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…

The Island Chronicles Part 6: Great Excitement

Day 15

I arrived this morning to find two squad cars parked in front of Mr. Savage’s encampment. To my surprise and relief, they are not there to arrest him. It turns out there was some excitement during the night.

Yesterday almost 300 sixth graders (two schools, 6 school buses) visited the Island, and Mr Savage spent considerable time with all of them. There was also heavy walk-on visitation as well. By day’s end he was understandably exhausted. Mr Savage is the sole actual resident of the Island. He has a canvas marquis tent erected near the job trailer that contains his cot and sleeping bag, a folding table and chairs, and his trunk and travelling bag.  It’s rough but comfortable.  Last evening just after sunset he found himself sitting in one of the folding chairs exhausted, sipping a beer and trying to muster up the energy to change out of his costume and warpaint and into jeans and a sweater. The tent flaps were closed, and he had just lit a small kerosene lamp. That’s when he heard the voices. There were apparently several people out skulking around the now empty parking lot.

Since he was entirely alone, he was of course concerned about the intentions of these clandestine visitors. He heard them enter the weatherport and look at the excavation. He heard them check the locked doors of the job trailer. Then he heard whispering voices right in front of his tent flaps! By this point Mr. Savage had devised a plan.

To fully appreciate what happened next, you must recall his appearance in reenactment regalia; last night that included the usual belt axe and large knife prominently displayed, as well as the breechcloth, fringed leggings, red hunting shirt, beaded sash, brass gorget, hair roach, feathers, scalp lock, etc. So it was that when Mr. Savage heard a voice say “I wonder what’s in here?” as a hand grasped the tent flap and jerked it aside, he leapt to his feet, extended his hands in the air above his head and shrieked

 “AIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

at the very top of his lungs!

Now, whatever the nocturnal visitors may have imagined might lay behind the closed tent flaps (even if they possessed very healthy imaginations) THAT was not on the list of possibilities.  Mr Savage never got a good look at them, but he did hear running feet in the parking lot. He made out several shadowy figures sprinting toward the Market Street Bridge, and he found a shoe that one young fellow had apparently run right out of.   

The cops and staff members were thoroughly amused by this picaresque tale, and one cop opined that they were probably looking for someone with one shoe. Another suggested they might also be looking for someone who had suffered an explosive and substantial bout of incontinence. At any rate, it would not require Dick Tracy to identify the perpetrators.

 All agreed that a return visit seemed unlikely.

One of our school visits today was from a large urban high school. It was a very sad visit. There’s nearly a hundred kids on two school buses, and there were a total of three adults (the two bus drivers and one teacher) accompanying them. Consequently most of the kids simply wandered away from the project and hung out near the baseball stadium concessions, or wandered over the bridge and into downtown. A small contingent, maybe 20 kids, took the tour.  Most of these were the “smart kids”, and one really stuck out. He was good looking, articulate, and a serious smart ass.  Lots of brains and lots of attitude were in evidence. He wore a football letter jacket, and a couple young ladies hung around him, showing great interest in him but none in archaeology. 

I was down in the tiger trap, interpreting a visible horizon that contained fire cracked rock, flakes of chert and rhyolite, and a projectile point, when this kid blurted out “But how do you know the river didn’t just wash those things in? You just said the whole island is a product of flooding. Why wouldn’t the flood also bring in those rocks and stuff?” There followed a prolonged and detailed discussion of kinetic energy, particle size, erosion and particle shape, and other aspects of hydrology and fluvial geomorphology. The kid considers and challenges every concept and statement. His girlfriends get bored and wander away. He comes down into the tiger trap and I show him the change in particle size (fining upward) that can help define individual flood events. He keeps questioning, postulating, probing. The conversation turns to radiometric dating, to artifact typology and ceramic seriation, to feature identification and interpretation, to the mechanics of culture change. The exchange is challenging, enervating, gratifying. It is why I do this.

