Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

Seals, the Floating Proletariat, and Indigeneity: From the Bass Strait Backwards

Hurrah! Our staff is up to complement, and I am able to defy the Omnicron Directive and start having days off again. I had thought to talk a bit about the economics of sealing, but it does not appear that there is much to say in this regard. The story of sealing industries is often told in terms of local extinctions, but there are more seals than ever. It is true that the classic long-distance sealing industry was always depopulating rookeries, while the coastal industries summarily disposed of by Brigitte Bardot were perhaps only semi-sustainable, but the only industry I am aware of actually exterminating the local population is the Caribbean one. So it is unique, maybe?

Recorded long distance sealing is associated with whaling, and makes a dramatic and easily documented intrusion into the south Atlantic, so that overwintering sealers are known on South George as late as "the eighteenth century," while a sealer may have been the first human to set foot in Antarctica, admittedly the Antarctic Peninsula, which only barely counts, but still. There is probably a great deal more to be said about the way in which the world's fur industry was able to absorb a sudden boom in seal pelts at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, but that is not where this post ended up, as it was distracted by the story of one member of the floating proletariat. And, to be fair, a SUNY Press author who was kind enough to post a large portion of her book. (I never fail to be amazed at the way in which university press publications come to appear on the website without a readily identifiable author. If you go to the previous link, you are reading Lynette Russell's Roving Mariners. )

The Bishop's Sea: Seals and State Collapse in the Pre-Columbian

 

So after eighteen apocalyptic months, UBC Library is open this week, and while I did not visit my precious old journals, because of pure laziness, it turns out that I wouldn't have been able to see most of them due to the usual robot uprising.

Damn. Should have gone with that instead of copping to being lazy.  Anyway, going to lean on the door marked "seals" and see where it takes us!

Postblogging Technology, March 1951, II: No Affray

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

I had yours of the 13th on the afternoon, and sent my condolences by telegram to Uncle Henry, and to Edgar and  Henry, and thank you for those numbers. I am very sorry that Aunt Bessie did not live to see her great-niece, and, even though we have been expecting it, can hardly bear to believe it even after two weeks.  My regrets also to your wife at the loss of her cousin.My mother has written to say that she will meet me in San Francisco when I arrive next month, so we will mourn together, and she will be my advance party when I arrive in Palo Alto, so that though I walk through the valley of the shadow, I shall fear no evil, because my mother is the mightiest battleaxe in all of California! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Gathering the Bones, XXII: A Lacustrine Civilisation?

The Great Pyramid at La Venta is 2400 years old, give or take. The fact that it is a clay mound erected in a lacustrine setting makes it very much reminiscent of the much later Monk's Mound at Cahokia. Based on the archaeologically reconstructed building technique at Cahokia, Martin Byers links Monk's Mound to a springtime "World Renewal Ceremony" in which a gathered community celebrates the end of the spring freshette by carrying newly deposited river silt up to the top of the mound and plastering new layers each year. The archaeologist cannot tell whether this prehistoric activity is linked to the "Earth Diver" story. Having been properly skeptical about the role of the Earth Diver story in the Ohio-Mississippi Valley of the 1100s, we're left being all the more cautious about an epoch another thousand years distant and farther away. Nevertheless, the fact that the Olmecs built their pyramid in clay rather than in stone like their more immediate successors in the Mayan regions, Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico is a standing invitation to speculation. Bombs away!

A Pseudo-Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1950: A Watershed Year for Pseudo-Science?

 

Three of the biggest pseudo-scientific books of the Twentieth Century were published (in English) 1950. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in April; L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in May; while Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki came out in an English edition late in the year, having been first published in Norwegian in 1948. I'm not an expert on Fortean bullshit, but off hand only  von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (1971) and Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle (1974) really engaged the public imagination to the same degree as 1950s' trinity of absurdity. 

These three books were not, of course, the only ones. I was finally driven to write this post by a Time reviewer calling our attention to the sales success of Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers and telling me, as the self-appointed voice of posterity, that there was something going on. Behind the Flying Saucers doesn't even come close to being in the same league as the first three titles, but, as the reviewer points out, it was making money hand over fist for Scully and his "conservative" publisher, Henry Holt, and that makes it significant in its own right.

Finally, the University of Washington signed up for a single go in the Ivy League Nude Portraiture Scandal in the fall of 1950. Although definitely pseudo-science, the ILNPS seems like a pretty different kind of phenomena. But was it? The answer is that it might not be. 

