Buried deep in my head is a peach-pit sized “primitive” brain that this Sunday’s autumnal equinox reawakened to a vision of Europe’s tribal past. There I proudly trudge with smelly pals behind our wobbly oxcart, rapping rowdy verses old as the dirt. We’re sweat-burnt and marrow-tired, but sore muscles do nothing to subdue cheerful randiness at the prospect of dancing with our women far into the fast-falling night. I can tangibly feel my lungs swell with the dry, sweet, grassy aroma of fall harvest in Saxon England.

All this is more than a daydream but less than Jungian racial memory. Maybe it’s just the slenderest thread of genetic code, braided into my DNA by the complaining of hungry children, the deliciousness of cold water, the belly-pleasing heat of hard-wheat bread. Slipping even farther into the long-ago, for a thousand generations these were the prized weeks of plenty – of ripe fruit and plump young swine. After painfully scraping past the “starvation gap,” the warm but barren months between the depletion of winter stores and arrival of a new summer’s crops, at last this was the time of frenetic gathering, of reaping whatever rewards could be had from strong-hearted prayer and soul-bending labor.

At our core, we all are peasants. Calluses thick as leather buckets. The kind of people who eat nettle soup. A name for each weed and wiggling creature, real and imagined. Malicious elves lying in wait behind every twisted oak, armed with plague-tipped arrows. (A surprising number of the rare surviving writings from England’s Dark Ages deal with countering poisonous elvish darts and enchantments.)

Our origins in the soil may come as an insult to those genealogists who fancy themselves directly descended from William the Conqueror, or New Age reincarnationists who, through remarkable coincidence, all were once exalted members of the warrior and priestly classes of fabled Atlantis. The fact is that even here in America you have to climb up only two or three branches of any family tree before coming to an unpruned tangle of humble farmers. We all have dirt under our fingernails.

There is, of course, a vast gulf between a farmer and a peasant, for all their shared reliance on the earth. It is a matter of ownership. Many of our forebears didn’t even truly own themselves, far less the land on which they labored. Up until a scant few centuries ago, peasants in England, Germany and Scandinavia were little more than serfs, bound to a particular property for life, living and dying within a mile of their birthplaces. And outright slavery once was common among native-born people in northwestern Europe. There was a time, for example, when “Welsh” and “slave” were virtually synonymous terms.

A good way of gauging the harshness of rural life in the Old World is to compare it with what people experienced once arriving in the New. It is a misconception that the pilgrims suffered horrendously in comparison with their supposedly cushy lives back in England and Holland. After a couple distinctly dangerous years at the start, life expectancies soared in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and child mortality plunged. Many first-generation colonists lived into their 80s and beyond, bearing gaggles of kids. Owning enough acres of productive farmland transformed our lives.

It has always seemed to me that this is the best time to give thanksgiving for all we treasure from this richly endowed continent, as opposed to a holiday at the stormy end of November, apparently designed to facilitate shameless Christmas merchandising. The pilgrims, no fans of revelry or Christmas, basically stripped the fun out of the traditional English equinox festival of Harvest-home, subtracting the laughter and begrudgingly leaving the feast, along with church … and more church. (Historian Roger Thompson notes that their former English neighbors saw the pilgrims as “interfering, self-righteous, directive, strident, neurotic, arrogant, excluding, aggressive, uncompromising, humorless, somber; a swarm of busybodies, bores, prigs, and interminable nasal droners.”)

Called Harvest-home for the very good reason that it’s when people brought home the last of the harvest, it was witnessed and described by a German traveler in 1598, a few decades before the brief Puritan takeover in England wiped away Harvest-home, May-poles and a host of other folk practices.

“We happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home, their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed … men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.”

If all this sounds a lot like my genetic memory of the equinox, it’s no accident. More than nearly anything, I’d love to travel back along the lost road to meet our country folk. To learn our long-forgotten family stories, listening to their tall tales and ancient dreams would fill me with joy – assuming I could talk them out of promptly burning me at the stake as a magician.

Wouldn’t it be something to sit among these bright people as autumn’s crystalline, slanting light set the hilltops ablaze? I know we would find plenty to laugh about and much in common, sharing the warmth of a smoky fire on a chilly equinox night, as the northern hemisphere silently slides into its fallow months.

Chinook Observer editor Matt Winters lives in Ilwaco with his wife and daughter.