Bring Out Your Dead*

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So I’ve been reading Necropolis, London and It’s Dead by Catherine Arnold.  I’m not even sure why.  I stumbled onto an excerpt on facebook, I think, and read it, and went out immediately and bought the book.

Yes, okay, so it’s a wee bit depressing … sort of.  It’s all about dying, death, and yes, the human remains as geological features, so to put it, ignored or built upon by the future generations.

I’m only halfway through – the last week having featured many, many interesting (and none particularly pleasant) incidents.  But it’s not actually depressing, in a way that I can’t explain.

It’s sort of like… like the Natural History Museum isn’t actually depressing, though it’s all skelletons, and species disappearing, and stuff.  But even after the great extinctions, more life comes up and flourishes.

In the same way, even after the plague, the survivors rebuilt and dealt with the massive amount of dead, not by going neurotic and weak at the knees, but by going on.  By building, living, loving and having more kids.

This admirable resilience is comforting, particularly when you confront our own age, where even smart people say things like “I couldn’t bring a child into this messed up a world.”  As opposed to our ancestors who brought vast batches of kids into worlds without antibiotics, basic sanitation, or often much personal freedom and where you lived or died at the whim of a monarch who was more often than not a nut case.

The book leaves a feeling, so far, of a life that’s sweet enough for us to cherish it, to enjoy the very process of being alive, despite the difficulties, the pain, and the sadness that are part of every life.

So far at least, there are no demands that this be fixed and humans be made to live forever.  (I, myself, would support the ability to live about double, so that the investment in kids would be just a part of life, not most of it.  But maybe it wouldn’t work very well to make kids a minor feature of human life.  Kind of like they’re being made now.)  And I have yet to hear a mournful note about the pollution of the environment with human remains.

Most of all what fascinates me, growing up in a place that is at least as old and inhabited as long as London, is that this sort of place is mostly built on dead people.  I mean, I sort of knew that.

I understand in the parts of France and Germany where the great battles of WWI took place, people routinely find bones or metal buttons or whatever while plowing and put them to one side, and go on to plant the field.

Where I grew up it was sort of like that.  When we dug for a garden or into a field that had lain fallow in living memory, we’d find bones (granted, most of them animal, even I could tell that.  Mostly cats and dogs because people used to dump dead pets) and sometimes bits of clearly ancient or at least medieval pottery or jewelry.  If it was usable you used it, but if it wasn’t, you put it in a neat pile in the corner of the field so it wouldn’t catch the plow/make it hard for you to plant.

Most of those sites are built over now, including the field where we used to grow our vegetables, (on a loan, sort of) and I would guarantee that whatever was found in the digging up of the basements of foundations for the apartment buildings, unless you were unlucky enough to dig it up while there are untrustworthy people watching, was never reported.

In a way this was a pity.  I always felt that the farmer who built the cow shed and found a Roman cemetery in doing it, should have reported it.  I mean, the entire village knew, but who knows what advancement of our understanding of Roman civilization lies under that cow shed.

On the other hand, Portuguese laws being what they are, they’d probably have confiscated the plot of land, and he couldn’t afford that.  (The sensible stuff they do in England, with bringing a team to do rapid study, then letting the building go on, is obviously the way to go, but I don’t know if it has made its way to Portugal yet.)

And yet on the other hand (Shut up you mutants.  I can has three) eventually the cow shed will fall down, and someone will dig up for another thing, and maybe by then the Roman Cemetery will be studied by more sensible people.

And that’s something I grew up with, that is more absent (though not completely, certainly not in the East) in America.  The idea that our present landscape, too, would one day become the foundation of the future.  That this too should pass.  And yes, the idea that death could come, swiftly, terribly and in great numbers.  Even our relatively bucolic place had a mass grave dating back to the Napoleonic wars.

I’ve since read – mostly diaries of British officers – what those wars did to the peninsula.  It gives you pause to realize that at some point significant stock must have been imported from elsewhere, too – look, even the work oxen were eaten by the two opposing armies.  So those humble cows I knew growing up had to have “foreign” ancestors.  Which is kind of amusing.

To be fair, all of us have foreign ancestors, of course.  Oh, I don’t mean just us Americans, who are, of course, mutts.  The idea that humans didn’t move around in the pre-modern age is fairly exploded.  For instance, the Roman Lady of Spittal fields, was not so much Roman as Basque.  Or perhaps one of her sisters moved to the basque region and had kids some descendants of whose survive.

This of course we know since the bog-man in Switzerland who is closer related to people in… Sicily, I believe.

And speaking of the peninsular wars – guys, there is a reason so many Portuguese have blue eyes, and I warrant it’s not just that they have Celtic ancestry in the North.

So in a time when my life seems to be determined to be turmoil and confusion, it’s relatively reassuring to find that humans can undergo much worse than this and survive.

Most of all, though, while reading this, I kept thinking “If Pratchett were still at his best, what magnificent book he’d make from this.”

Since I doubt he will, maybe I’ll eventually come up with an idea.  Which by itself will be life from death…

*According to Necropolis, there were body-picker-uppers close enough to that skit.

281 thoughts on “Bring Out Your Dead*”

    1. A beautiful concept that, unfortunately, we’re getting further from, all the time. Death happens in the clean antiseptic environment of the hospital, and some stranger deals with all the rest of it. Show up in black and shed a tear at the funeral. (Vast oversimplification, sorry. We still feel the grief, but a whole lot of the chores involved are hired out, now.) Same with food. Few of us grow or kill what we eat. Some don’t even cook it themselves, any more.

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      1. A sad thing indeed. It’s like our whole lives are becoming artificial. But I think that all this stuff was invented precisely to get us away from the ugliness of death up close.

        On a related note, all successful societies become victims of their own success.

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      2. And the leftists will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it that way.

        You see, if you take two people and remind one that he will die, and then administer tests, you will find (on average) that the one remembering his death will turn out much more conservative. Leftists like to frame this as conservatives are afraid of death, instead of leftists have delusions of immortality, but they need the denial to continue.

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      3. Even today, the bodies of deceased Mormons are usually dressed in temple robes for their funeral by their own next of kin. I’ve not had the experience myself (I mean doing the dressing, not being dressed) but friends and acquaintances speak of the experience in tones of reverence. And quite sincerely. I think this is a good thing.

        Most recently, my wife helped dress the body of my mother-in-law for her funeral. She repeated to me afterwards what someone had pointed out to her, that her mother had dressed her when she was little and couldn’t dress herself, and now it was time to return the favor.

        Yes. We lose something by sanitizing death out of our culture. We inadvertently sanitize a lot of life in the process.

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        1. There is some trend in medical circles to try and reverse some of the sanitation, to allow a little more human contact and respect back into end of life cases. It’s harder to accomplish with sudden death, but some folks are working on procedures even there. People are figuring out that a complete disconnect is not — healthy.

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      4. The Cow Belles (Or Cattlemen’s Association, depending on state) do things like “Meet your Meat!” days that are delightful.

        A quick search indicates that they should’ve trademarked that– my mom was using it before she met my dad, and I’m over thirty, but it seems PETA stole it for more lies and propaganda.

        That’s incredibly depressing, but not surprising. (I’m still shocked that anyone is SURPRISED when radical PETAphiles torture animals on tape so they can accuse others of abuse.)

        Rewinding digression…. oh, yeah.
        Try seeing if there’s a Cattlemen’s association– beef or dairy works, honestly– in your area that you can invite to local schools. Winter or spring is good, there’s usually calves they can be introduced to, and small children are amazingly open to the idea of “this animal is cute. This big scary animal over here isn’t. We eat the big scary ones. The cute little one eventually turns into the big scary one, but it’s OK to love him anyways.”

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        1. Was just talking last night to family about my twin cousins when they were younger. They raised a steer from a calf, and named him Charlie. One of them called my dad (they were about six or eight at the time) and invited him to dinner, informing him they were having Charlie for dinner. :)

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            2. I worked on a dairy farm for about a year, there was always an older cow with a broken down udder that was destined for the sale barn next time she dried up named Big Mac. Whenever one went to the sale the next worst broken down one immediately inherited the title.

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              1. I don’t ride much, but I remember Hackworth’s horse names. That’s the guy we rented horses from.

                I usually got Nimrod. Big, broad gelding, smooth ride but dumb as a post. Seems most folks were intimidated by size. My girlfriend of the time usually got a sweet tempered mare that for some reason answered to “Glue Factory.”

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          2. Signed up JUST to reply – Lady Foxfier’s been pointing me at this blog a while now and this comment made me smile (so, hello everyone!)

            We used to keep chickens as pets – they had names that usually corresponded to what my Mom said they’d end up as one day: Fried, Adobo, Tinola… and they never ended up that way because well, Mom got attached to them. Adobo was a chicken that followed her everywhere – even down the road to the end of the street when she’d go to buy bread. Adobo would follow her up the stairs when my mother would go up, and then fly back down when my mother went down again. She recounts that one day she lay down to take a nap and woke up because her ankles felt unusually hot – Adobo was perched on her ankles, also asleep.

            Tinola was more commonly known as Chicky, and was raised by my youngest brother. That hen learned to eat out of a plate as neat as you could wish, adored drinking Coca Cola out of a glass (she’d run in as soon as she’d hear the pssssh of a bottle opening) and if there was dark liquid in the glass, she’d drink out of it. She slept in my brother’s bed, liked to sit in a chair, refused to live outside with the rest of the flock of chickens and nested in my mother’s basket of onions and garlic in the kitchen. Whenever she and my mother fought (usually because Chicky believed she was stealing her eggs when Mom wanted the garlic) my mother would point at the pot and say “One day! One day, you’ll end up in there!” I once returned home from college to find my mother and the hen glaring at each other. Chicky had eaten all the onions again, which my mother had just bought. “She’s freshly stuffed, and ready for the pot!” Of course, we never ate her and Chicky eventually mellowed out as she aged, often sitting in my mom’s lap to be petted like the cat. (She totally dominated that cat too.)

            Chicky died in a flood while we were overseas once, or so we were told, but we strongly suspected that she was stolen and eaten.

            We eventually did learn to eat some of the chickens we raised, but for several years we did not lack for eggs.