Travel Notes, II: Tashme

 Here I am, back at my comfortable computer station in Vancouver, as from 9:40 last night. With the ergonomic issues --and the fatigue that comes from riding six hour+ stages-- I could write something more substantial, but I'm not going to, because I have a very small but personal matter in my teeth, and I am going to get it out!

A large part of high school Canadian history, at least in my day, was dedicated to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  I am not even sure that it is possible to argue that this is wrong, and offer a revisionist "People's History of Canada." It's not that there's not counter-narratives --that is, in fact, what I'll be writing about today-- but there is a very strong case that there would not be a Canada without the "iron road from the sea to the sea." I'm going to waffle all over that claim (I think it's wrong but am utterly unprepared to do the work needed to sustain a counterargument), but it's hard to argue against the economic and geographical logic. 

Hardrock miners on the porch of the Deadwood Store,
Greenwood, BC, c. 1900. It's hard to understate how strong
the completely unexamined notion that white Britons were 
the first "outsiders" in this province

The old-time historians and commentators were not modest about our ancestral achievement.  Firm that the "natural" lines of North American communication ran north-south, so that the railway realigned the geopolitics of a continent in line with the sociopolitical preferences of the infant nation. It was even, at least by the 1970s, the fashion to acknowledge some non-White participation, with dutiful Chinese labourers and misunderstood Metis, as well as the usual lot of "Indian guides."

Leaving everything else aside, there was a strong British Columbia connection to the generation that gave us this history, starting with Pierre Berton himself. For them, much of this argument was intuitive. It is hard to get from Vancouver to the interior of the province of British Columbia, and, more specifically, to travel between the Okanagan Valley and the Coast. For my grandfather's generation, you could take either I-95 or I-97 south until they joined away down south, at which point San Francisco --heck, Tijuana-- were as close as the other part of your native province, or the arduous but patriotic alternative of wagon road down the Fraser Canyon. 

A Technological and Hometown Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1950: The First Broken Arrow

I don't find any pictures of Port Hardy Airport's legendary derelict B-24.

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that the USAF lost three nuclear weapons in Canada in the early 1950s. If there's anything this blogging has brought home to me, it's that the aviation world remained just astonishingly lackadaisical in 1950. I didn't think anything was going to beat Bermuda Sky Queen or the BSAA saga, but then I noticed that no-one was noticing the four major KLM accidents in the two-and-a-half years beginning 26 January 1947. KLM is not an airline that occurs to me when the phrase "safety problem" comes up, perhaps because no-one brings it up. 

It's worth reflecting that the air search component of the Broken Arrow incident I will be discussing today was supplemented by aircraft called off the search for Douglas C-54 Skymaster 42-72469, which went down somewhere over the Yukon or British Columbia two weeks earlier with 8 crew, 34 members of SAC trooping to Montana, and someone's wife and baby (Joyce and Victor Espe, wife and infant son of Master Sergeant Robert Espe of 57th Air Installation Squadron.) The biggest air accident in Canada to that point and still the largest unexplained disappearance of American service personnel, you wouldn't even know about it from the aviation press. the much-urged policy of not mentioning passenger aircraft accidents in hopes that they would go away appears to have been implemented at some point in late 1949, and there you go. 

The same lackadaisicalness is seen in persistent reports that B-36B 44-92075 went down on Vancouver Island. The distinction between "Vancouver" and "Vancouver Island" seems to throw people for a loop and justify all sorts of geographical confusion, but the actual location of the wreckage, 6300ft up the side of Mount Kologet in the Nass Basin in the far northwest of British Columbia, is of very large significance to the story, and so is the island from which the survivors were recovered, Princess Royal Island in the central coast region, or, as we now say in a slightly twee way, "The Great Bear Rainforest." (Having given up on logging most of the region, we've settled for trying to attract the rare tourist who needs something more than 120" of rain a year to justify some adventure tourism.) 

On the other hand, the search headquarters was set up at Port Hardy, at least some of the survivors made it there before being hurriedly extracted to America, and for the first day of flying, the air search component was confined to the north end of Vancouver Island, because it was the only place where the weather allowed flying. Since Port Hardy is just a hop, skip and a bum-slide over from Port Alice, more than justifying slapping a "Port Alice" tag on this post. I had no idea that my hometown was so closely (that is, not closely at all) associated with a Broken Arrow incident, and, for that matter, the first one. 

