Who Am I? Who Are You?

The term motorist has been used over and over again to describe Rodney King. 

"Rodney King, the black motorist . . ."

"charged with using excessive force in arresting black motorist Rodney King  . . ."

 I don't think I've ever actually said the word 'motorist' in a sentence, but somehow King will be forever known as 'motorist Rodney King.'

I mention this because we are all victims of labels - labels others use about us and labels we use about others.  I suspect that categorizing things we see is part of our DNA.  It is an important survival tool to quickly determine whether something approaching us is dangerous or not.  But once we've labeled another person, we no longer have to figure them out.   The label(s) we connect them to allows us to stop thinking about who they are.  She's a doctor.  He's homeless.  A convict.  Each of those labels carries a huge amount of extraneous baggage that may or may not fit any particular individual we've so labeled.  Our understanding of other people is trapped in the labels we use as much as those others are trapped by others' labels of them. 

When I started this blog, I didn't want readers to look at my profile and get a convenient label that would allow them to judge what I wrote based on who they thought I was, derived from a few labels in the profile.   Instead I wanted people to evaluate what I had to say based on what I wrote.  And I figured if someone read enough posts, they'd start 'knowing' me in a far more meaningful way.

I know.  It's really frustrating.  You want to know if I'm young or old or in-between.  What work I do.  You want labels to capture who I am, to help you figure out what my writing means.   My name (Steve) reveals my sex.  And I do disclose where I live.  Since I started blogging, other bloggers and websites have identified my full name and profession.  And my posts, on occasion, reveal other tidbits about who I am.  I do acknowledge that the labels can be helpful.  And that my leaving them out makes you work harder to understand who I am, and more importantly, what I'm writing.  But I don't think hard work is a bad thing and that it gives us more authentic knowledge of people and ideas.   

Think about the labels you use to tell others who you are.  They give people a short cut to knowing who you are.  But does 'nurse' or 'pilot' or 'fast food cook' really convey who you are?  Do you ever hide labels or choose a more favorable version?  I suspect mostly labels tell us where in the societal pecking order you are.  They tell me how much deference I should or shouldn't give you.  They don't really tell me who you are.

I'm particularly fond of, and influenced by, anthropologist Clifford Geertz' concept of 'thick description.'  Here's a take on it from historian Dr. Christopher Knowles' blog How It Really Was*:

‘Thick Description’ is a term used by the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In an essay on: ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, he explained that his understanding of the culture of a people was not their "total way of life" or "a storehouse of learning", let alone their art, music or literature, but ‘webs of significance’, writing that:

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

Geertz described how he had taken the term ‘Thick Description’ from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who distinguished between a ‘thin description’ of, for example, a physical action, and a ‘thick description’ which includes the context: when and where the action took place, who performed it and their intentions in doing so. For example, the same physical act of someone "rapidly raising and lowering their right eyelid" could be a nervous twitch, a deliberate wink to attract attention or communicate with someone, or an imitation or mockery of someone else with a nervous twitch or winking. It all depends on the context, the aims of the person performing the action, and how these were understood by others.

 I want you to dig a little deeper than simple labels.  Look at the webs I weave.  Who I am is really not all that important.  This, some might say, perverse, exercise I'm asking of you is also related to the underlying theme of this blog:  how do you know what you know?  I'm asking you to resist the easy path to a conclusion and to reexamine how you know things, know people, know yourself.  To turn over your assumptions and see what's lurking underneath.   

*Dr. Knowles, in his blog profile, also offers some advice that would contradict what I'm writing here:

"Before you study the history study the historian' as E H Carr said in his classic work 'What is History.' (Macmillan 1961). 'When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains, but with the historian who wrote it.'"

And this advice is good too.  But I'm asking you  to find the blogger, if you must, by studying the blog.  

[This post is part of an attempt on my part, as this blog approaches its ninth anniversary, to update some of my descriptions of what this blog is about and who the blogger is.]

Looking For Queen Elizabeth II In Invisible Cities

Queen Elizabeth II from
National Portrait Gallery

The news of Queen Elizabeth II's death comes as I'm reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.  Calvino's book imagines the tales that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about the cities Polo had visited, many in Khan's empire, many not.  

Polo laments the impossibility of accurately describing these cities.  He raises questions about how to merge the past and the present,  the apparent and the invisible, the body and the soul of the cities he's visited.  Nothing is as it seems, or at least nothing of importance is.  His stories remind me of ethnographer Clifford Gertz' 'thick description".  The stories would suggest  caution taking too seriously the people explaining the meaning of Queen Elizabeth II's passing.

Let me give you an example. I also ask you to slow down.   Calvino wasted no words.  Read each word.  Maybe even read the passage twice.  

"In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions.  I could tell you how many steps up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs;  but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.  The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:  the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet;  the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession;  the height of that railing and the leap of the adutererer who climbed over it at dawn;  the tilt of the guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window;  the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared behind the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering;  the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.  A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past.  The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the blisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls." 

Queen Elizabeth is like a Calvino city.  Her death is not simply the death of one human being. It's a death in a monarchy that goes back more than a millennium.  It's the death of the heir to an empire that ruled much of the world, claiming the riches and labor of the people who were subjects of that ruling royal family.  While Queen Elizabeth II reigned longer than any other monarch in her family, she also reigned over the sharp decline of the empire and of the family's power and scope.  

Henry VIII image Wikipedia

"Queen Elizabeth II is the Church of England chief, officially known as the Supreme Governor, and sits at the helm of a centuries-old British institution established by the monarchy. Its founder was Tudor monarch King Henry VIII, one of the country's most infamous leaders, who created the breakaway institution after turning his back on Catholicism. Centuries later, the Queen has emerged as another landmark ruler who continues to honour the former King's religious practices. But people have questioned whether the two figures who share a throne also share blood.. . 

While there is no direct line between the two, the modern royals have a distant connection to the Tudors.

