The People of the Fly — Kutzadika'a

Walk easy on this stretch, because this one deserves an unhurried telling — and I tell it careful, because the people it belongs to are still here, still in this basin, and still telling it better than I ever will.

Long before there was a road around these lakes — before Carson's tents, before the tramway, before a single cabin — this valley was part of the seasonal round of the Kutzadika'a, the Mono Lake Paiute. Their homeland centers on the strange salt lake north of here, and their name tells you the most remarkable thing about them: it means, roughly, the people who eat the fly.

Now hold your face straight, because this is a story about genius, not strangeness. Mono Lake is too salty for a single fish. What it has instead — in almost unimaginable abundance — is brine flies, and every summer their larvae wash and heap along the shore. The Kutzadika'a harvested them, dried them, and made kutsavi — a food so rich, so storable and so PORTABLE that it became currency. Trade parties carried kutsavi over the passes into Yosemite country and beyond, and other peoples walked days to trade for it. Add the black volcanic glass from the craters east of here — obsidian, the finest tool stone on the continent — and this so-called harsh basin was rich: a crossroads of trade routes running every direction, some of them the same lines your highway follows today.

The seasons set the rhythm — the lake shore in fly season, the uplands for pine nuts in fall, valleys like this one for hunting and cool water in summer. Then the miners came, and the ranchers, and the city's aqueduct, each taking a piece of that round. The Kutzadika'a never left. They are a living community today, centered at Mono Lake — and as I tell you this, they are still petitioning the United States government for the federal recognition it has never granted them. Congress has had the bill in its hands more than once. That part of the story isn't history yet; it's pending.

So as you round this quiet corner of the lake — a view they had ten thousand years before any of us — remember the oldest economy this valley ever ran: not gold, not water, not lift tickets. A fly, a lake, and people clever enough to see wealth where everyone since has seen wasteland.

Quinn's got the far corner just ahead.