(The first verse of the Skookumchuk Song. Best the Internet can do. Summer Wages, following River Road, is the same genre.)

Postblogging Technology, January 1949, II: Our Hearts Go Out for Avro

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thanks for your kind concern. I am bearing up, I think, considering that I shot a man two weeks ago. Like you said, we tried to bring Mr. A. into the picture, since a foreign sailor found floating in the Bay is a matter for the spybusters, especially after we arranged a "tip" about his Green Tong membership. Unfortunately, the FBI immediately stepped in, with someone coming around to his office to tell him that he better keep his nose out of it, just like in a movie! This wasn't the end of it, because of course A. isn't without his own influence. I'm a little flabbergasted to report that no less than Shirley Temple was invoked. You'll note below that she was in Washington for the Inaugural, and of course she and A.know each other. The really flabbergasting part is that she knows ME! I am frankly beyond words that teenaged-me met Shirley TEMPLE(!!!!!) at a family gathering and didn't realise it! It says something about Temple that she can work a room so slickly.

Ahem. Close encounters with Hollywood stars in incognito aside, the upshot is that A. will be allowed to take over the case as soon as the Hoover Report leaves the front pages, so alphabetically-named agencies can step all over each other's feet again. In the mean time, everyone assumes that if you find a Tong man floating, it's because another Tong man's bullet managed to hit the target. (Insert hilarious joke about Tong men not shooting straight.) 

So, anyway, I mean, it's an urgent matter to me, but I've flowers and an apology wired from Shanghai in my room, which is either a bum steer or something is up. (The girls think they're from Reggie, and are wondering what he could possibly have done.) What could possibly be so sensitive about the Oregon Scandal seventy years on???

In other news, the millionth (okay, third) Avro Tudor to be lost is now history. I hear that James is telling everyone in sight that this is what you get when you let Don Bennett into your business, even though Bennett was out of BSAA well before the loss of Star Ariel. He is, however, creating a stink in the dailies about it being all due to "sabotage." What kind of maniac would sabotage an air liner? The suggestion that it is Avro's incompetence won't do, so I suppose we're all going to settle for blaming the Ministry of Civil Aviation. 

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie.

I'm a little surprised that the Tudor losses in the "Bermuda Triangle" don't get more play in the legend. In the mean time, I'm not going to let you forget some good old Marv Wolfman/Steve Gann goodness. 

An Intermittently Technical Appendix to Thalassocracy, 3: Bonanza Farms, Smokeless Powder and Endorheic Basins

This is a post about asymmetries of power, the globalisation of the grain trade, and the parts of the world where waters flow down to inland seas. It's less polished than I'd like it to be, because I have to go and put Driscoll Farms-brand strawberries out now. They're being shipped from California in big trucks, and since we can't stop the supply pipeline, we have to keep pushing, or they'll fill up our cooler. And we need the space! The Central Valley is, admittedly, not an endorheic basin, but close enough.

Anyway. . . 

Farmer's two-novel "Opar" series has a disproportionately long Wikipedia article, for those feeling nostalgic.

It's been a long time since I've read Philip Jose Farmer's Hadon of Ancient Opar books, but I do remember that they're a riff on a rationalisation of the lost city of Opar in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels. Burroughs' Opar is a former Atlantean (the original thalassocracy!) colony stuck in the middle of Africa, somehow. Tarzan goes there from time to time and . . has adventures. Adventures that allow Burroughs to comment on race in America in interesting ways. I'd say more, but I wasn't kidding about the length and detail of the Wikipedia articles on the subject. Nostalgia for the win! Anyway, Farmer's novels explain Opar by proposing that Atlantis was actually a prehistoric civilisation established around inland seas that once existed in two enormous  endorheic basins in the interior of northern Africa. Again, I'm a little hazy on the details, but I think that Farmer proposes that the water impounded in the basins eventually found its way to the Atlantic, causing Atlantis to be destroyed, not by flooding, but by having its sea drained away? Something like that is supposed to have happened in the intramontane Great Basin of the American West at the end of the last Ice Age, although, as far as I know, geologists do not currently believe that the Lake Chad Basin and adjacent endorheic basins in northern Africa were ever flooded (Map below the fold). Though eyewitness accounts of  pre-50-million-years-ago period are sparse and unreliable. 

