Happy Boy (Try Not to Be Offended)

I'm sorry to realize that there are those who will be offended at this, an image of Baby Jesus on a John Deere. I mean no offense, and anyway it wasn't me that staged this tableau. It was an innocent child, who happens to enjoy the Nativity scene (and yardsale-sourced tractor ornament) long after Christmas. I never could get the kids to play with the barn and plastic animals I had as a kid, but here they are replacing it with a creche, an ornament, and some wire.

And it sure looks like the holy child (who am I kidding? It's a piece of plastic, a mass-produced goof falling well short of even what idolators demand in an icon--my own kids are far more holy) is enjoying his ride. Good to get out of the manger, where the sheep have taken to whining and the cow continues her endless judgmental gossipy monologue. Joseph and Mary need some couple time, and what boy doesn't want to drive a tractor?

 

Aimless Rocking

Sometimes, I wanna post something, but have no immediate ideas. This time, I don;t even have a photo. 

What I do have is music blaring. X, live at the Whiskey a Gogo. Guitar blaring songs I have known for 30 years. This morning I saw a guitar on the way to breakfast, a turquoise Fender stratocaster (among others, but the one my kids immediately keyed in on) on the way to breakfast. All it took was their second look to make me covet it as I have not wanted any musical instrument. My kids play piano (and ukelele a little bit), but the sudden urge to drop half a kilobuck on an electric guitar is at once compelling and aimless.

Also, I have images of rocks every time I close my eyes. I spent the weekend looking at rocks. Small ones, worn round by glaciers and Puget Sound, pebbles sitting on quarter-inch hardware cloth, washed clean by a jet of water, among which hide shards and sherds, and only we archaeologists know which is which. 

The energy of hunger and rock and roll (call it punk if you wanna), drives me to write, as a soup borne of whatever-is-around (miso, german sausage, leftover roasted Ozette potatoes, celery, nettler, sesame oil, a scayttering o grits, past-due hunger, and maybe something else) simmers at the lowest setting. Maybe, given my lack of focus, theme, and intent, I should just eat.


 

And Now for Somethign Completely Redundant

William Holman Hunt + Comic Sans

This painting is disturbingly fine. Seems even better than Random Internet Photo for the GHNR (pronounced like "goner") meme. I am told that Comic Sans, while sansier and ergo better than my dictionary-ish mis-choice, is still a font of ridculosity, and unsuited to a proper meme. All the better to heap on yon scapegoat, I say. 

This is the age in which we live, where the pathetic end of the unjustly reviled passes for art, or momentary diversion, whatever it is we want these days. Soon, someone will steal this idea and make a 'reality' series in which creatures already scapegoated will be targeted for afterthoughty mockery.   

Roofline Foregrounds

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Oh, no it's not. Just a cloud.

Sick of the Virginia posts yet? I'm not.

I have nothing more to offer here than a couple of shots with nice sky and vista, and a bit of roof in the foreground. It's a symptom of my obsession with the imposition of civilization's intrusion into landscapes (and skyscapes), perhaps a species of the old-school documentarian impulse to show it like it is, and not how it looks prettiest. Still, there is a beauty in the juxtaposition of nature's and humans' versions of beauty.

And here, a shot with roofline in the foreground, and then Thomas Jefferson's garden (a massive linear terrace replete with fancy resting house), before seeing the next hill (less sculpted than Monticello, but then again that treeless sward ain't natural either. Then, finally, plain old natural sky (if you can ignore the contrails).
 

Obliterative Persistence

Yon shot shows the floodzone of Scottsville, Virginia, on the River James. Once, it was called by King James' subjects the River of Powhatan, the name they used for the local leader Wahunsenacawh (father of the one they called Pocahontas), but this is upstream of his territory, where Monacan people no doubt had their own name. 

The photo is dominated by the most recent development along the north bank of the river, the massive dike clad in grass; it protects a town where people travel by pick-up and, increasingly, crossover SUVs and hybrids, none of which appreciate being flooded. Just to the right is the penultimate development, black rails on a bed of gravel where grass nor weeds nor even the most beautiful shrubbery are tolerated. Under that, and perhaps in the trees to the right, lies the canal that was obsolesced by the railroad; old timey as it may seem, the canal was no less a scheme to make money off of development and the transit of goods to markets. The red brick building handled the trade, but now it's cut off by dike and a pair of rails.

