On Cerro Juanqueana and the Meridian

1.
Cerro Juanqueana is visible for miles.  The small rounded mountain rises above a river valley where patches of green foliage mark the course of an intermittent stream.  The landscape overlooking the river is barren, constructed from various shades of brown.  The lower slopes of the hill are mottled with sage, more or less the color of cardboard that has been left in the rain.  The hill’s higher chaparral is darker, the tint of chocolate where the rock outcrops on the summit and casts rounded shadows down the hillside.  The little conical mountain seems to have been scarred by a giant rake.  The cerro is marked by furrows cut into its slopes as if the rake were pulled sideways around the top of the peak.  The furrows cut into the hillside show as lighter yellow grooves indenting the matte beige-brown.  The sunshine is powerful here in the Chihuahuan desert and the roads are all gravel running over featureless chaparral and horizons where crumpled-looking, low nondescript mountains mark the limits of what one can see. 

Other hillsides in the area also seem to have been scored by a giant rake.  The marks are high on the knolls.  These places are called cerros de trincheras – that is, “hills with trenches.”  The largest of these prehistoric sites is Cerro Juanqueana.  If you go there, tread carefully in the stony debris on the hillsides – rattlesnakes and scorpions hide from the sun under cobbles the length of your forearm.  Wear a good hat with a broad brim because there is absolutely no shade on the steep, sixty-degree hillsides.  It’s best to travel in this area with the approval of Mexico’s archaeological authority, INAH.  The vans sanctioned by INAH are white with the letters of the government’s archaeological department prominently displayed.  At all costs avoid small Toyota mini-vans, particularly dark ones – this is the vehicle of choice of the Sinaloa cartel that controls the villages and ranches scattered across this barren land.  People are kidnaped here from time to time and there have been shootings and murders.

Cerro Juanaqueana is only 60 miles from the border and near the Casa Grandes ruins at Paquime, one of northern Mexico’s largest and most important prehistoric site.  But it feels a lot farther from Antelope Springs, the closest town in New Mexico, than the hour-long drive.  Except for a few ranches hidden under the low brown hills and some Mormon Colonia, there’s nothing here.

About three-thousand years ago, Indians in the area gathered to sculpt the cerro’s steep slopes into concentric terraces.  There are 550 terrace embankments carved into the hill, some of them 400 meters long.  Ninety-nine rock rings also mark the site.  Although the scale of the work here in re-modeling the mountain is monumental – more 40,000 tons of earth moved – the materials are humble.  The terraces are constructed from larger cobbles, generally about the circumference of a loaf of bread, heaped to create an embankment ring along the steep hillside.  The space cupped between the embankment of stones and the hillside was, then, filled with smaller stones and earth excavated from the side of the cerro.  The effect is to create a terrace or level lip along the mountainside.  Although the work can be performed without tools, merely by pitching cobbles distributed across the hillside’s surface into heaps, the works erected on slope are durable – they have lasted as an indelible mark on the cerro since about 1150 BC when the slopes were terraced.

We don’t know who made the rings on the mountain.  However, the site is replete with metates and manos for grinding corn and seeds – more 300 basin metates have been counted around the cerro.  This tells us several things.  First, the people who lived here were sedentary and farmed fields somewhere near the cerro.  No traces of agriculture have been located on the terraces themselves and, so, unlike similar features found in the Mayan highlands, these level places made on the hillside were not farmed.  (This makes the labor necessary to build the monumental terraces all the more extraordinary – experiments in the field show that the terraces in Chihuahua require much more labor than those constructed in the Mayan world.)  Second, the number of metate and mano sets provide a basis for estimating population.  Apparently, about 187 people lived here, more or less, continuously over a period of about 200 years. 

The terraces are now buried in colluvial deposits –that is, debris washed down the slopes by flashflooding and rain.  The actual terraces surfaces are about meter below the present surface.  Shovel-excavations show that the terraces were apparently used as surfaces on which to erect some kind of living quarters.  We don’t know what these dwellings were like – they weren’t pit-houses, ubiquitous in the southwest, because there are no post-holes.  I suspect that the dwellings were shelters woven from brush like wickiups.  In any event, we know that people occupied the terraces because of dense concentrations of faunal remains under the colluvial surface deposits.  The Indians ate mostly corn and rabbit – about 90% of the bones are either jackrabbit or cottontail (ten times as many jackrabbits as the other species).  People also ate an occasional antelope, probably a rare luxury, and lots of small minnows that must have been eaten whole. The remains of these prehistoric meals can be carbon-dated with high accuracy and, so, we have confidence that Cerro Juanaqueana is about three-thousand years old.  There is no pottery because these people were pre-ceramic – pottery hadn’t been invented yet.  Corn and amaranth seed were grown domestically – that is, the species of grains are not wild but genetically modified for human consumption and, clearly, were gardened.  Many nicely fashioned arrowheads and lance-points have been found, including some razor-sharp obsidian blades imported from someplace to the north, probably 80 to 100 miles away.  Oddly enough, there’s no evidence that the people dwelling here used the river bottoms about a thousand yards away from the hill.  However, the river is seasonal, dry most of the year but prone to flooding and the braided stream bed is much eroded.  If there were gardens planted along the river, which seems probable, the stream has washed away all evidence of them.  Only one burial has been discovered dating to the era of the Cerro Juanaqueana’s flourishing – and this is a half day’s walk away at another trenched hill.  A teenage girl was buried in tightly flexed position near some landmark rocks – there were no grave goods found. 

Three things are important about the site.  First, it shouldn’t exist: the first towns in the area date from the late Basketmaker period, that is about 500 AD.  This is about 1600 years after the terraces at Cerro Juanaqueana were engraved on the hillside.  Archaeologists believe that Native Americans in this part of northwestern Mexico were nomadic foragers before 500 AD.  But the Cerro Trincheras (trenched hills) tell a different story.  Clearly, these people showed a high degree of sedentism – that is, a village of about 200 people occupied this site for two-hundred years.  (Minneapolis has only existed for about 180 years.)  No one was supposed to be farming maiz in this area at 1150 BC.  But the people at Cerro Juanaqueana and living by the other trenched hills were raising corn here, probably near the river.  Thus, the place is an anomaly, very interesting or as Stephen Lekson, the controversial archaeologist specializing in the Chaco phenomenon writes, it is “downright weird.”

Second, the hilltop ridges were probably defensive.  The people lived behind low rock walls on the mountainside.  Two or three foot cobble walls don’t seem like much of a fortification, but, one must remember that the weapons the defenders faced would be short-range: arrows heavily laden with lithic points and lances or instruments made for lunging.  The hillside is very steep and attackers advancing up the slope slippery with gravel and cobbles, probably under a hail of rocks thrown down by the villagers would have faced a distinct and, probably, deadly disadvantage.  Obviously, there was some species of war at that time Cerro Juanaqueana was built.  It’s a melancholy fact that there is alway war.  As Kraznahorkai suggests in his great novel, it’s not War and Peace but rather War and War throughout almost all of human history.  The enemies of Juanaqueana such as they were didn’t have the staying power to mount a siege – there is no water on the hill and a protracted siege would have been deadly to the villagers but clearly tactics here were to strike and, then, retreat with whatever loot your band had seized. 

Third, Cerro Juanaqueana is only a few miles from Stephen Lekson’s Chaco Meridian.  On this topic, we depart from the conventional wisdom on which Southwestern (the southwest of the United States) archaeology is premised.   Lekson, who is based in Boulder, Colorado, has proposed a bold theory that links the great houses at Chaco Canyon, the most important archaeological site in the West, with the Aztec Ruins just south of the Four Corners and the huge adobe city at Paquime near Casas Grandes in the northern Sonoran desert.  Lekson’s theory is that these three city-sites were founded intentionally on a north-south meridian that extends from the Aztec Ruins in the north through Chaco Canyon’s Pueblo Bonita and, then, south to Paquime.  (Although the ancients wouldn’t have known the meridian, an European invention, is happens to be the 108th degree of north-south longitude.)  Aztec Ruins, Paquime, and Chaco’s Pueblo Bonita, separated by 550 miles from north to south, are aligned within about one or two miles east to west.  This alignment seems to be intentional and meant something to the people who ruled these places. 

Cerro Juanaqueana is about 15 miles to the west of the Chaco Meridian and, so, it might be asked whether that monumental site should be included in Lekson’s narrative.  Lekson demures.  One way of attacking the legitimacy of Lekson’s Aztec Ruins, Chaco, and Paquime hypothesis is to find other archaeological sites that line up with those place but which are obviously unrelated.  For instance, the Medicine Wheel site on the west escarpment of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, also, happens to be approximately on the Meridian – yet, it would be difficult to the point of absurdity to connect a prehistoric Plains Indian site to the pueblo cities hundreds of miles to the south.  The problem with Cerro Juanaqueana as a Meridian monument is that it is simply too early – 1700 years from the inception of the Chaco phenomenon.  On the other hand, Lekson, in a footnote published in his remarkable book The Chaco Meridian: One-Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest (1999, substantially revised 2015), agrees that the terraces at Cerro Juanaqueana are sufficiently weird and monumental to make the cut – although he suggests this may take 15 years or more of additional study. In other words, he won’t rule out a connections of some kind, but, presently, doesn’t know how that relationship would be argued.  (On the basis of aerial photographs, Cerro Juanaqueana looks to me a lot like the six concentric rings and mound-works at Poverty Point in western Louisiana – another “impossible” site that dates to about the same time.  The Poverty Point embankments are renowned for being “completely useless”.)

Lekson’s theory is remarkably interesting and worth understanding in some detail.  His historical narrative centers on Chaco Canyon and, so, a preliminary account of Lekson’s understanding of that place is necessary.  Chaco Canyon, as most people know, is the most important archaeological site in the southwestern United States. I’ve been there and can attest to its peculiar, ominous fascination.  First, the site is extremely remote – you drive for fifty miles on bad roads to reach the federally protected archaeological zone.  The territory is vast, empty chaparral with massive unexplored badlands, a place without towns or, even, any decent roads – now and then, you pass a Navajo ranch with a modest government pre-fab house standing next to the ruins of an old hogan.  Ragged-looking kids on horseback herd sheep across the desolate plain.  The ancient structures in the park, in many instances, are backed up against two-hundred foot chalky cliffs.  These people didn’t build with baked adobe – the walls are assembled from hewn stone, cyclopean ramparts looming over enormous kivas, structures with hundreds of cell-like rooms packed behind the formidable masonry.  The canyon is naked rock, a couple miles wide surrounding some salt flats where, perhaps, water floods through the landscape when it rains.  The canyon is nondescript and could be anywhere in the desert southwest, twenty miles of low crumbling cliffs with a few similarly nondescript and colorless buttes rising above the plains.  The vast walls and labyrinths of irregularly-shaped cubical rooms, passages between the cells marked with t-shaped masonry doors, have a brooding, sinister aspect.  When I crawled into the maze, I quickly became disoriented and almost panicked.  Inside the network of small chambers, of course, now all open to the blazing sunlight, there are blind passages, dead ends, and, if the way were not marked, you would immediately become lost, a prospect that I found very alarming.  When the labyrinth was roofed, it would have been even more horrible.  Experts imagine that many of the most interior rooms would have been totally dark and almost airless, possibly deadly to enter.  A number of so-called Great Houses, structures with D-shaped lay-out, were built in the canyon and, also, on the chaparral above the chalk cliffs.  Huge mound-shaped berms surrounded the Great Houses.  When archaeologists dug into them, expecting midden deposits, they found almost no organic debris.  In fact, there are very few burials in the canyon or its environs and little trace of agriculture.  The leads to the unsettling conclusion that no one really lived in the Great Houses – these structures were not pueblos or villages; they were something else.  A mile or so away from the canyon, on the plain, there are many “unit pueblos” – that is, small adobe structures that housed family groups of 15 to 30 people.  These are dwellings that look nothing like the Great Houses. 