The endorheic basins of Africa, whether flooded or not, are natural formations rather than largescale geoengineering. There are two reasons that I'm starting out with Farmer, anyway. The first is that it gives me an excuse to have some Roy Krenkel art in the thumbnail. The other is that I'm pretty sure that the first book starts with an historical introduction that describes a conjectured former channel connecting a sub-sea level depression within these larger endorheic basins to the Atlantic. I'm not entirely sure, but this sounds like Donald Mackenzie's 1877 scheme for an artificial inland sea in the southern Sahara, created by dredging out the sand blocking the channel at the coast in the region of "El Djouf." (Like a great many other African geological fantasias of the age, El Djouf barely exists.) I don't know anything about the Mackenzie scheme apart from what Wikipedia has told me, but, again, Roy Krenkel art.

On Thalassocracy, III: Warrior And Wheat

Lake Sidi Ali, in the Moroccan Atlas, 2000m above sea level. So not quite the Sahara Sea.

Thucydides said, early in his Peloponnesian War, that Minos of Crete was first of those to exert thalassocracy, a rulership of the seas. I--

Oh. You're wondering why I'm on about this. October is Thanksgiving month in Canada, and I'm not going to be able to do any techblogging unless I win some time by reusing old material, and it happens I have a grotesquely self-indulgent, 72pp chapter on technology and science and the Nineteenth Century and stuff that I think I can trim down into an interesting post about bonanza wheat lands. Since it also happens that there was a minor flurry of activity around my last "thalassocracy" post, it's a sequel. (Also, I'm eagerly waiting for a "thalassocracy" to make its appearance in Graydon's Commonweal series, so consider this a bit of a fan tribute, even if my take on sea power is unlikely to be his.)

Technology! Maybe someone's riff on the Theseus black sail/white sail myth?

A Surprisingly Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 194: Sealion Away!

Pearl Primus: Please pretend this amazing picture is somehow relevant to coal shortages in the United Kingdom in 1947. 

Operation Sealion was the German "plan" for invading the United Kingdom in the summer of 1940, of which all that needs to be said, was said to me long ago by Mr. Kristiansen: "Shut up, kid." Millwrights may not know counterfactual history, but they've been around enough fights in their time to know what's what, best army versus best navy department. 

However! Sealion was only a "plan" because the German navy and air force already had a plan, which was to place the entire United Kingdom under strategic siege and strangle it to death. On 21 August 1947, came irrefutable evidence that the strategy was working, as Britain abruptly cancelled the first steps already made to full convertibility from pounds sterling to dollars [pdf].  A year later, devaluation of the pound would signal Raeder and Goering's final victory. Three years after the end of the war.

Good hustle!

We know the basic outlines of the crisis: Britain was not earning enough dollars from exports to pay for imports from the hard currency dollar countries. In spite of the firm conventional wisdom that American manufacturing was hypertrophied at the end of the war due to the collapse of the competition, in fact Britain was going into debt buying mainly food and tobacco, while trying to pay for it by exporting machinery.* Britain would have been a great deal better off if it still had the robust coal exports that had enriched the nation in Victorian times, especially since a European coal shortage made for a robust market. It would also have been better off if it could  have run its domestic manufacturing sector at full bore, but in the winter of 1947, a domestic coal shortage wreaked havoc on industrial production. One of the reasons for drastic action in August of 1947 was the fear that the misery of the previous winter would recur. 

Infant sitting on a coal wagon. Alex J. Robertson, The Bleak Midwinter 

Postblogging Technology, August 1947, II: At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour

R. C.,

_. Roxborough Crescent,

Vancouver, Canada

Dear Dad:

Based on the last package, this will get to you before an envelope, and, anyway, I'm kind of worried about what might happen with a postal letter, so I'll just say this. We (Tommy and me) have a brilliant plan that requires a blond bear cub and those sedatives. I understand that it's easy to overdose a bear and have it die on you, but it needs to be really quiet while we're moving it around, and we need it now. Half the Stanford is off on summer vacation, and the N.s took V. around to the University of Chicago to see about registering and transferring credits. Miss Ch. has arranged things so that her registration rolls over at Stanford, but her parents' cheque needs to be in the mail by the middle of next month. (I'm not even going to get into the idea of someone else paying. It would kill her parents.) 

