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27 December, 2013

Re-Fuse


Photo appropos of nothing

A couple of years ago, I was posting often and eclectically enough that it made sense to spin off aspects of this blog, to try and focus. It was an experiment, I said, probably intending to make a decision before too long about which topics would live, and which would be abandoned to the Wayback Machine (which archive.org uses to let people access webpages of yore).

Then a couple of years went by, and none of the more focused blogs really took off. Now, it's time to kill some of those darlings, or at least to admit that I am a body eclectic. At one point or another, there have been 6 or so blogs under the Mojourner label, and it's time to re-absorb a few.

Land Before Me, a title that seemed just clever enough at the time, has a fan or two, and posts are regularly re-posted on a local aggegator page, but the fact is that Mojourner Truth (no link, because you're here now) is plenty able to travel and spew forth about landscapes natural, cultural, historical, archaeological, and fictional. There is not enough time to make frequent land-specific posts, so I'm cashing out for the $0 dollars this blog earned me.*

Urban Greenstead, my futile effort at glomming on to the DIY urban homesteading trend, live from a hotbed of such activity, fell flat. There are a million such sites, and for a guy who insists on creating my own content, not linking to popular sites, not posting daily (sacrificing the garden), and not promoting himself with twitterish or instagramatiation,...well that guy ain't going far. I went not far at all, and had fun in the garden. Thanks to all the folks who read about raised beds, christmas tree cycling, and vermicomposts, but this blog is over.

Mo Comment, intended to be the political/wonk/commentary page..., was never going to happen. No readers, no writer when it came down to it; not even worht a link. Huff and puff and,...no Huffington Post.

On the other hand, I will hang onto a few of the side-blogs. Procrastacritic, though it has been quiescent of late, is specific enough (fresh reviews of stale culture), and has enough posts in the hopper that I plan to maintain it. In keeping with the spirit of the name, I only get around to posting a handful of time per year, so it should not be too taxing. I have grand plans for a series about mid-1970s dystopia and dysaster flicks,...which I may write about some day. Also, I'm thinking of branching out into music.

Mocavore, although the title makes me cringe a bit, generally gets a lot of hits when I post, largely due to the local audience. It can absorb a bunch of the Urban Greenstead posts, since I tended to focus on food there anyway. Also, I feel a calling to continue writing about food at a very basic level, without the glossy photos taken with the proper angle and depth of field, without promos and give-aways, and without fancification of what is ultimately sustencance (tasty or not). It has been and will remain Food, Basically.

Then there's the new blog, ArchaeOlygy, borne from an archaeology project itself begat by bureaucratic dismissiveness and the wrath of an archaeologist spurned. Not nearly as spiteful as that last sentence would suggest, this blog deals with archaeology in the South Salish Sea region. It's the one blog I've opened to other writers, although none has yet answered. On the other hand, it's also received the most frequent and helpful audience participation. I look forward to this one growing.

So there it is. Mojourner Truth will retract a few tentacles, and continue to wave other about. What was spun off is reeled back. Fission reverses to fusion, and Mojourner Truth is at peace with being unfocused and eclectic.**


* Like all the rest. Why the hell would I take ads or monetize my pressure release valve, my utterly free platform, my soapbox in this empty room called the internet?
** An readerless, mostly. To those who show up, I thank you, and hope to entertain and provoke you anew.

22 December, 2013

Backroads: Egg and I Road

At the intersection of a memory lane and a road not taken.

One day this Fall, as the leaves were changing color under clear blue skies, I drove out through the Chiumacum Valley, past he town of Center (location one of my favorite  government facility names, the Center Work Center), and up the west side the valley to look for archaeology. For my effort, I founf one abandoned house, rumored to be haunted, but that's another story.

Getting there requires a short jaunt on Egg and I Road. The Egg and I was a book by Betty MacDonald, who followed her new (and before long, former) husband on his cockamamie dream of leaving the city and starting a chicken farm. Hilarity ensued, as it often does in the memories of people who go through ordeals. According to an article at Historylink, Betty's sister had told a publisher that she was writing a humorous book, and so The Egg and I came to be to save sister Mary the embarrassment, along with the dedication "To my sister Mary, who has always believed I could do anything whe puts her mind to."

The book came out at the end of WWII, ideal timing for a funny book about anything but the war, and long enough after the Depression for its sorrowful depredations to fade under a patina of humor. By then, Betty had left the chicken farm and re-married (what became of her chicken-raising husband Robert Haskett at that point, I do not know; he was stabbed to death in 1951 by another woman's jilted husband). Millions of copies of the book sold, and it became a movie. The Ma and Pa Kettle characters from Betty's book spawned a whole series of movies.



In 1981, a road first built about a century earlier was officially named "Egg and I Road," memorializing the way to the chicken farm. It runs western slope of the western fork of Chimacum valley to Route 19 (aka Beaver Valley Road) on the east slope of the east valley. There are pastures and wooded slopes, but no chickens that I could see, and nary a porch-sittin' hillbilly to be seen.

The chicken farm that turned out to be so funny and lucrative is part of a larger story that didn't turn out so well (check out Richard White's "Land Use, Environment, and Social Change" for a more thorough telling). By the late 1920's the combination of railroad logging technology and a roaring economy had led to the clear-cutting of unprecedented swaths of land, which then seemed worthless. Attempts were made to present acres of stumps and now exposed and depleted forest soild as great opportunities for farming. Generally, people tried, failed, and left, because farming in glacial gravel full of stumps does not work so well. According to White, one of the few chances to make a go of it was to raise chickens, so at least Haskett was on the right track, even if it did not work out.

Not the barn, but a barn on Egg and I Road.

These days, the pastures around Egg and I Road feel idyllic. The  urban crow can be there in a 20-mile flight from the filthiest part of Seattle, but the Sound and the land's folds make it more remote. The presence of a quarter horse farm airport indicates that the neighborhood is not entirely safe from gentrification, but it looks like there are still regular people who live there. Between the Bremerton-Poulsbo sprawl and the long-urban Port Townsend entry to the Sound, the Egg and I's neighborhood is remote enough to retain its rural charm. It never was as isolated as the book made it sound, but it remains a back road.

07 December, 2013

Olympia in October (in Color)

Walking Home, Clouds to the East, Nearly Sunset


Walking to Work, Cold Enough Morning to Fog Up the Lens

Priest Point Park

01 December, 2013

What's That Smell?

