Listening For The Bells

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

There is a persistent legend — yes, from Portugal, too, but I’ve heard it echoed from Italy and other places — of villages swallowed by earthquake and tsunami where the submerged church bells ring with sea storms.

Here, before I get into the post proper, I must make two things absolutely clear:

The first is that if I ever had any right to complain about how Portuguese run their own affairs, it was while I was one of them, before the age of 27 or so. I have absolutely no right to complain about how things are in Portugal now. It’s their country. I just visit, for increasingly brief periods further and further apart. And I’m not complaining. I’m observing, and some part of me is mourning, a little.

The second it’s that although I always felt out of place in Portugal — out of place enough to have bought Stranger in a Strange Land on the title alone, before Heinlein’s name was a must buy for me — there were parts of it, and aspects of it I loved. Mostly I loved the village I grew up in (my parents would be outraged to hear it called a village, since in Portugal at the time that meant an isolated settlement of maybe ten families. But it was a village in our terms. And worked like a village) and the woods around it. And I loved Porto, where I started spending most of my days from the time I was about 12 and went to high school.

Look, it was a vast, dirty port city with old crumbling buildings (and some well preserved ones) intractable traffic snarls, filthy sidewalks, crazy people who’d pursue you calling you names, and– But it was also a city of fogs, of dream, of coffee shops open in the early morning hours, pouring out their scent into the sidewalk, of forgotten little alfarrabios (yes, an arabic word for used book seller, but really, much more aromatic and textured. It has the implication of century old books, which some of these stores in fact had in their less noticed corners) where you could find a first edition Verne or Wells for pennies, because no one had touched it since it was first stocked. It was a place where I could find what I wanted at the time almost as though it had come into being because I wanted it. I’m still not sure I didn’t hallucinate the little shop that sold vintage pre-WWII stockings at pre-WWII prices into being when I was in my “Dress like a femme fatale” kick.

https://www.pexels.com/@joao-cabral-1723948/

This is the place where I first learned I was myself, and who myself was, distinct from who I was in the village, which came freighted with centuries of my people living there, and people expecting me to be a certain way, because I was an Almeida female. In a way it was the first tentative steps in the journey that would eventually lead to where I am.

https://www.pexels.com/@joao-cabral-1723948/

Over the years, going back, since at least 15 years ago, I find the city I loved receding further and further away from me.

https://www.pexels.com/@joao-cabral-1723948/

It’s not as obvious as the village, which no longer exists in any sense of existing. It’s been submerged under stack-a-prole concrete high rises and “urban” planning roundabouts (So many roundabouts) and highways that crisscross it. Grandma’s backyard, the center of the universe, where I first explored the galaxy in a spaceship that had a startling resemblance to a little red tricycle, has been cut to 1/4 its former size by a highway. The corner where we buried the cats and dogs who shared my childhood is now under several tons of highway. And that’s fine. It’s not my place any more. And I do realize, in the sane part of my brain, that as much as I loved it, the village was a hardscrabble place, inimical to man and beast, comfortless and unhygienic and well… There was a reason that waves of disease swept through it on the regular. Also most people who live there didn’t live there back then. A lot came from the villages in the hinterlands but a lot more came from all over. All over? Well, all the former Portuguese colonies, including Brazil, but also everyone who escaped Eastern Europe and ran as far as they could till they hit the sea, and also– well, people from all over. So the village doesn’t exist anymore, and it doesn’t hurt, really. My attachment there was my grandmother’s house, and that’s passed out of the family and been remodeled so it no longer exists. Visiting the site doesn’t much matter. There are no memories there. Oh, the way the light slants on certain mornings. The song of certain birds. The way the fog descends….

But Porto…. Porto is bewildering and it…. hurts. The plant is still there. Oh, sure, it’s being torn up as they’re installing a subway. But I know where things are. It’s the same streets and roughly the same buildings that were there when I was little, going downtown with dad to watch the city being decorated for Christmas.

It’s just the alfarrabios are gone. Heck, the bookstores are gone, save for one in the mall.

And the entire plant is overlaid with…. strangeness. Like one of the days we went downtown, all I heard was German.

And the purchases we made…. one of the shopkeepers spoke only Spanish and a little French. The coffee shop waiter had a strong Brazilian accent. Even the “locals’ meaning the people who live there, aren’t locals, but people from somewhere in the world, who knows where….

Which means the interactions, the behavior is wrong in subtle ways and my back brain keeps throwing up alarms of the “mommy, in the kitchen, eating live snakes” type: ie. the familiar and the bizarre intermixed so it’s never comfortable and you never relax.

Oh, some things are better. They cleaned up the old medieval streets. Sure the price for that is to fix the old buildings and sell them piecemeal as condos to foreigners, but it’s better than their being slums quite literally submerged in sh*t. And the museums and statues are cleaned up and sometimes they even remember to label them.