We could also use any files the family might have from the heist at Colville by return courier. It's even more urgent than the bear. We've been through the stuff that Bancroft got, and V.'s been through the library at Santa Clara and Coeur d'Alene, but we've never had a complete look at your stuff. Professor K. says that you can often reconstruct the missing parts of an archive from what you actually have. If we know what we're looking for, we can be in and out a lot faster. Maybe we won't even need the bear! 

Your Loving Son,

Reggie

Postblogging Technology, July 1947, II: Apocalypse Real Soon Now!

R_. C_.
__ Roxburgh Crescent,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Dad:

I'll be blowed if I can catch you up on everything that's happened 'round here. The ship turns out to have a cracked spar for sure, so I'm leaving for Hawaii tomorrow via Victoria, but that's the least of it. 

Because who should blow into town last week but A., with the --I know I'm not supposed to give out clues that might blow our code, but I've found a character that won't give the game away if I call V.'s parents, the "Ns." All the "C.s" were getting too gosh-darn confusing! Their story is that they got a  yen to yacht up the Alaska Passage, so naturally they borrowed a boat off of your neighbour. I didn't see anything natural about it at all, and I was a might suspicious to find "W.B." aboard as the deckhand/captain. You may recall him as the lad that Uncle George blackmailed into taking their daughter off their hands, and he really doesn't seem to be the type to swan about Fort Rupert of all places. For the most part he was civil --actually, loads of fun. But when I saw him looking at some of the Chinese and Indian boys, I couldn't help but be glad that Tommy was gone, because I was already thinking something might come up that would remind him that he was Wong Lee's son, and then would all the plans that have been made on W. B.'s head be?

So it turned out to me and Mr. Brookstein who caught W. B. in a boatshed with one of the boys. To his credit, he didn't try to brazen it out, just disintegrated. Turned out Mr. Brookstein knew just the way to put him back together --which should have made me suspicious right there-- while I just followed his line in trying to get the kid somewhere reasonable. It's pretty tough, since neither of us have Cantonese that is what it might be, but in the end I sent him home with a promise not to tell his parents, to recommend him to our local agent, and $60 in his pocket. 

Yes, yes, I do feel pretty low about that, like I've taken my first step down the road to being a brothel keeper, but I honestly couldn't see another way out of it. Then the other shoe dropped, when W. B. came to me that night and told me that Mr. Brookstein was blackmailing him to work for the Cominterm! I should have guessed from how hard the man works with the logger unions . . . 

However, I'm not completely wet behind the ears, so Mr. Brookstein doesn't know that I know A., who, it turns out, arranged the whole trip to recruit W. B. for the American intelligence services! It turns out that they're practically farming out the Mexican office to Mr. N., on the grounds that he's rich and influential and has ties to Mexico and somewhat old money, the meatpacking houses being long forgotten. I'm not sure that's the best qualification for spying on Mexico, but this would make W.B. a potential triple agent (for us!), and I'm not going to quarrel. Another step down the road. . . Well, all of that meant that I had to find a way to buck him up, with all his talk about "God this," and "God that," and I ended up telling him that he'd have to work things out as between God and man for himself.

Which, because he's an idiot, came down to a screaming match with V., after she'd politely and gently dismantled some gibberish about  the native word for cow showing that some Indian tribes were actually Welsh, and thus Caucasian. At the end of it, he was yelling about how much he could tell her about "God and Man" at --his college, can I name it? Probably not. Think "locks," though. And she yelled at him that he should write a book, and he yelled back that maybe he would, and half of bloody Fort Rupert must have been listening in. Not that that's the first drunken fight they've heard from the pub, but V. and W.B. are a great deal more genteel than most. 

You've notice that, in that long story, I've not said anything about the Ns. showing up out of nowhere --with A., yet, after I allowed in my letters that I was in the same county as V. You'll also notice that I started another page with the head of that paragraph. This time, no erasures that might be read by flipping the paper over! Yes, I'm encouraging you to read between the lines, and, no, I do not want this page sent on to Auntie Grace. I think our chances of keeping V. in Stanford are sinking pretty low by now already. 

Yr Loving Son,
Reggie.

The era's right, but I'm going to give a modern performer some exposure. Ha. "Exposure."

Postblogging Technology, March 1947, I: Rocket Is For Emergency Use Only

Source.

R_.C_.

Washington Square Hotel,

New York.