            Sadly, while we are allowed to keep chickens as pets in the suburb I live in, they must be hens, not roosters, so as not to disturb the peace. I’d have loved to raise my own chooks again…

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        2. I mistrust the sincerety of many PETA adherents. While some are doubtless sincerely concerned for animal welfare, some are clearly motivated by a desire for revolution so strong that pretty much any sufficiently radical cause would have been satisfactory.

          Had a very nice lasagna dinner as part of a group date in college. As we were picking our teeth, the host commented that “Yep, that was the last of Betsy.” It happens our host lived on a farm very close to the college. And Midge was not fifty feet from the kitchen window, happily munching on some kind of fodder and preparing herself for the next lasagna dinner.

          My date was a farm girl and unperturbed. Others were not quite as able to take it all in stride.

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          1. Grew up knowing my meat’s name.

            Funny story: my brother got a batch of jerkey from my folks, made from a deer they’d got.

            He worked with the SEALS and shared it around his team– eventually someone noticed it didn’t taste exactly like store jerky, and asked what it was.
            Two of them were physically sick at the idea of “eating Bambi.”

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                2. That was kind of my brother’s reaction– apparently the movie Bambie resulted in them identifying deer in their heads as closer to cats than cows.

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          2. If you work from the assumption that PETA is a performance art group masquerading as an “animal rights” group things start to make more sense.

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    2. And think of it – when Simba was singing “I just can’t WAIT to be King”, Mufasa was hearing “I just can’t WAIT for you to die!”

      Ah, parental love – it enables us to laugh when we realize the kids don’t know what they’re saying.

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  2. “It’s sort of like… like the Natural History Museum isn’t actually depressing, though it’s all skelletons, and species disappearing, and stuff. But even after the great extinctions, more life comes up and flourishes.”

    I think you can say it simpler: a Natural History Museum, especially a properly-done one, is a celebration of what WAS, rather than what IS. What a dinosaur skeleton IS, is rock in the shape of long-dead bones. What a dinosaur skeleton WAS, though, is an animal from another time – a living, moving, breathing example of the magnificent wonders Nature is capable of.

    “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ” — Charles Darwin, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, last sentence of the 1st Edition.

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  3. Personally when somebody says “I couldn’t bring a child into this messed up world” what I hear is “I’m too self-centered to want to raise a child, one wouldn’t compliment my lifestyle, I resent people who do have children and appear to be happy, and I want to be the center of attention and everybody is looking at that brat!”

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    1. If you’ve ever read a screed by the “childfree”, you know that inevitably, after the long rant about how a child would dent their selfishness (baths by candlelight — sandalwood candles — such a sacrifice!), they expected to be admired for their selflessness. Whether for not contributing to the population or because realizing you are a hard-hearted, self-centered narcissist is somehow more virtuous than not being one.

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      1. Personally, I congratulate them on their wise choice. Leaving unsaid the reason for congratulations, which is that they’re helping improve the gene pool by taking theirs out of it.

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        2. ^^all of this. YES. I have much the same reaction when I hear this line–and I hear it a LOT. I live in the Seattle area where there are more dogs than children, and kids (and the parents of more than one child) are commonly treated with disdain.

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        3. Ah, yes. But the problem isn’t their genetics. The problem is their ideas. Which they are taking every opportunity to propagate in every possible venue. Hence, though their genetics are out of the pool, the problem, like a viral plague, spreads to previously uncontaminated, healthy hosts.
          Which is why it’s important to point out their ideas to our own kids, discuss them, explain how and why they’re wrong, etc. You can’t shield them from them. You have to inoculate them against them.

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            1. Given their position on other things, including abortion, subsidizing birth control, taking stands against ‘slut-shaming’, etc., I doubt celibacy is something they’re much interested in…

              But I get the joke.

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  4. Oh well – I did say that I was “too self-centered with too many genetic problems to bring up a child.” And– I was right. Otherwise, I have been surprised by my capacity to love and live after my background even though my problems were probably not a tenth of some of the people in that era. ;-)

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  5. I worked with a woman who came of age in the 70’s, bought into the myth of the population bomb, and zero population growth. Had herself sterilized at a young age.

    I can admire the strength of belief, and acting on the belief, but it was a “permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

    When I knew her, she was 15 or 20 years down that road, and seemed … wistful…

    zuk

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      1. I remember it in the early 80s as well, of course, the ‘funny’ part is, that the ‘explosion” had already started slowing down in the 60s…

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              1. Yeah, that’s what I meant by “the propaganda” instead of propaganda in general. Indeed, in the appropriate niches of society where fertility is valued, it is selecting for susceptibility.

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          2. I can remember, as a teen, doing a Tolkien-and-family-reunion influenced dive into population growth as centered around my family.

            I had names up to my great-grandparents, in most cases including their nieces and nephews, and set down to see how this wonderful tree grew….

            …

            Then I figured out that it didn’t.

            We went from my grandparent’s generation– which, even with my grandfather being an only child of divorce and my grandmother being one of only three, had something like twenty-five kids old enough to have names and stories.

            Their kids went out to something like seventy, even with those that died and the one gal who had twins but acts younger than them.

            Their kids, my generation, went down to something like thirty. About half didn’t have kids at all, although that might be an artifact of the same problems that meant my grandma was one of three.

            Their kids are less than a dozen, even though I’m one of the younger cousins.

            I’m facing a lot of pressure to not have kids. In only one case has there been an objective reason offered– because she believed we need to be able to pay for their college. (Thank God I have a strong vein of treppenwitz, because if my mind was fast enough I would’ve informed her that I paid for MY OWN college, such as it is, and that fully funding the college for her sons meant that she’s got a forty year old high schooler and a thirty five year old newlywed. I’m not sure that family ties would allow such retaliation, no matter the insult offered.)

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            1. It’s much harder to pay for your own college now — but yeah. My kids are only in college because they want to have highly specialized professions and the help we give, which isn’t all of it, ends if they fail. I think the next generation will have competency exams, and might not have to attend college as we know it, the lucky sods.

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              1. All I had to do was offer my life and some downpayments….. (GI Bill. Haven’t actually used that, although I did take some classes while I was in using the tuition assistance.)

                Said cousins spent literal decades in college for a wide range of subjects, and one has yet to find a real job.

                I love my cousins, but I wish they’d grow up.

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              2. For that we need entrance requirements to legislatures, executives, the judiciary, and probably the legal occupation: basic Statistics 101. Until then, the test are lawsuit bait.

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              3. “””It’s much harder to pay for your own college now”””

                No, it isn’t. ROTC, National Guard and Reserves, Jr. colleges etc. are all options.

                My parents never paid a dime for my tuition or books (this was back in the 90s) and did 3 years at the School of the Art Institution of Chicago. Yes, I had a metric buttload of student loan debt, which was dumb (which is redundant, I’ve got a degree in fine art).

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                1. William: younger kid. Bizarrely malformed (though functional) heart and asthma cut that avenue off. But it’s harder to work to pay for it, unless you’re willing to take 7 years or so.

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            2. “because she believed we need to be able to pay for their college. (Thank God I have a strong vein of treppenwitz, because if my mind was fast enough I would’ve informed her that I paid for MY OWN college, such as it is, and that fully funding the college for her sons meant that she’s got a forty year old high schooler and a thirty five year old newlywed.”

              You have better self control than I do, people insisting that parents are responsible for paying for their adult children’s* college is a hot button topic for me. I did not particularly endear myself to a boss I had when I gave him my opinion after he was complaining about his younger son joining the Marines rather than going to college. Keeping in mind that his older son was working with us part time, while going back to school to get a degree in the exact same thing he had already been taught on the job by his father and I (both of whom knew more than the professor at the University, something we knew without a doubt since we were constantly fixing stuff he had screwed up while working in the private sector, and correcting the son on things the professor was teaching him incorrectly) AFTER already going to college for FIVE years without any idea of what he wanted to do “when he grew up.”

              *Except in very rare cases of juveniles attending college, anybody going to college is a legal adult, if their parents have the money and want to help them that is fine, but it is their responsibility and they certainly shouldn’t expect their parents to pay for it.

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              1. You have better self control than I do, people insisting that parents are responsible for paying for their adult children’s* college is a hot button topic for me.

                No credit deserved– if I’d thought of it at the time, it would’ve come out.

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            3. Oh yea– I paid for my OWN college too even if it took my GI bill to finish when I was almost 40. lol I feel the same way. Two of my brothers followed my example except they didn’t do the military. They did work and took the courses when they had enough money. One of my brothers has a double business, accounting degree and the other has a business degree. They came out with their degrees without owing anyone any money. So I agree totally.

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  6. To be fair, all of us have foreign ancestors, of course. Oh, I don’t mean just us Americans, who are, of course, mutts. The idea that humans didn’t move around in the pre-modern age is fairly exploded. For instance, the Roman Lady of Spittal fields, was not so much Roman as Basque. Or perhaps one of her sisters moved to the basque region and had kids some descendants of whose survive.

    This whole theory kills me. I mean there has been historical proof that people have moved around for as long as history has been studied. (And probably before that, but how would we know at that point?”) Think about it:

    Choose a spot in the world. Seriously. Here’s a globe. Point at a spot. Europe? Ok, you’re making it easy on me, I see. Thanks!

    See this spot over here? That’s called Greece. Once, long ago, there was a pretty important civilization there. No, not the current one that can’t support it’s leftist lifestyle. The one that gave us Pythagoras, Plato, Herodotus and yes, even King Leonidas.

    One day, the Persians, who were from this whole other place, decided they wanted to move in and set up shop. Yes, part of that would have been to conquer the people that lived there and rule them. Part of that also would have been to bring their own people in and expand their living space.

    A little later there was a semi-greek guy named Alexander the Great (Macedonia being close but not quite part of Greece) who took a bunch of his people and headed all over the place, in the process conquering every place that he actually knew existed. This conquest spread Greeks all over the place.

    Then came the Romans, who spread all over to hell and gone as well. That leaves aside the Celts (my ancestors) who spread all over Europe and were eventually forced out onto the British Isles. And let’s not forget the Huns, who migrated to Europe from Asia after being pushed out by the Mongols who were moving around and expanding.