The National Park service, when I visited Chaco Canyon, tells a couple of untruths about the place.  (Perhaps these errors have been since rectified.)  First, there is a suggestion that when Chaco Canyon culture flourished – between 800 and 1250 AD – the climate was different and more amenable to agriculture. This has proven to be untrue – Chaco Canyon is remarkably desolate now and was equally desolate a thousand years ago.  The place can’t sustain agriculture.  Food had to be carried to the complex of buildings by porters from the Chuska Valley, said to be the agricultural bread basket of Chaco, but about fifty miles away.  Second, the Park Service claims that the modern day Pueblo people, now mostly inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande between Bernalillo and Taos, are the descendants of the people who built Chaco Canyon.  (The previous name for these people, Anasazi – meaning “the enemy of my ancestors” in Navajo – is no longer de riguer.) The connection to the modern pueblo people, who pride themselves on efficient agriculture, revere the kachinas, and are resolutely egalitarian, is problematic.  A Hopi colleague of Lekson, considering the relationship between Chaco and his people, cites with approval the archaeologist’s observation that the pueblo Indian society arose “in reaction to, and rejection of Chaco, after 1300.”  In other words, the pueblo way of life is a repudiation of Chaco’s arrogance and power.  The Navajo always detested the place and what it represented – Athabaskan-speaking people, they were fundamentally hunter-gatherers forced by warfare, to adopt sedentary customs (sheep-herding and agriculture) and their culture was never even remotely equivalent to what seems to have happened at Chaco.  One of the most startling (and alarming) sites in Chaco Canyon is Chetro Ketl, a vast structure with formidable carved stone ramparts partly destroyed by a rockfall.  Big boulders from the crumbling yellow-white canyon escarpment have smashed and buried some of the labyrinth of small cell-rooms –the huge round boulders lie atop the masonry walls like colossal broken-knuckled fists.  The Navajo interpreted the rock-fall as the wrath of God, punishment inflicted on the Great Gambler who ruled the world from these structures.  The Great Gambler tricked mere mortals into playing games of chance with him and, then, enslaved his victims when their wagers were lost.  The Great Gambler came from some place else – in the early 20th century, the Navajo even said that he was probably a White man.  His grandmother was a giant old woman who carried a huge rock made from iron (most likely a meteorite) on her shoulders.  As far as the Navajo were concerned, the social experiment embodied by Chaco had been a catastrophe and should never be repeated in any way anywhere.

During my visit to the park, a man was lecturing in the Visitor Center’s small theater.  He had a group of about eight people with him.  I now think it was a Crow Canyon tour of Chaco.  (Crow Canyon is an archaeological conservancy associated with Mesa Verde.)  I recall that the man lecturing to the group said that the Great Houses had never been dwellings, at least, in the modern sense of the word.  “Instead,” he said (and I have remembered this for twenty years or more), “they are better conceived as opera sets.”  The group left the Visitor Center in a couple of jeeps.  They were planning to climb out of the canyon and, then, hike to administrative center of the Chaco complex, Pueblo Alto on the plain to the east of the canyon.  (I now know that this hike would have taken them up the daunting, but well-designed Jackson Staircase, a group of steps carved into the living rock of the cliff side leading up to the huge great house isolated in the desert about a couple miles away.)  The ancient staircase to the rim of the canyon also provided access to the Great Northern Road, a thirty foot wide causeway cut into the plain and striking north across the empty terrain toward the river valleys fifty kilometers away where the Aztec great house had been built.  In fact, Chaco stands at the center of radiating roads, all of them wide and curbed with boulders leading in the direction of the outlier Great Houses – that is, other big masonry structures located around the canyon center within a radius of about 250 kilometers.  Even as I write these words, I envy the happy people who hiked up the canyon wall and, then, walked to Pueblo Alto.  I’m too old today to walk five miles, particularly in the nightmarish heat of the desert, and, from photographs showing the Jackson Staircase, it’s not clear to me that I would be able to make it up those sheer steps chiseled in the bone-white cliff.     

The National Park Service, when I was in the park, asserted that no one knew exactly why Chaco Canyon’s vast and mostly empty Great Houses had been built.  Beginning in 1999, Lekson claimed that he had solved the problem.  For years, scholars debated the nature of the Chaco polity.  It was asserted that the eerie emptiness at the center of Chaco’s sphere of influence signified a hitherto unknown political system – some sort of theocracy ruled by mathematician-astronomer priests or, perhaps, an “acephalous chieftaincy”, that is, social system ruled by a chief except without a chief.  Some of these ideas circulated about the Mayans when I was in High School – their acropolis-temples hidden in the jungle were thought to be the realm of philosopher scientists, engaged in one task only, the study of celestial time.  The Mayans were thought to be uniquely peaceable and kindly.  This was before Linda Schele and others broke their linguistic code and were able to read Mayan glyphs.  We now know that the Mayans lived in city-states similar to the warring principalities in renaissance Italy.  Mayan city-states were ruled by dynastic families fully as violent as the great war lords like the Medici in Florence and the condottieri who ruled in Ferrara, Venice and other towns in Italy.

The Aztec empire consolidated numerous city-states in Mexico.  The Aztecs were a true empire on the imperial Roman scale – they conquered independent principalities, forced them to pay tribute, and garrisoned their cities.  Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztec emperors in Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) had a name for these sorts of duchies – they were called Altpeme, the plural for Altpetl (that is “water-mountain”).  An Altpetl was a city-state generally comprised of 10,000 to 15,000 (with some boasting 40,000 or more) people ruled by noble families that claimed celestial lineage from their subjects born from the earth.  Altpeme maintained their own religious and language traditions, although their rulers spoke Nahuatl in order to transact business with the Aztecs.  Prior to the Aztecs imposing their political will on these city-states, the altpeme were engaged in, more or less, perpetual warfare, forming and, then, breaking alliances between individual dukedoms – the elite families intermarried to form alliances, but these were tentative and, mostly, unstable.  An altpetl possessed a capital or central village where the ruling elite maintained palaces, more or less off-limits to the commoners. Usually, the capital or central village supported a market that attracted peasant farmers and tradesmen. 

Lekson claims that this model for social organization describes Chaco.  At its height, Chaco supported approximately 60,000 people, most of them living in scattered family pueblos or small villages, a densely populated “suburban” zone, as it were, surrounding the Great Houses in the canyon and located on its rim.  The Great Houses were mostly vacant, built to impress the people living in the unit (family) pueblos and the villages – these people grew maize and other crops that supported the polity.  Noble families lived in the Great Houses with their retainers.  Most of the structures at a Great House were uninhabited or used only rarely for religious or ritual purposes.  Periodically, it can be assumed that fearsome sacred dances and sacrifices occurred in the plazas at the Great Houses – these rituals, likely involving distribution of food, were intended to terrorize or intimidate the peasants into obedience.   Lekson suggests that the Chaco nobility probably sponsored a market, but the remains of that place have not been found.  Since the population density was low in “downtown Chaco”, as Lekson calls it, the polity seems to have an “empty” or vacant center – this is because peasants were afforded access to the majestic palaces only rarely, on ceremonial occasions.

American archaeology has long-labored under institutional racism.  Until the last forty years or so, there has been an aversion to ascribing complex political and social structures to North American Indians.  The notion was that Indians living north of the (wholly arbitrary) border were nomadic, hunter-gatherers, by and large, foraging a vast and empty territory.  But, anyone reading accounts of the first contacts between Europeans and Indian tribes will be struck by the fact that renaissance explorers describe the Indians as living in large villages, often with palisades and other fortifications, and ruled by “kings.”  The Spaniards, originating in a medieval feudal system, similarly assimilated the Indians to familiar social forms on the Iberian peninsula – the tribes had caciques, lived in cities that were more beautiful and well-designed than their European counterparts, and made war through a sort of chivalry, jaguar-knights who formed an elite nobility.  We are only now appreciating that the social structures of North American Indians, destroyed in a few generations by disease and genocide, were complex and, often, hierarchical.  Lekson says that if the buildings at Chaco Canyon were found in Egypt or Syria or Greece (and particularly Crete) they would immediately be recognized as palaces.  The fact that the Great Houses were built where they weren’t supposed to be – in the southwest 1200 miles from the high civilizations in Mexico led archaeologists to mis-identify them.  The Great Houses signify, in Lekson’s view, an altpetl ruled by dynastic noble families with a social system that probably formed around 500 AD and lasted a thousand years.

Lekson observes that Chaco Canyon supported an extremely large aggregate of pit-houses at a place called Shabik, a place on the 108th meridian.  All Chaco and proto-Chaco sites are, to use Lekson’s vocabulary “weird” – “weird” means interesting and rich with exotic trade goods.  Shabik was, in effect, a village before villages were supposed to exist in the American southwest.  It represents some kind of social phenomenon preceding the establishment of the Great Houses at Chaco.  North of Chaco is a place called Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge.  This place, now under the waters of Lake Nighthorse, an impounded reservoir on the Animas River, was about four miles south of Durango, Colorado.  Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge were also very strange places.  The settlement was really several congregations of pit-houses, but with odd dwellings much larger than the structures customary around 750 to 800 AD – in fact, the pit-houses look something like kivas, have benches in them, and are 50% larger than the dwellings elsewhere in the area.  Furthermore, the Sacred Ridge basin, now drowned by the lake, was dominated by a tower located within line-of-sight of the pit-house villages.  The tower was made to be seen since it was visible from all dwellings in the valley.  As with Chaco, the tower seems to have been a “vacant center” – it wasn’t a fortification or a dwelling as far as can be determined.  Blue Mesa and Sacred Ridge were immediately north of Shabik on the meridian.  The valley was abandoned around 800 AD after a horrific massacre.  About 31 people, men, women and children, were killed and their remains subjected to something called “Extreme Processing.”  The deceased seem to have been savagely tortured – they were hobbled by having their ankles smashed to pieces and the soles of their feet scalped.  Then, the victims were hacked into tiny pieces in two of the kiva-shaped pithouses.  Individual bones were crushed and ground on metates made for processing corn.  (One metate and mano ensemble was found with broken teeth still cradled on the grinding stone.)  The bodies were reduced to 35,000 splinters of bone and, then, the wood vigas supporting the roofs of the big kiva-shaped pithouses were set on fire and burned.  Analysis of the bone fragments shows that the people ground to pulp in the two pit-houses were ethnically distinct from the others living at Sacred Ridge and Blue Mesa, families that had immigrated to the valley apparently from somewhere else, but who had been living with the natives of the place before being “ethnically cleansed.”

After the massacre at Sacred Ridge, the elites in that place seem to have migrated back down the 108th Meridian to Chaco.  The great houses at Chaco Canyon were built at that time – between 850 and 1150.  Chaco was aggressive, large, and controlled a sphere of influence extending about 250 kilometers from the palace complexes in the canyon.  Archaeologists know that the palaces and their supporting population living within a five mile radius of the Great Houses were provisioned by porters carrying corn and other foods to the canyon from fields as far as 150 kilometers from the city.  (The use of the word “city” has been contested in application to Chaco.  This is because the palace compounds central to the polity were not densely inhabited and didn’t operate trade markets as far as we can determine.  However, if a city is defined as a system with a clearly delineated center and a periphery that is economically and socially dependent on that center – the current definition used in anthropology – then, Chaco was, indeed, a city-state.)   Chaco is “as full of weird stuff as a Santa Fe flea market, Lekson explains.  The palaces kept scarlet macaws imported from Mexico and there were clay pedestals specially designed for the display of exotic feathers.  (Lekson reminds us that when Cortez demanded that the Aztec lords produce their wealth, they didn’t pony-up gold, but, rather, the feathers of exotic birds native to the tropical rain forests in Chiapas, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.)  People had copper bells from Meso-America and the great lords drank hallucinogenic cacao from Mexico is tall ceramic flutes. Human sacrifices occurred at Chaco, the dead neatly laid out with extensive grave goods but with ceramic pots substituted for their (missing) skulls. 

