The Island Chronicles Part 3: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

Day 8

I begin my day doing something incredibly risky. We are erecting the last weatherport over the open excavation block. The arch tops are held together with pin connecting spanners that must be linked together at the top of the arch, 15 feet in the air. I am perched atop a 12 foot folding ladder, with two of its feet placed on planks that span the excavation block, which is a meter or so deep in most places, deeper in others. OSHA would, without a doubt, put me in prison, but somebody has to do it. As I concentrate on slipping two of the members together I feel a shudder in the ladder. Looking down, I see that the legs are now firmly supported by none other than Beelzebub…The Prince of Darkness himself has arrived! I scramble swiftly down the ladder.

The Prince is one of the most well known figures in American Archaeology. With primary research interests in Ice Age archaeology and in textiles and basketry, he runs a substantial archaeological consultancy out of a small private university. The nickname is based partly on appearance and partly on behavior. Like FD, he is of middling height, has spent a lifetime lifting weights, and looks like it. He adorns this overwrought physique with black jeans, black t-shirt, black jacket, black crosstrainers, black shades, formerly black and now salt and pepper beard and hair. His preternaturally deep and growling voice quite literally sounds like Darth Vader.  Intimidating doesn’t begin to adequately describe the complete effect.  While he is famous for terrorizing grad students and colleagues, he is also a wonderful public speaker, a gifted teacher, and a brilliant and funny conversationalist. He serves as one of the Commissioners of the agency I work for, and will be participating in our opening ceremony in two days time. He’s also here to give our poor, dumb and bumbling Executive Director his annual performance review.  I get the impression that this will be something like a slow and bitter execution, and that the Prince is going to enjoy it. In the meantime, he’s down here to help.

I’m glad he is.  We still have to put the gigantic skin on this weatherport, finish setting up the demonstration area that Mr. W will occupy, set the lab up, and most importantly, complete the preparation of the Tiger Trap.  The north wall of this huge, triangular hole in the parking lot is set up for profiling.  Perpendicular to the river and nearly 7 meters across and four deep, the wall profile depicts the complete alluvial history of the island, a landform built entirely of roughly 10 millennia of flood deposits. The wall profile is as plumb as the wall of a building.  FD strung a series of plumb bobs along the top of the profile, then using the plumblines and some tape measures as his guides, he and several volunteers and crewmembers shaved the profile with sharp trowels and shovels.   The many layers of flood deposits, buried landscapes, and Native American artifacts now clearly visible form a dramatic public exhibit and an invaluable source of hard data.  Unfortunately, the process of shaving down the profile has left many cubic yards of waste material that will have to be removed from the tiger trap before opening day.

There is no way to automate this process, since a backhoe would jeopardize all of FD’s careful work.  This does not stop FD from trying. Returning from a trip up to the museum, I catch him grasping the handles of a full wheelbarrow with several hundred pounds of soil that has a rope attached to the front bracket. As I watch in fascination and horror, he gives a signal and a crewmember guns the engine of the work truck.  The rope is tied to the bumper. The wheel barrow springs forward and FD sprints up the dirt ramp guiding the fishtailing wheelbarrow up to the parking lot. This is plainly so dangerous that even FD gets scared, so we don’t have to have a shouting match about it.  The decision is made to form a bucket brigade. Fortunately we have a large cadre of volunteers. There are the two Charlies, one in his thirties and one in his sixties, unrelated, who are known as the Charles the Younger and Charles the Elder. There is Charles the Younger’s wife Nurse Deborah. There is Santa (no explanation for this moniker required). There is Frank from the adjoining county historical society. There is Richard, now working on wife number five, who my female technicians have baptized Dirty Dick. There are half a dozen others.  Most of these folks volunteer every year, and some of them have hundreds of hours logged out here. They do almost everything the paid staff does simply for the love of learning and to satisfy their interest in the past. We couldn’t do this without them!

Among the volunteers detailed to help with the bucket brigade is a high school senior named Miss J, who has volunteered for this project for the last two years.  J lives with her mom in a very rural county two hours north, and has been bitten very badly by the archaeology bug.  Although they are pretty poor, her mom always finds a way to get her down to Harrisburg for the project for at least a week every year, and her teachers and school principal agree that the educational value is high enough to excuse the absence.  This year, Miss J’s mom, Mrs. D has arrived with a gift for FD. 

Among FD’s many archaeological interests is the identification of animal bone from archaeological sites (AKA faunal analysis).  Faunal analysis requires a good comparative collection of modern animal bone to use for the identification of archaeological examples.  It is also worth noting at this point that among FD’s numerous personality quirks is something of a cleanliness fetish (a quirk he seems to share, oddly enough, with the Prince; maybe it’s the weightlifting).  His home, vehicle and office are always absolutely spotless.  Mrs D appears to have something of a crush on FD, and perhaps hoping to win his favor, pulls a substantial Rubbermaid container out of her truck.  She explains that it’s a gift just for him.  He politely accepts it, and with a curious grin peels open the lid.  Mrs D declares “I got him right between the eyes from the back porch of the trailer; I figured you could add it to your comparative collection.” Inside the container is a coyote, entire, that was dispatched with a 30-30 about a week or ten days back and stored in an unrefrigerated shed.  Upon encountering this “gift” FD’s hair almost literally stands on end.  With a breathtaking display of willpower, he keeps it together, and thanks Mrs D graciously for her kindness.  As soon as she is out of sight, he hands the container and its grisly contents to one of the field technicians and instructs him to dig a deep hole over on the West edge of the island and inter it there. Maybe someday, somebody will find it.

 The bucket brigade for the tiger trap begins at 3:00 in the afternoon. We line up staff and volunteers four or five in a row passing 5 gallon buckets from the huge pile of soil in the bottom of the trench up the packed dirt ramp to the parking lot where they are dumped in a wheelbarrow and hauled off to the back dirt pile. The buckets are tossed back into the trench and filled again. We all rotate from shoveling to passing buckets to pushing wheelbarrows.  It is brutal, mind numbing, backbreaking work, but it has to be done if we’re to be ready for opening day. The dinner hour passes. Eventually we bring out lights and a generator, and keep going. At a certain point Miss J finds herself in the bucket line next to one of my very best and most long suffering field technicians, Mr. R.  J is now 17 years old, and has blossomed into a very attractive young lady, and she clearly finds the 20-something R fascinating. Despite the filth, sweat, and exhaustion, she flirts shamelessly with him, and his discomfort is palpable. Eventually she blurts out “OOOO, you have such beautiful dark hair and eyes! Are you Italian? You know what they say about those Italian guys!”

R, who is of Polish extraction, looks desperately at me, and I decide to come to his rescue, perhaps because I am genetically qualified.

“J!!! My mom was born in Italy!!! What ‘they’ say about Italian guys is horseshit! Go back to work and leave him alone!”

J blushes scarlet, the Prince of Darkness, who is shoving wheelbarrows and is also of Italian ancestry, howls with laughter, and everyone else does too. The laughter peels out from the floodlit backhoe trench, into the autumn night and across the water.

To be continued...