The fine fellow above they didn’t. More on that later.

But the old church I used to duck into for a quick prayer on the way to college had a line out the door, of tourists wanting to gawk at its baroque splendor, so I couldn’t go in. And my favorite street in the entire town has one side entirely boarded up, the facades crumbling. (I’m not sure why, or what sense it makes, since it otherwise seems to be expensive real estate. But I don’t live there.) Also most of the beautiful tile murals are crumbling, some of them literally, with the tiles apparently having been hit by a plague of tile-specific woodpeckers. I don’t know why.

And then there’s the fine fellow above. He’s on the way down from the Cathedral and I was struck dumb staring at him. I couldn’t remember any warrior in Portuguese history rumored to have gone to war with a dragon on his head, as metal as that sounds.

It took a bit of research to find who he was and realize I wasn’t in fact amnesiac. He didn’t use to be there, but in a location I didn’t often go to. (Or ever, really.) And he’s the city of Porto personified.

…. As it used to be. You know. Fine strapping young fellow, in armor, rocking dragon on his helmet, and striding off his plinth to go do some damage.

We took a picture. For that moment — just that moment — I caught an echo of the city I used to love, before it was submerged in tourism and internationalism and EU immiseration of poorer countries. For a moment, for just a moment, there was an echo of the old Porto, proud and more than a little bit strange.

A submerged bell tolling the oncoming storm.

108 thoughts on “Listening For The Bells”

  1. Interesting coincidence that you should post about your nostalgic Portugal spots having lots of new foreigners… on the same day that I saw a post on X extolling Portugal as one of the greatest spots in Europe for expats.

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    1. Look, it’s considered one of the best places to retire. I’ll be blunt: Why not deepest Appalachia? I mean, infrastructure sucks. Healthcare sucks. It’s 20 years behind the times. But everything is cheap.
      AND Appalachia will have fewer regulations and you still have your basic rights.

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        3. Paraphrasing a line from The Jerk: “Sir, you are TALKING to a hick!”

          I’ve got my own version of Hick Central I dream of going (back) to, out in the Mountain West. Near as it is to some internationally famous outdoor destinations, I’m constantly afraid that it’ll suffer the fate of Torrey and Jackson Hole, but so far it remains *just* far enough off the usual path and emanates *just* enough of a backward vibe that it remains mostly unsullied by Californicators and the international progtard set. The one big problem with this dream is that there are no jobs out there (comes with the whole Hickville thing), so I’d have to somehow become independently wealthy to make it a reality. I guess I’ll just live and die a dreamer.

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          1. Those that don’t have jobs are pushed further and further out. Not sure what all towns are south, east, and northeast, on up the highway (been through there, but I don’t retain names easily), but not only have the working populations been kicked out of Jackson/Wilson, but those who commute from Victor are being pushed further away as VRBO/AirBNB weasel their way in. We originally had a week long VRBO in Victor, but changed it to Wilson (spring 2021). Bit more leery now because the added on fees beyond lodging taxes (which apply to campground spots too) don’t make VRBO less expensive than medium/inexpensive hotels daily rates, for two. Now make that 4 VS two hotel or two room suite (w/kitchenette), then definitely less expensive. One difference with Banff and Jasper (what the 2024 fire has done is *horrible shame, even if it was lightening) is owner owned means owner primary residence and must work in town. But then both towns are within, not just adjacent to, the national parks.

            (* Mitigation was in progress. We saw that when we were there in 2019 and again spring 2023. South and to the west, trees had been cleared out on the south and just west of town. Hadn’t started north of town and up the hill, fire didn’t get that far. Did not matter. Fire came from the south, both sides of the river, and still took out the south western third.)

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        1. Your descriptions of what may have been best described as “You can’t go home again” elsewhere ring [allusion intended] true to many attempts I’ve made at going back to any of the many places I or my family grew up in.
        2. Appalachia, more specifically northwestern North Carolina and surrounding States, is where my great great great great grandfather seeded the local population with many progenitors of kin. Sadly now many of the family history sites, including a graveyard, are buried under mud and debris and a large proportion of kin aren’t yet found. Too many ghosts now for me to want to go back again. Those bells are ringing under the soil now.

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    1. Most of college. I dressed for the 1930s every day, complete with stiletto heels and silk stockings, sometimes patterned. And makeup to fit.
      It never occurred to me it was a pretty weird thing to do. I just liked it. So, years later, when younger son dressed in trenchcoat and fedora to go to college…. well, genetic?

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      1. All the art school kids are doing Blue Hair Genderless, except mine. Young Relative is rocking full-on Ikebukuro Gyaru, complete with the crazy eyelashes.

        Truly, swimming against the stream runs in the family.

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        2. Heh. Nice.

          And the even more amusing bit is that in Japan, where that look arose, it would be seen as somewhat counter-culture. Whereas here in the US, it’s seen conformist.