An important formula for Lekson is this: Chaco = Aztec Ruins + Paquime.  Around 1125 - 1150, the center of Chaco civilization was abandoned.  Lekson’s hypothesis is that part of the Chaco nobility followed the 108th meridian north to Aztec, a huge Chaco ruin about 50 miles north of the canyon.  The other moeity or half of the elite began a trek to the south that resulted in the foundation of Paquime, an adobe city in Chihuahua, Mexico about 650 miles from the deserted palaces at Chaco.  Everyone agrees that Aztec Ruins is a Chaco “outlier” and a very significant site – also “weird” in many ways.  Paquime’s relation to Chaco is denied by most practicing archaeologists specializing in Southwest prehistory.  Indeed, Paquime is generally argued to be a Mogollon culture site, albeit one that is massively more elaborate and urban than other known examples of those villages.  Casa Grandes, a massive adobe tower at the center of a huge network of irrigation ditches, about fifty miles south of Phoenix is, usually,described as Hohokom or Mogollon – the terms are used, more or less interchangeably.  Modern-day Phoenix contains the remains of several large Hohokom (Mogollon) pueblos –the “Grand Pueblo” near the Sky Harbor airport at Phoenix even has a small L-shaped ball-court built on the model of Aztec and Mayan playing fields.  Lekson’s innovation is to claim that Paquime, built on the 108th meridian is, in fact, a Chaco site, designed around a Great House of the kind found at Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and other places. Lekson’s formula describes estimates of the population of Chaco as compared with Aztec Ruins and Paquime – if we add the number of people living in Aztec Ruins to the numbers thought to have dwelt at Paquime, the total is the presumed population of Chaco.

Why does Lekson think Paquime is a Chaco site?  This argument proceeds on the basis of architectural traits that are diagnostic of Chaco culture.  Three arbitrary, and, therefore, distinctive features found in Chaco structures are vertically bifurcated interior rooms, colonnades, and stone-disc support systems.  Both Aztec and Chaco display rooms that have two levels.  A corridor bisects the room and the vertical space (floor to ceiling) is divided on both sides of his aisle into an upper lower compartment.  The shelf-like compartments are built by inserting vigas into the rooms about half-way up the walls and, then, using thatching or some other sort of woven material to create a shelf.  No one knows why this was done, but this quirk is found at all major Chaco sites and, further, has been identified at Paquime all across the site.  Chaco’s Chetro Ketl great house was built with an exterior colonnade, pillars creating alcoves along the facade of the structure.  (Colonnades are common in meso-American architecture throughout Mexico and the Mayan world and, apparently, signify public buildings.)  There are no known colonnades at Aztec Ruins, although we know that site is a Chaco culture location for other reasons.  Lekson also points out that only 5% of Aztec Ruins has been excavated and, although this is unlikely, perhaps there is a colonnade lurking somewhere underground.  Interior platforms were hidden in the structure and would not have been visible except to those admitted access to the palace compounds.  Therefore, we can be reasonably sure that this feature wasn’t simply imitated by the people who built Aztec Ruins and Paquime.  Of course, the colonnaded facade is an ostentatious public display and, so, perhaps, might have been simply mimicked by ambitious builders in Chihuahua – indeed, imitated from Aztec public buildings to the south.  But the third feature diagnostic of Chaco culture is wholly enigmatic and completely concealed.  This is the use of heavy stone discs as foundation support for load-bearing walls or great kivas.  Sandstone was chiseled into disks about 20 to 40 inches in diameter and about six inches thick.  These disks were stacked under the center posts in great kivas at Chaco and Aztec Ruins; they are found in many locations at Paquime supporting load-bearing elements in larger rooms.  This construction feature is installed below-grade and, therefore, is hidden by the building that it supports.  (The discs don’t represent a solution engineered to solve construction problems at the three sites; the discs, sometimes stacked like pancakes, as Lekson says, are not really functional – we don’t know what they mean.)  There are a number of other features that create “family resemblances” between the canonical Great Houses at Chaco Canyon and buildings at Aztec Ruins and Paquime – for instance, tau-shaped doors and facilities for housing macaws.  But the three distinguishing features that Lekson identifies suggest that the people who built the Great Houses at Chaco were related to those who constructed Aztec Ruins and Paquime. 

Aztec Ruins is a complex case.  First, there’s no doubt that this site is part of Chaco world.  Chaco princes built arrow-straight roads.  These roads are very wide and level, marked by curb-stones, and extend across long stretches of barren desert and chaparral.  Of course, the Chaco people didn’t have wheeled carts and no beasts of burden – porters carried things in wicker baskets on their backs.  Therefore, no reason exists for the construction of a 20 foot wide, graded road.  Furthermore, these roads are strangely abstract – they run directly into canyons or buttes, vanish for awhile, then, appear on the other side of the obstacle.  It seems that these roads were more schematic and ceremonial than practical.  Many of the roads begin at a Great House, radiate away from the structure than, simply, end in the open terrain.  A dozen miles later, a new road will pick up the alignment of the truncated one and, then, lead to another Great House outlier. 

The best documented Chaco structure of this sort is the Great North Road.  This road runs for miles, beginning at Tsin Kletsin, a great house on the south plateau overlooking the canyon.  The road passes through the canyon and leads to Pueblo Alto, the northernmost great house in the Chaco core.  From Pueblo Alto, a number of roads radiate in various directions.  However, the road linking Tsin Kletsin and Pueblo Alto continues due north for 50 kilometers, sometimes angling slightly to the east or west to avoid obstacles, but remaining within one degree of true north on the 108th meridian to end up at the door of Aztec Ruins.  Clearly, the people at Chaco and Aztec were bound together in some sort of cultural unity by the Great North Road.

Aztec, however, is architecturally peculiar.  Conventional Chaco great houses are D-shaped that is walled half-circles.  Aztec, at least where excavated, completes this circular form but complicates it by tri-wall construction.  A number of buildings at Aztec show this tri-wall feature – that is circular buildings in which three concentric walls encircle a central kiva equipped with bench extrusions from the inner (or fourth) wall.  (In fact, Aztec shows bi-, tri-, quadri walled circular structures – the buildings have a door on outer ring that opens into room within the second ring of walls; between the rings there are small cubicals, presumably accessed from above because they do not interconnect and can’t be reached from the room that connect to the outside.  The inner kiva is accessed through its smoke-hole for its hearth.) There is one of these tri-walls at Chaco at Pueblo del Arroyo – one of the last structures built in Chaco -- and several in various outliers.  However, the big ruins at Aztec have at least three tri-walls.  The last structure built at Aztec was a kiva-like enclosure ringed by four-walls.  Shortly after it was built, the quadri-wall was intentionally burned – again, the significance of this act is unclear but, it seems, to correlate with the abandonment of the city and the dispersion of its population in the direction of the historic pueblos located at Acoma, on the Zuni and Hopi lands, and at the Tewa villages north of Santa Fe.  This last tri-wall was burned and abandoned some time around 1275 – this date said to mark the end of the Chaco culture’s hegemony in the Four Corners area.  Lekson associates Aztec as a cultural innovation that drew upon Chaco traditions but interpreted them in a radically different way.  Acoma, Hopi, and Zuni oral histories assert that their people originated at the beautiful “white house”, but, then, migrated away from that place because “bad things” had happened there.  Lekson thinks the “white house” is Aztec Ruins.  These same tribes maintain that a large number of the original people “went south”.  This happened when a seer told the people to divide into two halves and, then, select either a bright blue egg or a plain brown one.  The people who picked the beautiful blue egg agreed to stay on the mesa at Acoma.  The blue egg was hoped to hatch a scarlet macaw, but the bird was only a crow.  Nonetheless, this group of people built their pueblo at Acoma, banished the noblemen, and lived as farmers – later, the Kachina rain gods came from the mountains and they worshiped them.  (The Catholic triune God arrived with the armor-plated conquistadors a couple centuries after that and was also accepted as a deity.)  The people who picked the dull brown egg waited until it hatched – inside was a scarlet macaw and so they went south and vanished from the world of the pueblo people. 

Paquime, Lekson maintains, is the place to which half of the people went after the collapse of Aztec.  This is where his meridian hypothesis may be tenuous, although he’s lawyerly, manipulative, and very persuasive in marshaling evidence in support of his contentions.  Pottery and ceramic-sequences are hostile to this theory since Paquime’s material culture seems to be Hohokom-Mogollon.  Ceramic chronology is a vital to most archaeological theory – in fact, the so-called modern scientific era of archaeological studies is characterized by field researchers defining pottery sequences by which to date sites.   Lekson breezily dismisses this sort of evidence.  He argues that the elites at Chaco could acquire any kind of pottery that they wanted by exchange and that, therefore, ceramics don’t mean more than that the people in the canyon traded with other tribes and used their goods.  He notes that the only distinctive pottery produced at Chaco were the tall, narrow flutes for drinking cacao – everything else was derived from neighboring traditions and, probably, produced remote from the canyon.  Accordingly, Lekson argues that the fact that Paquime looks like a Mogollon site on the basis of its pottery doesn’t require that the ruling elites be Mogollon – the ceramics at the site are opportunistic, a product of the fact that Paquime was built in the middle of older pueblos that it annexed and that were Mogollon. 

In a footnote, Lekson tells us that Vine Deloria, the famous Native American activist, was a practicing lawyer and encouraged the author to develop his arguments in a more forensic, courtroom-friendly style.  Accordingly, Lekson develops his “proof” that the Meridian connects Aztec Ruins through Chaco to Paquime on the basis of three parameters: means, motive, and opportunity – that is, did the Chaco elites have the means, motive, and opportunity to raise their cities along the 108th meridian?

Means to find true south and maneuver in that direction are readily established.  “Boy scouts,” according to Lekson can readily determine true south with no tools more sophisticated than a gnomon, that is a staff driven into the ground and string.  The gnomon’s shadow determines direction and tracing a 360 degree circle on the ground around the upright staff creates a compass that can be divided into quadrants to determine the cardinal directions.  This can be accomplished in a matter of minutes and, then, a sight-line can be established in the direction selected – here directly south along the 108th meridian.  Chaco surveyors knew how to do this –the Great North road runs true north for fifty kilometers to Aztec ruins and, in principle, there’s no reason a sight-line to the south couldn’t be drawn by people moving in that direction, day-after-day.  In fact, the extremely accurate determination of north and south seems correlated to daily re-establishment of compass directions and, then, sight lines.  Small errors that are intrinsic to the process will correct themselves if a large number of compass sightings are implemented – it’s a matter of statistics.  Lekson surmises that the survey-sightings were part of some kind of priestly ritual and had religious implication.  Chaco surveying was also a kind of worship or prayer.  Straight ritual-roads were not primarily means of conveyance, but, also, highways through time liking the mythic place of origins, the White House, with the present and future.

Motive may also be effectively argued.  We know that Chaco elites were obsessed with north-south axises.  Modern Pueblo people regard only one direction as true and unerring – this is the North.  All planetary and celestial phenomena revolve around the so-called “heart of the sky” – this is true North.  Truth, clarity, and eternal things are signified by the north.  Thus, establishing north-south meridians was important at Chaco.  In one case, a large subsurface kiva underlies a Great House.  The Great House was built on a north-south alignment that passes directly over the kiva.  This obviously created logistical difficulties but the alignment was regarded as pre-eminently important.  The builders erected weight-bearing piers atop the kiva in order to erect Great House walls and maintain the (presumably) sacred alignment of the structure. 

Lekson identifies the ritual phenomenon of moving in a direction accurately as a central motive in the development of his surmised meridian.  This is consistent with an understanding of ancient temples and palaces that ascribes the meaning of the structure to the work required to build it.  Building itself was sacramental.  (This idea underlies the secret society of the Freemasons).  The people who built the pyramids consecrated it with their labor – the labor was an end in itself.  Similarly, the concept of moving purposefully and accurately in a specific direction was meaningful to Chaco elites – the act of tracing the Meridian was itself a form of worship.  Lest we regard these ideas as fanciful, Lekson notes that every Islamic mosque is oriented toward Mecca.  Each mosque has a niche or a qibla that points toward Mecca.  There is a meridian-orientation in Islam.  Therefore, we can’t dismiss out of hand, a similar orientation among Chaco elites – there are indisputable examples of this kind of thinking even in our modern world.