Dear Father:

I hope this catches up with you before you board ship for England. I've included a private and confidential from Uncle George, who has been talking to the people behind the Dick Barton serials --this may be the lead we've been looking for. Uncle George is very anxious that it succeed, as he is getting nervous about the possibility of charges being pressed. He only went to England under very firm assurances that bygones with the cousins would be bygone if we got their money out of the country. I cannot for the life of me understand why they would continue to ostracise their daughter now that there are grandchildren, but they also have not reached out to Macau --not a good sign, if the silver "arbitrage" falls through before Uncle George can leave the country. 

As for sweetening the deal with the movie people, James has suggested that they might want to do something with Great-Uncle next. I think he was being sarcastic, as I am really not sure that the market is crying out for Great Uncle just now. Still, it is a property that we can command. Speaking of, one of you might want to hop over to France and have a sit-down with R. I have heard muttering at the Benevolent Society about his recent appearance in New York, and someone might remind him that his association with the family has been long and prosperous, and that he might have a serious think about keeping it that way.

My, I do sound bloodthirsty! Two weeks and counting of enforced bed rest will do that to a girl. All in, then, because, as for making a serial about Great Uncle and the likely response "on the street," the word is that it must be very, very clear, that it is tongue-in-cheek. . . and that it would be best if we made an example, to make it clear that we are not acting out of weakness. Perhaps there are some "open files" where an example might be made? Another week of this and I might just be willing to shoot the Engineer myself. 

I know that that's not very fair --I write it while looking at a very nice flower arrangement that he has sent me-- but in my current mood, best not to draw my attention!

"GRACE."

Postblogging Technology, August 1946, I: Drones and Continuous Flow

R_.C_.,

Leland Hotel,

Nakusp, Canada

My Dearest Reggie:

Well, your daughter-out-of-law is off to Hong-Kong, and you are stuck with me! Don't expect me to take this task up on a regular basis, though. Nor, I think, when I compare the volume of your replies to Grace's letters to mine, will you be disappointed to hear that.

I have your brief reply to my note about my own forthcoming trip, and I cannot imagine why you would be jealous of me! Remember those days around the fire, speculating about the joys and pleasures of the Leland Hotel, were we only allowed to be there, instead of blankets and saddles for pillows, out under the stars --when it was stars and not the rain? And now, just a few short years (give or take a half century) you are basking in its comforts, while I face the prospect of being crammed into a DC-4, on my way to Tokyo. Oh, I understand that you are bored with Nakusp and waiting for your final permission to return to Vancouver. But, believe me, flying across the Pacific is in no way a vacation. Even across continent is long enough that I've been tempted to ask the crew to bring a can opener to get me out of my seat on landing. Had I not been able to get such a good deal on those war-damaged C3s in the San Francisco auctions. . .

And now it is up to me to find an idle Pacific shipyard with the labour to get those horrid war-builds back into service. There is only one country we can turn to, and, of course, we can turn to it, though it shames me. So the admiral and Nanking and the memory of the kamikazes aside. . .  You know that I only do this for the good of the family. (I will at least make a detour to Seoul, but I am not hopeful.)

Hopefully, by the next letter, not only will James and Grace be back from their holiday, and free at last to make a home together, but Reggie will be in Santa Clara on furlough, and even some of our other far-flung clan. If you want to take a trip down, you can even stay on and attend Homecoming at the "junior college" as "Miss V.C.'s" escort! Wouldn't that have stuck in old Leland's craw? 

Recapping The Bishops' Sea

I have a point when I talk about how the early settlement of the Atlantic took place in a "bishop's sea." It is, in the first instance, that before there were states or even capitalists, there were bishops promoting the settlement of remote places and the Christianising of faraway pagans. The second point is that in the English-language historiography, we tend to handle bishops with far too much kindness. We choose not to see them, as German historiography sees them, as politicians and statesmen, often bloody-handed and always liars and cynics. If we allow full reign for dark and bloody acts of politics, and then suppose that the worst of these acts are swept under the rug for the Good of the Church, we create a darkness and a mystery in which smaller and more human histories can be hidden.

C. Wellwood Beall, of Boeing. In spite of his importance to Boeing, contemporary fame, large fortune, and extensive family, he does not have a Wikipedia article. It's almost like the family doesn't want to call attention to itself for some reason.