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      2. One of my older brothers wore a trench coat (no fedora) and sported hair down to his knees until way too recently. He’s a hilarious individual, but the hair was truly distracting because he didn’t really care for it, he just . . . didn’t cut it.

        I guess I have no room to talk. I wore rubber boots (the cheap kind you get for $20 at the local co-op) to high school for 3 years. Eccentricity is a well-established family trait, I guess.

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  3. This column pretty much reflects what I was trying to say when you asked me what I meant in my comment the other day, though from a different perspective.

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      1. i think that holds true for most places, the people you find are not the people who were or who originated there, its true of my home state as well, replaced by foreigners who diffuse the history and discard what doesnt suit their fancy.

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  4. Even the “locals’ meaning the people who live there, aren’t locals, but people from somewhere in the world, who knows where….

    Well, welcome to California, where the natives are a small fraction as everyone is from somewhere else.

    There’s probably a PhD thesis in there about the effects of absolutely everyone being from elsewhere, even the Spanish heritage Californio families trickling in really in the last 150 years, the American influx since the gold rush starting in 1849, and the vast majority of immigrants from everywhere since WWII, so what then is the impact of “everyone came from somewhere else” on the political landscape of the state.

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          1. There’s a reason that Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, is locally known as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Likewise here in the Charlotte area. My first boss at my current company was a relocation from Long Island (but I don’t hold it against him, he was a great guy and a 9/11 Lower Manhattan survivor). From his tiny corner lot house on Long Island, he was able to buy a massive McMansion right on Lake Norman and still pay 1/3 of the property taxes. I understand why people come here, I just wish they didn’t try to make it into where they fled from. I mean, I’m a transplant from rural Virginia to semi-rural North Carolina, so I’m a come-lately as well, but I’ve embraced the locality. I mean, hell, I even drink Cheerwine. Diet Cheerwine, but still.

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            1. Ah, Cheerwine. Bubbly cherry goodness. It became my refuge on the Great Retreat from woke sodas. (Losing Dr. Pepper to the Dark Side was rough, but I endured.) I may not be a fully assimilated ex-Northeasterner, but I got the Cheerwine part right.

              And sweet tea. I didn’t hear you mention sweet tea. Or did you already drink that from your time in rural Virginia?

              Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

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              1. Dr. Pepper? Morbid curiosity here: what did Dr. Pepper do? Something worse than race to the bottom of the high fructose corn syrup barrel, sounds like.

                Dr. Pepper was a childhood favorite. For a while it came in newfangled cans with crimp-on caps like soda bottles, back when toddlers toddled alone down the street to a friend’s house; back when improvements made things better…

                Summer evening, darkening blue sky; the ice cream man’s truck in the middle of the block, tire-tops at eye level; swarm of baby-boom kids, toddlers to early teens… Somebody bought me a “Bullet”–a cherry popsicle, bright electric red, round with fluted sides like a badminton bird. Never has anything else ever tasted so sweet.

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              2. Despite being a proud native Southerner who grew up steeped in the Lost Cause only twenty miles from Appomattox Court House, and son of the (formerly) wonderful Commonwealth of Virginia, before the DC cancer truly metastasized and ruined it, I have never liked sweet tea. I know, I know, there’s something wrong with me. I’ve just always been a soft drink guy. Coke, mostly, although nowadays I am truly agnostic about my soft drinks as long as they’re diet, and tend to mostly end up with store brands because have you seen the prices of name-brand 2-liters lately? As long as it’s at least mildly caffeinated.

                I do like Diet Cheerwine though. It’s got enough of a kick to balance the fake-sweetener sweetness that it’s a nice break to grab one if I’m out near a convenience store. And since I’m just down the road from the home of Cheerwine in Salisbury, NC, everyplace around here carries it. I never really lumped it in the same category as Dr. Pepper because to me it’s always tasted very different.

                I didn’t realize that Dr. Pepper had clamped down on the bottler in Texas that still made it with real cane sugar instead of HFCS. And then of course they started selling their OWN “Dr. Pepper Made With Real Sugar.” Sigh. I hate big corporations even though I work for one.

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      2. I will go look up the curve here. Basically US immigration, from the dust bowl onwards and really kicking in after 1945, has been supplanted by overseas immigration, both across the southern border at the lower socioeconomic strata and via H1B indentured servitude at the upper-middle end, and then the top end being drawn in by venture cap stuff to start new companies.

        Of course the latter is gone now, with the exodus of the middle and upper class folks, but the southern border and H1B stuff continues.

        It is incredibly rare to meet anyone born here.

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        1. I was born in California! As were my kids.

          My husband still resents the fact that his work doesn’t let him telecommute full-time, so we could move north again. He hates the weather so much. (Heat.)