They owe their existence to Queen Margaret of Scotland, grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots, and King Henry VIII's sister."  (From Express)

 Henry VIII lived from 1491 - 1547. 

What is real and what is imagination?  What is real, but incomplete?  How many Queen Elizabeth IIs are there?  The one seen by her father King George VI?  Her's sister's Elizabeth.  Her husband's.  The views of her children and grandchildren.  There's Gandhi's Queen Elizabeth. Nelson Mandela's? John F. Kennedy's? Churchill's?   Marilyn Monroe's or Elton John's? And every British subject has their own version of the Queen.  

Shakespeare wrote a plays about Henry VIII.  Netflix aired a television series about Elizabeth II.

Where lies the true Elizabeth II?  Nowhere and everywhere would be Calvino's Marco Polo's answer.  

Invisible Cities also includes descriptions of conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.  
In this excerpt I'm only using Kublai Khan's thoughts.  For perspective, Khan lived from 1215 - 1294.  Calvino wrote about him in the 20th Century.

Kublai Khan from WikePedia

"From the high balustrade of the palace the Great Khan watches his empire grow.  First the line of the boundaries had expanded to embrace conquered territories, but the regiments' advance encountered half-deserted regions, scrubby villages of huts, marshes where the rice refused to sprout, emaciated peoples, dried rivers, reeds.  "My empire has grown too far toward the outside.  It is time,"  the Khan thought, "for it to grow within itself," and he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing in landslips with glistening nuggets.  

Now many seasons of abundance have filled the granaries.  The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces.  caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent.  The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weight upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous.

"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness."

Aleutian Weather - Shell Should Have Known

With Shell's regular mention of the terrible weather when they talk about the Kulluk's problems, it seems appropriate to dip once more into Brian Garfield's Thousand Mile War where he discusses the weather conditions during WW II when the Japanese and Americans fought in the Aleutians. The Americans (and the Japanese) lost far more planes and pilots and ships to the weather and terrain than they lost to enemy fire.

"It was dreary but seldom calm, Corporal Dashiell Hammett wrote:  "There was a guage to measure the wind, but it only measured up to 110 miles and hour, and that was not always enough."

At Cold Bay, soldiers for the 260th Transportation Battalion built a hut for their day room (with 6X6 studs and joists stolen on a moonlight requisitioning sortie from Navy ships).  Wind rolled the building away.  The soldiers set it right-side-up and anchored it down with steel cables imbedded in concrete.  After that the hut stayed put, but it was the only permanent above-ground structure in the area.  Throughout the Aleutians in the next two years, the rule was dugout architecture. . .

The weather, "Made in Japan,"  lent truth to standard jokes:  "It's too thick to fly if you can't see your co-pilot."
"Stick your hand out.  If it touches a ship's mast, you're flying too low."
One pilot claimed he followed a duck because he knew it wouldn't fly into a cliff.  Unmak used "a 500 pound bomb for a windsock."  A PBY pilot claimed a seagull landed on his wing;  convinced that weather too thick for Hannibal the Hitch-Hiking Gull was too thick for a PBY, the pilot landed his seaplane on the water, and watched the gull jump off and go away - swimming.  (p. 125)

The stories were not always apocryphal.  It wasn't unusual for flights of B-17s to fly at 25-foot altitudes, so that pilots could follow the sea wake of the airblast from the leading plane's propellers.  On a socked in July day, three bombers landed at Cold Bay at six-minute intervals:  the first found the runway fogged in, the second found a clear 5000 foot ceiling and landed easily, and the third couldn't find the field in the fog.  "The weather," wrote Wheeler, "goes up and down like a whore's drawers."  (pp. 125-126)

Headwinds sometimes made it six hours to target and two hours back.  The noisy wind often blew west at one end of the runway and east at the other.  In a signle cloud front, a bomber could pick up a ton of ice.

At Umnak, PFC Edward O. Stephens invented a wind-driven washing machine.  Others boiled their laundry in discarded metal drums.  When they hung clothes out, they took three days or more to dry. . .

From Cold Bay and Umnak the air warriors saddled the weather and rode it out to Kiska and, usually, back home.  It was a hell unlike any other. Constant turbulence tossed airplanes like kites.  Ground crew mechanics learned to hate the unstable Aleutian air.  It twisted airframes, wrecked fuselages, stretched and loosened rivets, bent wings.  It shook up cockpit instruments and threw them out of whack.  It clogged carburetors.  It loosened window seals, rusted landing-gear oleos, ruined fuel lines, shook engine mounts loose, gummed guns, froze bomb-bay rack releases, and fouled hydraulic systems.  It killed.

The groundling grease monkeys seemed to keep the planes flying with nothing but skyhooks, rolling their own spare parts with hand-bellows forges and hammers, maintaining aircraft outdoors in williwawas with only flashlights  and truck headlamps for illumination.  The chief stockpile of repair parts was wrecked planes.  There were no inspectors, but the ground crews never failed to make a repairable plane airworthy within twenty-four hours.  It sometimes took four back-breaking hours in gale winds to refuel a B-17 by hand, pouring gas through a chamois filter.  Colonel Everett S. Davis wrote to Hap Arnold, "Don't figure on getting any serviceable planes back from us.  We have been hard on them." (p. 126)

The kind of weather the Kulluk encountered is nothing out of the ordinary.    It's nothing that Shell's contingency plans shouldn't have planned for.

And the book's description of the war is in sharp contrast to the heroic and nationalistic tone of this Academy Award winning 1943 documentary about the airbase in Adak that bombed the Japanese base in Kiska daily.  The end of the film shows an actual bombing raid from Adak to Kiska.