I must be doing something right, because I only started the kim-chee this afternoon, and already the kitchen smells like cabbage gone bad.

This must be a theme, or a season. In the few days betwixt Thanksgiving and Get-Back-to-Work-It's December, I've harvested a few quarts of sauerkraut, started a few more, pasteurized and bottled vinegar, and just now got kimchi going.

20 November, 2013

Rebunk


Verb. To prove something previously discredited.

This word came about when I was talking to my sister about archaeologists' habit of calling things they cannot identify "ritual objects" in a joking way, and how I found one of these, but through further reflection and research have come to believe is in fact a ritual object. (Just scroll down to the last post, if this is too confusing).

In any case, one of the supremely humorous ironic scenarios is that of the rebunking: A hasty and possibly unfounded load of bunk is presented as truth, only to be debunked. But then, it turns out to have been true all along: rebunked.

Leafing through my unabridged dictionary (a 1941 edition of the 1934 copyright of Webster's), the etymology refers briefly to a Spanish "supposed card game" before getting serious with a reference to a speech by an Appalachian North Carolinian rep in the 16th Congress of the US of A, in which he referred to the people of Buncombe (County). It is only fitting that "bunk" as in BS, no...not merely that, but as in "don't even waste my time with your ridiculo-pathetic prevarications," originated in Congress.

Rebunking, I hope, does not occur often in the august legislatures of our US of A, state or federal. So little political bunk stands a chance of ever becoming true. It's low grade stuff,  Scrapple to Spam, Hanna-Barbera to Warner-Brothers.

But out in the real world, rebunking can happen. Science is replete with examples (I'm looking at you, epigenetic Lamarckians), often with the pleasing side-effect of pompous experts being forced to eat crow in their ivory towers (I'm looking at you, pre-Clovis doubters, if you still exist).  Rebunking, or the nagging threat thereof, is a force that creates at least a little humbleness in advanced society.


19 November, 2013

ArchaeOlygy

What the hell is this? Ask an ArchaeOlygist.


OK, I held off saying so here until the Mission Spit salvage project was done, because I didn't want treasure hunters showing up at an unguarded pile of artifacts (even if they were all broken, and deemed officially insignificant by regulatory archaeocrats).

But there's an archaeology blog for Olympia now. Because I just cannot resist that kind of messing with words, it's called ArchaeOlygy. So far, it's mostly about a sand spit that contained evidence of the first Catholic Mission in the area, but I plan to branch out, if not go very far afield. Any other archaeologists in the area interested in contributing are welcome. I don't really care if you are a professional, as long as it's about the past down here in the South Sound, and does not talk about finding dinosaurs, use the word "treasure," or suggest that aliens of the Lost Tribe of Israel made the site you are writing about.

I may cross-post once in a while, and archaeology that has nothing to do with the Olympia area will still appear here, but ArchaeOlygy will exist until I'm bored or it's clear that nobody is reading it. I'll still be a smartass over there, but with more focus, and less trickery and fakelore.

11 November, 2013

Nature Show in the Yard*


My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.


Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes  be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk, but how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, does a hawk have to spend much time eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Maybe the impact of cats on raptors is tiny. Maybe I could find out if only I spent another few minutes searching the internet. But, I will not, because I suspect that the data are, even if they exist, apt to take more than a few minutes to find. Besides, the main point of this post was to share some photos of a nature show in my yard. These shots were zoomed like hell on a cheap digital camera, but they came out pretty cool, I thought. Sometimes just having a camera handy beats hours of waiting with fine photopgraphic gear.

* Adapted from a post at Land Before Me.

02 November, 2013

Feeding the Hand that Bites You

"So long, and thanks for all the fish."
The last book I read was about the Nez Perce war, and right now I'm working on one about the Puget Sound wars, treaties, and trial of Leschi a generation earlier. It ain't pretty, and ties into why I'd rather fill out "Other" than "White" or "Caucasian" on forms that ask for ethinicity. I have to assume that a large percentage of "Others" are similarly aware of "white" misdoings (I'll leave the "Caucasian" misdoings to that Caucasus favorite son, Joe Stalin).

Another Joseph, the Younger Joseph of the Nimipu (Nez Perce) was betrayed and hunted like a disagrreable neighbor's rabid dog a generation after Leschi of the Squally Absch (Nisqually) was killed like,...the same. The reason for this was not that either of these men, their forebears, or their kin, had done wrong by American settlers. To the contrary, Nimipu and others saved Lewis and Clark from starvation, provided guides, and even horse-sitting services, without which the Corps of Discovery would not have reached the Pacific, much less returned home. Leschi and others accomodated Hudsons Bay men and even attempted to deal with the Bostons (Americans) and their psychopath Governor of Washington Territory. 

As in Jamestown and a thousand points of dark in between, tribes in the Columbia Plateau and Puget Trough first dealt with west-hungry explorers and settlers by feeding them. Thanks for the Giving.

But food for the small settlements only led to hunger for everything outside the pale. Lewis and Clark handed out medals, but later American settlers grabbed and acted offended when the natives wanted to stay free on the land they'd tended for millennia. Even in the middle of the Pacific Moana, sons of missionaries who had depended on the kindness of kanakas turned around and plantationized islands, pauperizing most of the inhabitants.

Fresh out of native people to rob, the American elite eventually turned to stealing Africans and distilling wealth from their sweat (yeah, the Yankees did it too, with shiploads of human cargo headed to the plantations). Once they ran out of brown peoples, the uber-white people turned their attention to their unter-brethren, continuing to concentrate wealth among the few while consigning the masses of crackers to poverty. The process continues unabated (accelerated, even) until today.

But none of this would have happened had not Wahunsenakawh (Powhatan) fed the hand that would eventually bite him and eventually everyone else in Indian Country. As my people say, "No good deed goes unpunished."

01 November, 2013

Magic, Or Just Happy Happenstance?






The other day, as a ferry was bringing a bunch of artifacts to the Suquamish Tribe's museum, close to where they were excavated decades ago, a large number of orca bagan playing around the ferry. Sure, the whales have been active all week in the area, but to see so many around a ferry is unusual, and to have it happen when artifacts from ancient times are on their way home...it's just way too cool to dismiss as coincidence.