    UGH

    That’s just Europe. Under no circumstances would I represent this as an all-inclusive list either. It may very well be accurate (I’m tempted to think it would be) to say that most of the pre-modern population didn’t move around AS INDIVIDUALS. The odd outcast may have been forced out into the world and the occasional trader may have chosen to travel to increase profits but the most common type of movement was mass movement. It was constant and pretty much unstoppable, at least until the modern day when things became so crowded that there was no place to go. Think about it. Other than the creation of Israel there hasn’t really been a mass migration event since the white man came to the new world and then forced the natives onto reservations. Oddly enough, that’s not all that different than what has happened in every other part of the world as well. My theory of the reason for Hadrian’s Wall in Britannia was that it was built to divide “our” land (meaning the Romans) from “their” land (meaning the natives). I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it.

    Israel is also a special case because of the way it was created. But in a way, it was just like the ancient mass migrations as well. In the ancient world, movement was often triggered by refugee status or by intentional conquest. Israel is an example of both. Once again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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    1. Oh, mass migrations still happen. If we believe the numbers bandied about by the pro-amnesty crowd around 1/10th of our population is comprised of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico.
      They’re almost certainly overstating it, but it would be tough to prove that in my area.

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      1. Please don’t take this as nasty– anybody!– but thinking about mass immigration made me think about the folks I’ve seen everywhere:

        Folks from the Philippines. The PI guys are bloody everywhere— and it messes with my mind a bit, because Sarah’s description of how their economy use to depend on folks going out and doing jobs and sometimes coming back sounds really, really familiar.

        Sometimes they form highly-reminiscent-of-the-Jews sub-areas (like the third generation American guy who didn’t learn to read English until boot camp that I served with– California, of course), sometimes it’s just loosely packed (mostly same-sex) groups that really are just there for X years to make it good.

        (Side note, God help you if you’re around the X year group, have Philippine ancestry and are just American. They view it as being a traitor, especially if you don’t speak Tagalog. This holds true in the “just doing 20 in the Navy so I can retire” group. Mandatory other note, there ARE a lot of PI folks who join the Navy to serve honorably… even while they’re thinking “and that retirement will be really, really nice.” You can generally identify them by who the nasty folks are attacking.)

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        1. Portuguese view you as a traitor, too. My brother is shocked I don’t belong to the local Portuguese community (there’s a few hundred in town) but I’m married to an AMERICAN and consider myself American. I don’t want to go there.

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        2. It was a coworker of Greek extraction (second generation, I think) who told me that a lot of Greek men came to the US to work part of the year so that they could go back and party the rest of the year. He specifically mentioned several of his family who still lived there doing this.

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        3. “(Side note, God help you if you’re around the X year group, have Philippine ancestry and are just American. They view it as being a traitor, especially if you don’t speak Tagalog.”

          BAHAHAHAHAHA oh man the reaction I got when I returned home to the Philippines after growing up in East, then West Germany, then staying in the US for a while. I could NOT speak Tagalog, was called ‘The American’ in school. I kinda speak some now, but it’s still pidgin Taglish at best, and I still slip into weird (read: German or French) grammar structures when I’m tired. So my Aussie husband tells me. I’m a third culture kid and so is he, and it’s still a life I would not have traded for anything. To hear my Filipino friends tell it though, I have zero grasp of the local body language and the less tolerant people think I adopt Western mannerisms and speech modes to ‘show off’ when really, that’s how I grew up. Yeah, I’m an unrepentant ‘traitor’ linguistically, because Tagalog is partially tonal, and I’m not that good at it. A friend of mine who is/was in the Navy called the ‘supply store guys the Philippine Mafia’ and asked me what particular language to learn so to be more friendly / get a bit more insider favoritism (Illocano, my mom says.)

          But oh, the language wars still make me laugh, because when the government in Manila TRIED to make Tagalog/Filipino the official language of teaching in the 90’s, it backfired SPECTACULARLY because there’s more than ONE language in the Philippines, and it didn’t work to try implement Tagalog in the regions that don’t speak it (because regional tribalism. They stuck to English.)

          And yes, the PI folks are everywhere (That’s why we were in East Germany – Dad was a diplomat.) I’m actually still surprised at how many Pinoys I find here in this little corner of North Queensland – though I’m grateful there’s a little Filipino food store.

          When I finally get citizenship, I’ll be Australian. Filipino migrant. But Australian otherwise there’s just no point. I still take citizenship – and the responsibilities thereof – very seriously.

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          1. That’s how I feel about being American. I am American, not Portuguese-American, not Latin-American. My family doesn’t like it and the publishing establishment hated it, but that’s why G-d gave me middle fingers.

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            3. My father, while he would have had mixed feelings about my surrendering my citizenship of birth, would probably have said something along the lines of “Just never forget where you came from,” and that just because my citizenship changes, doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop representing my country of birth. Just means I’ll be representing two countries! And it definitely doesn’t mean I should stop being a good person, no matter what country I declare my allegiance to. Once I declare allegiance to Australia, that’s where my loyalty lies.

              (I do miss Filipino street food though…)

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              1. No kidding. I remember visiting a little street vendor outside where I used to live in Catbalogan on a VERY regular basis.

                Fresh bread delivered every morning from a little bakery down the way. Mmmm… Pan de sol.

                And, of course, balut.

                And the fresh fruit. I haven’t had good papaya since I’ve been in the Philippines, and that’s been about twenty years now (I was a missionary over there. White shirt, black name tag, etc…)

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                1. I enjoy reading this little website, and hopefully this will help with the pan de sal craving: http://panlasangpinoy.com/2009/08/13/filipino-food-bread-of-salt-pandesal-recipe/

                  He does a lot of recipes for people who’ve left the Philippines – both Filipinos and not! – and still yearn for certain tastes and foods. I sadly can’t get lye water here for making certain kakanin chewy and sticky.

                  Also, I’ve found the recently published book 7000 Islands to be a delight in terms of reading and recipes. It’s written by an Aussie of Filipino descent, who, like me, seems to remember things better when they’re centered around food. It also has a recipe for ube chiffon cake, which I proceeded to stare at for a loooooong time. Sadly, no Red Ribbon Black Forest cake, but plenty of different recipes that focus on lots of classic and known food.

                  The best papayas I’ve ever had grew in our back yard. My mother and I put one in the fridge and let it chill for a bit, then sliced it in half, took a piece each. After cleaning out the seeds, which we greedily saved to replant, we ate our shares. It was like eating papaya that was turned into ice cream, the fruit was so sweet and flavorful, and so creamy in texture.

                  That reminds me, I can make mango ice cream here! The calypso mango breed here in Queensland tastes just as good as the Carabao Mango from the Philippines – a description I do NOT give lightly! Just blend together mango, full fat whipping cream and a can of sweet condensed milk, pour the result into a container, add more mango bits if desired and freeze in the freezer overnight. (For avocado, do the same thing, but use avocado instead.)

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            1. I’ll occasionally switch over to Filipino/Taglish just because it’s easier for me to say something quickly, but I’ll apologize to my hubby first. I’ve had it used in a way to check on how I’m going – “He’s treating you well? You’re settling in fine? He takes care of you?” – but fortunately I understand that this is country-mateship and there are lots of Filipinos who are quite culture-shocked for a while when they arrive. Rhys relates that while he was stationed in Afghanistan, some of the Fil-Am soldiers whipped up huge batches of adobo and sinigang, shared with the rest of the soldiers, some of whom went over to the Aussie side of base and said “Hey, we’ve got Filipino cooking, let’s eat!” in the best of Filipino traditions. Rhys was soon told that he was welcome to come over and ‘have a taste of home cooking, like your Misis makes’ to ease the homesickness. (He mentioned hearing them talk in Filipino DID remind him of home, go figure.)

              But ah, the OFW flood.

              My younger brother and his wife are joining the economic hiring diaspora hopefully this year – heading over to Dubai (which would have given my father a fit if he were still alive The Middle East is consistently a hardship post; bar Israel. I hear they still talk about the good work my father did there as Ambassador.). Originally it was just going to be my sis-in-law, but the company was like ‘get your husband over here and we’ll find him work.’ I’m hoping that it’ll give them more financial security. The BPO business in the Philippines keeps screwing over my bro (“Oh, yeah, your training salary? Sorry we forgot to mention that on your contract, it’ll only be half even if you’re travelling across Metro Manila, coz oh heeey we have a brand new office! and no transportation allowance.” – that was the summary of his new job telling him yesterday.) Sis in law will be doing it to help her family, her flock of nephews and nieces, send them to school, provide for her elderly parents. Al hopefully will be able to begin a nest egg for their own security and because well, we look after our mom. Me, I’m just grateful Al will be there so the locals don’t see my sis in law as legal sexual prey.

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      2. Koreans like to remind people that they’re part Mongol.

        Reminding the Japanese that they’re mostly Korean, and that most of their great arts came by way of Korea or were invented there… probably more amusing on the Internet thanin real life. And most of the Koreans aren’t eager to claim the Japanese….

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        1. Though the Koreans find Japanese-Korean marriages more acceptible than other out-marriages. (B. R. Myers’s The Cleanest Race is interesting on the topic, though he does start with the stereotype that racism is rightist.)

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    3. This is why I’m always interested in theories about ancient explorers in places where history says they shouldn’t have been. Many are bunk, but a few are almost certainly accurate.

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      1. Remember that if there were a lot of contact between the Americas and either Asia or Europe, they would have carried over disease.

        probably good for the Americas to have a chance to recover from the epidemics before facing invasion, but didn’t happen.

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        1. Depends strongly on which theory of disease spread on the new world you ascribe to.

          I’ll take the “small villages will be randomly idiots,” plus the “low technology” one, but not the “all the plagues rolled into one plus some minus the documented interaction” one.

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    4. There has been mass immigration… but the genocide that used to go along with it now attracts international scorn and attention. World War 2 itself was a failed attempt at mass immigration. One of Hitler’s goals was “living space” for his people, preferably in the soon to be depopulated lands that were at the time held by Slavs (whom he viewed as sub-human). The German army got a start on the depopulating… but fortunately didn’t manage to get too far due to the ongoing war with the Soviets. The Soviets themselves engaged in some of this, moving Russian nationals into the member republics in an attempt to keep local movements from rising up that would play on nationalist sympathies against the central government in Moscow. And we see the Chinese doing the same in some of their outlying regions (or recently conquered neighbors in at least one case…), all the while denying with a straight face that they’re doing anything of the sort and viciously attacking anyone who brings it up.