This original comes from the internet archives which has this description:

Director John Huston, while a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1943, creates an Academy Award winning documentary, which he narrates with assistance from his actor father Walter, treating of the Armed Forces' successful effort to prevent the fall of the Aleutian Islands to advancing Japanese troops who had captured several islets. Although no claim can be reasonably made that this location was of major strategic importance during the War, it presented enormous tactical and logistic difficulty for those assigned there, and Huston's color film demonstrates the determined ensemble work upon the outpost of Adak by a wide range of military specialists who combat loneliness and boredom along with notably severe weather conditions. The work was made over a six month period, and is climaxed by the preparations for, followed by an actual filming of, a bombing run over Japanese-occupied Kiska, wherein Huston nearly lost his life, and which is significant for its combat footage and for the atmosphere of suspense present in the viewer who wonders if all will return safely.

It's very much a war propaganda movie making this sound much better than they were, as this comment reflects:

Reviewer: jimelena - 3.00 out of 5 stars - December 2, 2005 Subject: Progadanda. My dad was in the Aleutians during WWII so I watched this. This is a propaganda film. It does not begin to relate the huge mistakes made, the tragedy upon tragedy, or the reasons why it is known as "the forgotton war". Maybe someday the truth will come out but even 60 years after it is still too sad, too horrible, to be remembered for what it was.

  The Shell announcements about the Kulluk have the same flavor as the movie. They acknowledge problems (the movie even showed a burial of a pilot) but everyone is a hero, cooperating 100%, to achieve the goal. The book tells a very different story. 

All The King's Men - Setting The Atmosphere For The Story Of A Popular Corrupt Politician

The first chapter of Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel about Louisiana's Huey Long is 72 pages.  It's richly descriptive, setting the scene in 1920s rural Louisiana.  For those who are checking their screens every minute or two, the pace and detail require a mental adjustment.  It felt like landing in a foreign country  and having to slow my mind's pace and recalibrate to different cultural meanings.

"Then we saw the house.
It was set on a little rise, a biggish box of a house, two-story, rectangular, gray, and unpainted, with a tin roof, unpainted too and giving off blazes under the sun for it was new and the rust hadn't bitten down into it yet, and a big chimney at each end.  We pulled up to the gate.  The house was set up close to the road, with a good hog-wire fence around the not very big yard, and with some crepe myrtles in bloom the color of raspberry ice cream and looking cool in the heat in the corner of the yard and one live oak, nothing to brag on and dying on one side, in front of the house, and a couple of magnolias off to one side with rustiy-looking tinny leaves.  There wasn't much grass in the yard, and a half dozen hens wallowed and fluffed and cuck-cucked in the dust under the magnolia trees.  A big white hairy dog like a collie or a shepherd was lying on the front porch, a little one-story front porch that looked stuck on the bo of the house, like an afterthought.

"It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration.  She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks off into the distance and she listens to the flies.  That was the kind of house it was." (p. 33)  

The cinematographer who makes the movie has everything spelled out for her.

A Hemingway might have written:

"They approached a house with trees in front."

But Warren still has a couple more paragraphs before they get into the house.  It makes me think of Clifford Geertz'  "thick description" as he describes how anthropologists uncover layers and layers  as they go from objectively documenting objects and actions to gaining insight to their meaning.

Warren knows this country and he's giving us a tour that will help us understand the characters - major and minor - and why they act as they do.

The house is Willie Stark's pappy's house.  They stop there and then Willie and the narrator, Jack Burden, go off into the night on some business.

"Way off from the road a barn would stick up out of the mist like a house sticking out of the rising water when the river breaks the levee.  Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in a mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of lights which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us.  The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning its head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-Almighty or Fate or me, if I were standing their knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods.
But I wasn't standing there in the field, in the dark, with the mist turning slowly around my knees and the ticking no-noise of the night inside my head.  I was in the car, headed back to Burden's Landing, which was named for the people from whom I got my name, and which was the place where I had been born and raised." (p. 55)

This was a time when people didn't have televisions.  Maybe radios.  Books.  Lots of time to sit around and talk with others.  

This first chapter introduces us to the key characters and to the country they live in.   As Jack and Willie arrive in Jack's home town, they are going to visit a judge who was like a second father to Jack.  Willie's not happy with the judge who has just endorsed a candidate Willie isn't backing.  We see in this encounter not only Willie squeezing the judge for a changes endorsement, but even more ruthlessly, how he uses Jack to help him humiliate Jack's old mentor.

It's late at night when Willie (aka The Boss) gets Jack to show him where Judge Irwin's house is and then pushes Jack to get them in.

"'Park out here,' the Boss said.  And then to me, "There's a light.  The bugger ain't in bed.  You go on and knock on the door and tell him I want to see him."
'Suppose he won't open up?'
'He will,' the Boss said, 'But if he won't you make him.  What the hell do I pay your for!'
I got out of the car and went in the gate and started up the shell walk under the black trees.  Then I heard the Boss coming after me.  We went up the walk with him just behind me, and up the gallery steps.
The Boss stood to one side, and I pulled open the screen and knocked on the door.  I knocked again; then looking in through the glass by the door I saw a door open off the hall -where the library was, I remembered - then a side light come on in the hall.  He was coming to the door.  I could see him through the glass while he fumbled with the lock.
'Yes?' he asked.
'Good evening, Judge,' I said.
He stood there blinking into the dark outside, trying to make out my face.
'It's Jack Burden,' I said.
'Well, well, Jack - well I'll be jiggered.'  And he put out his hand.  'Come in.' He even looked glad to see me. . . "

The next ten pages verbally film the interaction between the Boss, Jack, and Judge Irwin.  It's a cold, cunning, chilling encounter that probably isn't unlike some of the interactions between Trump's henchmen and his prey.  Though even the Boss has a lot more class than Trump.

All that foreshadowing was getting us to this meeting at the end the first chapter.  I'll give more details of that encounter tomorrow.

The Writing Prior To The Posting

It's been over 24 hours since my last post. It's not like I've run out of things to say. I have a stack of backed up posts on a variety of topics - thoughts on the Redistricting Board's submission to the Department of Justice, the Municipality's approach to Boards and Commissions, the movie "The Help", a bear we saw near Child's Glacier, the mayor's justification for being able to veto amendments to ordinances before the ordinance has passed, a story about housing problems in Kosovo, Moira Kalman and book covers, and on and on.  Some of these are already lengthy drafts. Some just  ideas.  Or photos.  I have a video of the bear.  But they just aren't ready.