I was raised by a physicist, and I even make efforts to do archaeology in a scientific way, but I've also got enough experience and intelligence to know there are things I do not know and cannot explain. If people who descend from the ones who made the artifacts, from hundreds of generations of people who fished alongside the orca and recognized them as relations, if they see this as a welcome home gesture from the whales, who am I to argue?

30 October, 2013

Ironic, or Just Sad






Having clicked somewhere, sometime, I now get emails from Move To Amend, a group trying to "get money out of politics." You can read that phrase at least a couple of ways, but what they mean is not to wring cash from politics, but to eliminate the influence of money in elections.

Sadly, the solution is to, uh,...raise money. Will it work? Not unless they raise a bunch. True, it can take a 3 to 5-fold advantage in evil money to win over for-the-general-good money, but as soon as it becomes a money race, the poor are at a disadvantage. Sure, Move To Amend is after a multitude of small donations, but all it takes is a few super-rich guys (like, Sheldon "Drop a nuke in the Iranian desert to show them we mean business" Adelson) to wipe out the advantage. Play the money game against plutocrats, and you'll probably lose.

Alternatives? I got none. Our country's education policy over the past generation or two has dumbed down then population to the extent that we're exceedingly unlikely to vote in out own commoner interest, against the oligarchs. Revolution? Unlikely, and unlovely if it were to happen in a country so saturated with guns and fundamentalism. It's a sad state we're in.

29 October, 2013

Velvet 6 Feet Underground

Last Shot. October 2013, lifted from loureed.com
Flags at US Government facilities were ordered flown at half-staff today. Officially, this commemorates the recent death of Tom Foley, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Un-officially, let it mark the death of Lou Reed, representative of the avidly un-official.

26 October, 2013

Post 400: What Bots Like

Top hits this week.

October is when I typically start getting visitors here looking for information about heatilators, the passive convection fireplaces that harvest cool air from a room and spit it back out, heated. It turns out that my idle fascination with this technology made a couple of posts about heatilators perennial (if seasonal) favorites. If you blog about something that is both obscure and practical, people will find the post. They don't stick around to read the other posts, but over time the numbers pile up.

In the past couple of weeks, though, a new post shot to the top of the list. The title is generic enough that it should not stick out in google the way "heatilator" does. The topic--a discussion of agriculture, evolution, misperception among anthropologists, and risk--doesn't seem fascinating enough to justify 700 hits in a couple of weeks. I'm not seeing traffic sources that would indicate the hits are being generated by academics, and besides, there are no comments telling me where I am wrong, which the archaeologists would never be able to resist.

So, it's gotta be the bots. Why they like this topic more than teacher pay, or backroads, or whatever, I cannot fathom. I'm more interested in what the next post striking human interest will be.

12 October, 2013

Agriculture and Bias

Orchards count as agriculture

In the past day or three, I've been reminded of how weird our understanding of agriculture is in modern America. Another blog that I regularly read, written by an educated, smart woman, linked to an article about the novel theory that the introduction of agriculture actually led to instability and population collapse in Europe. Then today, working with some other archaeologists and archaeologists-in-training, we talked about how generations of our forebears (and their cultural anthropology kin) have sworn that in the Northwest there was no indigenous agriculture or horticulture, just hunting and gathering.

Like most children of Western civilization, I was taught that the rise and refinement of agriculture allowed production of surplus, which was what allowed humanity (some of it, at least) to step off the dreary treadmill of subsistence, so that some people could become businessmen, priests, bureaucrats, artists, and all of the other divisions of labor that make up a civilization. Even among the cynical who viewed some of these jobs as blights upon humanity, there were few that argued the basic tenet that by making the transition from gathering and hunting wild foods (yes, in that order, if you are to be honest about where the calories came from) to farming domesticated crops represented an advance, creating some respite from the struggle for survival.

Only, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view (so long, Bible Belt readers), agriculture does not provide stability. It is inherently unstable. From a diverse spectrum of wild plants, adapted to local conditions over millenia and more, people came to depend on a select and quite small group of species, using temporaryu success to grow larger human populations. Over time, this became more pronounced. Hundreds of wild starches gave way to dozens of grains and roots, and ultimately to a handful of cereals and russet potatoes, often grown outside their optimal range through generous application of non-renewable chemicals. Nomads moved to villages, which became cities and morphed into megalopolises. We stand now as the coyote did in the old road runner cartoons, over a canyon on a board nailed to a board nailed to a board, cantilevered so far out on a gamble that we are doomed to fall, unable to skitter back to solid ground. Evolution punishes monocroppers and urbanites who forgot how to find or grow their own food.

In our hubris, we have assumed that human selection can successfully replace natural selection, when in fact all domestication amounts to co-evolution. From corn's point of view, it has caused humans to adapt their behavior toward its own ends. We winnow down the gene pool to emphasize the parts that maximize kernel production, eliminating competition from weeds and even regional maize variants, maximizing acreage, extracting fossil fuel to fertilize and distribute the crop. Zea mays has domesticated and trained Homo sapiens to its benefit, not ours.

What amounts to genocide of other grains and the once diverse array of locally adapted cultivars of corn has resulted in such a narrow, patented gene pool that we are now at greatly increased risk of collapse in a major element of our food supply (and the same goes for soybeans, rice, wheat, and any other major food crop) should evolution create super-bugs, fungi, weeds, or diseases that could rip through the millions of acres planted in the same damned genome. Or maybe  the dirty work will be done by climate change, or the growing scarcity and cost of the chemical additives and artificial genetic alterations that are already deeply entrenched responses to the biological and climactic threats we already face.

Our smug modern bias that by replacing a "primitive" society (in which nearly every family produced its own diverse and locally adapted bread, vegetables, and protein) with a few corporately owned farms churning out the national output of food and food-like subtances is misplaced. Even before evolution engineers collapses in production, the elmination of diversity and removal of people from the healthful effects of working the land has created epidemics of heart disease, diabetes, and the other diseases of civilization that decrease individual fitness and create increasing drains on social resources. More angioplasty, less art.

Camas fields do not count as agriculture

But let's step back from that brink, back to the early days of agriculture. The domesticated crops all began as wild plants. As a young anthro, I was taught that this happened in a few select places: Mesopotamian cereals, Mesoamerican grains, Andean tubers, and a few others. While this select club would be expanded from time to time, membership rested on transformation of primitive forms to highly productive domesticates. People who ate "wild" foods were not agriculturalists, or even horticulturalists. They were foragers.