      And nowadays, you have some questions about what exactly is going on in Europe with the immigrant populations from the Middle East and Africa.

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      1. “the genocide that used to go along with it now attracts international scorn and attention”

        Only if the perpetrators are sufficiently pale. Lots of it going on with Arab populations pushing south in Africa.

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      2. Actually, there’s been a lot of genocide going on. After Mandela’s death, there was a lot of scorn for — Bush, I think, because he was classified as a terrorist and eyed as dangerous. Because it was wrong to do so even though leaders with no apparrent differences from him were practicing genocide when they got control

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  7. Compare with all the people today who imagine it sophisticated to respond to any mention of possible future disasters by saying “The living will envy the dead” or “I wouldn’t want to live through that,” or some such formulation — and then proceed to scorn anyone who actually prepares to be able to survive such an eventuality. This is magical thinking, the underlying thought being (“if I don’t take the possibility of disaster X seriously, disaster X can’t happen”). It is very much a sign of decadence, and (since often the mocking hipster in question lives in a large city where survival would be more difficult) often spite (the hidden thought being “If I’m not going to survive, nobody else should either.”

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      1. Ringo’s new series Black Tide Rising takes what could be the greyest of goo–Zombie Apocalypse (99.9% of humanity is either dead or a zombie)– and turns it into a story of resilience. They don’t just survive, they are winning. They will not bow to the zombies. I think that all of Ringo’s books have resilient people.

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      2. Indeed. Maybe aliens are raining down kinetic energy weapons, and there’s nanotech zombies running around, but I look at it this way: when things are *that* bad, you might as well live. What’s the worst that could happen, at that point?

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      3. Wow … was that really the straw that broke the camel’s back? Though it does make me think when someone says to me that they “don’t want to survive” this or that event — either they are lying to me (and possibly to themselves as well) or they are marginally-suicidal. I can think of certain extreme mutiliations (mostly involving losing most of my sensors and/or effectors) that I would not be sure if I would want to survive, but that’s because of the extent and irreversibility of the damage, not because of the cause of its infliction. I don’t actually see why some people are obsessed with the cause rather than the effect in such cases.

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        1. They could simply be looking at the scenario and thinking, “I REALLY don’t want to work as hard as I would have to in order to survive in that situation,” not realizing that, if they got there, they would fight like a cornered rat to stay alive.

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                  1. I thought they were all in London, drinking pina coladas at Trader Vic’s.

                    I’ve heard they have really nice hair.

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      4. And if one day the final fire explodes
        Across the whitened sky
        I know you’ve said you’d rather die
        And make it over fast

        With courage from your bravest friends
        Waiting outside for the end
        With no bitterness but an innocence
        That I can’t seem to grasp

        I know somehow I will survive
        This fury just to stay alive
        So drunk with sickness, weak with pain
        I can walk the hills one last time

        Scarred and smiling, dying slow
        I’ll scream to no one left at all
        I told you so, I told you so, I told you so
        Oh God, I love the world

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    2. Yeah, I heard this attitude expressed when I was in college, and it irritated me then.

      Nukes do horrific things. But they’re not quite the all-exterminating weapons people imagine. It is not well-known (even though it’s been in the public domain for a while now) that among the Hiroshima survivors were about half the occupants of a bank that was close enough to ground zero as doesn’t matter. The bank happened to be reinforced concrete, and while it was quite badly damaged, most of those on the ground floor survived.

      Admittedly, I can’t speak for their long term life expectancy. I imagine the experience was a bit tough on their chromosomes.

      Of course, there’s a lot of difference between a 15 kT Hiroshima nuke and a 15 mT giant strategic nuke. The effects radii are roughly ten times as great for the latter. But that means a hundred times the area for a thousand times the blast. Not particularly cost-effective.

      The dangers of radiation are, of course, routinely overestimated by almost everyone.

      Look, I’m not saying a nuclear war wouldn’t throw us back into the Middle Ages. It’s possible it would. I just get irritated when I read science fiction writers who ought to know better, like Asimov or Clarke, talk about a nuclear war taking the entire crust off the Earth. The world arsenal might be enough to take the entire crust off of Manhatten Island. And there are days I think that would be an improvement.

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      1. The mother of a nurse at my doctor’s office is a survivor of Hiroshima. Her primary doctor is an oncologist but afaik she’s still alive.

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      2. I’d miss the art in the Met (both branches) and the Frick, and a few other museums on Manhattan Island, but otherwise yeah.

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          2. Not for long if Cuomo gets his way. His tone sounded awfully Adolphian, so it might be wise for such friends to make sure they have a haven waiting (preferably not in another blue state) in case this is not just hubristic bravado.

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          1. Joel,
            I was born and raised in the City (actually in Brooklyn). I moved to Westchester after my father died.
            How’s the city doing these days? I remember Mario Cuomo. Do you remember Mayor Koch? He was such a character! Mayor Giuliani was amazing!

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            1. Just moved to Queens a few months back, but my wife & I also were born & raised in Brooklyn. We’re too young to remember Ed Koch as mayor, except that as the quintessential NYC “character” the local press kept reporting something or other he’d said up until his recent death.

              I was nine the summer of the ’91 riots. Different part of Brooklyn (plus the family was away for the summer) but that’s one of my earliest memories of being politically aware.

              After eight years of Giuliani, there were very few areas of the city that felt unsafe (and most of them were safer than they seemed). And the bulk of Mommy Bloomberg’s twelve years were “more of the same”. (Giuliani would never have tried to regulate soda cup sizes, and Bloomberg wasn’t as brash as Rudy, but in the way the city was run day-to-day there was broad similarity.) The big differences between the City I know and the one a just barely remember are the crime rate and the fact that Times Square is family-friendly.

              Going forward, I don’t know what to expect. At the inauguration, everyone kept saying that the New York I know isn’t the “real” New York, that folks like me are not going to be represented. And de Blasio certainly intends to turn back certain policies that have brought down crime & kept it down. (This when he’s not busy banning the carriage horses from Central Park because it’s sooo cruel that the horses have to work.)

              On the other hand, New Yorkers have had two decades of a safe city, and if anything he does actually changes this de Blasio’s going to find slim support for his agenda.

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              1. I’m too young to remember Mayor Lindsay. I remember Mayor Beame and the city going off the rails financially. I started high school in 1975. I remember Brooklyn College when it was still a good school. I even remember when Brooklyn College didn’t charge tuition. I rode the subways when they were still full of graffiti.

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                1. … And now Cooper Union is charging tuition too. :-(

                  (But I’m not complaining about clean(ish) subways without graffiti that are safe to travel on even late at night.)

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          3. In all seriousness, Joel, I don’t wish ill on about 98% of the population of NYC. It’s the culture and mindset of the remaining 2% that make me want to saw the New York megalopolis (and DC) off of North America and let it float off on the Gulf Stream for someone else to deal with.

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      3. I don’t have the time to do it, but….

        Some mildly obnoxious person should compare the risk factor difference between “being at Hiroshima” and “living past 60.”

        Brought on because fully half of my grandparents died of cancer…..

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          1. Hey, for volinteer work you are allowed to be over-qualified. (I’d do it, but teaching my kids to be similarly difficult rules it out.)

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    3. “Magical Thinking” is the hallmark of the left. See theories about avoiding a nuking by not having nukes and feeding everyone by making the whole world poor as examples.

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      1. I’m not happy nukes exist (though if aliens came calling that would change), but I know we can’t just wish them away, either. They exist, and we must deal with that fact.

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        1. Indeed, people seem to think that wishing away nuclear weapons is possible. Its not that nuclear weapons exists, its that physics “exists”.

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          2. You’re right as usual SPQR. You know, I guess this sounds weird coming from an SF/F fan, but there are times I really wish that I could handwave certain forms of science right out of existence. Einstein and his E=mc2 would be the first thing to go.

            Of course, I’m reminded of one of my mother’s favorite sayings when I was a child:

            “Want in one hand and s–t in the other one and see which one gets full first.”

            An eloquent person, my mother.

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          3. Had an international relations proff who was passionate about nuke arms proliferation and the elimination thereof. Hard to trust his credibility after that heart-felt, brain-dead speech.

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            1. I’d really like to see the nuclear states eliminate their arsenal and get *really* nasty about preventing proliferation. No rational actor is going to use nukes and accidents, corruption and theft by non-rational actors are all possibilities.

              Not to mention that the materials (from the warheads to the rocket fuel) are really, really toxic, noxious and bad for you. And freaking expensive.

              If we need those sorts of threats we can just go do the “Rods of God” thing (Picture a titanium rod surrounded by concrete and coated with ceramics in HEO and then de-orbited VERY precisely. Lots of energy, lots of penetration if you need it.)

              I’m not a huge advocate of doing this because, well, reality. But frankly nuclear weapons really aren’t a good idea.

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              1. In a lot of ways they’re a lousy idea. Further proliferation should be stopped. With these statements I have no argument.

                We should eliminate all nuclear weapons — this is the statement that tanks the credibility of an international relations professor. I really expect a poli-sci collegiate professor specializing in international relations to have some grasp of the competing interests that make this notion a dream. I have my dreams to, but I don’t air them in a professional setting when they clearly conflict with reality. That genie won’t go back in the bottle.

                Though, I’d love to be proven wrong. Thrilled, even.

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              2. When you compare 20th Century fatalities in war post-August 1945 with fatalities in war pre-August 1945, it’s not so clear that nuclear weapons are such a bad idea.

                Of course, the conclusion woud be different if someone had actually pressed the big red button post-Autust 1945.

                Quite a dilemma.

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  8. There’s also the idea of death as a transition versus death as a complete end. If death is a transition, then caring for your beloved dead may reassure them (as well as you) that they are still remembered fondly and will be missed, or that you respect their power. If death is an end, and the material body is all, then pfooy, why bother with caring for bodies or establishing grave yards? (May G-d forgive me, but there are some people I hope are buried just so I can go dance on their graves.)