Opportunity is established by chronology.  Here is where Lekson seems to run into difficulties with ceramic sequences.  Much of the pottery at Paquime seems to show Mimbres’ influence (Mimbres was a Mogollon culture in New Mexico).  Mimbres’ ceramics are among the most beautiful in the world, esthetically pleasing objects of the highest order, and this sort of table-ware is ubiquitous at Paquime, suggesting a connection to the New Mexico villages in the Mimbres’ valley.  Lekson argues that the move from Chaco to Paquime crossed through the Mimbres valley and, therefore, the elites undertaking that passage would have, certainly, acquired a taste for the uniquely beautiful ceramics produced in that place.  Thus, the Mimbres’ pottery found at Paquime is consistent with well-heeled elites passing through the Mimbres sphere of influence. 

Lekson’s account of “opportunity” to commit the ideological crime of the “meridian” is fundamentally chronological.  Shabik was on the meridian and abandoned a little after 700 A.D.  Sacred Ridge followed, also on the meridian, and flourished until about 800 AD when the massacre took place. The elites, then, moved to Chaco and built their great houses (palaces) in the canyon.  This cultural center dominated the southwest with its roads and extensive outliers through 1125 - 1150.  The elites, then, moved north on the Meridian to Aztec Ruins.  Around 1250, Aztec Ruins was abandoned and, by 1300 AD, Paquime is flourishing.  The movement across the southwest on the meridian is not a mass migration – rather, only elite nobility moves from place to place.  The substrate of peasants remains on the land in their unit (family) pueblos and, later, their larger tenement-style and communal pueblos.  Historic pueblo people are radically egalitarian and, generally, peaceful.  (There are exceptions – for instance, the slaughter at the Hopi pueblo at A’wotovi around 1700.)  These characteristics of historic pueblo society are a reaction against the top-down authoritarian rule of the Chaco elites.

Lekson doesn’t end his story with Paquime.  Hundreds of miles south of Paquime there was a enormous city-state pueblo at Culiacan.  Culiacan was known in historic times and seems to have reached its zenith a little after 1500.  Lekson is convinced the Culiacan, also on the meridian, was the final city colonized by Chaco elites.  Culiacan still exists as a modern city that Lekson thinks is probably “pleasant enough” if you know “the rules of the place.”  But Lekson admits he doesn’t know those rules and, if he went there to do field work, he would end up ‘disappeared’.  Culiacan is the headquarters for the Sinaloa drug cartel and it is one of the most dangerous places on the planet.  Accordingly, Lekson says that he can’t develop proof for what he knows intuitively – Culiacan also was part of the Chaco world, circa 1500 and continuing into the modern era.       


2.
Successful archaeologists have some elements of obsessive compulsive disorder.  They spend immense amounts of time looking at the ground, scrutinizing the terrain for tiny broken and discarded objects, and, then, labor for years to assemble these fragments into some kind of coherent narrative.  This narrative, of course, is what ultimately matters to non-archaeologists – we want to know what the data means.  But archaeological professionals are leery of interpretations.  This is because they accept the scientific proposition that all interpretations are provisional and, therefore, necessarily false to some degree.

Technical literature in the field tends to be written in a manner that is intentionally dull.  Most field reports are merely lists of objects and locations with very limited analysis of what this data means.  It seems to me that there is a level of disdain for so-called “interpretation” among professional archaeologists.  Once, I discussed a book by Timothy Pauketat with a highly regarded archaeologist specializing in Olmec studies.  Pauketat’s book about the prehistoric city at Cahokia in eastern Illinois had been a modest success - a lot of copies were sold.  The Olmec expert knew Pauketat slightly and expressed just the faintest disdain for the book – “your colleagues don’t forgive you if you write a popularization,” the man told me. 

Curiously, it seems that issues of “theory” have become increasingly important in archaeology as well as in sociology and, recently, in comparative literature.  A “theory” signifies an ideology, although, perhaps, hidden, an agenda that drives analysis.  “Theory” necessarily underlies all scientific endeavor and, therefore, it is necessary to make the theory visible –to expose it’s assumptions and limitations.  Thus, even no-nonsense writers like Lekson tend to raise theoretical considerations in their work.  But, notwithstanding “theory”, another interesting phenomenon is at work in archaeological studies – the archaeologist’s style comes to resemble the characteristics of the social phenomena that he (my examples are male) studies.

Chaco culture was flamboyant, dramatic, even theatrical.  Lekson writes in a melodramatic highly charged vernacular prose – he teases and, then, reveals; he sets up straw-men to knock down; he anticipates counter-arguments and dismisses them with flourishes of rhetoric.  The Chaco elites were aggressive and prone to histrionic violence.  Lekson is happiest when attacking adversaries.  He tends to be boastful and nakedly assertive.  The Chaco built big linear roads linking landscape features and structures that were significant to them.  Lekson’s argumentation lines things up along his meridian and, then, builds connecting links.  The Chaco elites loved scarlet macaw feathers.  Lekson decorates his prose with puns, jokes, hyperbole – he describes the use of the imported birds at Chaco as involving “macaws and effects” principles.  Sometimes, there’s a loopy, half-stoned quality to Lekson’s prose, possibly related to his home base at Boulder, Colorado.  People in Boulder are radically left-leaning except when they’re not – the place engenders contrarians of all kinds, enemies to established thought, including right-wing idealogues who live in Boulder just for the purpose of stirring up trouble.  (I knew a former NASA rocket-scientist who was from the place: He called in “Fort Boulder” after its origins and observed that about every month “someone gets a bee in their bonnet and rides out of Fort Boulder to save the world.”  Of course, he was disdainful but wouldn’t live anywhere else.)  The Chaco elites may have been similar – one imagines them aristocratically gulping down hallucinogenic chocolate in yard-long ceramic mugs.

Poverty Point’s poet-laureate of archaeology is Jon Gibson.  Gibson’s published work on Poverty Point is exceptionally interesting and, also, demonstrates the stylistic convergence between student and the thing studied. Gibson, who is now 77, has spent his professional life excavating at Poverty Point and communities peripheral to that place located in east central Louisiana, about twenty miles to the west of the Mississippi – Poverty Point is 55 miles northwest of Vicksburg.  As I have earlier remarked, Poverty Point looks a bit like Cerro Juanaqueana, albeit squashed flat.  The city of mounds was built between 1800 and 1400 BC, that is, far too early for an urban site to exist according to conventional archaeological wisdom.  But there’s no doubt that the place was a city by all definitions – first, it was densely populated and, second, the core or center of a peripheral apparatus of smaller villages and what Gibson styles “work camps.”  Poverty Point consists of six elliptical embankment rings, arranged in a half-circle around a low escarpment that overlooks the vast swamps, bayous, and ox-bow lakes extending to the main channel of the Mississippi.  The concentric ring embankments comprise earthworks that would be 4000 yards long if stretched out head to tail.  The rings are not fortifications, because six aisles or corridors slash through them.  Six large mounds are located along alignments established by the corridors cut through the embankments.  One of the mounds in the shape of a flying bird is about 70 feet high. 

Midden deposits show that the embankments were where the people inhabiting this place lived.  They built their houses atop the mounds and threw garbage into the swales between the embankments.  Like most hunter-forager groups they ate just about everything including frogs, alligators and rodents.  Poverty Point people also consumed seeds and various sorts of wild fruits and gourds.  However, their staple was fish – the lagoons and bayous to the east of Poverty Point teem with fish, as much as a million pounds per acre of wetland.  Poverty Point was anything but poor.  In fact, Gibson describes the city as existing in a kind of earthly paradise, abundantly, even, voluptuously fruitful.   Although sedentary – the place dominated the region for 350 years – there is no trace of agriculture – this was a hunter-gatherer culture that somehow built a city.  Through most of its history, Poverty Point lacked ceramics – people cooked in carved soapstone bowls or used hearth-ovens.  Fires were established in these pits which were filled with so-called PPO – Poverty Point Objects.  PPO are thumb-sized spheres or tube-shaped objects fashioned from hand-molded clay (loess) and, then, baked until hard.  PPO retained heat and allowed the people to cook in the hearths without burning their food.  Soups could be made by assembling contents in a soapstone pot and, then, dropping in a PPO to heat the water.  Tens of thousands of these objects have been found at Poverty Point and its associated camps – the objects are considered diagnostic of the culture. 

Gibson characterizes himself ethnically as a “southerner.”  He was raised in rural Louisiana in LaSalle Parish.  His non-technical book describing Poverty Point field work and studies is The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point, Place of Rings (University Press of Florida, Tallahassee 2000).  Like Lekson, Gibson writes in an engaging, though non-confrontational style.  (By contrast, Lekson begins Chapter 1 in the Meridian with a series of exhortations concluding with “Fill up, because we’re diving into the deep end and not coming up for air!”  Gibson, as a polite and courtly southerner, would regard this kind of prose as simply rude.)  Gibson’s prehistoric Poverty Point is the exact antithesis to Lekson’s brutal and hierarchical Chaco.  Gibson regards his tribe at Poverty Point as committed to egalitarian principles of kindness and sharing.  No one had more than anyone else – there were no noble families and no commoners, no warfare, no violence; everyone lived in harmony on their six semi-circular embankments, these earthworks were a mandala for a cosmos in divine equilibrium.  There are six embankment earthworks because the world has six dimensions – east, west, south, north, up and down.  Evil came from the west and, therefore, the circles opened to the east where the life-giving sun rose and were closed to wicked spiritual influences emanating from the opposite direction.  Some of the corridors cut through the embankments were celestially aligned.  The ring of the city, accordingly, was a diagram of the universe. 

Gibson’s imagined Poverty Point people are gentle, courteous, and idealized southerners.  In short, they are like the author who has studied them.  Gibson clearly loves his pre-agriculture Arcadians – he is prone to writing sentences of this kind: (the mixture of kindness and mutual obligation at Poverty Point) “was potent, supercharged with selfless doers who in their tireless travail raised standards of living to new heights.”  Much of his book has this flavor, something that I find charming, but that some readers might reject as saccharine.  The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point is a rigorous study – in fact, some chapters are close to unreadable lists of exotic minerals and different types of lithic lance and atlatl points.  Gibson likes statistics and lards the book with them.  (In pre-ceramic cultures, lithic tools are used to establish chronological sequences: in other words, the way rock adzes, penetrators, biface hoes, and lance-tips are made tells us who made them, where, and at what time.)  He is a gifted artist and his sketches of ancient mounds and artifacts enliven the book – he also draws elegant images of the ancient people using their tools although the form of the man is always depicted as a black silhouette.  Humble to a fault, the only portrait of Gibson in the book shows him sitting in a pit that he has dug, cooling off against the heat of the day – you just see the top of his baseball cap and his luxuriant sideburns in the image.  In his own quiet way, Gibson is as persuasive as Lekson, although he ignites fewer fire-works and his conclusions, all based on generosity and kindness don’t have the gloomy Sturm und Drang of Lekson’s interpretations. 

Gibson’s first chapter is a fairly elegant jargon-free summary of theoretical trends in archaeology.  He notes that mid-century archaeology was cultural – artifacts provided clues to timeless prehistoric cultural characteristics.  Cultural history was supplanted by processual archaeology – in this analysis, the process by which social structures were formed is the subject of study; the field worker looks for transitional forms, early examples of social systems that reached their climaxes generations or, even, hundreds of years earlier.  Post-processual archaeology is founded upon the notion that the mentality of ancient people can be ascertained from the traces they leave.  We can reconstruct how ancient people’s thought about their world, how they “constructed” the world, by examining archaeological evidence.  Gibson considers himself post-processual, an adherent, when he was young, to the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss.  (Post-processual archaeology seems now supplanted in the academy with studies that emphasize the political or social agency of classes that were hitherto considered subservient and, therefore, ahistorical – in Meso-American studies archaeologists try to figure out how peasants or women acted as agents of change in their societies.  This emphasis is irrelevant to Gibson because his Povery Point People lived in an ideal classless society in which women’s labor was considered as meritorious as the work that men did.) 