A prime example of that class were the indigenous tribes of the Northwest, who stood out among hunter-gatherers in having a higher level of social stratification and cultural elaboration than anthtropologists expected of tribal, non-agricultural peoples. Being an exception only proved the rule, however, since it was pointed out that a peculiar natural abundance of food, from salmon runs to camas meadows, was what allowed them to advance beyond, for example, their Great Basin counterparts.

But the more we look, and the more we listen to the Native cultures, the more we see that the Northwest tribes (and although I am ignorant of the details, I would have to suspect the tribes in other parts of the country) were not passive collectors of a random bounty. People burned meadows to return nutrients to the soil to such a degree that once-poor glacial outwash became black loam, while at the same time arresting succesional processes that would have liked to establish forest where berries and root foods grew. Harvesting techniques aerated the soil, gave next year's crop room to grow, rotated the burden of harvest, and propagated new generations of food. There was weeding and transplanting. Just because Tribal knowledge acknowledges first and foremost the role of Coyote for the origin of many foods does not mean that the actions of mortals played no role in the perpetuation of those foods. My suspicion is that the "wild" characterization of foods like camas and cous has as much to do with our lack of investigation as with absolute reality--the same people who weeded out the death camas, who harvested roots and berries over millennia, am I to believe that they never rooted out smaller, sicklier plants in favor of tastier or more productive ones? Are we supposed to think that because a food plant is found within it's "natural" range, it was not the result of transplanting or establishment of patches convenient to trails and settlements? I find that hard to swallow.

But our bias is that if a plant is native to its range (typically defined thousands of years after people began eating it, hmm...), it is wild. If it is not ridiculously oversized, the food part dwarfing the other elements, it must not be domesticated. If it is merely tended, rather than planted in rows or milpas, it is not agriculture. Our bias is that hard farming work, rather than knowledge of how best to feed off of natural systems with minor inputs, is superior.

We see what we want to see (I'll admit that I want to see humans who adapted to a place over millennia as pretty wise to its ways), and so Euro-Americans who conquered continents generally want to see that as progress. Casting agriculture as a noble effort, even as a single God's will that Man exercise dominion over the earth and its lesser creatures (Indians included), serves that goal. Defining what everyone else did as inferior helps make the stealing and subsequent transformation of the land more justifiable to most Americans, eases the guilt of wiping out thousands of little societies attuned to nature to make way for a large one attuned to itself. Bad as that particular bias may be, the one that may come back to haunt us more deeply is that other bias, the one in which we presume that civilization is always getting better, that we are exceptional, and our agriculture is smart and sustaining, rather than unstable, a dangerous taunt toward evolution.

09 October, 2013

Yellow Matter Textures


If for no other reason than the last post being a bummer, here's something completely different: a couple of yellowish photos. Since the advent of digital cameras has made it incredibly cheap and easy to take lots of shots, I supplement the "archaeological object with scale" genre with pictures of pretty much anything else of interest: landscapes, mylar balloons in unexpected places, pretty rocks, funny signs,...and textures.


Shooting an image that lacks a specific point of interest, a textured wash of color, can be a nice departure from my usual focus, complexion instead of complexity. Also, they can make nice backgrounds for slide shows that I occasionally give at a conference or presentation (because something in me rebels against the powerpoint pre-fab options).

These two shots, miles and months apart, are just a couple of examples. The bottom one is the "mother," a mat of microbes on the surface of apple cider I was letting ferment itself into vinegar. The top one is what some people call beach dodder, Hawaiians call kauna`oa, and biologists would call a species of Cuscuta. Parasite, lei material (it's Lana`i's official flower), colonizer of seashores all over the earth, background for a slide,...the shot with no focal point is open to whatever story you lay on it.

04 October, 2013

The Curse of Oh No, or, The Rum Diarrhea


The week took it's time in skulking up behind and bludgeoning me with what I can only assume was a femur unearthed from the San Quentin boneyard. If I'd been more aware, the signs were there: truck reluctant to travel, resulting in a starved frenzied drive to the very tip of the lower 48, a headache so long in the tooth that it reached my manawa, the skull-top whose calcification signals passage to something beyond infancy for all but our Tea Party brethren.


But for the time being, said signs hid and instead I saw the rainbow over an inlet, and enjoyed the presence of mind and present of time to pull over and photograph this glowingly fine apparition. I felt the truck complain and turned back before I ended up stranded hours from town. I got another evening in my own bed. I spent the next two days at an uncharacteristically sunny Neah Bay, basking in the warmth of government and tribal resource managers mostly in agreement. Somewhere offshore, I was sure, sea lions and lambs lay together in harmony.

I, I, I. As long as my phone was back home and the internet proved too slow to deal with. Everything was fine, as long as it was just I. Aye-aye-yai. No them.

Them them phoned in on Thursday. Him, specifically. He who is a legendary island archaeologist and drunkard (there is a difference, so he gets double credit), who began working in Hawai`i about when I did, and whose strait is now dire (same as it ever was). He who was not cajoled into an MA, or out of the field and into the bidness, or into a marriage. He who now faces another bout of unemployment with no back-up. He who is one of the best in his field, but archaeological fields are parochial, so when there is no work locally, emigration is no option unless cannibals nip at his heels. If some project does not emerge soon, he's fucked.

So he was frustrated, down, and was several days out into booze ocean when I heard from him. Gone the moderate wine of the past few months--down the gullet with rum and coconut milk. I had to go not long after he called, but rang back later only to get an answering app. Responding later that evening, having forgotten what day it was and that we'd talked earlier, he was Out...

Of...

It.

Which I can understand. No job. He made the calls and found no work among the usual suspects (the only kind there are in the islands, really), so who's to question despondency and maybe even dependency on a bottle of that which will be there (for a while) when employment (gainful or joyful) has walked out? So a guy may well plead the fifth, and then another, and so further past a gallon, maybe firkins and before all is said and done a hogshead. But to any hard drinker, it's not about the cumulative total, it's about taking it one bottle at a time.

But so goes the spiral that heads down or stagnates. There are few ups from weeks blacked out and besotted. Regrets, yes, sometimes leading to another round. Recoveries, perhaps, but sure to be challenged by another layoff.

