In the beginning there was ocean. It was cold and dark and upon it was the Pioneer. The Pioneer made a ship with sails to travel on the ocean. He looked up into the darkness and sang a song of vastness to make the stars. He turned and pointed to the horizon and traced a line through the sky above him to the other end and made the sun. The Pioneer observed them and navigated west. It was the first day.
He gathered breath and filled his sails. He sailed until the horizon grew rough with the outline of land. The Pioneer took some of the ocean and cupped it in his hands to make a harbor for his ship. He disembarked and saw the land was wild. He cleared the brush and trees and used the rudder from the ship to plow rows in the soil. The Pioneer created sky between the earth and space and filled it with rain clouds to water the earth and make it fertile. He collected good seeds from the wild and made them grow in rows according to their kind. The sun set in the West, it was the second day.
The Pioneer went to the wild and took the animals and yoked them together. He drove them back to the rows of seeds, dragging the largest tree behind them to clear the rest away. He made them strong and obedient and let them graze. He took the trees hewn by the livestock to make beams and took stones plowed up from the ground and made a homestead. The Pioneer took salt from the earth and made settlers in his image, male and female, and showed them the fields of seeds and livestock. He struck fire for their hearth and gave them dominion over all the land they could see. It was the third day.
He moved further west and cleared a path through the wild to make a road. He dug trenches north and there were canals. He stood in the river and pushed its banks to the width of his outspread arms. He followed it south and filled the mouth with sand and mud. The Pioneer turned and looked to see what He had done and saw that it was good. He commanded the settlers to have families and follow Him west to name the places and things they saw along the way. The sun set and it was the fourth day.
The Pioneer kept west. He made there to be grass in the great plain where he stood. He turned to the North and colored it every shade of red. He set great rocks there and stretched the sky above them. The Pioneer turned south and split the Earth open, making a river to pass through the bottom to show the greatness of the canyon He had created. Pioneer faced west and took the land in His hands and crumpled it into tall mountains. Upon these He set trees of long life which the settlers were not to hew. These, He told the settlers, were places of honor and beauty and forbade them from using them for their own purposes. He charged them with their conservation. This was the fifth day.
Now there were settlers all throughout the land. The Pioneer reached the western ocean and surveyed the land and told the settlers of the boundaries. He saw their number and gave them Democracy and divided them into industries and agriculture. The Pioneer faced the coast and kneeled on the ground, placing His hands one atop the other against the earth and pushed hard into the ground. A tower rose before Him as He pressed, then another and another, until He had made a great city in each direction. As the sun set the Pioneer created the moon and ascended in a column of fire toward it. It was the sixth day.
On the seventh day Pioneer had finished His labor and rested. Thus was America, in its vast array. The Pioneer made this day sacred because on it He rested, the final day of labor complete.
go back
© 2006 Damion Armentrout. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.