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    2. Both my parents were born in CA – which made them apparently quite unusual among their peers. Mom told me once that her elementary school doubled between 1941 and 1942, with all the new war industry and military coming in to California. She recalled pre-war So Cal as being a very nice, quiet, rural place, back then. The war changed everything, and it never changed back, once it was over.

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  5. One question for the science geeks. It’s something that has been bothering me.
    What will happen to the lithium ion batteries in the presence of a nuclear reaction?
    Will they act in the same fashion as the lithium in the bravo test?

    Okay two questions, sorry, cold, and like the Mistress of this post I get weird under the affect of viruses. I shall go and drown myself in over the counter drugs.

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    1. IIRC, the lithium in nukes is to produce tritium when bombarded by the neutrons of the fission bomb. It’s in the center of the plutonium core, so the tritium is both heated and compressed to initiate fusion.

      Possibly if a battery were right under the detonation of a nuke, some of the tritium could fuse. But, offhand, I don’t think the pressure would be sufficient, even if the temperature is.

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      1. I think it’s (mostly) the wrong isotope. Lithium 6 is the one used for thermonuclear weapons in the form of Lithium(6) Deuteride. LI(7) is like 95% of all lithium in nature so that is MOST of the lithium in the battery. LI(6) both needs the deuterium and very high pressure & neutron levels to ignite. No thermonuclear Teslas as far as my limited knowledge goes. I will note lest anyone panic Li(6) is stable and non radioactive, so Teslas won’t glow from that :-).

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        2. Lithium-7 is also stable (else it wouldn’t be 95% of all naturally occurring lithium) so nothing to worry about there, either. Unless you accidentally wander into the middle of an atomic explosion with your cell phone. :-P

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          1. The point that I was making is that it is now so prevalent in our society that it would boost any reaction near it. Everyone has a phone nowadays even homeless people have phones. All that lithium in every strata of society, tablets, laptops, cars, trucks, it’s everywhere.

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            1. ‘Near’ it, no. Only under conditions found nowhere except in the middle of an atomic explosion, or inside a star. The lithium-7 that unexpectedly boosted Castle Bravo was part of the bomb.

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    2. Only if they are subjected to heat, pressure and neutron bombardment at similar levels to those found in the core of an exploding atomic bomb. If the cell phone in your pocket is exposed to such conditions, reacting lithium will be the least of your problems. :-D

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      1. This. Being immeasurably more glowy for a picosecond as you browse on your phone sitting on top of the battery pack in your Tesla underneath an airburst would be at best a slightly interesting phenomena, if you could somehow detect it before you got too crispy to notice anything anymore.

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        1. Given airburst are at 1000 to 1500 M (and higher as yield goes up to maximize damage) the energy densities just aren’t there. Even if Maj Kong in Dr. Strangelove somehow managed to have an anachronistic Iphone is his pocket as he rode a 9-20 megaton to detonation by the time he and the phone are turned to plasma maybe 100 microseconds after detonation the wavefront is probably too dispersed.

          It is really HARD to ignite fusion see fusion is just 20 years away and has been since I was 5 (I’m 63 now and its STILL 20 years away) :-) .

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      1. Wiki gets into it on the Castle Bravo article. Lithium-6 is the good stuff; it forms two tritium and thus the glowy bits of a thermonuke. OTOH, as they discovered, if Lithium-7 is subjected to high energy neutrons, you also get an alpha particle, a spare neutron, plus another tritium for the ‘splody bits. CB came out at 3X the oomph because of the Li-7.

        Not sure you’d need the pressure if the neutrons got their first. I suppose setting off a thermonuke in a battery plant would cause a bit more ruckus than in, say, city hall. The pros and cons of the two alternatives will be left to the reader.

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        2. Correct.

          Outside the “sparkplug” secondary, any Lithium is just going to get converted into fallout, ash, and/or debris. Not reactive absent the heat/pressure.

          That is why it is properly called “thermonuclear”, not “hydrogen” weapon.

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          1. This 100 times this. You need the radiative pressure to contain the reaction and as far as I understand the exact mechanics of how that works is one of the best kept secrets. That is “born secret” i.e. it is implicitly classified without anyone stating so implicitly which is unusual. The secrecy is such that the process to make one of the materials related to the process called FOGBANK was lost and had to be recreated and the documented manufacturing process was WRONG. Any of the original makers/designers were unavailable when they had to recreate it in the 90’s when warheads needed refurbishing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank).

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            1. I’m happy to be ignorant of the finer points of getting more boom out of a thermonuclear weapon.

              OTOH, saw an article on lower tech A-bombs, and the author mentioned the gun approach way too casually. I thought that getting really large quantities of U-235 was still a difficult task. Especially with Stuxnet helping run the centrifuges.

              Tom Clancy noted that there was a fair amount of info (some of it might even be accurate. Maybe) about “how to thermonuke” in his notes for the <i>Sum of all Fears</i> book. He said he fudged some points to throw copycats further off.