While it may not always seem like it, I try to write these posts in a way that pinpoints the most important parts of the issue and follows Strunk and White's Elementary Principles of Composition.  (The link goes to Strunk's 1918 edition online.  The countless newer editions have more modern examples, but the basic advice is the same pithy insight into clearer writing.)

So, I write.  Maybe I'll put up some photos or a video.  As I write, new questions arise.  Or I see connections to other seemingly unrelated issues.  I'll google and check out background information.  Sometimes, but rarely, I'll make phone calls.   I revise.  Move stuff. Delete stuff.  Maybe it's repetitious or doesn't directly add to the story.  Though I do keep in a number of digressions that add context.  (I'm a big fan of Tristram Shandy (read paragraph 2 and the quote in the link) and I even did a post on Dickens' thoughts on meandering.  Clifford Geertz's thick description is another influence.)

When it seems close to complete, I'll push the preview button and read it there.  That leads to a long series of backs-and-forths between the post and the preview as I correct typos, cut out unnecessary verbiage, or have an entirely new thought about how to clarify a point. 

I could keep editing forever, because it's always improvable. But each change carries the possibility of new errors.  While I do this, to some extent, with every post, the more sensitive the topic, the more I work at it.  Eventually, there comes a point where I say, "OK, this is it.  I'll look at the preview one more time, but no more changes unless it's flat out wrong."  And even then I might see something I missed before which would be so much better if . . . and I revise it despite my 'last time' resolve.  [I know, some of you are thinking, "He does all that?  It must be really bad to start with."  It is.]


I don't have an editor to correct my overlooked typos or give me deadlines or assignments.  One of the best ADN reporters once told me the benefits (of no editor) far outweigh the drawbacks.  So this one is not a complaint.  Well, none are complaints, just explanations of what happens before something gets posted.

Some of these posts have been held up because I've tried to get a little more information. (Does anyone out there know if the Greater Anchorage Area Borough (GAAB) had a charter? And if it did, do you know where I can get a copy? I've talked to the Archives at UAA, the Alaskana Room at Loussac,  the State Archives in Juneau,  the Mayor of the GAAB, and the Municipal Clerk's office. They either said they didn't know or it would cost to do more research. Did I mention the Boundary Commission?)

Sometimes I just have to do something else for a while so my brain can sort things out without me disturbing it.  When I get back to it, a day or three later, it's all much clearer.  But it may also mean I have to start all over with a totally new structure. 

Sometimes other things present themselves to be blogged. They look like quick, easy posts (like this one did),  but usually turn out to have some twist that takes much longer than I intended.

And while I got 2 more gigabytes memory for my MacBook (another post to be written) my cursor has begun to skip to seemingly random places, to select what I've just typed, and then to delete it with the next stroke. If I type realllllllll slooooooooowly it doesn't happen as much.  And sometimes I get five minutes with no quirks. (This feral cursor would make an amusing video.)

And this is supposed to be fun, so sometimes I have to just leave a post awhile, until it's fun again, and not work.

And my wife offered a massage, which is always better than blogging.

"Faith is the most peculiar thing." Thoughts On Finishing Niall Williams' History of the Rain,

The first part of this post is really for people who have read the book.  Not because it gives

anything away, but because it's my attempt to distill the themes of the book, without really offering examples that might be a little more interesting  to someone who hasn't lived through the history of Virgil Swain and Mary McCarroll.  (Well, in the end,  I couldn't do it without a couple of examples.)


History of the Rain by Niall Williams is about the rain, the river, and the sea - and the water that moves from one to the other to keep the cycle going.  It's about the salmon that live in the river and the sea and return.  It's about fathers.  Fathers and sons and fathers and daughters and how, to know oneself,  one needs to know who your fathers (and to a lesser extent) mothers and grandparents were.  This, of course, overlaps the theme of rain, river, and sea being all of the same water.   Your identity is like the water in the rain that goes into the rivers, that flow into the sea, and then returns back as rain.  The whole of part one, chapter 12:

"Your blood is a river." (p. 99)

Mothers aren't ignored in this novel, and Williams acknowledges their contribution to one's identity, but in Ruth Swain's (the narrator) family, the women do the practical work of keeping things together - getting money, getting food on the table, nurturing poets.   Whole chapters are devoted to the paternal great grandfather, grandfather, and particularly the father of the narrator.  The maternal antecedents get much less attention.   Chapter 13, on page 100, a third of the way into the book,  begins, for instance,

"The drizzling dawn of my father's fourteenth birthday.  Abraham appeared in the big droughty bedroom and shook his son awake."  (p. 100)

Propitiously, he takes him to the river to go salmon fishing.  But it's not until the beginning of Chapter 14, that we learn

"When my father told it, they caught a salmon that day.
I think it is an imagined one, but I didn't say so.
From the look on y face he could tell.  'O Ruthie, you don't believe anything,' he said and crumpled his face to a small boy's dismay.
I do, Dad.  I do.  I believe everything." (p. 103)

Yet the mother's side doesn't start until part 2 chapter 1.  While it goes further back, there's much less detail on the immediate antecedents than on the father's side.

"By the year 520 Tommy says there were 9,046 Partholonians in Ireland.  Then in one week in May a horde of midges came, brought a plague and wiped them all out.
Except for one.
Tuan MacCarrill survived by becoming a salmon.
Fact.  It's in the History of Ireland." (p. 159)

If you remember Ruth's mother's name from up top - Mary McCarroll - it makes a little more sense.  And this apparently is part of Irish myth/history.  If you didn't remember her name, you're like me.  I had to start the book over again after I finished to catch the early parts where people and places were referenced that I had no context for. But which the book eventually fills in.

The book is about community - specifically the town of Faha,  Clare County, Ireland.  It's about how the people care for each other like family - not always getting along, but being there when needed.  A thought occurred - I will have to pay careful attention to see if it's accurate - that most books are about the people who leave, who go away and strike out on their own in new places.  This book is about the people who stay behind in the waterlogged town along the river Shannon.