When I went into this question last time, it was with a blog post entitled "Christ Stops at Kingcome."  In his 1945 memoir of his Fascist-era internal exile, teaching in two remote towns in the mountains of southern Italy, Carlo Levi promoted a powerful, although, as James Scott points out, actually fairly stereotyped idea. The idea that "Christ stopped at Eboli," the terminus of the railway on the plains far below, is that not Christianity, nor morality,even history itself, had penetrated any further than the last railway station. Substitute the names of assorted tribal communities of upland South Asia, and you get the old saw that Scott is criticising  in his History of Not Being Governed, and, as fresh as the idea may have been to Levi, he could have picked it up in casual conversation in any Qing commandery of the south, or in the palaces of any of fifty or so of the "paddy states" which have now been swept into Assam, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand. Mostly Thailand, actually.  

In my experience, oblivious to Scott, you can take this literally without your head exploding. An old Italian navy officer I knew in my MA programme, did. He would lustily explain that the fires of the high mountain villages visible as you sailed in and out of Taranto were lit by inexperessibly primitive people who never came down to the plain, and who presumably still spoke Samnite and worshipped Mars and Saturn, although in the last bits I am putting words in his mouth, and I am not all sure that the Samnite branches of Italic were ever spoken that far south. The point is, it didn't hurt Tullio Vidoni's historical acumen any. When he wasn't reminiscing about the old days, he had quite a sophisticated take about how the Viking voyages out of Greenland could only have been going "south," by their understanding of geography, and so needed to be understood as part of the genre of wonder stories about Africa and the tropics, and not about some New World which did not, yet, conceptually exist.

Or you can accuse Levi of being unserious, show that the people of the Basilicata were actually thoroughly involved in the life of the lowlands, as Horden and Purcell do. Fair enough, but my point in substituting the old Catholic mission station on Kingcome Inlet for Eboli.

Looking For Alvin: The Debacle

This post leads from a comment I made over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative to the effect that Canadian rural abandonment had become so severe that entire regions of British Columbia had been depopulated. 

. 

I was kind of talking out of my ass, as commenters do in comment threads. I had the Lardeau Lake country along Highway 31 in mind as something I could point to, but it's a little weak, as the region is basically a string of old copper-boom ghost towns. Semi-abandoned mining towns don't count, except maybe  in Zenna Henderson short stories. So it occurred to me that I might check for something with a little higher impact. What is the closest "abandoned region" to the Greater Vancouver Regional District? You know, "Hollywood North?" Skyrocketing house prices? More than half the population of the province? Place where most of the jobs in Canada are being created now?" (Along with Toronto, but who cares about Toronto? Oddly second-wave British Columbia city, not even imagined when Port Douglas and Yale were being built?

What I found was a bit shocking. Also, something worth contemplating as the precarious staffing at my place of work came undone this week under one irreplaceable sick shift another. When, just for a non-dairy whipped topping, I had to deal with an elderly customer having a cerebral aneurysm and one of our hardest-working, minimum wage kids being crippled by one of the most easily treated chronic medical conditions it's possible to imagine. Since most of these things are related to demographics, it is easy to see them getting worse. It's also easy to imagine it getting worse, much quicker. That is, if I was being Chicken Little last week, I'm extra-crispy Chicken Little this week.

That's the preamble: now, audience participation. "Compare and contrast."

Compare:

Screen Capture from Panoramio, photo by niftynial.

"Generic footage of a German panzer division parading in Paris, 1940."

And contrast.

Gather the Bones, XIX: Another Roadside Attraction

The Roadside Attraction Formerly Known as Bedrock City. Source. I remember reading the memoirs of an old B.C. forester, in which he described walking from Hope to Princeton over the old Dewdney Trail, now the Hope-Princeton Highway segment of Highway 3, in the mid-20s. He was young, and even though it took two-and-a-half days, it was still faster than taking the train through the Fraser Canyon and up to Kamloops, and then down through the Okanagan to his destination of Penticton. Walking. 

In the 21 February, 1946 issue of Newsweek, Our Editors took a break from "news significance" to give (Kentucky) Colonel Fain White King some free publicity in his campaign to sell his "Buried City" roadside attraction just outside the very small town of Wickliffe, Kentucky. (It's officially "part of the Paducah, KY-IN Micropolitan region." Micropolitan.) in the far southwest of the state, just above the delta. 

Currently for sale on Amazon.