              Wiki says Li-7 needs to see neutrons at about 2.47MeV for the alpha/neutron/tritium result. It’s been way too many years (no, decades) since I had a physics class that got near nuclear processes.

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              1. Yeah I’ve kind of had a love hate relationship with nuclear weapons since I was a kid. I’m JUST old enough to remember sitting in the hallways as a kindergartner when they still did drills and that scared the spit out of a 5 year old. And yet the images are amazing as is the whole technology and physics at some level (see Trinity and Beyond for the visuals).

                Happily I have NEVER had to deal with CNWDI (Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information) nor anything even close. But there are VERY good public information (Los Alamos primer, Rhodes Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun) and other sources if you want to look.

                And yes you have to use highly enriched (80% enriched, maybe more thats one of those CNWDI things…) U-235 for a gun type bomb. Plutonium won’t work it has a tendency to predetonate because Pu-240 is REALLY sensitive to neutrons so you can’t assemble it fast enough with existing explosives. The Thin Man plutonium gun design got tossed early in development when milligram quantities of Plutonium became available and the fission cross section was WAY higher than expected.

                You also need a darn sturdy pipe. I think Little Boy used a 5″ naval gun for the tube and that’s almost as hard to get a hold of as the U-235. The gun design is also ungainly usually several feet long (Little Boy was 11 feet), so not conducive to delivery as a missile warhead.

                In the past I had thought that Iran would go for a Little Boy type bomb, but the more I think about it the more I feel it is likely that almost all modern weapons (even U-235 ones) use an implosion model. It’s well understood and if you can make an anti tank weapon (and Iran can) you have the basics for an implosion weapon. What sub millisecond timing was hard to do in 1945 is boring off the shelf easily available timing hardware in 2024. Likely Iran has the A. Q. Khan design Pakistan used for its Chagai tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagai-I), or they have North Korea’s poor copy of that design.

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                1. Wiki has a good article on the Little Boy weapon.

                  The gun was not what I had read* (I suspect the Rhodes book is off; the final design didn’t get published until 2003, per the article), but a 6+ inch smoothbore that fired rings to the smaller target. Tungsten carbide tamper surrounded all but the back of the target, and the projectile had a TC plate as a pusher. So once assembled, it hat a full tamper. (There were also polonium-beryllium initiators.)

                  LB uses a lot of uranium, about 64 kilograms, most enriched to 89%, but more at 50% giving that 80% value. So yeah, implosion/compression is going to make for a smaller bomb. Wiki has the usual articles. (Davy Crockett was the shell, with sort-of similar design used as a satchel charge.) See the W54 article.

                  ((*)) The assumption was a plug was fired into a cylinder. The reverse is the case. The fact that the plug was 4″ implied that a 105mm cannon would do the job, but nope.

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        3. The D-T fusion reaction generates neutrons in the 10 MeV range. Someone noted that’s a perfect energy range to fission the U-238 that otherwise isn’t directly usable in nuclear weapons (or power stations). So they surrounded the fusion core with a tamper made of uranium-238, making a fission-fusion-fission weapon.

          The result (if I remember the percentages correctly) was that some 60% of the energy released by that system came from the tamper fission. The step up in yield almost cooked the observers because it was so much more than expected. I don’t recall if that was the Castle Bravo series or not.

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          1. Castle Bravo was one of the Castle series. Wiki mentions Castle Yankee in passing, but I don’t know if it was done. I’m reasonably sure that Richard Rhodes’ second book (<i>Dark Sun</i>) on the nuclear weapons blamed the overenthusiatic reaction from Castle Bravo on the Lithium-7.

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  6. But but… How can there be towns/villages under the sea before AGW started? [Very Big Crazy Grin]

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  7. I think I know the feeling, with steriods, because of this week.

    I finally got around to calling the realtor recommended by the receptionist at the church we attended when we went to my parents’ house. The realtor recommended the lawyer who had also been recommended by the receptionist. (He’s been practicing law about as long as my beloved has been practicing accounting. I expect them to get along famously).

    He recommended we wait a bit longer to contact probate, then was suggesting having the house spruced up and getting a rental agent. I was saying, “We plan to sell it as is and take whatever we can get.” In the midst of that conversation I got a text from the realtor, who had offered to go over and have a look at the place.

    We knew there had been, “a fire,” separate from the fire that happened before my Dad died. I was visualizing, “smoky cinderblock building.”

    There is no building. It’s GONE. Someone (the city?) razed it to the ground, right down to the slab. There is no slab. She sent us several photos of the now vacant lot where I used to live.

    So my Mom is gone, my Dad is gone, my brother is gone, and now the house is gone. On one level, it should make things easier. Assuming whatever lien is on it (surely someone wants to be paid for demolishing it) leaves any cash.