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    1. yes. I’m now in the later part of the book where she talks about how non-useful these cemeteries/memorials etc were. BUT I think she’s wrong. In Portugal, looking after your family tomb is your middle-age and later women’s job. And there’s huge comfort in that. You know you too will be looked after…

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      1. Family and community continues, both here and in the here-after. It’s a very reassuring thought, especially if you’ve seen war, and plague, and tsunamis and tornadoes and other disasters.

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      2. I believe in the hereafter, but I don’t think the carcass you used while here will matter to you at all after you are dead, no more than a dress which got too many holes in it to use or repair matters after you have thrown it in the trash (at least I hope so). So while I do have some emotional connection to graves of people I loved it’s not very strong. And I don’t care what will happen to my body after I no longer use it. I have been thinking of finding out what kind of research uses corpses may have in this country and see if I can donate mine to something like that. (Besides, while I don’t care about the body I am somewhat claustrophobic, and have had a few nightmares about waking up in a coffin – some books are not advisable if you have some phobias – so the idea of making very, very sure that my corpse really truly is just a corpse before it gets disposed of, like it has been cut open or left to rot somewhere for a while, is quite appealing :) ).

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                2. Jig, clogging, probably not waltz because of the space requirement and need for a partner.

                  Dancing is fine “so long as you leave room for the Holy Spirit,” or so I heard some chaperones telling high-schoolers. (Of course, these were Dutch Calvinists in the Midwest, not SB, so of course they are heretics and splitters. ;) )

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                  1. I don’t know the exact people* you have in mind, but I trust your judgement, so I’ll volunteer to partner you in a waltz. Just be warned that I have two left feet when it comes to dancing.

                    *Michael Moore’s grave would give one plenty of room to have a square dance on.

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                    1. I don’t live that far from those graves. And I think there are still something like interrail passes for retirees, so it might not take that much money, just time. So if I manage to get even some extra I could do a tour after I retire. Probably would have to be a bottle filled with the stuff though, I’d prefer not to get arrested and squatting on a grave might lead to that (unless those graveyards are accessible during the night… that might be fun :) ).

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                    2. Pohjalainen:

                      F’k mate, if you’re that close, once I get working again I’ll send you train fair and enough dosh to buy a bottle to fill up in on the way.

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          1. Yeah. Older son isn’t observant because of the pink bits. The bacon and … the rest ;) But at some point TXRed said something about converting if it weren’t for that, so I don’t think she’s Jewish.

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      2. I’m . . . well . . . let’s say my official affiliation is Protestant, but my theology is closer to Jewish. A lot closer. I imprinted on pre-Vatican II Catholic as a small child because of a babysitter, and still follow some of the big trends in modern Catholicism just to keep up on the news. A friend of mine keeps telling me to just convert to Judaism and be done with it, but there’s that pork BBQ and shellfish problem (and a few more serious considerations).

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          2. Pick one religion please. It drives me batty when people say that they are both Jewish and Christian. Sarah is exempt because she is kinda sorta both due to historical circumstances.

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            1. I would, but one is not permitted to be a strict monotheistic Christian because of the theological basis (and biases) built into modern Christianity. Except in the privacy of your own mind.

              And I think we’d better stop here, because otherwise this is going to slam into the “No theological arguments in the comment section” wall. :)

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                  1. Some aren’t even Jews. No seriously. They just “consider” themselves Jews.

                    I find it funny, but I have a weird sense of humor. Humans and their identity dances amuse me.

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                    3. I was raised Orthodox Jewish. I think that if you that the Messiah has already come you aren’t Jewish, you’re some flavor of Christian. As far as people who aren’t Jewish but consider themselves Jewish, I met some in Montgomery, AL.

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                    4. But that’s circular. Jews who believe that the Messiah has come aren’t Jews because — Jews who believe that the Messiah has come aren’t Jews.

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                    5. Mary, I once talked with a religious Jew on this subject.

                      IIRC, it’s a matter of “is the Christ a *separate god*”.

                      The basic Jewish thought is that a “Jew” is a member of the Jewish tribe and/or a worshiper of the One God.

                      In their view, if a “Jew” worships other gods than the “One God” then he is no longer a Jew.

                      If the Christ is a separate god (even if He’s linked to the One God), then a follower of the Christ is no longer a Jew even if he was born a Jew.

                      We have to remember that the Jewish view of the Messiah is that He will be a Great Leader (like Moses) not the Son Of God.

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                    6. Thank you for explaining this.

                      Jews don’t believe in the Trinity. We believe that the Messiah hasn’t come yet. These beliefs contradict core doctrines in Judaism. If don’t believe in the core doctrines of Judaism, you aren’t a Jew.

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                    7. To be fair, most aren’t OBSERVANT Jews, since they believe they live under the new dispensation. Also to be fair, not all Jews who believe the Messiah has come agree on who it was.

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  9. One of the things that fascinates me about visiting Europe and Asia (had a grand time in Istanbul doing both!) was the recognizable history permeating the places. This feeling of long continuity and movement, the gathering of lives in an area over millenia. It has a — feel, that I’ve not found in the States. Wandering through a museum in Rome and reading about the tribal peoples that first settled among the seven hills…walking out of Rome along the Via Appia…wandering around the old town in Prague… One of the things that frustrated me was that the inhabitants were largely oblivious to it. Hmph.

    Istanbul was particularly fun, as history taught in school tends to be done in discrete ‘units’ missing the blending and crashing of various waves. Istanbul is a good spot to stand and see so many periods and peoples crashing together frozen in stone. I had a pleasant amble along the Wall south of the Hippodrome one afternoon, picking out the pieces of the wall made from ancient marble ruins, stacked in and surrounded by more mundane rocks. The two Medusa column bases in the Basilica Cistern are another fun touch, the Hagia Sophia frozen in restoration from mosque back to cathedral.

    Anyway, as I ramble, the continuity and perseverance are comforting, as our host notes, and not something so easily felt here. Now I’m going to go pour another cup.

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      1. Thanks for the link! Those are fantastic. I stayed in a little hotel just off the Hippodrome proper on the west side of the Sphendone and recognize most of those drawings from my time there.

        The artwork is nicely evocative of the presence of the Sphendone and the incredible weight of the history still standing. It’s really fascinating stuff.

        Thanks, again!

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    2. ” Wandering through a museum in Rome and reading about the tribal peoples that first settled among the seven hills…”

      There’s a spot on the Palatine where they’ve excavated half a dozen stone-age huts. Nearly identical to, say, Hopewell-Adena huts here in Ohio. Almost homey…

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  11. You get the same, only as a larger picture, from paleontology and geology. Life lasts, species are ephemeral. And that thought was quite comforting when I was young and believed a lot of the green propaganda. Yes, trying to preserve species or environments is often the smartest way to go, since sometimes the loss of some key species can mean that what was productive is now less so. And, of course, especially when we are talking about a species humans use directly. Even if I have tasted beluga caviar only once I’d still hate if I lost the chance to eat it again, which makes me very supportive of the efforts of preserving that species, or any other like it. It’s a lot smarter to be careful with what you can use, instead of using them so wantonly that after a while you no longer have them.

    But equally, trying to preserve everything at any cost makes no sense. So some beetle species is found only in one small patch of a forest, and now nothing can be built on that patch, or no trees harvested, or nothing? If humans won’t destroy those beetles, sooner or later something else will. And that goes for everything around us. Species are ephemeral. Life endures. Living in a world which had no tigers or pandas or whatever might be sad to us, but ‘Gaia’ probably would not care at all since some day there will be other species filling those niches. She does seem to see occasional setbacks, like mass extinctions, more as an opportunity than a disaster.

    And the way our science seems to be going, it may not be all that long until we, ourselves, can recreate something as long as we have stored enough good samples of its DNA. So I’d say it’s probably a good idea to collect those samples, or to keep plants and species in zoos and parks and reservations – you might find out some of them have something you can use at some point.

    But yes, I think I’d worry about my own species first, and of the others mostly in relation to our survival, and after that, maybe in relation to our pleasure. Some consideration also perhaps when it comes to the most intelligent ones of those other species, the ones which actually seem to have something like rudimentary cultures, as long as that doesn’t too badly with the survival aspect. But something like beetles, or trying to preserve every single variation of something which is basically one species (like all the subspecies of wolves), or anything else like that? Please. They are ephemeral. They always have been. That’s the way nature operates.

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    1. On-the-way-to-becoming-cliche observation:

      The best way to make sure a species survives is to make sure that humans either eat it or have it as a pet.

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      2. Yep. Or benefit more from it in any other way when it’s managed rather than destroyed. Which is one reason why those people who are trying to destroy the fur industry starting from the farms which raise the animals are f****** idiots. Not that many people bother to hunt foxes or minks in the wild because the farmed ones have better belts. And however unpleasant the thought is, the best way to protect several other species – tigers or rhinos or whatever – probably would be to start raising them on farms and harvesting them for those parts which are valuable commercially. Well, some creatures like elephants might be bit of a problem since they eat a lot, live long, breed somewhat slowly and the wanted part is the ivory, but farming might work with several other large species which breed faster and with which the whole carcass might sell, for folk medicine or whatever. If there was a reliable legal trade poaching might become a lot less tempting fast. But dare to talk about that…

        Well, as said, I don’t like the idea that we might lose some of those animals – or plants either, for that matter. The world will be far more boring if that happens. But I am not worried about our planet’s biosphere on the long run. As long as this world remains habitable new species will develop to fill all the available niches.

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        1. “Farming” elephants by allowing harvesting of old and/or trouble animal, with the proceeds going to the locals, has been shown to greatly increase their populations.

          It’s a lot less of a problem if all your food for the year is eaten by somehting that will provide two year’s food money.

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          1. South Africa had a program where you could go hunt a leopard. And the farmer whose lands you hunted on got a cut.

            When they stopped it, the leopard population crashed. Seems to you can buy a lot of tolerance for lost calves and lambs — but you gotta buy it.

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        2. ” Not that many people bother to hunt foxes or minks in the wild because the farmed ones have better belts.”