The mentality that Gibson uses to reconstruct life at Poverty Point is that of a rural southerner.  Whatever else they were, the Poverty Point people were, first and foremost southerners, who behaved according to the social paradigms of the rural parish where Gibson was raised.  Although stated in this way, Gibson’s conclusions may seem arbitrary, I think his arguments as reasonable and have a patina of common-sense persuasiveness.  Gibson was raised among rural people who were self-sufficient and supplemented their wages by hunting and foraging.  These people were reliant on kin for assistance in hard times and recognized that doing favors for others was the glue of social obligation.  Gibson uses the rather odd locution “the power of kindness” for this system of reciprocal obligations.  When someone does a favor for you, your response is “much obliged” – that is, articulating that you are now “obliged” to perform a reciprocal favor.  The reciprocal favor should have a value slightly greater than the good deed done for you – this is the distinctively Louisianan notion of lagniappe.  Lagniappe signifies this “little bit extra” accompanying the reciprocal good deed.  Southerners as distinct as Gibson, the Poverty Point People over 3000 years ago, and Huey Long all relied upon lagniappe as the lubricant that made their social system functional.  Gibson illustrates these concepts by anecdotes from his youth in rural LaSalle Parish.  These autobiographical memories are touchstones for Gibson – they establish in a common sense way a proposition that is mystical: Gibson understands the Poverty Point People because, intellectually, he is really one of them.

It’s worth parsing the outlines of Gibson’s theory to understand how his demiurge –the power of kindness – works.  Like Rousseau, Gibson accepts that there is inequality among men.  However, this inequality is homely and practical – some men are just better fishermen than others; no one knows why but it’s an observed fact.  Fish are highly perishable and, so, if you catch more fish than your neighbors, you will necessarily share those fish with them – otherwise, the catch will rot.  (I’ve experienced this in Minnesota – when I was a kid, men would come back from fishing trips to the north lakes or Canada with a superabundance of walleyes and muskies.  These fish would, then, be distributed as gifts to people in the blue-collar neighborhood where I was raised.)  Sharing food in this way creates a system of mutual obligation – if you give me some fish, I’ll be willing to help you pile up dirt to make a mound on which to erect your dwelling.  Around the 18th century BC, Poverty Point fisherman figured out how to use nets to catch fish when the water was running high and with a current – that is, in winter or flood season.  The technology that allowed Poverty Point fisherman to successfully net their prey in bad weather was the weighted plumb-line net.  The tips of nets were weighted with carefully fashioned tear-drop-shaped orbs of hematite, a heavy stone that pulled the net down to the bottom of the lagoon even if the water was high or a current was flowing.  Poverty Point is built on a long, narrow terrace, the Macon ridge that runs for about a hundred miles above the Mississippi swamps. This ridge was formed from loess – that is, wind-blown silt and this soil formation is wholly devoid of stones and rock.  The nearest rock deposits were gravel about 40 miles away.  Therefore, the people at Poverty Point, who were, of course, stone-age hunters and gatherers lacked the single most important resource necessary to survival, that is, stone from which to fashion tools, including the plumb-weights for their skein nets.  Hematite and other exotic stones are quarried in the Ouachita Mountains in present-day Arkansas about 125 miles away.  The settlement at Poverty Point became a center for the processing and redistribution of exotic rocks.  These stones could be conveyed to Poverty Point by river, using pirogues or canoes.  The volume of exotic, imported rock found at Poverty Point is simply staggering – there may be as much as 30 tons of imported rock strewn around the place. 

The exotic minerals are equally distributed throughout the entire site.  There is absolutely no evidence that anyone had more of this commodity than anyone else.  There are no palaces, no hoards, no caches, and no burials have been found and, so, no grave goods.  Everyone in town had the same amount of imported rock to chip into tools.  Similarly, the “work camps” discovered all around Poverty Point were also equally equipped with appropriate tools – adzes to use in skinning and processing deer, atlatl points, and hoes employed to rake up swamp-roots that were ground to make soups and flat-cakes.

Gibson’s interpretative theories seem plausible enough but they founder on one key point.  How did Poverty Point pay for the 30 tons of exotic rocks laboriously hauled to them and traded into their city?  Here Gibson admits being baffled – we don’t have any evidence that the other tribes supplying Poverty Point with exotic rock received anything in exchange.  Of course, something had to provided in consideration of all that chert, flint, greenstone, agate, and soapstone.  (There was even an blade made from Wyoming obsidian.)  But what was it?  Gibson says that what was given was “perishable or ideological”, but this is unclear.  Ultimately, Gibson says that what the traders with Poverty Point received for their exotic rocks was “hugs and handshakes, fun and festivities, wives and husbands, alliance-building and non-aggression pacts, revivals and rituals” – ultimately, the rocks were imported as a sort of gift.  This doesn’t seem exactly plausible although I admire Gibson for his sanguine view of human nature.  In this aspect of his treatise, Gibson’s love for his Poverty Point people colors his interpretation – the Poverty Point tribe was so remarkably kind, generous, wise and enterprising that foreigners would travel 600 arduous miles by river, pushing pirogues full of rock downstream, just for the opportunity of socializing with them.  Poverty Point was a kind of New Orleans or Memphis – it was fun to just be there in the bright lights of the big city.  Like all archaeological interpretations, the idea is a fiction but one that is pleasant to imagine. 

Southern culture is foreign to me and, to my eyes, much of Gibson’s analysis may be questionable.  But I recall once when I was in Atlanta, I ate in a franchise restaurant.  At the end of my meal, the waiter came to my table and, basically, offered me “seconds” – “Have you had a gracious a-plenty?” the waiter asked  Of course, I didn’t ask for more food, but it was strange to me that the offer was made.  I was a little tongue-tied and the waiter looked at me with an odd expression as if I were some kind of exotic barbarian. 

 


















  C

On the Individual in History

1.
We are living in historic times.  This is a curse.

Twice before, I have lived in historic times.  In both instances, the experience was unpleasant.  In the late sixties, society collapsed into warring factions.  The divide was mostly generational.  In the Minneapolis suburb where I lived, this cultural chaos resulted in schoolteachers refusing to teach.  For a solid year, I went to school but the teachers didn’t teach – I presume they were holed-up in the faculty lounge nursing hangovers or recovering from LSD binges and, undoubtedly, smoking like chimneys.  The Vietnam war had reached its crisis with the Tet offensive and people were setting off bombs at public buildings and the Democratic National Convention exploded into street-fighting in Chicago.  Although I don’t think the outcome was ever seriously in doubt, nonetheless, I remember that history mostly as boredom – normal routines were suspended and this meant that nothing could be done and that necessary curriculum was neglected and ordinary routines disrupted; teachers didn’t teach although the more active students learned different and more complex card games and more aggressive ways to wager and bluff.  The sense of boredom arose from waiting helplessly for the crisis to come to an end.

In the mid-eighties, Local P-9, the meat packer’s union struck the Hormel Foods plant in Austin.  This was also a historic event and one in which I was at its epicenter.  The strike inaugurated a wave of labor unrest that fundamentally transformed the economy and work force.  What I recall about that event was a flood of rumor and speculation, almost all of it ultimately found to be untrue, and the willful refusal of half of the participants in the strike, the workers, to observe what was obvious – they had neither the means nor the will to defeat management and the outcome of the strike seemed somehow a foregone conclusion.  (However, I wonder if my memories of that aspect of the strike suffer from “hindsight bias.”) Chiefly, I recall that it was dangerous to express opinions on the subject and, so, the principal event in the history of our town really wasn’t ever discussed because the topic couldn’t be broached without danger.  Thus, what I recall about the Great Strike was mainly silence – even when there was fighting at the gates to the Plant, the local press and news media didn’t carry the story for fear of upsetting advertisers.  We had to read about what had happened in our town a couple years later in a book assembled by Minneapolis reporters who had been assigned to cover the story.  Only, then, did a clear picture, albeit fictional as is all good journalism, emerge from the fog.  (In the case of the Great Strike, the fog was literal: one famous event was the loss of a helicopter containing a camera crew and news personnel who crashed into an utilities tower in the pre-dawn fog while hurrying to Austin from Minneapolis to cover the fighting at the Plant gates – all of the news happened before 7:00 am when the plant’s operations began.)

The covid-19 pandemic has shut down major economies, killed over 75,000 Americans, and resulted in economic dislocations that are greater than those wrought by the Great Depression.  This crisis is ongoing as I write.  Two familiar impressions as to the experience of “historical events” have returned to me.  First, the situation is intensely boring, the news all sounding in one key and timbre, even the sense of panic attenuating into something deeply dull and tedious.  Everyone is waiting for something that can not occur – that is a return to normalcy.  Second, the landscape is very hazy – no one knows how this will end (or, even, if it can exactly end).  Nothing at all is clear except that prognostications are eagerly made, and no less eagerly, consumed and, then, generally turn out to be false.

2.
In his excellent book on Hollywood narrative technique, Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell notes that studio pictures in the forties used “flashbacks” to tighten their narratives.  Bordwell identifies a sort of fallacy called “hindsight bias” – this is simply that everything looks pre-determined and the outcome of events seems necessary when viewed in retrospect.  Many Hollywood plots involved extreme, even absurd, coincidences necessary to knit together characters and story-lines.  These coincidences can be made to seem less arbitrary, less capricious, if plot cause and effect is viewed in hindsight.

Hindsight bias takes a series of accidents and fuses them into a plot.  This is how history is written.

But, as we all instinctively know, historians write in retrospect, that is, looking backward while life is lived prospectively, peering into an uncertain future.

Thomas Heise’s film Heimat is a Space in Time is a long documentary (almost four hours) tracing German history through family memoirs.  In one extended take, Heise reads letters documenting the courtship of his grandmother and grandfather.  The couple met in Vienna and commenced their relationship in that city.  While Heise reads the letters written by his protagonists, his camera records the view out of the rear-window of a Viennese bus.  It is raining and the window is smeared.  We can see where the bus has been, that is, how it has reached the present position on its route, but not where it is going.  Even our view of the past is occluded by the rain droplets speckling the bus’ back window and running down the glass. (It is like viewing past events through a veil of tears.)  A disembodied voice announces stops about a half-block before they are reached – we can hear the stop announced but don’t see the intersection until the bus has passed through it.  This device, the extended take viewed through the bus’ back window, is a metaphor for history.  We are moving forward but nothing is visible to us except the path that we have taken to this moment – and, even, that terrain is unclear because of the falling rain spattering the glass through which we see.  There is nothing inevitable about the young people becoming a couple just as there was nothing inevitable about the Holocaust.  Heise dramatizes this in a wrenching and lengthy episode in his film: a young man and woman named Udo and Rosi engage in a torrid, complicated love affair that lasts almost seven years and results in many passionate letters; then, suddenly, Rosi meets another man and sleeps with him – this is Wolfgang, the filmmaker’s father who enters a history that seems configured to deliver one result, Rosi and Udo’s marriage, but that takes a sudden, even, inexplicable turn into another narrative entirely. 

Applied to our own experience, “hindsight bias” defines history as the series of events that led to me.  I am the pinnacle of creation.  All historical processes have somehow led to my consciousness.  Since I ineluctably exist – indeed, may be the only thing that really exists – history’s accidents and coincidences are all propitious in that they lead to the glory of creation, that is me. 

3.
A writer whom I respect noted that the covid virus doesn’t attack young people.  This writer declared that whatever happened to older people, the young would surely survive: they would be humanity’s lifeboat. 

But it’s not a lifeboat unless I am on it.


4.
Heise’s film about German history leads to the melancholy conclusion that everyone is either a victim of history, a victimizer, or a witness, more or less, indifferent to the plight of the victims.  In fact, since most people view themselves as acting under compulsion, that is, “obeying orders”, there are really only victims and witnesses.  I would suspect that almost all concentration camp guards and administrators viewed themselves as complicit with the system, but not active agents in its enterprise – that is, they saw themselves as witnesses to the suffering of others but not the causes of that suffering.  The cause of that suffering was abstractly “orders”, that is, orders from superiors and, more theoretically, the “order of things.”