Further right, the brownwater of the James peeks between tree trunks. Once, people and their stuff moved on the river itself. Canoes, then batteaux. Way before that, there was a low spot in the terrain that water sought in it's quest to become saline. Now, cities pump out of the flow so the masses may drink, and a warming globe sucks it dryer and dryer every summer. 

Even when I canoed this part of the river in the early 1980's and had to hop out and tow it (downstream, no less) through massive algae blooms in tepid water, the James seemed like a hard place to move even a lightly loaded boat. The canal meant to bypass seasonal shallows and permanent outcrops was first damaged by federal troops before succumbing to rail-borne manifest destiny. Railroads still run, but mostly for the most massive of commodities such as Appalachian coal headed seaward, while diesel trucks carry the bulk of consumer goods. The town of Scottsville feels safe behind it's dike, but this too is momentary, as it was not planned for the climate changes facing the good townspeople and everyone else. 

The town exists because there a road crosses a river. One transportation system lays itself over the last. The stay the same even as they change. What we are used to will change, and what we build will fall, but the river still flows to the sea.

Lion Rock

 

On a trail somewhere in the Blue Ridge there is this rock. Looks like a lion's face to me. That is all. 

It's All About Meme

I don't even pretend to understand the magic of memes. My favorite is Pepper Spray Cop, but that's just me...something about that lardass strolling through an impressionist masterpiece speaks to me about the banality of evil.

Most memes would rather be funny, or cuuuute, or hip, or whatever matters to the pre-middle-age demographic that consumes most of the genre. It can be a phrase, plopped onto whatever image you want, I am told. My daughter swears that there are meme generators where you hardly have to do anything, and it spits up a meme. 

That ain't for me. I'll John Henry this internet, dammit.

That's right.  I made a meme.

My daughter says the font is, and I quote, "The wrong one." Apparently, there is a single acceptable meme-font. It happens that she cannot name it, and makes a Comic Sans joke to distract me. 

"But this is an artisanal meme," I whine, "Of course I'm not gonna use the same san serif font that all the lemmemes use. I chose Cochin quite intentionally." Harrumph. Pause to make sure she understood how clever I was for "lemmemes" off the cuff, plus the nod to Portlandia. 

Still, she dismisses it as a dictionary font (probably true), and I realize that I may not be a cool as I thought. 

I was, however, able to make a slight recovery, adapting my text to another image, a screenshot my daughter sent in response to my email, "Chibby Point." If you do not know Gayle Waters-Waters, you are uncool. [Disclosure: I do know who Gayle Waters-Waters is, but still am not cool, so don't sweat it.]

Grave Stones

Occupants of last post's family plot rest on a hillside the upper reaches of which cradle this grave. There is no fence, just a low stone wall. Instead of groomed grass, there's ivy bare to the ground in one spot and crambering over the slab in others. The headstone slab and footstone are not marble, and are strewn with a few random cobbles. No family evident, and the grave is dug through the residue of the previous occupants, who were slaves of yon president, themselves occupying what had been a wash house. 

If this grave is what archaeologists would call intrusive--excavated through prior layers--that's nothing compared to the stream of visitors passing inches away, looking down on it if they acknowledge it at all, but more often gazing over it at the distant horizon and ignoring the grave. But I covered desecration last time, and this time instead let's just look.

Or maybe not just look. Look like anthropologists, who assign great significance to burials. 

This grave is not so monumental as some in the family plot (on the hill's west slope, the sundown direction being good ground to plant the dead in many cultures), but it does hold higher ground with a commanding view, and the markers are fine enough to be sure that this is not the resting place of a slave or even a middling farmer. The inscription tells us this is the resting place of Rachel Levy, marked by her son Uriah, Virginian naval luminary. The Levy family bought the place from the president's heirs, who were among his white progeny.

The name is probably familiar to most readers as a Jewish one, and sure enough Mrs. Levy may have been born in 1790, but she died in 5591. Around the turn of the Millenium, Southern Christians took to the Jews as partners in bringing about the end times, but decades ago "Jew" was a slur in those parts, and it probably surprises a lot of people (including Virginians) to know that Jewish people could waltz their way into hallowed gentry grounds, or be commodores, but Richmond has one of the nation's oldest Jewish cemeteries, and for that matter the Confederate Secretary of War was Jewish.