If we lived in a world where enthusiasm, skill, and knowledge were rewarded, he'd be fine, and if being funny counted he'd be sitting pretty. But we live in a world where "just" being a field guy comes off as unambitious, and skepticism spiced with comedy comes off as trouble-making. Besides which, it's easier to hire new kids who work for peanuts than to offer a man a living wage because he gathers the data upon which the whole enterprise depends. Predictably and sadly, this is true even if the kids have little clue and the 40-something vet has the benefit of decades of experience. Missed sites are bulldozed away, none the wiser except for the veteran shovelbum who knew the deal, and was cut out or walked out.

But the honor of a guy like my friend, who would walk out on a crook's deal, does not demand much on the market. If it's not for sale, the fixers and fiends find a work-around--someone willing to sell fake honor, typically--and then honor's Cash Value = Zero. As a consolation prize, cast-aways of this system receive enough unemployment to live a seriously bleak life or a drunkenly numb one.

Either ailment in this short list of options weighs so heavily on any one man that recovering without company can crush vertebra. So, I'll keep calling from time to time. Maybe I cannot fix the economy, or thirsty genes, but I can be better than nothing, if only barely.


21 September, 2013

Add an Extra Shot

Not a High-Res Shot. You're welcome. (Oh, and I am welcome: image courtesy of Christian Science Monitor)

Last week, Starbucks asked customers not to come in carrying firearms. Gun rights advocates were incensed, even though their manual already tells them to steer clear of possible queer places, such as Starbucks, which serves foreign-sounding drinks to liberal effetes.

I used to despise Starbucks, not so much because of their progressive yuppie vibe as for their global corporate domination, but now I live where they are legitimately a regional business, besides which they do make a point of making it corporate policy to not discriminate against same-sex enthusiasts and to request that people not come in armed. Nobody wants a caffeine-jittered finger on the trigger.

Starbucks made it clear that their request was just that, and that gun-toters could still come in and offer to the coffer their US dollars, but other businesses have gone all-out and banned guns on their premises. Places like Buffalo Wild Wings (no kidding, allowing guns in a place with men drunk on Coors and angry that there are no hooters would be a bad business model). Of course there are the upscale 'liberal' places like Whole Foods and California Pizza Kitchen where nobody would think to bring a gun in the first place. But then there are bastions of childhood like Toys R Us and Disney World (although to be honest, Disney only has that policy to discourage local crackers from getting season passes and sullying the magic kingdom for the Yankee tourists).

And therin lies the magic and doom of our market based society. The very same government despised by the right wing, the socialist-UN-nazi-Obamacare conspiracy that wants to take away our American guns is powerless to do so (precisely, and ironically given the tea party fears, because government--unlike corporations--must be reponsive to vocal minorities). But corporations sure as hell can ban, and they are. If companies really thought banning guns would hurt their bottom line in a substantial way, they would not go out on that limb, if for no other reason than the shareholders would not let them. Turns out, though, that more people feel safer with a gun ban in place than they do with the alleged deterrent of allowing every Zimmerman on the block to pack a glock. If the tea partiers have their way, public schools will be full of guns; meanwhile, the market will speak and part of boutique chic will be the metal detector at the door.

31 August, 2013

What Smell?


I have a friend who was looking for a place to live in the Portland-Vancouver sphere of influence, and found himself in the town of Camas, Washington. A massive pulp mill there pumps out stinky steam in vast volumes, at least on some days, and he wondered if this was the case all the time. So he asked a local, "Does it smell like this all the time?"

And the local said, "What smell?"

We get used to the local stinks and our auto-aromatic effluvia. Some people cannot stand it and move, or slather themselves in some masking odor, but often as not, the nose and mind conspire to erase the stench we cannot escape. It moves so far into the background that we cannot tell it smells; it dissipates so we can get on with life.

Recognizing the stank of someone else's town is easy, sensing the pee smell in an apartment where cats dwell challenges noone but the cat lady, and this adds to our perception that the townspeople may be brain-damaged by the smoke-stack blightning and that the cat lady is deranged. But she feels normal, and the people of Camas go about lives like most of us; they don't spend their days bemoaning a sub-standard life, as far as I can tell.

Which makes me wonder, what stinks in my life? What is it that people smell, or see, or hear about me that is odious or off-putting, but that I have no clue about? I can guess at a few: I sweat a lot and am no stranger to the aromatic aftermath, I speak caustic and radical ideas,...but there must be things about me that I am smell-blind or sight-deaf to, things that feel normal to me, but to others are offensive.

We all have our Camas smokestacks. Some people may pity us for them, while others hold their nose, and still others flee in disgust. Sometimes, we can and should shut down the mill, make changes to eliminate offal odors and improve ourselves. But our ability to say "What smell?" can be a positive adaptation, an ability to live in the moment and get done what needs doing, rather than engaging in what will end up being an endless and ultimately futile campaign of eliminating all odors, or banishing every quirk and imperfection. Places and people differ, and it would be boring if everyone and all places were universally acceptable.

20 August, 2013

Cocktail Attire

That is one weird cock-tail.

Due to some oversight, I was invited to my high school reunion. They must've forgotten the omnidirectional scorn that characterized my relationship with most everyone I graduated with. Or, because another member of the Virginia Diaspora (a legally married lesbian!?!) tipped me off.

I did show up for the sesquidecadal reunion, for the same reason that most people show up to such things: spite. "Yes, preppie kids who stuck around town and do boring shit and glom onto our parents' revenue stream," I thought, "I am a fucking archaeologist,...in Hawai`i."


Well, no more. Now I am a fucking archaeologist in the Pacific Northwest. Which will sound less cool to them, but only due to their ignorance. And I am happy enough to stay home and skip their forced revelry.

Which includes: drinks at a place named "Bar Louie," (turns out to be a franchise chain, one that did not even exist when we were in high school, located at an "upscale" mall that was a farm at the time; in so being, it is a multi-dimensional  tribute to shallowness and land-rape), a football game (we were a new high school, booted around by every other school, but I guess we're supposed to forget that), and a reunion at the country club (apparently, it is no longer segregated).

For the latter, we are advised to come clad in "cocktail wear." According to the internet, this is a clothes-class I do not own. I do have a suit, but someone has to die for me to wear it, and it is probably full of moth holes by now anyway. Fixation with the idea that there are "correct" outfits is one of the main things that turned me off to these people in the first place. I'd have thought they'd have grown out of it, but apparently not.

And I have not, it is now clear, grown out of my disdain for the money-worshipping fools of western Henrico County. Pose at your upscale bar. Go to the football game as a bloc, and pretend you were never the jealous backbiting bunch you were. Live it up at the country club while darkies and the wastrel sons of millionaires serve up drunken dreams. I'll be home, or in the field, doing something worthwhile instead.