    On the other hand, it hurts. A lot. There were some bad experiences in that house, but a lot more good ones, and a lot of just plain life. Now all that’s left is my memories (and those of our son and my beloved).

    So I think I know the feeling. It sucks.

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    2. My childhood home is now a yard extension to the neighbor’s property. The giant black walnut tree that was 6 feet off the back porch is sill there, as are a few of the maples we planted.

      The rest? All gone.

      Makes sense, it was falling apart slowly as we lived there. The core of it was competent/pro-built in about 1830. The rest was all “occupant built add-ons”. And few were competent. And code was “Did it explode? No? Good to go.”.

      All gone. I do miss it.

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      1. The 900 sq ft 1950’s ranch I grew up in is still there. The empty 100 acre+ lot I used to roam about in is gone filled with a little strip mall. Visited the area in 2023 and honestly some things are unchanged but other stuff especially the people are radically changed. When I was a kid it was mostly blue collar with folks working at Electric Boat, Sikorsky, Firestone Tire and Ponds and a bunch of local stuff with a smattering of Naval personnel (primarily upper echelon Enlisted folk) from the Groton Sub Base. Most of the housing was old farmhouses, capes, ranches (normal and raised) and a few very fancy garrison style homes. It’s now closer to its neighbor to the west Madison with LOTS of folks commuting to New Haven (or even NYC) by car or train. Houses are 3000 sq ft plus mcMansions with fancy rooflines. Older stuff is still there but seems to pass hand to hand among the remaining native families (especially the few gorgeous beach front properties). Many of the raised ranches got razed and upgraded. Population when I grew up was about 4K. These days I think its north of 10K. Still seems to have a fair additional summer population (There are some nice beaches and easy access to Long Island Sound). Of course I became a New Hampshire/Massachusetts resident in the Early 80’s (and had been to school in Worcester before that) so much of my experience of the place is 40+ years old. There is a sadness about things but many of the areas (like the nearby Hammonasset state park) remain unchanged.

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  8. In England, the story of the bells under the sea, tolling when a storm comes, is drowned Lyonesse – off the shore of Cornwall, I think.

    I tried to go back and find my own grandmother’s house in Pasadena – a house that she lived in for almost fifty years, where my mom grew up, and which I still visit in dreams. Couldn’t even begin to recognize it, when we visited Mom and my sister this June. My daughter was quite exasperated with me – because I couldn’t even find it … the big trees in their garden are all gone, Grandpa’s miniature formal rose garden – gone for years – and another house was built at the front of the long, deep lot.

    The Air Force made me, in a lot of ways. And the Air Force that I knew and lived in – mostly gone, as well/

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  9. Don’t really have a childhood hometown, but the one I spent the most time in changed physically for the mostly better. The old CCC football stadium was rebuilt and the rodeo got it’s own arena instead of using the stadium. The downtown got the 1950s-1960s false fronts removed revealing the original 1880-1900 elevations. Lots of Victorian buildings and the old state capitol/Shriners temple.

    Feels like 45 years ago, when we actually thought we had a functioning Republic. But it has been 15 years since I’ve last checked up on that.

    Now everywhere I’ve lived in Texas has changed. Even the current hometown in the last 5 years. City council and staff got bought out by developers and decided “Apartments Everywhere”. And rumor is plenty of new units are earmarked for “refugees”. Everyone is chasing so-called “federal funds” and NGO “dollars” and shafting citizens without the lube. Mo’ people, mo’ problems…

    Hard to have a home, when interesting times keep the thumb on fast-forward.

    3 weekends till the election, need to get some more water storage and some more “precious” metals. Fall hit today, and I’m glad we stocked on firewood early while it was on sale.

    Bells are ringing at work, we are prepping for more interesting times. Going to be brutually crazy busy next year, as long as the infrastructure is functional.

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  10. Sarah, I literally felt that image you painted with words.

    My own story is not so glamorous, my hometown not so picturesque or old, but it really struck a nerve in a good way. Well, it reminded me of when I enjoyed living there.

    And I’m stealing “stack-a-prole concrete high rises“.

    God bless you.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Ouch. This one got me. The town I consider home has changed as I watched, and what I loved about it when I was young has been set aside by the Powers-That-Want-To-Be. They wanted to be hip and trendy. The Millennials they were courting didn’t come, leaving a sort of void.

    The town isn’t what it once was culturally, but it doesn’t have a solid sense of “this new thing is us” yet. Toss in lots and lots of refugees and “refugees,” and while still nice, it isn’t what I recall, even allowing for the golden glow of the past. I miss the old sense of identity and confidence.

    Yet, as you say, there are moments when the old place surfaces for a moment or two.

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  15. I drove around a lot of the old haunts last Saturday and what hasn’t fallen into massive disrepair has gone major BoBo (Bohemian Bourgeois) in one way or another.

