Day 30
Today was our last day out here, and I came to a momentous
decision.
I was out by the west edge of the parking lot, all alone,
prying up the heavy base of a weatherport with a 20 pound iron wrecking bar.
The Chief pulled up in his ancient Toyota, clearly flustered and exorcised, and
began a loud and profane rant berating me for asking for a week of leave after
30 straight days of work. As I stood
there staring at him while he snarled and yelled in my face, I gradually quit
listening, and smiled at him. This made
him yell louder, but it no longer mattered. A great weight had been lifted from
my shoulders.
I had decided to murder him.
I would use the wrecking bar of course, for the satisfying,
hands on brutality of it. I would then hide his corpse in an old steel barrel I
had found on the riverbank. There was a chance it might not fit, but FD had
left the chainsaw in the job trailer, so I could make it fit.
I calmed down of course. It dawned on me that I would not
thrive in a penitentiary. In the sex-for-cigarettes
economy, I fear I would find myself on the supply side. It also occurred to me that the Chief’s ill
temper was not entirely a product of his limited suite of social skills. In
part, it came from the stress of trying to provide some modicum of protection
and consideration for the Commonwealth’s archaeological sites. There is no shortage of daunting and
frustrating problems; a tiny budget and staff, weak laws and regulations, an
uninformed and disinterested public, greedy and shortsighted project sponsors
and program managers, corrupt and ambitious politicians, a Byzantine and
unsupportive bureaucracy. It’s also very hard to make a persuasive argument for
preservation when your buried heritage suffers from an ailment euphemistically
known as “Mesa Verde Syndrome”. In much
of the Eastern US, and in many other parts of the world, some of the largest, most
important and most spectacular archaeological sites have no visible evidence
above the ground. From huge Susquehannock settlements, to Ice Age Indian
encampments, to Civil War battlefields, there is no cliff side pueblo to marvel
at. There is, instead, a cornfield or a patch of woods, or a parking lot. The
archaeologist and preservationist must conjure up vanished worlds and people
from a field of beans. As often as not, the public yawns, looks around a
little, and walks away.
It would frustrate a saint, and as I have said before, the
Chief ain’t Mother Theresa.
So I deliberately squatted down, and placed the wrecking bar
flat on the pavement, then stood up, turned my back while the tirade continued,
and walked to the fringe of woods at the edge of the parking lot, where I
struck a trail that led down to the river. He didn’t follow me into the woods,
which probably saved both of us from real trouble. When I came out about 15
minutes later, I had cooled off and he was gone.
The very last task for us to perform prior to leaving the
island for the year is to hand shovel a small dumptruck load of sand atop the 6
mil plastic liner we have put into the block. The sand will cushion the
excavated surface from the gravel and asphalt to follow. Most of the staff is
now engaged in cleaning and putting away the mountain of tools, equipment, soil
samples, charcoal samples, field notes and artifacts we’ve used and generated in
the last month. This year shoveling the
sand falls to Miss J, one of our permanent staffers, and to me. Right after
lunch we attack the sand pile with shovels and a wheelbarrow. It’s good,
honest, and somewhat mindless work, and it takes us two or three hours on a
cool, bluebird October afternoon. As we shovel, we talk about this year’s
project, about Miss J’s impending wedding to AW, about the November election,
about our profession. The pile steadily shrinks, and almost before we know it,
it’s gone.
Miss J lights a cigarette, puts one hand on a hip while
leaning on her shovel and says,
“Well! The sand’s all.”
“Huh? All, what?
“You know…All!”
She explains the term. Her family came to Pennsylvania in
the great wave of German Anabaptists that arrived in the port of Philadelphia
in the early 18th century.
The odd turn of phrase means the sand is all gone, and it’s an
expression endemic to Pennsylvania Germans. She uses the phrase, and other ethnic
expressions, with pride. She’s not a Mennonite, and she doesn’t drive a buggy
or wear a bonnet, but she knows who she is and where she came from, and draws
strength from deep roots in this landscape.
Me too. My Dad’s people came here from Ulster in the decades
following the Battle of the Boyne. They have
been in the South Mountain country of Cumberland, York, Adams and Franklin
counties, where I live now, ever since. Those
generations of flinty, clannish and combative Scots Irish people were very
different from the college educated 21st century author of this journal,
but make no mistake, I am of them. When I find determination, adventurousness,
love of kin and poetry and music and whiskey in myself, I am drawing at least
some of it from them. I am anchored
here.
The Stone Age camps of Native People anchor all of us in
deeper water. If we could step back into their world, there would no doubt be
shock at how different they looked and sounded and behaved and thought, but
there would also be surprise at commonalities large and small. One of the
artifacts from the Island is a stone point or knife that has been resharpened
and touched up until its blade is half as wide as it originally was. In my jeans
pocket is an old Barlow pocket knife that belonged to my grandfather. I keep it
sharp, and it is now half worn away from lapping against a whetstone. I have something in common with this man who
camped out here 3500 years ago, a commonality we’d both recognize from
examining each other’s pocket knives. We’re not so different him and I; we’d
have much to talk about.
One of the problems the preservation and study of
archaeology has is a societal insistence on valuing everything monetarily.
Archaeologists and preservationists have caught this disease like everyone
else, and we tend to tout the value of heritage in terms of tourist dollars, TV
ratings, website hits, twitter followers, and so on. In my opinion, this masks and can even
undermine the real value of understanding and caring for the past. Heritage is
important because it connects us across time and space, and connects us to
places and to each other. It lets us see the challenges and triumphs and
failures of our predecessors, and affords us a chance to learn from them. An
honest and wide eyed look deep into our heritage can only lead to the
conclusion that far more important than our politics or our ethnicity or our technology
or our beliefs is our humanity. The lives we lead and have led for millennia on
this strange, blue and lovely planet are woven tightly together by common
experience, by our care and love and hope for our children, by our respect and
admiration for our elders, by our delight in a blue sky or a nice meal or a story
well told or the arms of our loved ones. We are informed by our own and by everyone else’s
past; it’s a gift too dear to value in dollars. It’s a gift worth working for a
solid month to share.
Miss J and I gather up the last of the tools and odds and
ends, and put them in the truck. After a last look around, we drive away from
the Island for the last time this year. Later this afternoon, a truck will come
for the job trailer. Shortly thereafter, the city will repave the excavation
block, and tomorrow morning people will be parking on it. If they
don’t notice the fresh asphalt, they’ll never even know we were here.
My deepest and most sincere thanks to the many staffers and volunteers
and kids who worked at and visited the City Island project. It would not have happened
without you!
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