18 August, 2013

A Day at the Beach, in Garish Color


The Happy Flotsam of Little Oak Bay


It wasn't a rock lobster; it was a rock.

A rock with an infinity symbol, that is.

12 August, 2013

My Sporadic Ritual of Cellphonicide

My flip-phone may be gone, but this shirt is forever.

It would be easy to blame the occasional destruction of cellphones on my work. If I just told people that it was dropped into a bottomless lava tube, or drowned in a Cascadian stream, or even dropped in some remote spot where the next person to see it will be an excited archaeologist (who happens to be a cousin of President Bush VI), they would believe it.

Other than one that was swampified on a wapato hunt (I'd held a camera over my head for hours, while the phone was in my pocket, in the mud, so it was a stupid waste), however, the culprit has generally been the washing machine, into which I'd thrown the phone, again in the pocket. Maybe if I'd had one of those phone holsters, accepted awkward accoutrements in the name of protecting the phone, but no, I liked the pocket of my fake Carhart work pants, the skinny one on the side that's so convenient for a phone. Two fingers reach in and chopstick the phone up, an instant of weightless apex, then it falls into my palm and the thumb flips it open. Tactile satisfaction that became one of those small rituals we don't even recognize as rituals.

That one will be no more, because after destroying my most recent phone, the cheapest phone they have now is the kind with the little keyboard that slides out. Not as fun, so far. I mean, it's not smart and there's no touch screen, so I can still embarrass my kids with it, but it's just not the same as flipping, which for someone my age is so layered in meta and ironicool. As a kid, Star Trek's communicator was the future. As an adult, the future arrived, and a huge percentage of first-calls on first-generation flip-phones included a Shatneresque pose and the words "Beam me up." Now, those times and tech are archaic (the actual flip-phone era, that is, the Trek ones still being acceptable on a certain level to younger hipsters). But I digress, and recognize that I am in way over my head trying to talk Trek.

No telling how long this phone will last. I don't think I'll miss it like the flipper, which is not all that much, to be honest, flip-phones being a flimsy substitute for the old Nokia brick.

The Brick, in Period-appropriate Resolution
Compared to the flip-ritual, the less frequent (and thus, more momentous) ritual of cellphonicide embodies much more. Like the drift into reminisce I got into above, a lamentation that the consumption economy leads always to new models, more features, more intrusion, a big shallow network in which nobody is worth more than a few seconds' attention and the ads will not cease. Killing the phone may have been an accident, but as with any religious act, retroactive imbuement with significance is allowed, and it can be ruled a sacrifice. The disdain for the dead phone, stripped and recycled (resurrected, perhaps, in some 3rd World place, but that's not my doing) is also a statement: I don't care about this gadget and its demise.

Of course, I do end up going out and getting another phone. I'm no John Henry (especially since I have no more Nokia, which oculd be used to hammer a jack). At the store, I subject the young staff who actually feel sorry for my backwardness to a cold luddite demand that they get me something that's cheap as shit and goes on my prepaid plan. No contract, no data plan, no upgraded phone. No small talk foreplay to the upsell, get me my archaic phone so I can get back to embarrassing my kids.

Losing the phone means losing the numbers stored up on its card, and though I could just ask the NSA to tell me, getting a new phone means I'll seek out people again. Contacting them some other way and asking for their number again, renewing the connections, and talking with some people whose voices I've not heard for a while when I do finally find them. It used to be easier, because I used to remember numbers instead of making my phone do it, or, if you can believe it, I would write them down. Also, there are the connections that don't continue. For one last time, I think about that person I don't think about anymore, or someone I do think about turns out to be out of reach, no number I can get at. That's the difference between evanescent reminisce and a fistful of wistfulness.

So, here I go again. My number's the same--in case you're reading this and know me--give me a call. I'll reconnect, and enjoy that. I'll celebrate the death of another phone (forgot to mention how this one went: it fell out while I was at the county landfill, never to be seen again), and shake my fist at the demons Verizon, 4g, and Smartphone. I'll have fuzzy nostaligia for old tech.

Then I'll wait til next time.

09 August, 2013

It's the Watershed



Thanks to stevenl on olyblog for posting this down-Deschutes shot. He thinks the postcard dates to the mid-1970s, a time when the Olympia Brewing Company still ran strong, and was so proud of it's beige industrial sprawl they issued this image, rather than the charming old brick building.

Olympia's motto, of course, was "It's the Water," and we do have great water, our artesian wells are famous, delicious, and clean. But surface water is an other story, a sad one, as this shot illustrates.

In the foreground, the Deshutes River, in summertime flaccid flow. Could just be a dead-calm day, but I feel like there's an oil sheen. Maybe not.

As far as the river is visible, the brewery takes up the right bank. Since I'm too lazy to track it down, I don't know what they may have flushed into the river as part of normal operations, but up until about the date of this postcard, when Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (what a liberal!), people and corporations did dump all kinds of things in the water. All this view shows is a treeless bank and acres of impervious surface, which when the rain kicks in will dump huge amounts of runoff compared to what the natural watershed would have, not to mention the sediment, railway grime, and other trappings of civilization.

Which the river then delivers to,...Wait, I cannot see. It disappears on the other side of the Capital Boulevard bridge, past more brewery buildings, over the spillway...I mean Falls, and finally past the old brew house, Olympia's most famous ruin. There's a park on the other bank now, and the old brewery is abandoned. You can kid yourself into thinking it's returning to nature as long as you deafen yourself to the I-5 din.

But really, the Deschutes is about to empty into Capitol Lake. Or, as stevenl calls it, the Fetid Lake Of Doom, or FLOD. Flotsam and sediment from the watershed settle out here. In fact, the muck contains the remains of Little Hollywood (Olympia's Depression-era Hoovertown), and before that a literally marginalized Chinese community, I think. The artificial lake relies on a dam that transformed the original estuary into a pond (yep, the reflection of capitol and trees sure is pretty) with a sluice being the only way out. So the estuary gets buried and eutrophies (yep, the low tides and summer algae blooms sure are ugly).