I later discuss this kid with Mr. Savage, FD, and several other staffers, all of whom had similar encounters.  This young man in some way moved all of us, but our encounters were tinged with pathos. He could be the next truly brilliant archaeologist, or the next Einstein, or the President of the United States, or whatever. He is extremely bright, intellectually curious, and suspicious of convention. He is full of energy and promise. But his school is badly underfunded, does not challenge or nurture him or his classmates, and is sometimes dangerous. His neighborhood is poor, and drug traffic and violence are not uncommon.  A shocking percentage of young men from his world wind up in prison or in an early grave. Despite his obvious and formidable intellect, the odds are stacked against him and all of his classmates.

Like all archaeologists, I view the world through an historical and evolutionary lens. I know that cultural change and adaptation to evolving conditions are driven by need and circumstance, and shaped by tradition and social organization.  Critical adaptations have always been ignited by talented and forward thinking young folks who build on the experience and traditions of their elders and use their energy and smarts to innovate and lead.  Societies that don’t innovate and adapt collapse and die, sometimes abruptly. The archaeological record is full of them.

We live in a world that is changing at frightening speed and is fraught with ample opportunities for catastrophe. We need the energy and potential of youth to ensure our survival. When we allow our young folks to languish in poverty, ignore their education, limit their potential for growth, and subject them to violence, we do so at all of our peril.

I still think about that kid all the time and I frequently wonder what happened to him.

To be continued....

The Island Chronicles Part 5: Job Trailer Triptych

Day 13

I am hiding in the office, a five foot square divided corner of the job trailer that contains a small desk and a chair. There is electric service and I have plugged in my laptop computer. By mid-afternoon I must complete a two paragraph daily report to the World Wide Web from the Island (in the next millennium, these will come to be called blogs). I must also oversee the excavation block (7 by 5 meters), speak to 200 middle school kids in four groups of fifty at twenty to thirty minute intervals, and try to keep an eye on everything else down here.  Today it’s not going well due to interruptions. As it happens, like Scrooge, I am to be visited three times.

First it’s the Savage and FD. Being a pair of large and polar opposite personalities, they’re usually like oil and water, but today they have made common cause and have come to see me together.

“Sorry to bother you, but we have something important to ask.”

“I see…and what is it?”

“We would like to go to the hardware store and buy a length of heavy chain and a padlock.”

“Because…?”

“We want to lock up the port-a-jon.”

“Because…?”

“Well, if we don’t lock it up…people will use it!”

I try just sitting there and not saying anything, but this is a pair that can have a half-ton chunk of irony whiz right past their heads and shatter on the ground behind them without either of them noticing anything untoward.

One of them finally blurts out, “By people, we mean non-staff and volunteers.”

“You don’t think that folks other than us ever have to pee?”

“But they’ll make the port-o-jon dirty for the rest of us! People are pigs!’

…and so on. In the end, my calculus is that I have much to do, and the quickest way to get them to leave is to say yes. I extract a promise that they will leave the key in a place known to the staff so we can relieve ourselves. They finally go away, to begin constructing the replica Eastern Woodlands house and to send one of the technicians to the hardware store.

I type another two sentences and there is another knock. It’s Miss E…

“Yes?”

“Look, I know you’re busy, but I just thought I should tell you that if Mr. Savage puts his hand on me one more time, I’m going to punch his teeth straight down his throat! Are you OK with that?”

I am looking at this lovely and fiery young woman, and my head is full of twitching synapses that are making mostly incomplete connections. I point out that what she has proposed is rash and is not the approved procedure for dealing with an incidence of sexual harassment in government service. She replies that she is confident that her plan of action will get results, and less so about following the prescribed procedures.  In the end, after sitting there and blinking at her for a full minute, I decide that she’s probably correct.

“Alright.”

“Alright then!” She spins on her heel and walks out. I never hear anything else about it.