    Many of the bookstores I used to know, gone.

    Many of the shops, gone.

    When I went to the anime con this Saturday, it was half KPop, a quarter CCG, and the rest was stuff that was selling to the collectors or “modern” audience. Could barely find even classic stuff at some spots. People considering ’00s and ’10s anime as “classics” for cosplay. Booth art was heavy into yaoi and Hazbin Hotel and cheap trinkets.

    I see pictures of San Francisco and I am sad because I knew many of those places before they got chewed up by the city and the TechBros and their ilk.

    The world changes, and it does not change in good ways. All you can do is secure the memories as long as you can.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. There used to be shops like that in Ireland. I picked up a first edition of O’Neill’s Dance Musicmof Ireland (1907) in an old junk shop “on d’island” in Limerick. It had never been cracked and might have sat there for the 70 years between its publication and my picking it up. Some of the other things in the shop looked to be older. All gone now.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. it’s times like these where I am glad not to have the lifespan of an elf.

    They seemed so powerful and magical when I read Tolkien, but in my elder years I realize just how impotent they were.

    Sure they fought ultimate evil, but they watched every place they ever loved pass into history and shadow.

    I did understand why my grandma said, “I’m glad I won’t live to see this all come to tears.”

    I get it now, Grandma. I get it.

    Liked by 3 people

    2. There was an interesting point about vampires made in Barbara Hambly’s Vampire Series.

      As vampires reached a certain age where everything they knew (as non-vampires) disappeared (people, places, etc.), they often died by being careless in the hunt or other preventable accidents.

      As everything around them changed, they apparently wondered why should they continue their “undead” lives.

      Of course, Barbara’s Vampires were nasty beings. To stay “undead”, they had to kill humans. [Wink]

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Most vampires in stories I read have the same problem. They have to find something to want to live beyond those years, again, again, and again. Have read versions where to become a vampire, the individual gives up everything they were before. When rising as a vampire, they become something else and the memories before are lost, but that is rare.

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        1. David Eddings played with that in his Belgariad and Malloreon series. Sorcerers are immortal, unless they suicide, and several of them do. But those who survive best are the ones (Belgarath, Polgara, Garion) are those who have a purpose. But he mentions Polgara, especially, grieving over and over as the families in her charge age and die.

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          1. Jim Butcher’s Dresden File Wizards. Not immortal, but extremely long lived if they use their abilities. Most divorce themselves from their families, and world in general (ultimate hermits on huge tracts of land). Which is why when wizards go bad because not found soon enough, it is a surprise. Then there are those who do stay in contact with extended family because the wizard trait might crop up in next generations (one knew her great-great-great+ grandchildren and nieces/nephews).

            Faith Hunter’s Native Skinwalkers. Again not immortal, but extremely long lived IF they learn and use their abilities. Other supernaturals who are immortal (vampires) or extremely long lived.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. Fred the Vampire Accountant manages. Then, he keeps all his memories, his identity, his personality. . . .

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      1. The quote stuck with me. “Time moves both fast and slow for them. Fast, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by; slow, because the passing years are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.”

        (From memory, pardon any misquotes.)

        Liked by 1 person

  18. Lemme see if I can tangentially relate this item which came up over on Insty to the feeling of familiar stuff gone forever to tie it to Sarah’s post today…nope, can’t do it. Lets just launch into it then:

    Per a story in SpaceNews (https://spacenews.com/ocean-experts-raise-concerns-over-deorbiting-the-international-space-station/), the EPA wants to assert authority over the NASA plan to deorbit of the 400 ton International Space Station into the remotest part of the Pacific Ocean as a pollution risk:

    The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is evaluating how the disposal of the International Space Station into the ocean will need to be regulated but has not shared the details of any specific concerns or aspects of regulation.

    “EPA’s Office of Water is coordinating with the Office of General Counsel on this complex issue. The agency does not have a timeline for this evaluation,” EPA spokeswoman Dominique Joseph told SpaceNews.

    .
    SpaceNews scares up a couple of academic “experts” – a molecular biologist PhD from a medical school Kiel, Germany and a “PhD Candidate” from British Columbia – who compare the deorbit of 400 tons of space hardware with WWII bombs and plastic forks, respectively.

    My response reentry target proposal is an ellipse centered on the US EPA headquarters, or alternately Kiel, Germany, which has a historical expertise in cleanup after large amounts of American metal land on it, or the University of British Columbia, because it’s Canada.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. “My response reentry target proposal is an ellipse centered on the US EPA
      headquarters, or alternately Kiel, Germany, which has a historical
      expertise in cleanup after large amounts of American metal land on it,
      or the University of British Columbia, because it’s Canada.”

      .

      🤣🤣🤣🤣

      Liked by 2 people

        1. It would be wrong–oh, so very, very wrong–even to daydream of a “Repulsive Attractors” map-app that lets millions of anonymous users put that X wherever they think it should go.