And if you're wondering why I'm racing to put a blog post up about a news event in late February, 1946 on a Saturday morning before I leave for work --Actually, when I put it that way, you're not wondering.

Postblogging Technology, January 1946, I: No Pessimism, Please. We're British

A fortunate 1946 to all!

My Lord:

The seasons have come  around again, at least insofar as they do in Santa Clara. (It is not hot, so it must be winter!) Now it is orange harvest. As I sit in the study, overlooking the guest house and the back, Michael yells hoarse orders in Spanish, the smell of boiling  marmalade is everywhere, and the sound of hammers on packing crates makes it very hard to read dry, boring technical journals. Fortunately, as I have learned from the Luce press, when you are not in a mood to produce serious copy, you can write a rambly introduction full of purple prose and references to the turning seasons. (If you are wondering, and care, your allotment of marmalade is coming by sea, via Montreal, in March.) 

With orange boxes rattling away to Chinese groceries on bare-tired Model Ts. one's mind turns to preparations for Lunar New Year, and the sad moment when we must say goodbye to my step-mother. Father has been called away to Ottawa to explain once again that nothing the Russians can detect from their embassy there will tell them anything about what is going on at Chalk River. Everyone is archly mysterious about it all, but I gather that a secretary from the embassy has sought protection from the Canadians, and has passed on some information to the effect of nefarious Red spies ferreting out secrets entrusted to Canada by London and Washington. We are informed that a parallel case is progressing in Washington, and there is a fever in Virginia to have the sense wrung out of the Russian ciphers. 

We will be celebrating with Uncle Henry this year. Aunt Beth's condition is progressing rapidly, and her doctors will not be able to keep her comfortable for much longer. She had a heart attack in October, which, I am told, is a common symptom if her condition, as is her increasing confusion. So her son is bringing his wife, and his little daughter. This means that we will celebrate it as a "Late Robbie Burns Day," in tribute to Great-Grandfather's little joke.  What Mrs. Edgar will make of it all, I can scarcely guess. She is aware that she is not to talk about Aunt Beth's side of the family, but, hopefully, supposes it to be about the touch of the sagebrush and, behind it, the hint of assorted land scandals.  A family bound in secrets is a family united. One hopes. 

Speaking of old secrets, I have now made my rather sticky visit to the "Junior College." Donald was down-at-mouth at the idea of owing us a favour, but our condition was met, and "Miss V.C." will be permitted unrestricted access to the library and university archives, ostensibly to get a headstart on her senior thesis. Donald tells me that much of the money will be used as an investment, to support a "West Coast research institute," which will in turn support the university with its profits. I tried to talk him out of the idea --he frankly sounds like a confidence artist's dupe on the subject-- and the conversation ended in some heat. 

Forties tie!

Still, we have what we came for. Hopefully it will not all be rendered moot when we are allowed to buy the entire archives as scrap paper in the liquidation sale! As to what, exactly, "Miss V.C." is to find, that is another matter. Whatever dark secrets might have been suppressed, as between Bancroft's agents and Great-Grandfather's, they are hardly actionable today! But Grace is convinced that there would not have been so much effort spent on keeping them secret if they did not still matter. 

I did not task Donald with keeping the arrangement secret from the Engineer, as I did not expect him to honour the agreement even before harsh words were uttered on the chances of the university making good on something Lockheed has already given up on. Consequently, while I expect difficult moments with him when I see him next, at least he will not be under the impression that I was trying to keep secrets from him. (Just trying to implicate him in the Oregon Land Scanndal. That is so much better!) 

Ah, well. The Engineer is hardly happy anyway unless he is in a state of priggish outrage. At least with respect to his bastard, how far the apple falls from the tree! What I fear  is that he will throw over punctiliousness and secure the assistance of Koumintang assassins. I hope we have protected ourselves enough that I do not have to worry about a White Russian psychopath dismembering "Miss V.C." in the bath. The poor girl has been down-at-mouth enough since my brother left  (could it be?), and I do not want to be the one telling her that Wong Lee must accompany her to campus. Not to mention that Wong Lee has quite enough to do keeping up his business and his family life, especially with a granddaughter under foot, and now another child on the way. 

Pardon me, I do not wish to be indiscreet, but I thought, after dire talk of torso murders, that it would be better to end on a positive note, of new beginnings and good fortune at the turn of the Year of the Dog. I wish you and yours, therefore, luck and prosperity in the year to come.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

James.