Back to my diary entry. If I can just get a couple more sentences down in the next five minutes, I can dump it onto a disk and go check everyone’s field notes before the next busload of kids arrives.  Donald, the photographer and web master from the museum, who has been wandering around the Island all morning taking pictures, will then take the disk to his office, and by evening there’ll be an entry about today’s efforts on the Island for the whole world to share.

But it ain’t to be.  There is another knock at the office door. Without waiting for a “come in” Mr. Savage flings the door open. He is livid…slobbering mad!  In full regalia and bristling as he is with weapons, he requires attention.

“What’s the matter?”

“You know what HE’s doing?”

“No…?”

“HE’s using a metal knife and a saw on those poles and the bark!  HE’s ruining the house!”

Clearly FD and Mr. Savage have reverted to the warm and fraternal bon ami that has characterized their relationship over the years.

“Come on now…Ruining it? How so?”

I have ignited the powder keg! He is now red as a tomato, his eyes bug out, his chest expands, and this loudest of men, screams in my face: “HE’S BUILDING IT LIKE…LIKE…LIKE A FUCKING WHITE MAN!!!!!!”

It’s of course unhelpful to point out that the reason for this may be that FD is as manifestly Caucasian as they get, but I can’t help myself.

Mr Savage storms out, and I throw in the towel on my little diary entry and grab my clipboard. It’s time to look in on the excavation, and get ready for some sixth graders…  

To be continued...

 

The Island Chronicles Part 4: Opening Day

Day 10

One of the innumerable sad realities of working in the public sector is the inflexibility of the organizational structure. To-wit: there is simply no way to recognize and/or reward high quality work and accumulated experience and expertise other than conveying supervisory status.  The problem is, of course, that there are innumerable accomplished folks who are more than deserving of a raise and recognition and who also have absolutely no aptitude for supervision. A good case example is our Chief.  The Chief is a frustrated academic archaeologist whose capacity for hard core research work is the stuff of legend. He has been known to refit and glue back together literally thousands of pieces of chipped flint and jasper to reconstruct the original pieces of raw material prehistoric craftsmen were fashioning into tools.

Think about that.  

Because of his research accomplishments, his boss, Queen B, promoted him to supervisor. The chief has publicly opined on a number of occasions (most of them involving beer) that he doesn’t think he is a very good supervisor because he really doesn’t like people all that much. So it is that hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t provide some evidence that this opinion is well founded.

 Opening day has arrived here on the Island. The press has gathered, the excavation is camera ready. Mr. Savage has arrived and set up his reenacted Native encampment along the west edge of the parking lot. A busload of 50 middle school kids and their teachers are in attendance. The volunteers and staff have assembled. A podium and P.A. have been set up. The dignitaries are on-site. The list of luminaries include the Commonwealth’s First Lady, the Mayor, the President of the state archaeological society,  the Executive Director (who apparently survived his annual review)  and all of the agency Commissioners, including the Prince.  At a few minutes to 9:00AM we are all milling about waiting for the speeches and formal opening ceremony to begin when the Prince spots the archaeology society President in the crowd. As it happens, this man used to work for the Prince, and they had an unfortunate and extremely acrimonious falling out a number of years ago. The Prince’s face darkens, and he glares at the Chief, who is standing in front of him, and snarls “If that shithead gets within five feet of me, I’ll snap his fucking neck!”  The Chief goes white as a sheet and begins blinking rapidly, then turns to FD and me and says “Take care of this.”  He then walks away and heads for his car.

FD and I look at each other, and engage in a brief conversation.

“What do you think that means?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you suppose we should do?”

“Beat’s me!”

…etc. 

Eventually FD gently walks the Prince over to one edge of the crowd, while I walk the President, now sweating in terror having glimpsed his former boss’s threatening glare, to the opposite edge. We adjust the speaking order so that they do not follow each other at the podium, and the opening remarks (the typical lengthy litany of banal and harmless inanities) go off without a hitch.  Soon we have packed the President safely into his car and sent him home.  It is time for the first tour of the project.