The modern world of capitalism is kept at bay in the cities.  We hear about the impacts of the Irish bank failures, but in Faha the father can be a poet with no income and be respected for that.

It's about stories.  Stories are to families what the water is to the river.   The meaning in people's lives come from the stories  of their parents and grandparents  - about truths, what people remember, not necessarily what actually was.  About poetry and novels, about books and their writers and readers.  The same pattern here among the books one has read and their affect on what one writes, as the rain and river and sea, and grandparents and parents and oneself.

It's about knowing  - science, stories, faith, religion, God, literature, nature.   It's about fate and one's ability to shape one's own life.

It draws no clear lines, there are no winners and losers.  Everyone shines at some point and suffers at others.

It slowly tells us about the minute details that cumulatively make up one's life.  It reminds me of Clifford Geertz' methodology of thick description, for anthropologists to use to find the meaning of life in a community they are studying.

And to make the journey easier, the writing is exquisite.  It's like dropping into another country (well, I guess I was) where it takes a while to get used to the rhythms and cadence of the language and the way things are phrased.  The rich down-to-earth details kept me connected.

For example he writes about Mrs. Quinty, the teacher who saw promise in Ruth's writing and comes visiting when Ruth is ill to comfort and encourage her.  Mrs. Quinty's husband was gone.  (Be sure to read to the last sentence of the quote.)

"If Mr. Quinty had Passed On it would have been better.  If he had Gone to His Reward, Mrs. Quinty would cope;  she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe.  But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea, Wales, managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.
He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he's not Done yet." (pp. 9-10)

The sound of the stories and the language is from an older time, so when the reality of things like wi-fi flow by, it's a bit startling that this all takes place recently.

While this book is about a small rain soaked river town in Ireland, it's about every human community and it covers many themes of importance to everyone everywhere.  I started this post because of this quote about faith which I think we could all benefit from copying and passing out to people with faith in all varieties of beliefs.

"Faith is the most peculiar thing.  It's Number One in human mysteries.  Because how do you do it?  Where do you learn it?  For the Believers it doesn't matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there's no arguing.  Pythagoras's early life was spent as a cucumber.  And after that he lived as a sardine.  That's in Heraclitus.  That's what he believed*.  Besides the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks' Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks' kitchen and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don't want to tax Heaven.  Just in case.  That's in The Salmon in Ireland.  Birdie Clohessy believes her weight is all water.  Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things.  Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer.  With faith there's no arguing." (pp. 191-192)

*The Pythagoras reference is partly backed up here, but as I read it all, Heraclitus seems to have made up the vegetable and the fish to make light of Pythagoras.  I wanted to give you a Dunning-Kruger reference, but this Irish Times article seemed more appropriate given the book's locale.  And a little more, here's from the American Psychological Association.

I also wanted to write here about the importance of fathers, but I'll save that for another post.  Enough for now.

Walkable Cities Circa 1669

As we prepare for a trip to Paris, I've been doing some reading.  Joan DeJean's How Paris Became Paris  offers lots of history of how Paris became, in many eyes, the world's greatest city.  

Image of Louis XIV, 1661 from Wikipedia

Louis XIV began by conquering land controlled by the Spanish Netherlands which thus moved Paris
from a border city to a city more in the center of the country.  Then he built fortification along the country's new frontiers.  He then wanted to get rid of the walls that fortified Paris (and most other cities then) and open Paris up.

"At a time when other European cities remained as they had been for centuries, fortified units enclosed within walls designed for their protection . . . Louis XIV decided to redefine the city.
Rather than shore up the ragtag fortifications that surrounded his capital, as many were encouraging him to do, the king announced that france was in such a strong position militarily that Paris no longer needed to be enclosed with a system of defenses.  He ordered all of its walls demolished, parts had been built by his father, while other sections dated from the reign of Charles V in the fourteenth century.  This decision sounded the death knell for medieval Paris.
The king had the fortifications replaced with parallel rows of elms, what he later described as "a rampart of trees all around the city's rim."  The green wall was soon given a mission:  it was to sere as a cours, a gigantic walkway or space for communal walking - more than one hundred and twenty feet wide and extending, in the description of one of its architects, "in a straight line as far as the eye can see."

"In 1600, there was no public walking space in the city.  Then, with its sidewalks, the Pont Neuf had introduced Parisians to a new way of experiencing a city on foot, and the Pace Royale had given them their first recreational space.  Louis XIV applied these concepts on a citywide scale.  As a result, by 1700, Paris had become the original ret walking city, a place where people walked not just to get around but for pleasure." 

No wonder that, later in the 1700s, people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin enjoyed their time in Paris so much.  

In partnership with the official in charge of the royal finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and François Blondel, 'among the most brilliant architects of the age,'  Louis XIV transformed Paris.

"The city of which LouisXIV 'took possession' in 1660 still had the layout of a medieval city:  most of its streets were mere alleyways, narrow and dark.  This detail from Braun's 1572 map shows how such premodern streets functioned:  they helped people negotiate only their immediate neighborhood.  Indeed, in the early seventeenth century, the French word rue or street designated simply 'any passageway between houses or between walls.'  Late-seventeenth-century dictionaries further advised that 'when walking Paris, one should always take these big streets.'  In less than a century, the rebuilding of Paris had transformed the concept of a street."
"In the late sixteenth century, when municipal authorities first evoked the possibility of creating broader streets, anything over fifteen feet wide was considered impossibly huge.  By 1700, the French Royal Academy of Architecture had begun to establish norms: its members determined that a width of twenty-one feet was 'an absolute minimum.'  Several years later, Delamare noted that 'the average width of a Parisian street is now between thirty and thirty-two feet.'"