          That’s because the wild ones aren’t concerned with style, just with holding their pants up. /runs/

          Actually wild mink and fox are both trapped fairly extensively in the US and Canada, and foxes are extensively hunted, although that is done primarily for the sport, not the pelt. With of course their numbers in the wild increasing because they have a value, and people value something a lot more, and take better care of it, if it has a worth to them.

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  12. Evidence of the prior residents still turns up from time to time. Unfortunately, it all too frequently runs afoul of politics, given the somewhat unusual nature of the relationship between the US Government and the Native American tribes.

    RE: Non-native oxen species – I’ve heard that the various heavy warhorse strains used by the old European militaries essentially went extinct. Supposedly, some experts even thought that the horses in question had never existed… until mass graves turned up with horse skeletons that were too big to be any of the existing European riding breeds. I’ve also read that toward the end of the Napoleonic era, decent horses were in critically short supply for some of the cavalry units. There were so many men fighting, and so many horses being slaughtered on the battlefield for twenty-odd years, that the breeders literally could not keep up with the demands being placed on them by the various militaries. The need for military mounts (which played an important role on the battlefield), meant that the armies were being forced to use up even the horses that should have been breeding stock.

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    1. And fashions change, too. That’s part of why only the Lusitano and Lipizzaner breeds of so-called Baroque horses still exist – people no longer wanted heavy, thick-necked, “stubby” parade and show horses. So those heavy non-draft horses that did survive all the wars no longer had as much of a market compared to other styles.

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      1. About fifteen or twenty years ago, the Nez Perce started up a breeding program to try and recreate the long-lost Nez Perce breed of horses (confiscated by the US Army when the tribe was put on reservations, and cross-bred out of existence.) I believe they got a gift of Azhal Teke horses (the metallic-coat ones) as part of their base stock.

        I wonder where that project is. Seems to me they’d be about two generations in.

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  13. Its my understanding that the Irish ‘Hallow’s Eve” was a time set aside to remember the past ancestors and honor the dead. However, when it crossed the pond so to speak, we got witches and goblins and trick or treat instead. Many people do use ‘Memorial Day’ to go to the grave site of their ancestors. There is a lot of truth to “Those who do not remember their past are doomed to repeat it.”

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    1. The North of Portugal too. You go to the cemetery, meet extended kin, light candles, remember the dead, come home, have chestnuts and red wine, get all reminiscent, go to bed a little teary…

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    2. We used to take the kids to the local cemetary on Memorial Day, even though they have no relatives or friends there. I grew up here and have quite a number of acquaintances there.

      For some reason I’m particularly touched by the infant section. Lots of tombstones with only one date on them. Some of these only have a surname. Infant mortality is vastly reduced, thank goodness, but it hasn’t entirely gone away. Its rareness probably makes it that much harder for the modern parents who lose an infant.

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      1. When I was little, I always wanted to visit the tomb of my cousin Dulce who’d been within a month of my age (I can’t remember which way. Sigh. But she was bigger and stronger than I) and died at three.

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      2. This post reminds me of two things. One is a modern saying:

        “In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.”

        This would not necessarily have applied a few hundred years ago when most children did not live until their fifth birthday. Large families were indispensable then, if only so that there would be someone to leave the farm to. Life was harsh.

        As far as being touched by the graves of youngsters, I get that too. I remember going to the memorial to those lost in the Oklahoma City bombing when my oldest daughter was a few months shy of her second birthday. There are chairs on the lawn there, one for each person killed by the blast. There are two different sizes of chairs. The smaller ones are for the children that died that day.

        The lawn is roped off, but one of the ropes was missing that day. I remember walking up to one of those little chairs and resting my hand on it with tears in my eyes. I could hear one my friends (who did not have children at the time) saying, “I didn’t even think about that.” Yeah, it had a massive effect on me. I don’t cry EVER and for me to well up is a lot.

        I guess things have changed in the modern world, in this case for the better. In Caesar’s day children were frequently lost and it probably would have been easier to deal with. In the modern world, not so much.

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        1. One of the horrors of China didn’t hit me until I happened to be stuck in a house with a Chinese exchange student during Christmas Break.

          I only had Princess back then, and she was about four months old. I was utterly exhausted.

          We still managed to get talking, and– as usually happens with me– I ended up telling a bunch of stories involving the phrase “my uncle”.

          About a dozen stories in, this sweet little 15 year old tilted her head at me and ask: “What does it mean, ‘my uncle’?”

          End result, she had no concept of uncle, aunt, cousin, great-aunt, great-uncle….

          Just her.

          This is why China cannot survive: each time they have a tragedy, as will happen even in the most careful of situations, a half-dozen people will see their entire existence ended in each youth’s death.

          Until the horror of the one child policy is ended, China is dying by bits.

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          1. Tangentially: this situation also drove home why you shouldn’t take a military member’s judgment as gospel.

            The gal’s host-family was a mixed Army/AF couple, and the lady was constantly complaining that the girl wasn’t allowed on base.

            It really never occurred to her that it might have justification, including “making sure her parents aren’t tortured to death to get her to harm the US.”

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          2. God in heaven, but that’s a horrifying thing. Chinese literature is full, full, full of family words; and as in Japanese and other languages, “uncle” and “aunt” are also honorifics for unrelated people of a certain age.

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            2. I know very little about China, and only slightly more about Japan beyond that they are similar in honoring family.

              The Communist ideal of “destroy all power outside of the state” lives strong.

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              1. Totalitarian. And Germany is still enforcing the Nazi era law about home-schooling for the same reason it was implemented: to avoid people forming societies within society.

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                1. Can communism exist in any other society?

                  On a side– I love the standard response when folks point out that law, that Reichsschulpflichtgesetz (seriously!) wasn’t one of his pet projects. Makes it so much better that it’s not tainted by direct contact with Hitler– because there wasn’t anything wrong with the society at that point other than him, right?

                  Ow, I think I sprained my eye, rolling it so hard….

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          3. Yeah, China’s in pretty deep kimchee. They’re about 10 years away from an unimaginable demographic crisis. How does a country respond when there are 2 million men who have no chance to get married? Nobody knows, it’s never happened, but I’m betting on some flavor of “Bad ^%&*ing Day.”

            It seems to be a recurring pattern in their history. They get *this* close to becoming a major world power, then something – an invasion, natural disaster, or civil war – comes along to knock them on their heels.

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            1. This may not be a bad thing,(I realize that it’s going to be a disaster for the people trapped in it.), I’d hate living in a world dominated by the Chinese. I think that they are our largest or one of our largest trading partners. So much of our stuff is made in China. If they go boom it won’t be good for anyone.

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              1. I’m with you on preferring our system to China’s. And no, catastrophic economic failure anywhere in the world is bad for everyone. Fortunately (or not) for us, there are plenty of other places in the world that offer cheap unskilled labor. In fact, China is starting to see competition from below from placed like Vietnam and Bangladesh.

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                  1. They may have better factories, they may have cheaper labor, they may have a better loan agreement and shipping agreements. Then again they may have a giant factory dedicated to making labels.

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              1. I don’t think they’d go after the PI first. I think they’ll probably move against the natural resources in Siberia first, or – for historical reasons – against Taiwan or Japan.

                I think the last two are less likely because China has next to no sealift, and they don’t have the time to build it up. Our submarines could make it impossible to sustain an amphibious assault while maintaining plausible deniability for our involvement, much like the Soviet pilots in Korea and Vietnam.

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                  1. Is my estimate of Taiwan that far off? I thought they were relatively small?

                    Oh, I read off the “what would you do for a Klondike bar” comment from elsewhere here to my husband, and his response was roughly “well no feces, honey.”

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                2. I kind of figured Taiwan didn’t have anything like enough people, and I know that Japan has way too many resources– something about having a crud ton of American bases makes you less appealing, y’know?

                  The recent Chinese sea increase is really scary to me.

                  Thinking harder, it would be SMARTER for them to just kill the Kim in power, then shoot any males coming across the border.
                  BOOM: large female population that probably doesn’t want to kill you.

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                  1. If they were REALLY REALLY smart, they’d leave Kim in place and sent “recruiters” down with a few tons of rice. How do you say “What would you do for a Klondike Bar” in Korean?

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                3. But we have a lot more interest in PI than in Siberia. Include a bunch of 30 carbine ammo also, I think there are still quite a few of those floating around the islands from the last time we shipped tons of guns to the islands.

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                4. For awhile, China was building some amphib capacity. A lot of their naval construction has been oriented around what it would take to dominate the straits to Taiwan.

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                  1. Last I looked, which was a couple of years ago, they had enough to lift one division at a time. That would start taking losses as soon as their intent became obvious, from Taiwanese missiles, aircraft, and SSK’s. Whatever survived the two or three days it would take to get US fast attacks into the straights wouldn’t last much longer. The PLA, facing numeric inferiority (I think the Taiwanese can field 3 divisions) as well as their lack of experience in amphibious operations, supply, and morale (you’re not going to fight as hard to take someone’s home as they will to keep you from taking it), are going to face an uphill fight.

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                    2. IRBM’s can’t occupy territory, and I’m sure Taiwan has heavily bunkered their forces. The only thing Chinese missiles can do is kill the civilian population, which somewhat defeats the purpose of going there for women.

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                5. My guess is Taiwan. Both because it gots Chinese women, and because Taiwan is a renegade province of China. So Mr. Obama can shrug his shoulders and say that, after all, they’re just stepping out into their own garden.

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                  1. They’re not going to do anything during Obama’s term. They’d have to wait until the next left-leaning President was elected, and if the indications I’m seeing about single women and millenials are right, Obama could do for Progressivism what Carter did: discredit it for a generation, possibly more.

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                    4. Right now they’re too focused on keeping their shadow credit bubble from blowing up in their faces.

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                    5. The one bright thing about Romney not getting elected: Obama’s pigeons are going to come home to roost, sooner or later, and if Romney had been elected, they might have ended up pooping on him instead of Obama.

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                    6. I think that if Hillary! is elected we’ll see a whole slew of mutual-defense pacts along the First Island Chain. They’ve seen enough of her as SecState to know she’s not going to war for anyone if it doesn’t benefit her politically.