In one scene, Heise reads from a DDR (East German) state security file amassed by the government about his family.  The narrative compiled in the Stasi file tells us that the Heise’s have friends with automobiles who often come and go, but that the family itself doesn’t own a car and uses taxi-cabs.  At the family home, a red flag is flown, supposedly in “solidarity” with workers.  Mrs. Heise dresses elegantly and looks younger than her age.  Sometimes, the family entertains people with “Southern complexions” – that is, possibly Turks or Arabs.  The file, then, scrupulously documents the identities of the snitches providing this information  – there are about nine sources, most of them neighbors said to reside “within 300 meters” of the Heise home in East Berlin.  Accordingly, this rather slender and inconsequential account of the doings of the Family Heise is the result of a dozen or so interviews with nine different informants, all willing to spy on the Heise’s works and days.  It is sozusagen etwas komisch.  (“It is, so to speak, a bit comical.”)

May 7, 2020

On the Coronavirus (3)

1.
A grey-brown stippled bird accompanies me as I walk my dog.  The little bird has a beak like an awl and it chirps as it flutters up and down again, always remaining about ten feet ahead of me in the margin of snow remaining streetside. The day is cold and the bird doesn’t take flight – perhaps, it is husbanding energy against the oncoming night.

Snowblowers and plows have cast up angular shards of ice that line the gutters of the streets.  The ice is shattered into tilted strata piled up along the edge of the road.  These miniature landscapes are like the sea of smashed ice in Friedrich’s famous painting of the wreck of the Hoffnung (“The Hope”).  The tiny bird bouncing up and down amidst the snow may be a house wren, probably migrated to this climate a week ago from the jungles of Mexico or the sultry woods in Georgia and the Smoky Mountains.  The wren has come here on the edge of Winter, wagering that the weather will warm enough to allow it to survive this climate.  For much of its life, the little bird flies on the edge of a climate that would destroy it, on the margins of destruction, as it were – build your cities on the rims of the volcanos, Nietzsche admonished. 

My dog takes no interest in the house wren.  The animal is small, mostly beak and claw and inedible feather.  And no dog is swift enough to pounce upon such an animal, although I understand that the cruel and stealthy cats devour them in great numbers. 

In nature, much of life is lived on the threshold of death.

2.
The death count from coronavirus is about 26,500 as I write these words.  (No, I’m wrong – this afternoon, April 15, 2020, the death toll is 30,035 – with 2800 new casualties reported overnight.)

3.
Meat-packing plants near Omaha and Sioux City have shut down due to the Coronavirus.  Workers have become ill.  Are we on the verge of some kind of compromise to the food distribution center?

4.
There are bright red drops of blood in my dog’s urine, a bright and pretty color against the fresh-fallen snow but disturbing.  I try to ignore this symptom for a day or so, but the situation doesn’t improve and so I have to take my dog to the veterinarian in Clark’s Grove. 

It’s a clear day, bright with windrows of snow still draping the fields.  The little lagoons of melt-water are bright green and blue, like cold pools of water where flotillas of tiny icebergs float in stone basins high in the mountains.  At the veterinarian’s office, I have to call the front desk from my car.  A girl clad in capacious and billowy blue lab scrubs emerges, her face hidden behind a mask.  I surrender my dog to her and she vanishes behind a closed door in the side of the clinic.  A little later, the veterinarian calls to tell me that he suspects a urinary tract infection in my ten-year old Labrador, that an ultrasound shows no sign of gravel in her bladder or kidneys, and that he’s injected her with some antibiotic.  He transfers the call to the front desk where someone tells me the bill and asks me for a card number with which to make payment.  I list the numbers on the debit card but the payment can’t be processed – there’s something wrong with the card.  So I have to provide another set of digits, the number on a credit card.  The masked girl in the pajama-like blue garment appears once more.  She has the dog on my leash and a sack full of medications for heart-worm, ticks and fleas, dog-painkiller for the UTI and a bottle of antibiotics. 

Back in town, I have to pick up some contact lenses prepared by the ophthalmologist.  The entrance on Main Street is locked and no one comes when I knock.  Finally, I call and am told to circle the block and come to the back door where someone will respond to my knock.  I go around to the rear of the block, the rear entrances of the old taverns now all padlocked, and, again, knock at the door.  The clerk calls me and wants a debit card number which I provide, but am, then, told that the card has been declined.  I provide a credit card number.  A girl wearing green and blue plastic pajamas appears on the threshold of the clinic’s back door –she is brandishing tongs by which she holds the box of contact lenses.  Only her eyes are visible and her hands gloved in tight pink plastic. 

5.
What’s wrong with my debit card?

My secretary, Susan, sends me an email about what an ex-boyfriend has told her.  The covid-19 crisis is all a hoax – the deaths that have occurred are merely those to be expected during the flu-season.  The supposed peril is all manufactured.  The media has been enlisted by the government in a plot to banish currency – henceforth, all transactions will occur on the basis of electronic fund transfers.  These transfers allow the government to track purchases in the most exquisite detail – soon transactions that are deemed anti-social (that is, purchases of guns and ammunition) will be wholly banned.  This is the first step in the conspiracy to confiscate firearms and reduce the population to dependency on the centralized federal government. Soon the food distribution system will be mobilized to starve into submission those recalcitrant folks still clinging to their guns and religion – already churches have been ordered to close and, even, Easter worship, was, for all intents and purposes, banned.  Black market crypto-currencies are under attack.  Anyone making use of dollar bills or gold or any sort of paper-money will be targeted for re-education or eliminated.

Military convoys have been sighted, long lines of trucks and ordinance moving through the night.  On sidings in small towns, long black trains are awaiting orders from authorities at the Federal Reserve Bank.  Drones sent aloft by patriots show that rock quarries, once abandoned, are now crowded with tanks and armored personnel carriers guarded by soldiers wearing uniforms no one can identify.  Troops have been mobilized and, even, now death squads are active.  In South Dakota, near the Smithfield pork processing plant, hogs have been executed by the million, masked men with submachine guns killing swine and, then, bulldozing them into mass graves so vast they are visible from space-satellites revolving around the earth.  The food supply must be reduced to destroy resistence.  Toxic agents have been introduced into the water supply mimicking flu symptoms in those drinking from the tap, all to sow chaos and bolster the government’s claim that we are under attack by some kind of novel coronavirus. 

This is socialism rampant, industries nationalized to make respirators and hospital personal protective gear, but I ask you where are these respirators (have you seen one?) and where are the gowns and N95 masks (do you have these things?)?  This war-time production is actually manufacturing gear for concentration camps.  Is it any surprise that so-called field hospitals for covid-19 victims are, in fact,  built behind walls, hidden from the view by canvas ramparts, and designed like concentration camps, complete with crematoriums to destroy the corpses manufactured there. 

These are the end-times, the tribulation foreseen and described by the Good Book.  My secretary receives by email a manual describing small-unit guerilla tactics, how to apply first aid to battle casualties, how bleach can be used to purify urine for drinking, advice for manufacturing explosives and distilling home-made whiskey and vodka.  There’s even a chapter on how to butcher a human being for consumption as meat – man-flesh is said to taste very good, like veal.

On April 17, 1847, rescue parties reached Alder Lake, one of the locations in the high Sierra where the
Donner Party survivors were holed-up.  At Alder Lake, Lewis Keseberg, Sr. was found in a shelter surrounded by half-eaten corpses.  Keseberg had smashed open George Donner’s skull and extracted his brains.  Remarkably, an intact ox leg was found untouched amidst the gory debris.  Keseberg said that the ox leg was “too dry” and that he much preferred eating human heart, liver, and brains. 

6.
I know a man whose son was employed by a major American airlines and assigned management of operations in a populous Asian country.  Now, the 45-year old airline executive is living in his parent’s basement in Austin. 

7.
Ninety minutes before dawn, I am awake with worry.  The moon is a pinkish-mustard colored blur in the sky very near the south horizon.  The moon is wounded, a big wedge bitten off on its right side, and it seems to be leaking pus into the sky.  Perhaps, I fall asleep, then, awake, then sleep again.  Every time I turn my face toward the sky, the injured moon has moved – it seems to be plowing through the sky above the dark horizon like a freight train.  Something is unnatural about the speed with which the moon scuttles through the darkness – it’s like a luminous crab or cockroach.

8.
Sky-trumpets sound over Jerusalem and Anchorage.  There are sky-trumpets blaring above Vancouver Island and Nashville and a half-dozen places all around the world.  The trumpets bellow, changing pitch a little and, then, generating overtones and resonances that vibrate around the central pitch.  The videos posted to You-Tube show darkness, dotted with remote lights, or sometimes stormy grey skies over old buildings or vacant fields.  “What is that sound?” someone whispers.  “The covid...the covid...” another voice declares.

In Pittsburgh, a child is heard crying in the streets.  The sound is loud, distressing, and distinct.  The police are called and don’t hear anything.  As soon as their squad cars depart, the child cries again echo over the narrow streets among the old houses tilted together on the steep hillside.  It’s an old working class neighborhood with sidewalks like ladders and yards full of melting snow and every two blocks the brick chimneys of church steeples looming over rectories and ancient convents. 

9.
The painter, Egon Schiele, was one of Gustav Klimt’s apostles in Vienna before World War I.  As a young man, his sensibility was morbid.  He painted himself as an ecorche, flayed like one of Honore Fragonard’s anatomical specimen, raw bloody muscle and sinew with gore pooled in the tips of his long fingers and testicles.  Schiele made studies of himself masturbating and executed a series of sketches of pubescent girls sprawled on their backs with their legs spread.  (He also liked picturing lesbian couples in the throes of passion.)  These sorts of decadent images were not unusual in fin de siecle Vienna, after all, the place where Freud became famous.  Schiele’s pictures are pornography – the little girls have faces with button-eyes like dolls and, even today, the images are more than a little disturbing.  When he was 22, Schiele was arrested for molesting a little girl, one of his models, and jailed in a small village near Vienna for three weeks.  (He spent his time in his cell drawing detailed still lives.)  There’s no evidence that Schiele committed any actual crimes and so he was released.  In 1915, he married and was, then, conscripted into the armed services.  Schiele wasn’t assigned combat duty – instead, he worked as a clerk in Vienna. 

Klimt died early in 1918 and Schiele was positioned to assume a dominant role in the so-called Viennese Secession, the art nouveau movement of which the artist was a part, but also transcended in many ways.  Schiele, a gaunt man with hands with huge tapering fingers, portrayed himself as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows and his face contorted into a rictus of agony.  He was 28 and maturing.  His late paintings take up the theme of Der Tote Stadt (“the dead city”), images of empty city streets and tenements with hollow, dark windows, painted in glistening, macabre pigment that suggests enamel or intaglio woodwork.  (“The Dead City” is derived from novella by Georges Rodenbach “Bruges-de-Mort” published in 1892, a ghostly work that was adapted into a successful opera in 1920 by Erich Korngold.  Schiele’s canvases, however, presage some of the pictures of empty streets and inexpressive buildings that we see today during the covid epidemic.)  Schiele’s portraits become less provocative; his strangely lit landscapes are wonderfully expressive and, some of his studies of gaunt trees and foliage, verge on Mondrian-like abstraction. 

Schiele was precociously gifted and, even his pornographic sketches, have an exquisite balance, clarity, and elegantly calligraphic style – his haggard, attenuated figures look like modernist versions of the saints and martyrs that El Greco painted.  Schiele’s landscapes and city-pictures are revelatory.  He was chosen by the Vienna arts community to headline the great Secession exhibition planned for the Spring of 1919 and, in fact, completed a poster advertising the show.  (It’s an odd image, an aerial view of a L-shaped table with people ranged around it, something like a skewed picture of the Last Supper.)  The Spanish flu was abroad and Schiele’s young wife, who was six months pregnant, died on October 28, 1918.  He didn’t mourn her for long.  He was dead on October 31, 1918, also a victim of the great pandemic.