Meanwhile, back at the grave, we can look at the small stones on the grave differently now, right? Seems to me there is a Jewish tradition of putting rocks on graves. Since there are not many on this one, it makes me wonder if the grounds crew removes them periodically. Do they know what's going on? What do they do with rocks they "clean" from the grave? Could they ever be persuaded to stop removing offerings of stones, and if so would the grave become a stone mound? 

Also, what's with the gothic arched stones? A nod to Christians, or just the style of the day?

I guess I'm too shiftless to apply myself and find the answers. It's getting late, and that's enough half-assed anthropological gazing for now. So I guess it's time to say Shalom, yall.

Desecration is in the Eye of the Beholder

Do this to my grave and I will haunt the Hell into you.

Some people decide what's gonna happen to their bodies when life departs, willing the afterdeath: cremation, burial, embalming, burning viking ship, and so on, hoping the dearly un-departed will live up to the legal document, maybe even the dying wish. I'll cop to having considered all of the above except embalment, and can add a few more to the list, like: worm-food, fertilizer, being planted at the base of a tree, and something like the Zoroastrian end. 

Some people live in fear that somehow their corpse will be defiled, their burial site will be desecrated, their remembrance dirtied. As an archaeologist I've witnessed cases and heard reliable tell of epidemics of graves razed, bones bulldozed, and I'd rather it not happen to my bones, but I don't lose sleep over it, or even comprehend it as more than an abstraction.

But the other day I witnessed the routine maintenance of a US President's grave, a founding father, beloved by Virginians. A guy pulled up, trimmed weeds with one gas-powered machine before blowing trimmings with another. I don't speak for any dead presidents, singular or en bloc, but the racket and fumes felt like desecration to me. Said president remains synonymous with ambitious and creative husbandry, the idealized American nation of farmers, and so it's hard to imagine the guy being OK with a noisome din and gassy humors of the modern maintenance regime.

I don't blame people like the guy in the photo, and if you recognize him, don't be mean. He's just doing his job, and there's a lot to do for only a few staff, not the dozens of slaves and overseers that did everything in the President's day. Blame goes to that culture which cannot get things done without real slavery, or a mix of wage slavery and polluting technology. Maybe someday we'll be forced to do things by hand again, kill the leaf blowers and employ corps of landscapers at fair wages to weed, rake, and in all manners tend the grounds and graves, but I'm not holding my breath (until I die). Until I can keep gas-scaping from tending my grave, I think I'd rather be cremated and put where the weedeaters and leafblowers cannot reach, where the noise blows in on the wind and not out on the exhaust.

The dead were not issued ear protection.

 
 . 

Is This What We Want?

A dispute rolled into the Northwest a few years ago, and the rumblings grow louder. On one side, mining and railroad interests with some union support, advocating for ports where coal from the Powder River basin can be put onto boats headed to China. On the other, environmentalists and local residents who don't want the pollution and headaches that would come from a major coal port. 

Several locations from Oregon to British Columbia are vying to get the port. There will be jobs as it is constructed, and a smaller number of jobs to operate it once it is built. Industry never tires of pointing to these jobs, and unions have been hit hard enough that they chime in with support, but there is little evidence that ports--which are increasingly mechanized--will make much of a dent in long term unemployment. Advocates of any one location prey on citizens' fear that the jobs will go elsewhere if locals do not welcome this development; the NIMBY urge lives in tension with "Well, if it's gonna happen somewhere anyway..."

The question is whether the trade-off is worth it. Jobs and perhaps some revenue (if the local governments don't dangle too much tax relief as a lure) balanced against traffic delays, noise, and the local environmental effects of the development and operation. Coal dust and blaring horns will fill the local air, locals will spend more time idling as mile-long trains pass through, trees will be cleared and archaeological sites obliterated. A leading candidate, Cherry Point in Washington, has long been a herring fishery important to the Lummi and other tribes, including the salmon people who need forage fish; nobody expects the underwater residents to fare well with a massive increase in development, dust, and boat traffic. 