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                    7. I don’t know — from an Aggressor State point of view, this may be the best historical chance for decades. Obama’s probably going to be in the Oval Office until January 2017, and after that it will take at least a few years to begin undoing the damage he’ll have done in eight years to the US military. We’ve cut classes of weapons that can’t be built-back rapidly, such as warships, warplanes and nuclear missiles. So China — and Russia, and Iran — have a window that lasts them till around 2019-2020 or so.

                      Basically, the 2010’s are going to be like the 1970’s were, in terms of the fortunes of the Free World. There will be death and destruction in the Third World, gloom and doom in the First World, and probably several promising Third World countries falling to enemies of one or another stripe. In particular, the Muslims will advance in Africa, Russia in Central Asia, and China in East Asia.

                      Iran and/or Pakistan are likely to commit national suicide around this point, or set themselves up to commit such suicide in the 2020’s. There will probably be, by 2030, at least one medium-scale nuclear war on the Third World — this will almost in passing put an end to fears of Global Warming, after a nuclear autumn or two gets icecap deposition back up. This will be a shame, as the systemic problems threatening global warming won’t have been cured — unless we plan to have a medium-sized nuclear war every decade or so, which is not something I think human civilization could survive for more than a few decades.

                      This is the optimistic scenario. In the pessimistic one, Russia feels frisky enough to attack Poland and Germany, or China to attack Japan and Australia. In that one, the 2010’s are more like the 1930’s, and we find ourselves fighting a global war in the 2020’s — probably a strategic thermonuclear one.

                      In either case, a heck of a lot of human beings are about to die to pay for Obama’s crisp pants creases.

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                    10. I’m sure the entire NE of the country want some global warming to melt that foot of snow. Does anyone know where Al Gore is? He usually leaves cold weather and snow in his wake.

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                    12. Make no mistake, our military – while it will be suffering from a significant degradation in capability over the next decade or so – will remain more than capable of completely demolishing any conventional opponent on the planet. We even have a good institutional memory for COIN, so another overthrow-occupy-rebuild operation like Iraq would be much less costly (scaling for size of the target, and assuming there was the political will to do it). Furthermore, while our procurement process is a mess, our current systems – the Burkes, F-16, F-22, Abrams, etc. – are still best in class and their production lines can be restarted or ramped up.

                      Not that any of this matters against someone like China. If we ever directly engage Chinese forces the war will be over in about 4 hours. Millions of Americans will be dead and the Chinese nation would be destroyed.

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                    13. I would really appreciate it if the NE would send some of that snow this way. We haven’t had a drop in two weeks and only in the high country then. What little we have is froze hard as a brick.

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                    14. I disagree, I’m expecting China to create an international crisis in or around the Spratley’s in the next year or two. The ADIZ last month was the beginning IMO.

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      3. I wrote some thoughts on one of those Memorial Days that seem worth repeating, with editing for privacy. Apologies to Sarah for taking up so much space in her comments:

        ——————————————

        I took the family to visit some old friends today.

        Bruce Brazier was my Cubmaster when I was growing up. He was also the public relations director for a local tech company. A born showman, he would occasionally entertain us by firing off a live volcano at Pack Meeting. It was a paper mache volcano, and instead of lava, it erupted burning ammonium dichromate, and we thought it was great fun. I thought my family might enjoy meeting him today. He passed away just a few years ago.

        Richard and Evelyn Levee were the very sweet older couple who lived across the street from the house where I grew up. They were older than most of the parents in the neighborhood, and their daughter was sometimes my babysitter. She liked to eat and watch TV and let us alone as long as we didn’t cause any trouble for her. I sometimes wish my government worked more like her. An enthusiastic gardener, Mrs. Levee once gave me a very young willow tree to plant after she found me staring in fascination at the ivy growing on her house, trying to figure out how it held on so tight. I was four years old. The willow tree eventually got so big that it had to be removed before it cracked the foundation of our house. The Levees passed away almost twenty years ago, one right after the other.

        Arthur Mattheson was a little younger than me. Arthur’s older brother dated my sister once or twice, and she may have even briefly had a crush on him. His younger sister eventually married one of the finest men I knew at college. Arthur died quite suddenly of a stroke many years ago. He was in his thirties. By one of those astonishing coincidences, my Mormon congregation had the pastoral assignment that week at the regional hospital where they brought him to see if the damage could somehow be repaired. I participated in the blessing for the sick before the surgery, and the Holy Spirit would not let us bless him to survive. His mother was deeply grateful to us anyway.

        Papa Seth was a World War II veteran who had been a guest of the Third Reich for the last few months of the war. He and Mama Seth looked after my siblings and I when my parents journeyed back to their home town for my grandmother’s funeral. He died just a few years ago after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, a more ruthless enemy even than the Germans. They buried him a few feet away from Arthur.

        Cindy Clark graduated from high school with me. I did not know her well. Judging from what was written on her gravestone, she lived long enough to become a wife, but not a mother. I don’t know anything else about the circumstances.

        Darrell Byrnes was the owner and operator of a local radio station, and he was a natural-born radio announcer, with a voice that could have made serious money doing voiceovers on either coast. I do not know why he chose our little town instead. I did not know him well, either, but my father spent some time with him and his family while serving as a Mormon bishop. Brother Byrnes also passed away many years ago, and in addition to his grave, they put a nice memorial with a bronze plaque with his name in the town square.

        I didn’t know Baby Baker at all well. None of us did. She has only one date on her gravestone. There are a lot of gravestones like that in the children’s section of the cemetery. My family have learned to let me be alone when I visit there.

        M son wanted to know why we were visiting a bunch of dead people. I thought about Russell Kirk and what he wrote about the mystical community of souls: Those who have gone before, those now living, and those yet to be born. My boy is too teenaged to explain all that to, and I didn’t really try, leaving it for him to find his own meaning in the day. He had a bouquet of flowers to place on the grave of any veteran we found without flowers or a flag, and I suspect he was anxious to be rid of them.

        My daughter aspires to be a writer. I asked her if she had ever read Spoon River Anthology. She had not. What do they teach kids in high school nowadays? Hopefully not derivative tales about sparkly vampires, though in fairness all tales are derivative. There is only one Great Story, told in a thousand variations in as many human cultures, and she will learn this eventually. Perhaps today helped.

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      4. The infant mortality thing becoming so rare is something that experts are finally recognizing needs to be addressed by allowing parents time to grieve. It used to be that women would give birth in the hospital, be told “the baby died but don’t worry, we’ve taken care of everything” and be expected to get up after their 10 days of confinement and act like nothing had happened. Now, they recommend letting the family keep the baby with them for a time, take pictures, or other mementos, have funerals/memorials, and refer them to grief support groups.

        One of my cousins is a mortician and he says that there are plenty of women in their 60’s and 70’s who are asking for those temporary grave markers to be placed beside the tombstone of another loved one, so that they can have a place to mourn their baby gone 50 years and “disposed of” by the hospital.

        And from personal experience, it helped out so much that we were allowed to spend as much time with our baby as possible. My husband even walked his body down to the hospital morgue. We transported him to the morticians and (because it was a VERY small town and a tradition down that way) were even allowed to help dig the grave and fill it in. We did pretty much everything that people 100 years ago did.

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        1. Ow. I’m so glad I never experienced the loss of a child. But yes, seeing them and knowing they exist would seem to have a healing effect. I always hurt more when my miscarriages were too early to even be recognized as such, because I felt I didn’t have the right to be sad.

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        2. Well, the grief was not universally scorned. The Feast of the Holy Innocents is, after all, especially extended to those parents who had lost children at that age.

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    3. Er, yeah. Part and parcel of All Saints’ Day. You pray and do good works — like give food to beggars — in order to enable your deceased family and friends to get out of Purgatory into Heaven in time for the big party tomorrow.

      yes, you read a lot of silliness about Samhain. The theory that it stems from that holiday is not only wrong but impossible: the November date was of German, not Irish, origin. Furthermore, the Irish were late adopters, sticking to the original April date for All Saints’ longer than a lot of people. (Not all. The Orthodox still do it in April.)

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  14. About a half dozen years ago, my wife and I took a couple of weeks to tour north-west Europe. We spent a day on a tour of Flanders around Ieper – the historic WWI battlefield of “Ypres”. In one way it was disappointing, in a good sense, because there really is nothing of the battlefield itself. All of the land is returned to farming, the city rebuilt. But the area is full of cemeteries. Scores and scores of cemeteries. By the end of the day, both of us were just moments from slitting our own wrists from depression.

    At one point, we were on the outskirts of modern Ieper, looking at a small length of preserved trench when the guide pointed at a nearby warehouse, recently built of the tip-up concrete slab style construction. He stated that when they excavated for the foundation, they found hundreds of remains in the footprint of the building.

    Essentially the entire valley is an immense cemetery.

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    1. I was told in 1994 that the reason the main train line from Metz to Paris diverts to the south, instead of cutting straight west past Verdun and the Marne, stemmed from the amount of unexploded ordinance in the area at the time the rail lines were rebuilt. It was easier to go around than to try and demine . . . Not certain if it is true or not, but from what I’ve read about all the shells they keep turning up in fields and construction sites, I’m inclined to believe it.

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      1. Maybe a dozen years ago, a Belgian member of their army chemical weapons disposal unit was killed at a site they use to dispose of chemical weapons from WWI. And from time to time you hear of a farmer killed when he plowed a shell up.

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  15. Most of those sites are built over now, including the field where we used to grow our vegetables, (on a loan, sort of) and I would guarantee that whatever was found in the digging up of the basements of foundations for the apartment buildings, unless you were unlucky enough to dig it up while there are untrustworthy people watching, was never reported.

    In a way this was a pity. I always felt that the farmer who built the cow shed and found a Roman cemetery in doing it, should have reported it. I mean, the entire village knew, but who knows what advancement of our understanding of Roman civilization lies under that cow shed.

    Don’t mention arrowhead hunting around my mom.

    She use to go out hunting with her dad– he was a good enough civilian archaeologist that he got into the Smithsonian magazine, and helped them get some items that I got to see when I visited DC.

    Then some brilliant folks decided to make it illegal to arrowhead hunt.