The postcard more or less hides The Isthmus, site of many a battle in this millenium. Positions on Isthmus development cause the city council to change, parts of it were Occupied, it is home to Olympia's second most famous ruin: the Mistake on the Lake. Walk around the lake, and you'll see signs explaining various positions in the Debate of the Lake: dredge it, restore the estuary, do nothing...There is no sign saying "Isthmus be Hell."

Meanwhile, the lake keeps filling with muck, and the water keeps flowing into Budd Inlet. The head of Budd is divided into West Bay, which is where the Deschutes comes in, and East Bay, which is where a culvert let's loose what's left of Indian and Moxlie Creeks. Most of the city between East and West is built on dredging spoils and fill.

West Bay is undergoing a transformation these days, as the buildings and piers of yesteryear's manufacturing concerns disappear. Some of it is undergoing restoration, as far as a railway embankment can be restored to a natural state. But people are not about to abandon the waterfront entirely, ceding it to nature. So pockets of "beach nourishment" gravel and chained-down "large woody debris" have to coexist with armored shorelines in a state that I will now call Percivaltory, after Percival's Landing on the waterfront.

In the postcard, it looks like there may be log booms in the bay. No more, although the POO (Port Of Olympia) is hopping, putting trucked-in logs on trans-Pacific ships. The watershed's wood (state timber excepted) flows all the way to China. 

06 August, 2013

Carto Art



I rarely link outside of this blog, but I ran across a post about an artist creating a map of NY City from scrap-paper sketches drawn by strangers when he asks for directions. See more here.

There are so many aspects of this that appeal to me. People whip out smartphones, and the artist asks for a hand-drawn version. People reveal how they make sense of space, what the landmarks are, and how they navigate. A mosaic of discrete pieces makes a weird whole (in which there are probably weird holes). It's another form of cartography. And so on. Map geeks rejoice.

Puppy!


These goggles make my nose look big. Please take them off.
 Long ago, a fluffy puppy joined a daughter in the house. Ten years, another daughter, and a cross-country move later, Daisy dog is still fluffy. People always think she's a puppy, even though she's mellowed out a lot, and does a lot of this:


For some reason nobody can remember, much less make sense of, the plan had been to go to the shelter and adopt a cat. All the felines were tweekers, or on a smoke break, or hazing new arrivals, but then a pack o puppies hit the floor, and soon enough a girl was headed home with a puppy in her arms.

She (the puppy) turned out to be--stop me if you've heard this before--the best dog ever. Smart, nice, pretty easy to train and to live with. Instead of growing up to be the Labrador mutt the shelter staff thought, she looks a lot like what people here call a mid-sized Alaskan Eskimo dog. Curly tail like a sled dog, but with much softer fur. Fur like the softest wool, in fact, fur like the famous (and allegedly extinct) Salish Wool Dog, which was used by Indians in the Pacific NW to make blankets. We've woven (OK, twisted and plaited) some of her fur from the Spring haircut that always makes people say "Ohhhh, cute puppy!," and yeah, it makes good wool.

But planning ahead to wash her at the right time, save a few years' worth of fur, and actually weave anything is more than me or anyone descended from me may be able to achieve. Salish Sea tribes apparently raised flocks of these dogs, placing them on islands all summer, where they would be safe from predators and interbreeding with hunting dogs and village curs. That, and a general description of dogs much like mine, is about all I can find out about the breed, but I have to assume that this wool-dog husbandry was complex, and had it's mavens. Absent real info, I speculate: shepherding may have been a convenient way to send pain-in-the-ass teenage boys away from polite society, wool-dogs may have inhabited prairies where root-foods grew to keep the rodents in check,...my mind wanders.

In any case, it had to be cute in extreme. A bunch of fluffy white canines cavorting in an island meadow, pouncing on voles and each other, playing, and of course, napping in the sun.


My puppy is not part of a flock. She'll tolerate some dogs, ignore a lot more, and occasionally snarl down the law on the ones stupid enough to question her reign. She is part of a small flock of girls, trained by her, who do her bidding (mostly). Her fur is in our furniture and clothes (and more food than we'd like to think), but not woven into a blanket. Being a pound puppy, she's not going to have any pups of her own, so there will be no flock o' Daisies. It's sad to know that despite her eternal youthful looks, she is not immortal, and there will never be a replacement, but we enjoy the time we have with her.

03 August, 2013

Tendril is the Day

Thank you, Orange Survey Pinflag, for the backdrop.

Cucumber tendrils, wiry spirals reaching out for a hold, trying to seize the day. Tender is the night? Well, tendril is the day.


I love watching the tendrils explore thin air, riding the breeze and climbing the sunray until the coil touches something. Tender no more, the tip runs around the target a half dozen loops in no time. As it holds fast, it flexes, and gets stronger while the next tendril reaches higher. The vine won't climb without this.

But I didn't intend to get philosophical about it. I just like the orange and green, and tendrils look cool.

28 July, 2013

One Love Loop


Truth be told, it was just the odds catching up, I guess, but yesterday it felt like a spell was broken. For the past few laps around the sun, I've found out about concerts right after they happen. I'd be listening to Camper Van Beethoven one day when the computer was handy, I'd look up their tour dates, and see that they'd been in Seattle the night before. D'oh! At one point which I will memorialize as El Tiempo de Los Losses, I missed Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys in rapid succession, and then later the 20th Anniversary Lobos tour for Kiko, one of my favorite albums ever. Fucking D'oh.

This week, I looked up them and a bunch of other bands, because I had a hankering to see some music. Luckily, I hadn't just missed the Hackensaw Boys or some other band I've been waiting to hear for years. On the other hand, there was nothing going on that I wanted to hear.

So I went with the flow, which led me through the garden for a while, and then into the garage, where I turned on KAOS and looked for something to carve. As Chef Moss laid down the reggae beat, I picked up a piece of milo wood that I've probably had for 15 years. It's a little sapwood scrap, chainsawed flat on two sides, no bigger than my hand. The reason I kept it is that it has this nice teardrop hole through it, and because it has a strong resemblance to certain Hawaiian ki'i (tiki). Strong enough that maybe that's why I never laid blade to it.

Yesterday, though, I picked it up and saw something completely different, and I sat and carved while the music played and the ripe sun shone softly.

Then I thought I heard the DJ say something about Mike Love and Paula Fuga being in town. KAOS being a friendly community station, I called in and found out that yeah, they were playing in a few hours at the Olympia Ballroom. Touring as a trio this time around, I've been listening to them as Dubkonscious since 2005 or so, when I was mapping a Kona village with two other guys who played in the band. For years since, CDs of their two performances on University of Hawai'i's Monday Night Live show (on KTUH, another friendly community station) have traveled with me all over.