"When their plans made it necessary to demolish existing public works, in an early instance of what is now called historic preservation, the city's architects studied them carefully to determine their architectural merit.  Thus, in the case of the double Saint-Antoine gate, Blondel decided that one could be torn down but not the other, 'because of the beauty of its bas-reliefs' by noted sixteenth-centurysculptor Jean Goujon and of 'the exceptional design' of one of its archways.  The resulting blend of old and new was universally praised;  an eighteenth-century historian of the city still considered it 'the most successful of Paris' gates."

Porte Saint Antoine 1671 image from Wikipedia (click to enlarge and focus)

Wikipedia says the gate was demolished in 1788 because it was an impediment to traffic.

There's a description of paving Paris with cobblestones (seven to eight inches square, eight to ten inches thick).

From the start, those cobblestones were presented as essential to the cit's beauty.  Until the 1660s, the municipality had simply encouraged individual property owners to clean in front of their homes.  But in November 1665 the inception of official street-cleaning was announced in the press:  '4,000 men have begun to rid our superb city of dirt.'  The newsman, adrien Persou de Subligny, explained that the kind had taken time off from his military campaigns to make sure Paris was running properly and had decided on this new measure.  The following year another journalist declared that 'our paving stones are now gleaming.'

Lots to think about.  Visionary, holistic planning can do amazing things.  They did have to tear down old building but they were careful about how they did it according to DeJean.  No wholesale razing of buildings as the Chinese have done in the last couple of decades.  On the other hand, there were grand Chinese cities well before this.

The Man From Porlock

 Indulge me as I borrow this poem from the Poetry Foundation website.  Coleridge was born in 1772, which means he was three years old when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  Four years old when the Declaration of Independence was written.  Nine when the Articles of Confederation were written.  How much would a child of that age have been aware of the momentous events that were taking place then?  He was 11 when the Treaty of Paris ended the war in 1783. 

This poem was written in 1797 when Coleridge was 25, when John Adams was succeeding George Washington as the second president of the United States.  And, a note to give poets and other writers hope, it was published in 1816, a year after Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.  

You can't read it like a tweet.  You have to slow down.  The words flow in a different rhythm.  Let yourself relax and get caught up in that rhythm. 

Kubla Khan

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

So why have I introduced this poem here tonight?  In part because the post I was writing just isn't ready yet and I thought I shouldn't let too many days go by.  But that's not why I offer Coleridge.  Coleridge comes courtesy of Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist.  In his incredible book Snow, poet Ka goes to Kars, a town in the northeast of Turkey, as a journalist.  It snows the entire time he's there.  Ka has lived in Germany and is a famous Turkish poet and while the people of Kars have different suspicions of why he is in Kars, they know he's a famous poet and he's been asked to recite a recent poem.  

Just before his public recital, Necip, a local youth who has aspirations to be a poet as well, corners Ka and tells him about a landscape that appears to him when he tries to imagine a world where God does not exist.  Pamuk writes:

"He thought about Necip's landscape - he could remember his description word for word as if it were already a poem - and if no one came from Porlock he was sure he would soon be writing the poem in his notebook."

The reader of Snow is just as surprised and puzzled by the reference to the man from Porlock as you might be.  But Pamuk continues:

"The man from Porlock!  During our last years in school when Ka and I would stay up half the night talking about literature, this was one of our favorite topics.  Anyone who knows anything about English poetry will remember the note at the start of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."  It explains how the work is a 'fragment of a poem, from a vision during a dream";  the poet had fallen asleep after taking medicine for an illness (actually, he'd taken opium for fun) and had seen, in his deepest sleep, sentences from the book he'd been reading just before losing consciousness, except that now each sentence and each object had taken on a life of its own in a magnificent dreamscape to become a poem.  Imagine, a magnificent poem that had created itself, without the poet's having exerted any mental energy!  Even more amazing, when Coleridge woke up he could remember this splendid poem word for word.  He got out his pen and ink and some paper and carefully began to write it down, one line after the other, as if he were taking dictation.  He had just written the last line of the poem as we know it when there came a knock at the door.  He rose to answer it, and it was a man from the nearby city of Porlock, come to collect a debt. As soon as he'd dealt with this man, he rushed back to his table, only to discover that he'd forgotten the rest of the poem, except for a few scattered words and the general atmosphere."

What does this have to do with anything?  I suppose someone could use it to interpret what is happening in the US today, but for me it's just an interesting, unexpected pleasure of reading Snow.

Though we all get visits from the man from Porlock at the most inopportune times.  

 

Oh, and it began to snow about the time I was reading tonight.  

You can learn more about Coleridge's contributions here.

"Decisions in the sound are creations, not selections from a menu of choices."

Author Charles Wohlforth and his orca studying hosts in Prince William Sound leave their boat anchored  to paddle ashore in small kayaks to pick blueberries:

The silence of deep moss rendered hypnotic the repetitive process of grasping one bright blue orb and then another and the gradual increase of the blueness in a plastic bag - the only contrast from universal green.  The sound erases the rest of the world in a few days  Being is different here.  Time smoothes, pulsing slowly with the tide, losing the quantized, mechanical tick it has in the city.  Decisions in the sound are creations, not selections from a menu of choices.  Cognition, or thought, is different here too.  It's continuous, not suited to boxes.  Whole ideas grow up, long thoughts leading to unexpected destinations - unlike the flitting of city thinking, which is mostly reactions to questions, messages, lines and squares.  From this perspective, the city life, if remembered at all, looks like a mechanical complex of herky-jerky activity, as incoherent as a hazily remembered dream.  Both mental frames are real - urban or outdoor - but the continuity that arises in this environment makes it easier to feel connected to other living things.

I'm reading Wohlforth's The Fate of Nature for my next book club meeting.  He writes with a magic wand that lets complex ideas shine through stunning wordscapes.

It's easy to be seduced by his prose, so I've copied the paragraph above to think it through.