    So none of the folks who FORGOT more than the professionals know about the local Indian scene stopped talking, and made dang sure nobody outside of their trust zone knew about it.

    Also, flat out grave desecration went up because nobody would mention if they saw someone being shady, out of fear that they’d be counter-accused.

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    1. Grave desecration also is common because of the ridiculous way it is handled when reported. Just across the border in Washington they were replacing a bridge in a county road, (the ONLY access to a fair number of houses) and turned up Indian remains when digging for the abutments. The entire project was shut down for over five years. It took a court battle to even keep the one lane temporary bridge in place so people could access their homes while they fiddled around for years deciding what to do. The project was shut down for so long that the construction company that was contracted to do it was out of business before they restarted work on it. I’ve no doubt the contractor heartily wished the hoe operator had never noticed the remains, or simply loaded them into a dump truck without saying anything.

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      2. You could feel and hear the sighs of relief when the remains they found in a drainage project in Amarillo a few years ago turned out to be so old that no recognized tribe claimed affiliation or wanted to take custody of the bones. The remains got shipped to A&M (IIRC) and excavation could continue. Only took seven or eight months.

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    3. Arrowheads and Indian burial sites are a sore point for our family as well. The family owned property in Aztec, NM for decades – a house, a couple of trailers, a nice big stream/small river running through it, and a big pasture that they leased to the rodeos to run their cattle on during the off season. Then, somehow, the Feds discovered that there were ruins under the pasture (we used to find tons of arrowheads and such in the ravine wall). Life became an unrelenting pain in the arse from then on. They wanted Opa to hand over the land to them; the bureaucrats eventually hooked up with some local no-accounts who wanted the rest of the land as well, and both groups harassed Opa and Grandpa for many years. It even rose to the level of vandalism and stalking with the tacit approval of the government pinheads. The family finally sold the land after Opa died, and I’ve no idea what happened to it after that, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth forever after.

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      1. Look on the up side, they weren’t required to turn it over while paying all taxes and fees.

        Yes, it’s to the point where that’s the GOOD side.

        An old couple lost their farm– their retirement home– because the Veteran guy couldn’t bring himself to shoot he nesting bald eagles in the back.

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  16. And speaking of the peninsular wars – guys, there is a reason so many Portuguese have blue eyes, and I warrant it’s not just that they have Celtic ancestry in the North.

    Random thought… sitting in my chair half asleep, in the dark, because the girls are napping on the couch and if I move the Baron will wake up, so please pardon if it’s incoherent.

    Humans crave both exotic and familiar.

    Example: Spock is awesome hot. Other example, a bit less geek based: half Asian women are incredibly popular visually both in East and West visual media.

    Additionally, there are always outliers– if a person, or more likely a small group, ends up in an area… SOMEBODY is going to find their daughter attractive enough to marry.

    Those folks’ kids are going to appeal to a much larger group because they’re both exotic and familiar, until you end up with whatever “exotic” markers being more along the lines of “being blonde in the USA” than “being blonde in ancient Tokyo.”

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    2. ” Other example, a bit less geek based: half Asian women are incredibly popular visually both in East and West visual media.”

      Or it could just be that half Asian women tend to be beautiful. At least I can’t recall ever meeting one that wasn’t at least pretty and well proportioned.

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      1. Is there a difference between being beautiful and being visually attractive?

        An example that came to mind but that I didn’t get to work in was (pardon spelling) Angelina Jolie.

        Her bone structure is very stark, but not THAT unusual…if her eyes weren’t so incredibly striking, I don’t think she’d be so attractive. She’s a little different here, a little different there, but overall similar enough to what’s well loved to be WOW.

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        1. Yes. Visually attractive depends on things like bone structure, facial symmetry, body proportions, etc.

          Beauty depends on being willing to sleep with me.

          There aren’t many beautiful women in the world.

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        2. Sort of, to be truly beautiful a woman needs character to back up her looks, but no not in the context I was using.

          I took your statement to mean that they were visually popular to cast because they were both exotic and familiar. I was just stating that they could be popular to cast because they were beautiful. Apparently you are saying they are a beautiful because they are exotic and familiar?

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      1. I’ll have to recommend this particular thread to my friend Lily (1st gen. British/Korean lady). She seems to be under the misapprehension that she is unattractive and fat.

        *belly laugh*

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  17. I read your post this moring and all day long I have been thinking of Mark Twain writing about visiting the Capuchin monastery in Italy in Innocents Abroad

    Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves! Evidently the old masters had been at work in this place. There were six divisions in the apartment, and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to itself–and these decorations were in every instance formed of human bones! There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails. Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) and there was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that betrayed the artist’s love of his labors as well as his schooled ability. I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this? And he said, “We did it”–meaning himself and his brethren up stairs. I could see that the old friar took a high pride in his curious show. We made him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to guides.

    “Who were these people?”
    “We–up stairs–Monks of the Capuchin order–my brethren.”
    “How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?”
    “These are the bones of four thousand.”
    “It took a long time to get enough?”
    “Many, many centuries.”

    He ends with the comment:

    I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this place when they died. He answered quietly:
    “We must all lie here at last.

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    1. I’ve visited such installations in Rome and Prague. It’s interesting and complex emotionally. And fascinating.

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  19. Back in the twisty hollows of Southern Virginia, there’s a farm set back from a kiss-your-own-butt turn. Beside that farm is a gate with a “No Tresspassing” sign. The sign as a smattering of bullet holes in it, a couple of disturbingly large caliber.

    Suppose you aren’t deterred by rusty signs. Suppose you hop that cattle gate and hike up the dirt track a ways. Follow it between a tobacco field and a marshy pond. Through a rough quarry. Hit a stream and follow that for about a mile.

    On your right you’d find another track, cut with horses and dirtbikes, kept clear by chainsaws and sweat, twice a year. Follow it until you come to another stream, this one just a rivulet, save when it floods. Follow that for a bit. The source of that rivulet is a spring on the side of a hill. You can drink the water, it’s from a deep aquifer nowhere near the coal seams or spoil.

    Just past that spring and around the bend is a fieldstone foundation cabin. Built sometime after the War Between the States but before the Great War, it’s probably about as old as the house I bought in town a bit ago, and am still fixing up to live in.

    That cabin’s framing is more true than the house I bought, and mine was once considered one of the better homes in town (near the railroad, before realities of what that meant set in). Ironic, considered it was built with a hammer, a saw, some knotted string and not much else.

    Go up the hill a ways. The path narrows, and ain’t kind to knees and backs not accustomed to the slope. This is the easy way. The hard way is straight up the side of a hill, a forty-five degree slope that gets sharper in spots.

    Up on the ridgetop, about a half mile along, there’s a cemetery. Not the kind most of you’d be familiar with. The stones here were old when my great grandfather was still hunting small game in the early morning twilight (one shot, one squirrel, two shots, two squirrels). Some are sunk into the ground. All are far too weathered to read, and have been so for nearly a century now.

    Some are broke. Nearly lost one when a nearby red oak uprooted and tumbled it down the hillside. We put it back.

    Once a year the family gets together and we talk. Bring lots of food, of course. And young ‘uns. Shoot a bit. Get reacquainted.

    Another thing we do is make the hike up to the cemetery. The men go up with axes, loppers, and gas powered weedeaters. They come back, and the women and kids on apron strings go up and lay flowers. Then both come back up and tell stories.

    That’s how I came to know some of my ancestors were slaves, and I don’t mean ancient Greeks. Some were “Cherokee,” but could have been Catawba or otherwise. I’ve two great grandmothers who were technically pure, and a few others with bits of genetic junk, which is why my sister and I look like throwbacks when we tan.

    Also learned where my temper comes from, and that I should definitely stay away from alcohol (got to be something genetic there). Yes, some of us come up that way to get stone drunk once in a while, but that’s depression, not alcoholism. Mostly. Though great-grandma used to tell “he’s not drunk, he’s sick” stories, and cackle like mad as she told them.

    There’s no cell reception at the cabin. The internet’s a distant dream. So’s electricity. I’ve stumbled across bear, deer, and some rather weirder things on the trail to that spot. It’s not easy to get to, and there’s darn few flat places that haven’t been cleared with dynamite and bulldozers. That, and the stories we tell build a kind of picture of the folks that made me and mine.

    I can say we’ve calmed down a lot, some of us. Used to be my family name was black, and not just because of skin color. A few nasty characters in my family tree, some right bastards, darn few saints. It’s rather comforting to know, in a way, that my ancestors were brutally tough, no-nonsense kind of folk sometimes. There were enough wars and such that every generation we can recall had soldiers of some sort or other. Might explain the odd features, like the fact that my family pictures show folks of every major color and race, all blood kin.

    Anyways, that’s what this post made me think of. We might not have the columns of Greece and Rome, the temples of the far East, or the cemeteries and ancient foundations of Europe, but there’s history here, too. Sometimes that history is in us as much as it is around us.

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    1. Dan, I must say, I’m a little distressed. That there was some of the loveliest geographical narrative* I’ve seen, and a fine description of people and times. I’ll admit, it might have caught my eye especially because I just finished John the Balladeer a few days ago; but regardless, that’s some fine writing. I’m distressed, you see, because I’m looking through my email for which of your books you’ve sent me for the promotion post, and I don’t see any!

      * that term I made up sounds stilted, but I don’t know a concise way to identify that technique of second person travelogue in describing a location and the people in it.

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      1. That may be because I’ve not written anything of substance since… 2003ish? I keep saying I need to make time to write a bit. It’s therapeutic, and occasionally makes somebody smile. And hey, if I can con someone into paying for stuff I wrote, that’s not insignificant given the state of the economy.

        Real life tends to get in the way, though. Hard to say “It can wait, dammit, I’m writing!” when some days you’re rushing from crisis to crisis, p*ssing on fires. I’m not special, everybody has demands and lives, I’m just flabbergasted at how people like Sarah and the rest of you people manage to do so much (full disclosure: I am lazy, too).

        Thanks for the compliment, good sir. True credit belongs to my maternal grandfather, who taught me many, many stories, and how to tell them. If I’m ever half the man he was, I’ll be twice the man I could ever hope to be. Mistakes are, of course, my own.

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