebody. And there was no-where else to go.

And there I was: at the end of the great trek of civilisation – in Malibu. For seven thousand years humankind had travelled slowly westward over twelve thousand miles to seek adventure, power or prestige and it all ended where I was sitting.

We had no new place to go. No more could the disenchanted move to a new land and set up their own country. As the Eagle’s song says “Cause there is no more new frontier/ We have got to make it here”.

I remember sitting on that Malibu beach thinking about all this and hoping that one day Americans would begin to understand the profound message of that simple lyric.

I am still hoping.