I've never lived by a coal port, and Olympia is too small to be in the race. But I do drive Route 14 up the Columbia from time to time, I have tried to sleep in Stevenson as the plains rumble through, horns blasting, and it's hard to imagine how a massive increase in traffic would be tolerable. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where trainloads of Appalachian coal would pass by on their way to the port of Norfolk (location of these photos). The last time I saw that port was a decade ago, mountains of coal feet away from Chesapeake Bay, grime everywhere. 

And not just the immediate everywhere, because this issue reaches beyond the effects in Bellingham. All along the coal train tracks, localities will experience the dust, noise, and traffic. At the source, miles of earth ripped apart never to be the same. Carbon now in the ground, stable, not contributing to global warming, will be torn out and put on the market. Once in China, it will be burnt without even the weakened environmental controls that exist here. The smoke and pollution will move downwind to visit the US again, and the global atmosphere will get tauntingly dirtier, warmer. These consequences will visit the people who welcomed the port, yes, but they will hurt everyone else as well. If and when the Chinese plants burn all the US coal, they will fall back on their own reserves, and keep on burning.

If a coal port happens--and the relentlessness of North American capital suggests it will--the lucky winner will likely learn some hard lessons. Many of the construction jobs will go to outsiders, and operations won't generate the employment or revenue expected. At Cherry Point, we've already learned that the proponents' initial statements about the volume were a fraction of what they really plan, that there will be twice as much traffic and pollution. Friendly promises will be reneged. Coal, being a global commodity, may become more profitable (leading to increased shipping), or the bottom may drop out (causing jobs to disappear from time to time). Even if you support coal power, does it make sense to sell our reserves to China, whose import policy is partly to protect their own for the future?

That Portsmouth Project

 

Since I needed to write a conference paper this week, I spent some time procrastinating, eventually searching out the one place I did any real archaeology in Virginia. A couple of weeks digging shovel probes in 100-degrees, poison ivy and snakes all around, an employer jerking us around and housing us in a crackhead hotel was enough to send me as far away as possible. 

The location was what must have been the last agricultural remnant north of Portsmouth, and subsequent development has insured that there are no animals or plants surviving. In their place is the largest privately funded marine container terminal in the US, capable of handling 1.44 million containers. Archaeologists in the private sector know that they are often the last to see a place before it is developed, but I had no idea that this would end up being hundreds of acres of barrenscape.

Besides the wildlife that had clung to this refuge, all of the archaeology there was obliterated. My job was to run a crew that would dig a hole, walk 25 feet, and dig another, looking for artifacts. With 300 acres to cover in a couple of weeks, that meant giving up at the outset on some areas, so there are parts of the project that were never tested. I concentrated on the shoreline, and although there was more recent stuff mixed in often as not, we found prehistoric artifacts. There was a concentration of quartz cobbles that tribes had used forever as a raw material for tools--this is a rarity in tidewater Virginia.

My memory of what exactly we found a decade ago is fuzzy, but it seems like it was more than the report ever mentioned. The company that hired me forgot their promise to have me to some writing, and I never saw the report. They cashed in on data recovery excavation at the two sites they acknowledge to the tune of $300,000, and brag about it to this day on their website (it sounds like a lot, but the terminal cost $509,000,000). I got $15 an hour and poison ivy; the crew got less money, but about as much poison ivy. Maersk got a terminal that can bring in ships carrying 9,000 standard containers and transfer them to rail or trucks.

 

 It's an amazing facility. Cranes on rails move back and forth offloading containers, and smaller machines grab them and take them to the right place, eventually loading them onto trains or trucks. And off they go to walmart or wherever all that stuff is needed. It's immense, and a high achievement of efficient logistics. But it's also inhuman. When everything is in containers moved by machines (I think there are human operators for the time being, but would not count on that for toomuch longer), there are not many jobs. Row after 200-foot row of containers stacked high is not a landscape for soul-endowed primates. I don't long for bugs and snakes and poison ivy, but it still looks like a net loss to me, and strengthens my resolve to buy as few shipped goods as possible.

Sole-less Corporations

Devobootion

I'm pretty down-to-earth, and the most down and earthiest part of anyone is the soles of their feet, or the strip of rubber or leather or plastic that forms the soles of their shoes.

