The Island Chronicles Part 7: A Tough Morning and a Trip to the Market

Day 18

This has not been a good morning.

There was a hard rain last night that I knew would likely flood the excavation block and possibly the tiger trap.  We are equipped with pumps and a generator, and we are all used to working on a river island, so we are prepared for this eventuality. But we weren’t quite prepared for everything, as it turned out.

I arrived before anyone else, and found a damp and surly Mr Savage shaking his head and dripping water from his feathers and finery. He’s mad at me because I “fired” his Delaware brother Dave from Dillsburg a couple days ago. While he wore more clothing when the weather cooled, and was very helpful in the dugout canoe construction, he rolled his own cigarettes and smoked them in front of visiting school children while lacing his home-spun interpretive talks with F-bombs. The kids, of course, loved it, but he had to go. The dugout work then largely fell to Dirty Dick.

 As it happened, Dirty Dick had decided late yesterday afternoon that the hard rain, predicted to last all night, would extinguish the fire going in the hull of the 18 foot long White Pine log that was beginning to look like a dugout canoe, so he didn’t extinguish it before he went home. The rain did extinguish the surface fire, but the hot coals beneath continued smoldering. By daylight we had a steaming and asymmetrical surfboard, the sidewalls having completely burned away, and all of our hard work with it! When Dick arrived he was inconsolable, and a lot of people were mad at him, but it was an honest mistake. Besides, that’s potentially not the worst thing that happened overnight.

The huge suspended tarp over the tiger trap filled with water like an immense balloon, and collapsed the wooden frame that held it. This bag of many hundreds of gallons of water was now suspended over the trench by a network of fixed lines. They were now so taut that they were, literally, singing. Miraculously, it didn’t burst, the trench beneath it was still pretty dry, and the lines hadn’t broken…yet!

More help arrived. As my field crew and FD filed in we reviewed the various messes the storm has created. The excavation block was in surprisingly good shape, requiring only a little pumping and the placement of some large electric fans to help dry it out. That was good because yesterday afternoon, FD and the crew completed removing an old, buried plowed horizon from the entire block, leaving intact beneath it the fossilized furrow marks of the last plowing of that part of the Island lined up in neat southwest to northeast rows like standing waves.  These plow bights reflect in the most concrete way the Island’s history as a farm in 19^th and 18^th centuries.

The excavation block looks like perfect, geometric art, without even a crumb of dirt out of place. It looks that way because after the painstaking excavation of the plowed horizon was complete, FD padded out into the excavation block in his socks yesterday afternoon with a shop vac and vacuumed up every last loose crumb of soil.

I’m not kidding.

After drying , the gameplan was to photograph it, and complete our mapping before proceeding into the next, and older plowed horizon below it.

Meanwhile, young Mr. R approached the collapsed tarp full of water on tip toes, a sump pump in his hand.  With incredible delicacy and dexterity, he lowered the pump a foot or so into the water without touching the tarp or any of the lines. He nodded his head, and one of the other kids threw a switch. The little pump sprang to life and water began to drain out of the outlet hose. With amazing care, R slowly lowered the pump every 10 minutes or so, carefully suspending it from a makeshift wooden arm he made from part of the collapsed frame. In a couple hours, the tarp was empty, and not a drop spilled into the tiger trap. The only long term consequence seems to have been that young Mr. R walked around on his tiptoes the rest of the morning, and was pretty jumpy whenever there were any loud sounds. While this project may lack funding, it doesn’t lack guile and talent.

Regrettably, while Mr. R has saved the tiger trap from the storm, no one can save the excavation block from the Chief.

Around 10:00 AM, right after a bus load of school kids came through the excavation area, and right after FD and I completed our photography, the Chief showed up. While we are all down here on the Island, the Chief is running interference for us back at the office, which means he is fielding angry and impatient phone calls and e-mails from surly developers, bureaucrats and political staffers.  They are all rather pointedly wondering when we’ll be getting to their projects so they can proceed with the permitting process and get on with the important work of paving the entire state. This is the sort of thing that would piss off a saint, and the Chief, as anyone will tell you, is not Mother Theresa! So he is a little testy and rash.

The Chief is a prehistorian.  As a consequence, he is only interested in the various Stone Age occupations of the Island, and has very little use for or understanding of the Island’s Euro-American history.  The sixth graders who were just here were amazed by and interested in the Island’s agricultural history. The Chief is not. 

“Look! There’s still pottery and glass and stuff in here! You’re not deep enough!”

“That’s because there’s a second plowzone in here. We’ll get through it.”

“Not in less that a week you won’t! Gimme a shovel!”

“But…”

He’s the boss, so we couldn’t really do much about it. He selected a one meter square in the middle of the block, tramped across FD’s vacuumed surface in his boots, and started digging furiously. FD looked like he was going to murder someone, and stormed off to the Savage’s encampment before he did.  A visitor stopped by and asked if archaeologists are supposed to dig like that, because it didn’t look like the archaeology shows he’s seen on Public TV where they use trowels and dental picks.  In about an hour the Chief has filled 8 five gallon buckets with shovel loads of the second plowzone. Suddenly he glanced at his watch and remembered that one of his kids had a school activity he’s supposed to be at. He ran off to his car leaving behind no field notes, 8 unscreened buckets of soil, a shovel, boot prints, and what looked like a bomb crater about a half meter deep.

I sighed very deeply, and asked four volunteers to start screening the dirt. I then asked young Mr. J to pull together some field notes, grab a trowel, and try to get this horrible mess sorted out. 

Ten minutes later, I found him holding a clipboard and just staring at the bomb crater. I finally lost my temper, although it was hardly J’s fault.

“Goddammit J, what are you doing!!!???”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not sure where to start or what to do!”

“Jesus H Christ J…It DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU DO!!! It’s bound to be an improvement over THAT!  JUST DO SOMETHING!!!”

The poor kid. 

We have all been working now for over two weeks straight, and everyone is getting punchy. I’ll apologize to Mr J later after I cool off. In the interim, I declare lunch hour and grab him, FD, and a few others and head to the farmer’s market for a bite to eat.

After a fine lunch at the market, I found myself standing at a green grocer’s display admiring all the wonderful produce that appears in the Susquehanna Valley in autumn. This included a bin of large purple bulbs of garlic and fresh Hawaiian ginger of the best quality. I had a generous fistful of each in my hands, and was already imagining the evening’s fabulous stir fry. Suddenly FD’s large square head appeared over my shoulder.

While FD is possibly the healthiest person I’ve ever known, it turns out he cannot successfully boil water. Staring suspiciously at the goodies in my hands he blurted out “What the hell’s that good for?”

Now FD had recently parted ways with a long-term girlfriend, so I figured I might pull his chain a bit. I glared back at him and replied

“This will put lead in your pencil!”

I got a blank stare in response.  Presently he replied

“But I don’t have anybody to write to!”

A sensible response! I suggested he could perhaps start keeping a diary.

Of course the field tech’s thought this exchange was the funniest thing they had ever heard. We all burst into loud howling like schoolkids and the green grocer made us leave because we were disturbing the other shoppers. Still hooting, we piled into the rig and headed back to the Island.

To be continued…