Schiele’s aborted career, cut-off just as he became famous, is one of the great question-marks in art history.  What would have happened had he lived?  On this question, the pandemic is silent.

10. 
One day, I don’t know exactly when, I woke and didn’t know whether it was the weekend or a week-day.

11.
The plague story is so dull, so utterly repetitious as to be completely uninteresting.  So-called “front line heroes” are lauded.  Deaths are (insincerely) mourned.  Pundits call for more testing.  A vaccine is always 18 months away – it was 18 months away in February and 18 months in the future today as well. Trump’s pronunciamientos against the virus (he has declared himself “a war time president”) are predictably divisive and equivocal – we must continue “social distancing” at the same time that he tweets “Liberate Minnesota,” that is, denouncing “social distancing” so long as it is the product of a Democratic gubernatorial decree.  Immigration is shut-down, or threatened to be shut-down, although immigrants have nothing to do with the contagion.  When called upon to justify this perverse proposal, Trump says that he doesn’t want immigrants taking jobs that Americans would perform once the work-restrictions are lifted.  But, in fact, most immigrant workers have notes declaring that they are “essential” to our economy –these are meat-packers, food processors, people who kill hogs and bone fish and labor in the fields.  These are the people whose jobs are so significant that they have to keep working or the rest of us will go hungry.  The immigrants, legal or illegal, aren’t part of the problem – they are indisputably part of the solution.  But Trump’s proposal is the very purest form of dog-whistle.  The great majority of Trump supporters are ignorant and xenophobic fools – they need someone to blame for the plague and, in times of crisis, it’s always the stranger who is the source of all our problems.  In fact, Trump’s daily program pivots around saying something so dangerously irresponsible that the Press is distracted from the death toll, increasing by increments of 3000 every 24 hours, and spends the next news cycle summoning a parade of self-righteous talking heads to denounce the president: Presidential power is “absolute” and the President can do anything, Trump says on one day, then, that he can overrule the States and make them open their economies, or that Minnesota and Michigan and some third State that didn’t vote for him should be “liberated”, the US should de-fund the World Health Organization (in the middle of a pandemic), and, at last, that immigration to the United States must be suspended.  It’s a noxious strategy but the Press takes the bait – during the last several days, it’s pretty obvious that the steadily rising death toll is, as they say, “boresome” and disheartening as well and its best to report Trump’s latest provocation with all suitable sound and fury.   You can only amuse the public so long with tributes to brave medical doctors (all of whom seem to be immigrants or the children of immigrants), check-out clerks, and tales of people who died alone, separated from kin, in sterile plastic tents filled with oxygen tubes and Iv bags futilely infusing some kind of poison into their veins.  People stand on balconies and sing to firefighters and cops; someone plays a cello alone on a porch.  A pop star releases a timely song.  More people die. 

12.
Now the news is that the virus can infect you a second time, even after you have earlier survived the illness.  (This seems questionable but who knows?  Half of what is reported is reliably and wholly wrong.)  Covid-19 is studying us more astutely than we study it.  The virus is learning to become more fiercely lethal and its learning curve is steep.

13.
The Banks are entrusted with delivering stimulus loans.  (Disclosure: my firm applied-for and has received such an operating loan – it’s free money, although I think the distribution’s tax status is not yet established.)  The banks are merely conduits for the proceeds but they are entitled to charge up to 5% on small loans, fewer percentage points on the big grants.  So the banks are now earning obscenely huge amounts of money with no risk and little labor.

Covid-19 just magnifies the world’s inequities: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and for those who have nothing at all, everything will be taken.

14.
As New York City and State start to relax some of the social distancing rules, the contagion now sweeps the country.  Although the media dutifully covers outbreaks in places like Sioux Falls and Boise, there’s no urgency, none of the full-throated fear and indignation and desperation that characterized plague horror-stories in the Big Apple.  At least not yet.  The media hasn’t yet learned that New York City doesn’t produce anything but third-rate, derivative musicals and TV chatter.  So far as I know, there are no slaughter-houses (even Kosher ones) in New York’s seven boroughs.  No feed-lots either and no row crop fields extending to the horizon and green with corn and soybeans.  New York’s celebrity chefs are about to find out where their food comes from.

15.
A few hundred deplorables gather to protest the shut-down.  The men are all bewhiskered and look as if they have just come from their woodland den and mail-bomb factory.  The women are better-looking, blonde with broad hips, breeders, it seems.  Some of these people have guns and ammo- bandoliers strung across their brawny chests.  A lot of them carry hand-lettered dyslexic-looking signs that read “My Right to Work” or other pithy expressions of a desire to contribute to the mighty economy that once drove the world (but now no more).  An enterprising reporter should talk to these people and find out exactly what kinds of jobs these folks purport to hold – mink-farm operator? proprietor of taverns catering to bikers and snowmobile enthusiasts? antiques vendor? dog groomer? trap-line operator or big game guide in the North Woods or marina owner?  It doesn’t look like most of these people have ever been gainfully employed.  In fact, some of them seem to be folks with bad backs who have been on work comp for awhile and, possibly, acquired heroin habits in the course of their interminable convalescence.

In some Eastern state, there’s a demonstration of this kind and the goons in their cars who are aiming to block some major intersection encounter a couple of health care workers in pristine blue scrubs.  The health care workers are cut from the heroic mold and I presume that they are actors hired to stage this piquant confrontation between those who protest being forced to stay home and those who are “fighting (as they say) at the front lines.”  The goons in the cars and pick-ups shriek imprecations at the health care workers who stand their ground in stony silence.  The stand-off results in the intersection being blocked anyway and, probably, for a longer time and so everyone walks away from the confrontation with their objectives achieved.  Mission accomplished.  (A few days later, predicatably, someone writes an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal noting that surgical scrubs are sterile and not supposed to be ever worn outside of a hospital ward and operating theater.)

Some of the protesters seem to be confused about what they are protesting.  Among their signs, I see some placards extolling the second amendment, a misbegotten error in the Constitution that accords morons the right to bear arms.  One hapless guy is carrying a sign that says “All Lives Matter!”  Maybe, he’s just recycled that slogan from the last racist and right-wing demonstration in which he participated.

16.
No one is traveling and so oil is just a black tarry substance that pollutes rivers and kills sea-fowl.  Briefly, the cost of oil in the markets for the commodity dips below zero.  This means that oil producers will pay you to accept delivery of the stuff.

Enterprising folks have their swimming pools filled with oil and several small towns dump their reserves of water to have oil pumped into their water towers.  The producers are paying $37 dollars a barrel to purchasers and so a city on the prairie with a couple thousand residents can score ten- or twenty-thousand dollars buying the stuff and injecting it into the tank on the tower next to Main Street. The problem for the entrepreneurs in Dallas and Phoenix who have filled their swimming pools with petroleum is that its not good for swimming and you have trouble getting the oil out of your hair.  It takes the citizens of the small towns a few weeks to accustom themselves to drinking oil instead of tap-water but with fortitude the task can be accomplished.

17.
On Monday, Trump told the governors to start opening their economies and suggested that lock-downs (so-called Shelter-in-Place orders) be rescinded.  So the Republican governor of Georgia proposed to open his State on Friday.  Trump appears on TV on Wednesday to say that he thinks it’s too soon for Georgia to re-open.  The governor had authorized such essential services as nail salons, spas, massage parlors, and tattoo joints to re-open.  “It’s too soon to open,” Trump says on TV during his daily two-hour plus press conference.  MSNBC, the loyal opposition, and Fox, of course, cover the press conferences from beginning to end – they are grotesque affairs involving the president praising himself for his sagacity and acumen as to the plague, contradicting the physician experts or humiliating them by making them reverse previous statement (perhaps only the day before) that have offended the Commander-in-Chief.  (One poor sawbones has to retract his statement that the probable confluence of flu and covid-19 resurgence in the Fall would be “very bad”.  “I didn’t say ‘bad’,” the doctor tries to explain.  “I said ‘difficult’.”  Q: “Well does ‘difficult’ mean ‘bad’?”  A: “Yes.”  Q: “But you said ‘bad’?”  A: “Well, I meant ‘difficult’.”  Q: “So were you misquoted when you said that the fall flu season with covid-19 would be ‘bad’?”  A: “No.  I wasn’t misquoted.”  All the while, Trump looms beside him on-stage with his orange complexion turning a bit purplish with rage.)  CNN won’t cover these press conferences, regarding them as political rallies, albeit of a muted sort.  But this strategy backfires since CNN commentators, then, spend each evening and late into the night analyzing and mocking Trump’s comments. 

As always, but even more obviously with this plague, Trump takes all possible positions without regard to coherence or consistency.  Then, later, he can always point to some declaration that he made that has been borne out by subsequent events.

What is needed, I submit, is the humility to recognize that there are no maps to this terrain, that no one in a modern technologically advanced society, has ever had to deal with these sorts of strains and that the future is simply unknowable.

All we can predict is that another 3000 people in the United States will be listed as dead tomorrow.

18.
The toilet downstairs doesn’t flush right and almost overflows but doesn’t.   I’m relieved.  I flush the toilet a couple more times and am alarmed to see that big noxious bubbles agitate the water in the bowl.  It’s as if the system is burping or farting and distressed in some way.

My relief turns out to be premature.  In the evening, I find that a drain in the floor of the basement room where I store my books has backed up and there is a hideous puddle of water, likely raw sewage spreading out across the floor.

A couple years ago, one of my bookcases collapsed.  It took me more than a year to remove the books from the broken shelves, stack them on the floor, and, then, disassemble the wooden frame of the book case.  I had nowhere to put the wooden parts and so I simply leaned them against the wall.  The books ousted from their ordinary shelves were stacked on the floor. Now, these tottering towers of books are standing in water that is, perhaps, about an inch deep and none too clean by the look of things.

Clearly, the waste-water drain running to the city sewer is clogged.  When a toilet is flushed upstairs, the stinking drain burbles and surges, sending another sheet of filthy water across the tiles.  I have to walk in the water, bare foot, and I presume that the bacteria will infect my toes and cause infection.  The contagion is spreading.  It’s in my house now.  The shit is, literally, coming for me.

19.
There are 24 million people unemployed.  Casualties in the United States stand at 56,000.  The Minnesota State Fair, the “great state get-together” that takes place in the first week of September has been canceled.  The damage to the economy is unprecedented, far worse than the Recession of 2008, worse that the Great Depression in the “dirty thirties.”  A heat wave is rolling across the southwest.  It will be hotter than a 100 degrees tomorrow in Phoenix and Tucson.  Trump has two suggestions for defeating the covid-19 virus: scientists should discover a way to irradiate the human body from within with ultra-violet rays (I think he means infra-red light) or, in the alternative, people can inject themselves with bleach or other kinds of disinfectant.

20.
All plumbers in Austin have Irish names: there is McDermott, Callahan, and M. J. O’Connor.  McDermott, who is now mostly retired, sent out invoices bearing a green four-leaf clover and the yin-yang emblem.  O’Connor also uses a four-leaf clover to advertise his services. 

McDermott is older than me and has weak lungs and, so, he isn’t stirring from his home.  (His ex-wife whom he helps is very sick and her health is fragile and he doesn’t want to risk infecting her.)  McDermott is a life-long friend, a person with the best temperament and disposition of anyone I have ever known.  The sordid problem in my basement is not something I would want to impose upon an enemy, let alone a good friend and, so, I’m relieved when he tells me that his business is closed.  He suggests that I call Callahan.

Callahan comes out to my house with motorized “snake’, a kind of roto-rooter with a cutting head to chop through any clogs in the line.  I chain up my dog on the front porch and Callahan goes downstairs through the side-door that I haven’t used for many years and, together, we splash around in the sewage, now about one to two inches deep.  He yanks out the drain and puts the cutting-head down in the black hole and, then, powers up the roto-rooter.  I go upstairs and sit at the dining room table, listening to the rhythmic rumble of his tool.  Then, I hear Callahan shout: “Goddammit!  Jesus Christ!”  He’s still cursing when I get to the water at the bottom of the steps.  “It’s stuck,” he says.  He reverses the torque on the coil and, also, yanks on the rotating cable.  After a minute or two, the cable starts to retract although reluctantly.  Then, the rooter catches again and the motor clutches.  Callahan pulls on the cable some more, tugging until it the snake is freed and, then, the spinning rotor, the dark, lethal-looking blade emerges from the drain.  There’s an inky gush of mud into the sewage standing around the drain.