So getting to see them was incredible. It was a good (and not crowded) crowd, there to listen and dance. Paula's voice was beautiful and her style, just like it is in Dubkonscious and her solo album Lilikoi, is strong and individual. Mike Love's voice spoke in words, whistles and beyond (including a killer horn riff with no horn), while his hands played and thumped the guitar. Which is enough for most people, but he was busy with both feet making loops and adding effects, affecting several additional players up on stage. Sorry to say, I don't even know if percussionist and non-virtual trio member Sam Ites was in Dubkonscious back when, but now his beats and vocals transformed the duo into something much more.

During their break, I picked up a Dubkonscious album, and talked to Paula and Mike for a while. Actually, I got them to sign the first KTUH disk, and found out that they don't have the second one, so I can burn one for them. I think they were happy to see a disk (the Kona-mapping bass-player's handwriting on it) from so far back, and know that a person has been listening to the whole time. Paula told me that the guy who made the CD for me now lives in Washington!

Maybe there's nothing special, and it really was bound to happen that I'd find out about a concert before it happened, but I'm not gonna look at it that way. As I sat and carved that wood, looping around the hole, the spell broke and the flow was restored. The music played and looped, a recording from years away circled back to find it's singers, and I found an old friend living in the NW. I'm gonna be all non-sciency and think that this is One Love at work.

25 July, 2013

Forsake Fossil Fuel


Of all the energy sources powering the blogosphere, dissatisfaction with the status quo ranks pretty high. From carefully constructed criticism to ad hoc rants, blogs complain about where we are, where we were, and where we're headed. Often as not, the blogger thinks that by calling out some flaw, highlighting a problem, readers might be inspired to change their minds, maybe even take positive action. But the status quo is one hell of a grindstone, and while a brilliant critique may nick it, more often the critic is worn down. Once in a great while, some random or sudden event may lead to change, but more often it is action, collective and directed and occurring in the non-cyber world, that re-shapes the monolith.

The ways we power our society, by burning fossil fuel and by coaxing electrons from rivers or water, wind, and photons, has been a recurring subject here at Mojourner Truth. Sometimes, I've argued against continuing to rely on oil and coal, but of my small audience, I have a feeling that many agree already, and doubt that my words pulled anyone off the grid. Other times, I've extolled the virtues of renewable energy and low-tech efficiencies, but how many people have a heatilator? Blogging is impotence, published.

Recently, though, I actually took action that may make a real difference. For the past year, I've gotten a small block of my energy from renewables. The utility offers you the opportunity to purchase your energy just from wind, hydro, solar, and reclaimed methane, $4 at a time. A month or two ago, I switched to 100% renewable. It costs marginally more, but since I'm not much of a power consumer (no air conditioner, no TV, and a near-Ludditic reliance on muscle-powered gear rather than electro-gadgets), electricity overall is a minor part of my cost of living.

I am not quite so green as Ed Begley in that Simpsons episode where he speeds off in a car "powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction," but my 100% renewable electricity does have me feeling pretty smug. And the more people who do this, the less incentive industry has to drill and frack up the earth. I don't share many Americans' belief in the magic of The Market, but I do understand that changes in consumer choice affect what's for sale, and if we collectively choose renewable energy (imperfect as it may be), maybe a mountain in West Virginia doesn't get flattened, maybe a midwest aquifer won't be pumped full of frack-chemicals, maybe the climate will stabilize.

An extra 1.25 cents per kilowatt-hour buys me this non-fossil energy. The energy company says that for a typical house, the environmental benefit is equivalent to taking a car off the road. But there's also no military cost to using power that is 100% domestic. It's a small act, but it's meaningful, and in aggregate, it will help shift us away from our dangerous reliance on oil, gas, and coal that are killing us and ruining the earth for our progeny.

If you live on the Puget Sound Energy Company grid, the way to do this is here. Everywhere else, just do a search on "green power" plus your local utility.

23 July, 2013

Building a Treehouse

That dog is one hell of a supervisor.

A couple weekends ago, the kids and I built a treehouse. I guess "house" is an exaggeration: no walls, no roof, and not much room. But, it is attached to a tree, and you do have to climb a ladder to get there.

Some people think vice is not a good foundation, but occasionally it works out. (That black thing in back is the bumper-seat, not haging beneath the structure.)

The treehouse begins with the tree. In this case, no dendritic cradle, and not even any useful branches, just a slightly off vertical pillar of conifer. For that reason, and because I rent this place and may be required to tear it down someday,* my idea was to use 2" x 8" boards more or less like a vice. Four threaded steel rods, bolted tightly together clamp the boards to the tree (a couple of nails held them in place during drilling and tightening, but would not be enough to support weight by themselves). The result is that the treehouse is minimally bothersome to the tree; as it grows, the bark below will swell a bit, increasing the support. The bolts could be loosened if it looks like the tree is getting squeezed too much, but I doubt that will happen.

Architecturally, I think treehouses should be vernacular and adaptive, expressions of the tree and the inhabitants, and not a static imposed design. So the basic cantilevered vice idea, which may have supported the kids, but not me, required some changing, and we added posts to the outer end of the beams. The joists, rather than being parallel and evenly spaces, radiate slightly to accomodate the geometry of our platform, and the sheet of plywood for the floor has a cutout that hugs the tree.

Those posts express another aspect that I've always thought crucial to a genuine treehouse:they are salvaged. Each consists of a couple of 2 x 4's that used to be a neighbor's bathroom wall, nailed together and cut to fit the odd lengths between beam and the rocks I dragged into place. Ascent is by means of half a step ladder whose braces and other half were getting rickety, and wwas removed; it is lashed into place with some rope salvaged from a boat headed to a landfill.

Almost done. The skinny post was a temporary support, and the real ladder is not in place, but you get the idea.


The treehouse will continue to evolve, and the kids will accesorize it. Already, we added a seat beneath, consisting of a big floating boat bumper suspended from more of that rope. The space beneath the floor, I should mention, was designed so I can stand up under it, out of the rain. The campfire ring nearby may need to scoot over a few feet for safety's sake, but will remain along with the sod-sofa that has been in place ever since I dug the last garden bed. Together, they are becoming a nice little outdoor living space.