Does one really think so dramatically differently in nature than in the city?  Minute and hour hands organize time very differently than tides and migrating birds.  Alarm clocks regulate our lives differently than sunrises, crowing cocks, and cats mewing to be fed. (I had to look up the word 'quantize.' (see below))

"Decisions are creations . . ., not selections from a menu of choice"

This sounds beautiful, but how much is this more novelty, than a condition of man in nature?  If one is in a new environment one has to create ways to cope. One hasn't yet made habits of living in the new surroundings. This includes a person used to living in the wilds learning to cope in the city.  True, you don't choose your meal from a written menu, but you do choose it from a natural menu of what's available.  And just like you have to know where that great little Korean restaurant is, you have to know where the caribou or moose are likely to be found.

Uninterrupted time does give one space to think deeper and longer.  But I had that luxury as a child walking 20 or 30 minutes each way to school.  I'd hone fantasies or trace possibilities to fill the time.  I think on the whole, though, I agree.  The natural world affords longer more frequent uninterrupted moments for the brain to spin out ideas.   Nature, not the newspaper,  offers the weather and other news necessary to survival.


Below, he paints a profound ecological cycle tapping every human sense in three breathtaking paragraphs. [Update:  I found a good way to describe this passage.  It's like filming for Imax from a helicopter, swooping down the mountainside into the sound and down under the water and then back up again - all on this giant screen.  But he does it with words.]  I'm skipping an opening paragraph that moves the water from the skies to the mountain top glaciers, and downslope where "the perpetually damp temperate rainforest grow enormous trees" and eventually flows back into the sea.

"There are mountains and canyons under the sea also, along the ragged-edged continental shelf, the fringe between land and the abyss.  At the center of the gulf's arc, vertical rock confuses the waves and wind, with contradictions offered by fjords, islands, channels, and spires, and within the unfathomably complex inland sea of Prince William Sound, which encloses a world of its own, water-floored corridors walled by brooding spruces leading to secret, fecund gardens of mud and flashing fish, prey for eagles.  Winds funnel and focus through these mazes.  Currents twist in baroque patterns, changing with each turn of the tide or season.  Intricate forces, entangle ecological stories into as many digressions and surprise endings as there are eddies and tide-pools.  But the tempo of every tale comes from the beat of the storms and the timing of the moment in the spring when the sun emerges warmly on stilled waters.

"The prodigious biological productivity of the Gulf of Alaska owes everything to that moment when the surface's crop of phytoplankton is perfectly prepared for growth.  The winter storms have stirred up organic nutrients from the seafloor, mainly nitrogen;  few other waters in the world are as rich.  The rush of fresh water from the mountains, more than the Mississippi River's annual flow by half, and all in a few months, disgorges atop the heavier saltwater.  Iron and other mineral nutrients arrive with the fresh water to mix with the nitrates.  As the storms die and the fresh water spreads, a surface layer develops to hold blooming plankton near the sun (when the sea is mixed, the plantlike organisms fall into darkness).  Now, in May, sunshine is high, gaining every day until it lasts almost all night, brightness reflecting off still-snowy shores.  Water is calm and rich in fertilizer.  Everything is perfect for an explosion of photosynthesis, and the phytoplankton blooms.

The energy that plankton capture from the sun over a few weeks will feed zooplankton by the billion - tiny creatures like krill and copepods, which look like shrimp, and larval forms of many other animals, such as crabs, barnacles, and other shellfish.  The water clouds with them, especially where tidal currents meet, fronts between waters of different temperatures or salinity that concerntrate matter like invisible walls in the ocean.  Forage fish such as sand ance and herring gather to feed on zooplankton in crowed schools.  Gulls find the schools from the air and dive on the water, wheeling and dropping straight down, as violently as spears, then hurriedly climbing up the air again to protect a catch.  Humpback whales lunge through the schools, bursting diagonally from the surface, occasionally catching a bird, too, before rolling over and sinking back again with a giant slosh.  Salmon, lightning fast and bright, blaze through the schools of forage, fattening for a single spawning journey upriver.  Rivers along the gulf cost reaching hundreds of miles over the mountains will receive salmon eggs and carcasses.  Salmon flesh will feed bears, birds, and scavengers, whose waste will fertilize the trees, moss, and grass.  Long before that can happen, during the spring, phytoplankton bloom subsides, having consumed the winter's mixture of nutrients, but that energy flows on through the system, from mouth to mouth, up the trophic levels of the food web, and up to the floppy tops of towering hemlock trees fertilized by bear scat.

Wow, he's woven a vivid word movie of the interrelationships that hold together the Prince William Sound ecosystem.  For those unimpressed, consider the stodgy prose of a text book explaining all this.  In comparison, these words fly off the page and take a (at least this) reader up in the flight.  [I wouldn't normally take such a long citation, but it needed to come  full circle.]

Does it help that I've kayaked in Prince William Sound and seen the whales leap, and camped in the fecund gardens - thick with ferns and skunk cabbage and countless other greens - dripping with recent rain?  Oh, I'm sure that helps light up his words for me.

In contrast, I offer a bit from a NASA website on a workshop held last week on similar topics. 

"NASA’s carbon cycle and ecosystems research provides knowledge of the interactions of global biogeochemical cycles and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with global environmental change and the implications for Earth’s climate, productivity, and natural resources.
There are three major research objectives:
1)		Document and understand how the global carbon cycle, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and land cover and use are changing
2)		Quantify global productivity, biomass, carbon fluxes, and changes in land cover
3)		Provide information about future changes in global carbon cycling and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for use in ecological forecasting and as inputs for improved climate change projections."

Of course, they have different purposes, but in any context, Wohlforth's prose and ability to conjure up words that make complex systems into a wild adventure leave me in awe and, as a blogger, enormously jealous.

I'm not even very far into the book, so you may be getting more samples as I go along.  But if I take too much time with individual pages like this, I'll never finish.  

_____
 Below
quan·tize
verb (used with object), -tized, -tiz·ing.

1.

Mathematics, Physics . to restrict (a variable quantity) to discrete values rather than to a continuous set of values.

2.