I've obsessed before about boots, from their importance to punk rock kids to their evolutionary diversification, to my propensity to buy cheap boots and leave their used-up husks as offerings in various places I worked. I've also ranted about the crappiness of corporations.

Now's the time to lay those threads together into a rope of righteous rage that I can use to flog the boot industry.

A year or so ago, having decided that not all my money is earmarked for food and housing and having run through my supply of hand-me-down boots from my dead dad, I decided to abandon my old policy of buying cheap-ass boots. I'd gotten some hand-me-down shoes from a cousin's boyfriend (who has better consumer awareness than I do, and apparently a larger clothing budget) that had held up pretty well, and there was a new REI store in town, so I went there instead of dropping the usual $35, and bought a pair that cost $130, the logic being that maybe they'd hold together 4 times longer than the cheap Hi-Techs (whose quality had diminished noticeably the last time I'd bought them), putting me ahead of the game. 

What I bought were Keens, famous for being able to handle large-caliber feet like mine (I have what Hawaiians call 'Luau feet,' and Americans generally refer to as 'duck feet,' wide if not clownishly long). The sole began to peel away the first time I wore them. To REI's credit, they allowed me to return them slightly used simply because they suck, no further explanation required.

Boots by Robber Soul, be sure to avoid this patent no.

Having returned my unintentional flip-flops, I turned around and chose a similarly priced pair of Merrills. I know that 130 bucks is not even halfway up the price scale, but I still held hope that they would not be utter crap. But they were. The first photo of this post shows what happens to the sides, which I suppose the corporate PR tools will try to spin as the result of my girthy feet, but I ain't buying that. Besides, the shot above shows what happened to the soles weeks after buying this pair: chunks of sole missing, red stuff wearing away to reveal sof grey foam less than a millimeter below. Besides which, the "waterproof" label is a lie, even before the sides split. 

I guess I could have taken this pair back to REI, but I was busy and the laces still worked, my feet still held within the boot more or less, and I had another newly acquired pair of boots that I could use in situations rougher than cubicle floors and long plastic hallways. Because the new pair were steel-toed, they were considered safety equipment, and therefore part of the $250 or so that they cost was reimbursed by my work. Hiking for miles in high-rise steel-toed boots sucks, though, and inevitably, the soles have started to do this:

"Hi, I'm Dick, spokesman for the Outsourced Sole Council of AmeriCo"

This most expensive pair, by the way, are Danners. I lack the funding to sample all of the boot manufacturers in America (by which, I mean China), but it seems like I will find nothing better without taking out a mortgage. This is a central commandment of life in 21st Century Americorp: Thou Shalt Pay Exhorbitant Prices for Premium Products. [The corollary to which is, All Non-Premium Products Are Shitty.]

Some would say that I should not blame Keen, or Merrill, or Danner, but the sole manufacturer, which happens to be Vibram. Long ago, that name was the gold standard of boot-soles. Rugged, oil-resistant, non-slip. The Danner's Vibrams may live up to that promise, but it won't do much good if they cannot stay attached to the midsole. The ones on the Merrills were slippery as hell even in light rain, and wore out after a few miles. I would not let Vibram off the hook, but neither will I blame them entirely.

Our system of manufacturing--by which I mean our system of contracting the lowest bidder somewhere across the globe and then slapping an American label on it--has lost its soul. If it were just boots, it would be bad enough, but this extends all the way up to the Boeing 787. If you are a middle class or lower consumer unwilling to mortgage your future, you are doomed to getting sub-par goods while the owners of the companies that 'make' them try to make par on some tropical golf course. Maybe it's time to re-aquaint these soul-less robber barons with the steel toe.

Or maybe, something less drastic, something less demanding of my tired and aching feet. Last week, finding myself in a far-flung place (the northwestermost portion of the lower 48, but not the contiguous 48), and done with fieldwork for the moment, that old urge to sacrifice a pair of spent boots struck again. And so somewhere in the 6 square miles or so of Point Roberts lies the pair of Merrills. As I placed them in a thorny thicket, I had no particular prayer--bunions for the 1% and bankruptcy for the offending companies, or even return of the soul of American industry--just a sense of relief, of ditching the silly dream that I could spend a middling amount and get a decent product. 

Back home again after the trip, I bought another pair of cheap boots. Let's see how long they last, and where they end up...