These begin with me or one of the other staff holding forth for 15 minutes on the Island’s formation and long history from inside the excavation block. I will give this talk approximately 40 or 50 times by the time the project closes in a couple weeks. There are small variations each time, but by the time we close up I will be able to give it in my sleep, or near delirious from exhaustion, or probably drunk.  Most of my crew can also do it, and they sometimes amuse themselves with devastating and spot-on impressions of me, often substituting some ribald, sidesplitting and unfortunate dialog in place of the scripted comments. They think I don’t know about this, and I never let on that I do.

Following the talk, the group proceeds to the west edge of the Island where they encounter the Savage in full regalia: handmade moccasins, wool and deer hide leggings, breech cloth and belt, a mid-thigh length gingham hunting shirt and beaded sash with a belt axe tucked in it, a red wool British officer’s coat if the weather is cold, with a handmade iron knife in a sheath around his neck, a brightly colored porcupine roach and turkey feathers in a carefully groomed scalplock (his head is otherwise shaved) and sometimes face paint if he’s feeling frisky. The overall effect, especially on kids, is just amazing. He demonstrates flint knapping, the plaiting of cordage and weaving of nets, and the manufacture of ceramics. There is also a native garden with heirloom varieties of maize, beans and pumpkins (planted by a volunteer in the previous spring) to interpret, and a log that is at the earliest stage of being burned and scraped into a dugout canoe. Educators from the State Museum take the kids through an exercise in grid mapping and artifact interpretation. Later in the week, Mr Savage and FD will be erecting a small storage or multi-purpose structure and a larger Eastern Woodland house from posts and poles, cordage and bark.  These demonstration projects really serve to put the artifacts and features encountered in the site into a more accessible context, and the kids and older visitors are always transfixed.

Finally there is the book sales and information tent where a variety of archaeological and historical books and periodicals, as well as Mr. Savage’s beadwork, can be purchased. At one point we had actually asked if a more formal kiosk could be constructed for this purpose by the good folks in the museum exhibits shop. Unfortunately they handed the project to an exhibit designer who was newly divorced and had much on his mind. He modeled his design on the Pennsylvania State Museum which is of concrete and light colored stone masonry, round and domed.  The resulting design was a pale eight foot tall domed and elongated cylinder which bore a shocking and unmistakable resemblance to a gigantic marital aid. A prominent feature of this distinctive design was a pair of doors that opened in the middle of it to reveal a sales desk. Mr. Savage, on viewing a scale drawing, offered to sit inside with a sign hanging in front offering “Kisses: $2.00”.  Mercifully, we caught it before it went to construction.

Following the tour, I am standing in the excavation block with the Prince, discussing the fine points of site stratigraphy when we hear an engine start. We look up and out the open end of the weatherport to see a large white passenger van, with the Executive Director at the wheel, pulling out of the parking lot with all of the commissioners on board save one; the one standing next to me in the excavation.  The State Museum is a mile and a half away. The Prince is stranded on the Island and none too happy about it.

“That BASTARD! He’s stranded me here! And he’s taken my things!!!”

He looked like he was ready to tear someone to pieces, maybe me.  What to do!? Then I remembered that AW, one of the other staff archaeologists, had his truck in the parking lot.  AW was living the bachelor life at the time. One of the results was disdain for certain civilized conventions. For example, whenever he traveled somewhere in his truck, and happened to finish a pack of smokes, a cup of coffee, a soda, a sandwich, etc., the trash simply went on the passenger side floor. 

As I mentioned before, the Prince has a profound-going-on-pathological dislike of dirt (he literally did white glove inspections of department field vehicles). When he opened the passenger side door of AW’s vehicle, he was greeted with a cascade of garbage that soiled his trouser cuffs. AW somewhat sheepishly noted that he was sorry but that his rig had “…become a bit of a pigsty.” As he entered the vehicle the Prince glared pointedly at me and while replying to AW in a dangerous sounding growl “Indeed!”

I had the camera trained on him and clicked the shutter as AW put her in gear and drove off toward the museum.  Must have been some ride…

To be continued...