Physics . to change the description of (a physical system) from classical to quantum-mechanical, usually resulting in discrete values for observable quantities, as energy or angular momentum.  [from Dictionary.com]

What's the Largest US National Park?- Post 5: Kennecott Copper Mill

[click here for all the Wrangell-St. Elias Posts]

For me, the highlight of the trip to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park was the Endecott Mill. Copper was what opened up this area. When the first train left Kennecott in April 1911, Lone E. Jansen writes in The Copper Spike, what appears to be the most thorough book on the topic:

It was loaded with ore so rich that it was not even milled, but simply shoveled into sacks as it came from the mountain. The ore from the mine averaged 70 percent pure copper.

The first copper train was expected to be 60 cars long to bring down the great backlog of ore; however, since insurance could only be obtained on a value of up to $250,000 the train was reduced to 35 ore cars. These cars carried 1,200 tons of copper ore, valued at the maximum insurable amount, $250,000.

And things shut down rather abruptly in 1938. The tour of the mill (the mines are further up the mountain and not open for tours at this point) is unlike most US historical tours. It feels like nothing has been touched since they walked out. Nothing has been prettied up. This mill has not been Disneyfied. [All pictures can be enlarged by double clicking on them.]


The private tour - $25 per person, $10 for under 12 - is about two and a half hours. I think there is also a free Park Service tour, but I'm not sure. You walk through town past this pile of gravel where the creek flooded a year or two ago - can't remember all the details - and then past those freshly painted red buildings you go up a path through the underbrush to the top of the mill. The tour starts at the 14th floor - the top - of the mine. In the picture above you can see the mill from below and then looking down back at the town from the very top of the mill. Here, from the top, you can see some remnants of the tram (I'm pretty sure that's what this picture is) and the mountains above the mine where the copper was). The copper was hauled down in big buckets on the tram.

Miners got up to the mines, and their dormitories, by riding the tram or a 3 or 4 mile walk. They had to sign a no-liability form first, and according to our guide, a number of people weren't able to duck low enough and got whacked. He said the death records weren't well kept, but a lot of people died or got badly injured. They had a hospital of sorts on site.


These are a couple of the buildings along the creek that flooded not too long ago.













These are pictures inside the mill.














Everything in here, we were told, is original, including all the stairs. But as I look at the pictures, surely not the safety stripes, and possibly not the hand rail. But that was what made this all so remarkable. There were still tools lying around, scraps on the floor. Actually, I suspect it might have been tidier when it was a working mill. It's good we started at the top rather than at the bottom.




These tables were where ore was shaken in water to separate the copper from the rest of the rock. People worked in this mill and in the mine for 12 hour shifts. When one worker was getting up, the one he shared a bed with was finishing up. They had two holidays - Christmas and July 4th. So it was appropriate to be there July 4th.







This is a closer look at one of the slurry tables. There's linoleum on a wood base, then wooden slats to catch the various sized chunks from the ore.



At the end of the tour we were back on the main street at the bottom of the mill. Here's a picture looking back up at the bizarre building we'd just toured.




We went across the street into the power plant at the end of the tour.


One can't help but think about this strange chapter in US history. Here was this incredibly rich copper mine but it was separated from regular transportation routes by rugged mountains, rushing rivers, in country that was cold (temperatures get well under -40˚ which is the same in F and C) and snowy in the winter and thick undergrowth and hungry mosquitoes in the summer. The railroad to Kennecott from Cordova is 196 miles long, crossing rivers, gorges, and in one case five miles right over a glacier. Repairs had to be made every year. Janson writes

From the beginning, the Copper River and Northwestern was really more than a mining railroad. It was glamor, adventure and excitement. Its construction had truly been "man against the wilderness." Its people, such as M.J. Heney, E.C. Hawkins[There's only a bit about Hawkins, but this is in an interesting on-line book Alaska, An Empire in the Making published in 1913 two after the completion of the railroad], Dr. Whiting[The link has a picture about 3/4 down the page of Dr. Whiting performing the autopsy on Soapy Smith], Jack McCord and "Big Mike" Sullivan, seemed bigger than life, their achievements almost beyond the power of description, and therefore a challenge to writers to try, somehow, to describe them.(p. 149)

The tour guide told us that net profits for the Guggenheims and JP Morgan owned mine were $100-200 million, or over $1 billion in today's dollars. The workers got paid well by the going wage but the work must have been punishing and we don't know how many died. Lone E. Janson writes in The Copper Spike:

The Cordova Alaskan reported that, "A rumor from some disgruntled source in Valdez that the wages for unskilled labor would be cut from $3.50 to $3.00 a day, a reduction of 50 cents for a ten-hour day, is not the case, although unskilled labor in the states at $1.75 per day is plentiful." (p. 72). . .

Someone I talked to said that she'd heard that the Chinese workers on the railroad were treated terribly and many died. I could find nothing in The Copper Spike about Chinese workers.

"The railroad was built," said old-timer Dick Janson Sr.,[a relative of the author?] "by what they call 'station men.' Two or three men would form a 'companie' which contracted for different jobs at so much per cubic yard of rock or dirt moved, or in railroad construction, so much per station.

"They followed the heavy construction around the world, these station men, and they knew each other from other jobs and other places. Like on the Copper river, I worked with men from the Gillevara Ofoten, the Iron Ore mountain in Sweden, which is the world's farthest north railroad. . .

"Most of the station men were Scandinavians, and they had some colorful names. Sometimes you worked with a man for years and never knew his real name. There were such handles as Pickhandle Jones, The Norwegian King, Shoot-em-up Sweede, Crooked Swede, Hurry-up Jones, and the like.
...The men were of assorted nationalities, some with exceedingly unpronounceable names. If a Mr. Mxlovopovsky appled for work, the paymaster would fix a firm eye on him and pronounce, "From now on your name is Jack Robbins.". . .

Another oddity of the paymaster's window was the fact that horses were on the payroll, that services brought in exactly the same manner as a man's. (p. 72)

[The use of quotations was inconsistent in the original.]



Here's an Alaska-Yukon Railroad bibliography
I found working on this post.