          Proudly I say that such an idea would never, ever even cross my mind.

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  19. I read this while listening to Ralph Stanley sing “Rank Stranger” and… maybe Portugal is part of Appalachia?
    “I wandered again to my home in the mountain
    Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free
    I looked for my friends but I never could find them
    I found they were all rank strangers to me…”
    https://youtu.be/1eLxTZIDP_o?feature=shared

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Why is the statue facing the wall? I thought it looked like a cool statue, but I wanted to see it at a different angle but you can’t. All the pictures of him are just like yours.

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  21. This sounds like an Irish song.

    “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad

    For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.” —GKC, The Ballad of the White Horse

    Liked by 1 person

  22. Thank you Sarah. You have once again captured my mood and or perspective on given subject. I have also wrestled with the same thing coming from a rural area of southeastern Pennsylvania. Same thing is happening/has happened to the village where I am from. My area has been overrun by people squeezed out of NYC and Philly though. Accents are still different and the culture may as well have the international strangeness of Porto. I’ve found less and less reason to go back there anymore. The food is now the same junk one can get anywhere else. The roads no longer go where they used to go. The buildings have lost their specialness, and the remaining ones often get a “bold new facade” smeared over them. It was never “home” but it was a place I felt I was allowed to be…perhaps a place I was able to “go back to”. It’s not even that familiar now. The locals lament the change to be sure, and yet they’ve also got deals in place to sell tracts of farmland to warehouse developers. I’m not sure I can blame them because the traffic and development will make the are unusable if even just half of the land owners were participating. I couldn’t wait to get out of there (quite literally), but it’s still a shame. If it were to not change, it would likely just serve as a place for Winston and Julia to spend the afternoon sightseeing. There would probably still be microphones in the bushes though.
    Meh, I’m probably not as clever as I’d like to be.
    Just…thanks.

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  23. Reminds me of that story by Joan Aiken of the lost village in Wales and the absent-minded school teacher. Church bells under drowned cities is a thing of the British isles too.

    Mrs. Hoyt might like her short stories. One used to be able to find many of them in the Internet Archive.

    Smoke From Cromwell’s Time, A Small Pinch of Weather, Armitage stories. Good collections.

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  24. This is where the sentiment that it is not possible to go “home” comes from. I for one do not wish to revisit Montevideo any longer. It was home up to age 18.

    Last time there (2002) it had changed a lot but was still recognizable and I could get around from memory. I fear this will no longer be the case and so choose to keep it in memory only. Age has some benefits, eh?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Note, I made it a point not to walk by grandma’s house — the place I go when I dream — because I know it’s totally changed, and that’s not how I want to remember it.

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  25. “… my “Dress like a femme fatale” kick.”

    As you are a married woman and I am a gentleman, I am brutally suppressing my “hubba hubba” reaction. But for his sake, I hope Dan got to know you during this phase, because … well, hubba hubba.

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      1. (sigh) I am remembering the college acquaintance gaming-circle nerdy girl who dressed kinda plain and shapeless. Then my buddy with the stripper girlfriend turned her loose on “coaching” nerdy girl.

        So one gaming night, Nerdy Girl strolls in to play game.

        ….Wearing a tight schoolgirl blouse.

        …..And a tight leather mid thigh skirt.

        …..And moderate heels.

        …………And Nerdy girl is actually cut kinda athletic. Girl-curvy, but toned.

        ….

        …. !!!

        THUD!

        ……

        Code Blue! Code Blue!

        Liked by 1 person

  27. The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe

    http://www.online-literature.com/poe/575/

    The use of four types of bells as a shout out to the four kinds of people/jobs in Plato’s Republic is a new point to me but certainly explains why there are four kinds of metal referenced in “Cold Iron” though I suppose it could all just be a happy coincidence.

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  28. Utah had a literally drowned town by accident of a dam failure when we were living there in the 1970s, but I don’t think any bells were involved.

    My last visit to my childhood home was in 2016 (we were done out of a HS reunion in 2020 because you-know-why) and I haven’t had a reason to return since then. It was holding up moderately well, but I have fewer inclinations to check up on the old homeplace as the years pass, although I still have friends and relatives there. My last visit to Grandpa’s Farm had a jarring new house in place of the old one I remembered, but the stone barn and play house had not been altered (the chicken coops were gone).

    The Welsh have many drowned bell legends, and perhaps the displaced inhabitants felt much as Sarah did if they ever returned.

    https://aberdoveylondoner.com/2018/08/26/the-legend-of-cantrer-gawelod-and-the-bells-of-aberdovey-2/

    “Bells of Aberdovey” is actually a love song, at the end of the post.

    Search the Tube of You for Robin Huw Bowen’s fabulous triple-harp performance.

    WP won’t take my links to YT.

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