“They are clay pipes,” Callahan says, “and either crushed or blocked by roots.  You have trees out there.”

He said that the blade advanced 23 feet before getting stuck in the muck.

Callahan drags his motor and the coiled roto-rooter out to his panel truck.  I ask him what I owe him.  He shrugs.  “Gimme fifty dollars,” he says.  I can see that he’s desperate to get away from this basement, the pool of sewage and the dark and vicious drain.  I write him a check.

“Now what?” I say.

He says: “There’s a company called ‘Jetter’.  They use pressurized water to blast through clogs.  Ask them to look at it.”

Relieved to be dismissed, he shuts the back of his panel truck and drives away.

‘Jetter’ wants nothing to do with the problem.  I tell the man on the phone about what happened with Callahan.  “So what do you want me to do?” he says.  I sense his worry.  The drain is clogged, probably on account of a crushed pipe or tree roots.  If he jets 1000 gallons of water down the hole, he will simply create a sink-hole in my yard or collapse the street and sidewalk or, perhap, create such back pressure on my basement walls that they will simply fall inward.  At minimum, his high pressure jet will flood the basement.

“Nothing I can do,” he says.

21.
Julie checks into a motel with Angelica.  I make some more calls.  O’Connor is the premiere plumbing contractor in town – they install big commercial plumbing systems.  I call O’Connor.  He’s out on a job but his wife says she’ll give him my cell-phone number.  He doesn’t call until late afternoon.  O’Connor has a “scope” that can be used to transmit a TV image of the interior of a pipe.  He tells me that he’ll send out a worker the next morning to put the “scope” down the drain.  But he says that if the water is full of muck, the “scope” probably won’t show anything.  “But it’s worth a try,” he says.

I have no water in the house.  I wait until it’s dark and, then, go in the back yard to urinate like a dog. 

22.
The Israelis have perfected a tracking device that identifies where a person has been so that “contact tracing” for the virus can be accurately accomplished.  “Contact tracing” is determining each and every person with whom the sick person had contact during the incubation period of the disease – thought to be five days, but, as long, possibly as two weeks.  Phone data can be downloaded to identify every place, every store, bar, restaurant, and street corner where the infected person has been.  Of course, use of phone data of this sort will be helpful in many other ways – counter-terrorism, surveillance of political dissenters, supervision of unruly members of the public.

Freedoms lost now may not be restored.  Although who knows?  No one can know the future. 

23.
A feeling of claustrophobia is abroad.  The world is now a place of closed borders and locked doors, empty arcades and plazas as in a de Chirico painting.  The disease has seized the entirety of our imaginations – we can’t conceive of a world without this unceasing peril.

24.
O’Connor’s man comes with his monitor and camera on the end of a roto-rooter cable.  He warns me that the water may be too murky to see anything.

I have to pick up some medications.  You drive to the window at the pharmacy, announce your name, and the woman behind the plexi-glass at the counter, hands you the pills in their bottle in a sack and the sack set inside of plastic box.  The woman at the counter is wearing a surgical mask and blue gloves.

When I return to the house, the plumber is putting away his scope and TV monitor.  “The screen was just bright red,” he said.  “Nothing was visible.”  He tells me that he thinks the blockage in the main sewer line is 23 feet from the drain.  Then, he gets out a can of green spray paint.  He intends to mark the place on the lawn above the blockage – this is so the excavator can dig down to find the crushed or root-infiltrated clay pipe.  The young man is vigorous with a black moustache and a big tattoo like a decal signifying deadly radiation on his bicep.  He has a cell-phone that is supposed to pick up pinging signal from the tip of the ‘scope’.  But the cell-phone and the locator, a sort of listening tube, aren’t calibrated correctly.  The plumber paces around in my front yard, searching for the signal to show him where to mark the lawn.

But the locator leads him in circles and, then, to the foundation walls of the house.  I know that the pipe can’t be in that place. 

“We know where the pipe enters the floor of the basement,” the plumber says, “and I know where it feeds into the city sewer.  But who knows what sort of loops and curves and twists it takes to get to the city sewer.”

After 15 minutes pacing around the sides of house, he gives up.  He says that his boss, Mike O’Connor will call me in an hour or so with a proposal.
 
25.
For about eight years, my son drank heavily and used dangerous drugs.  He would often pass out or wander around the neighborhood and town staggering drunk or almost comatose from drugs.  During this period of time, my wife and I were terrified that he would overdose or kill himself or be horribly injured as a result of his intoxication, falling into water or dying in a ditch or snowbank or plunging off an overpass or bridge somewhere.  In those years, we lived in a state of abject and degrading fear.  During that time, my son had problems with the law and, ultimately was committed to a locked psychiatric ward – he was held in awful conditions of confinement for over 180 days.  When these horrible things happened, Jack hid vodka bottles and other booze in a space under our front porch, an enclosed trench-like room full of spiders and centipedes and dusty cans of paint and smashed up furniture.  When he was drunk, my son and his cronies broke things, left shards of glass everywhere, and ruined chairs and lamps and tables.  All of this wretched detritus was shoved into the “cold room”, as we called it, hidden there, put out of sight and out of mind, on an icy concrete floor where sinister pools of water sometimes appeared.  Pretty soon, the cold room was so filled with ruined furniture and bottles and other debris that you couldn’t really open the door any longer.  Spider webs cloaked the debris.  Dust settled over everything.

O’Connor doesn’t call me back.  I presume that he really isn’t enthused about the basement full of raw sewage, the clogged pipe, and the fact that no one can really chart the course of the waste-water system in my house.  I call him and there is an enormously long delay; presumably, he’s stiffening up his courage with respect to the sewer problems that have rendered my house uninhabitable.

When he comes on the phone, O’Connor says he’ll have to send out a crew to jackhammer open the concrete floor in the “little pantry under your porch.”  He is referring to the unlit “cold room” as we call it, the place bearing the loathsome evidence of my son’s mental illness, the site of ruins and decay.  “The ‘scope’ only advanced four feet,” O’Connor says.  “I thought he was 23 feet into the pipe,” I say.  “No, only four feet,” O’Connor tells me.  “This means the blockage is under the concrete floor of the pantry,” he says.  I feel physically ill, reeling. “We’ll come on Monday and jack-hammer it open, maybe put in a drain and clean-out in the pantry.  But, then, we’ll have to deal with the rest of the pipe and, presumably, that will be all tangled up with roots and crushed also,” O’Connor says.

O’Connor says that the clog was so bad that his man almost lost the ‘scope’ with its camera-head in the drain.

I ask for an estimate.  “I can’t give you an estimate,” he says.  “It underground.  I can’t even begin to estimate what will have to be done.” 

I’ve talk to my insurance.  I have $6000 coverage for sewage back-up with a one-thousand dollar deductible. 

I’m guessing this problem will cost about $17,500 dollars.  And tomorrow, I’m going to have to drag garbage out of the cold room, clear out the wolf-spiders and the centipedes, drag heavy items through the sewage to open up a place under the porch where the workers can smash out the concrete over the blocked sewer pipe.  The weekend now intervenes with no water in the house and standing sewage in the basement.  “It must be really blocked,” O’Connor says.  “I would have thought that the water would seep back down but it hasn’t.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I say.

26.
The sewage in my basement, my terror at confronting the “cold room”, the chaos and dismay in the world: it’s all heaping up on me.  I can’t breathe.  Pretty soon, I expect, that I will be sick.

27.
During the last two days, the roads have been flooded with traffic.  It’s warm, about 65 during the day-time, and, suddenly, people are out and about.  I have the sense that only the very ill and the very elderly will follow the governor’s orders about staying-at-home.  People have become inured to the slaughter in the hospitals.  Some dictator observed that the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of thousands a statistic.  And that sort thinking prevails this weekend. 

New evidence suggests that covid-19 virus, once it has swept through a population, doesn’t confer any immunity.  People are getting re-infected with the virus – at least, that is the current news, although I wonder about the accuracy of these reports.  I know that testing to ascertain whether someone had the novel covid virus has been flawed and that there have been many inaccurate results recorded.  (Current tests are trending 15% false negative – this implies many false positives as well.) Accordingly, I wonder if the people now testing positive for covid 19 really had the illness previously.  We live in the realm of conjecture and fearful surmise.

28.
I’ve now used a Shop-vac to extract about 400 gallons of raw sewage from the room where I store books and my DVD collection.  The process was to vacuum water in five gallon increments, disassemble the Shop-Vac receptacle so that the water could be poured and, then, dump the filth into buckets.  Each bucket was big enough to contain fifteen gallons, a load of water that I, then, hauled up the stairs and, then, thirty feet or so into my back yard where I splashed the sewage down on grass and shrubs.  Angelica assisted me with task.  After about two hours, no standing water remained in the basement except in the black fatal drain in the floor.

I took breaks ever ten or eleven buckets of water because my back hurt and my legs were sore from squatting and, then, climbing steps.  Angelica and I also pulled garbage out of the cold room.  There was a surprising amount of fairly good furniture in that room – at least three black upholstered office chairs with swivels and wheels, two beautiful wooden chairs that were part of dining set, a lamp, and an antique chest as well as two big suitcases.  In ruinous condition were two bookcases, both of them of particle board and immensely heavy.   We also dragged out onto the boulevard a box of antiquated stereo equipment, what used to be called Hi-Fi receivers, a green plastic Christmas tree and two boxes of ornaments, as well as several partially disassembled book cases made of metal and plastic.  Half of the room is still piled floor to ceiling with rotting boxes containing god knows what, but we’ve made progress.  Most interestingly, I’ve uncovered a large clean-out plug in the middle of the cold room.  I wonder if this entrance into the underworld, about four feet from the drain in the paneled basement room is the stricture where the roto-rooter equipment has been entrapped. 

29.
As I’ve earlier mentioned, more than 85% of patients put on respirators die.  (I’m aware that like everything reported about this virus, these figures may be unsound.)  Of course, a month ago there was a vast alarum about whether enough respirators would be available to treat patients who needed them.  Now, it’s pretty clear that respirators weren’t particularly effective in decreasing mortality and, in fact, may have increased deaths – we just don’t know at this time.  Doctors need to feel that they helping their patients and this requires some form of “doing”, that is, some kind of active therapy.  The respirators, at first, were probably more beneficial to the physicians than their patients – they provided the illusion that there was some kind of task that could be performed to alleviate this misery.  People want action, not analysis and not sympathy.  This is why the media and the president are constantly proposing additional measures that may stem the tide.  But it’s obvious that much of this is just theater, illusory and without efficacy.

Patients put on respirators died alone with painful apparatus drilled down their throats.  Medical comas were induced to keep the patients’ gag reflexes from vomited back the tubing.  But the patients succumbed anyway.  Probably people over 65 should be issued cyanide tablets sufficient for suicide with the option of swallowing that poison to avoid the inevitable.

30.
Lulu Garcia-Narvarro, a newscaster with National Public Radio, ends her broadcast by advising people to be “kind to themselves.”  I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. People think they are being “kind to themselves” even when they are rending their flesh or preparing to put a bullet through their brains.

31.
Morning news on Sunday, April 26, 2020: Jake Tapper is quarreling with Ann Birks, a physician who is part of President’s team of advisors.  His questions are mostly in the aftermath of Trump’s bizarre remark that people might consider injecting disinfectant or ultra-violet rays into their bodies.  (As is always the case with Trump is thought-processes are so strangely illogical and his communication skills so negligible that no one call tell precisely what he means at any given time.)  I heard the exchange at the Thursday, April 23 press conference and thought that Trump was musing out loud without suggesting anything to anyone except himself – this kind of narcissistic self-absorbed monologue is characteristic of this president.  So far as I know there’s no evidence that anyone ran out, filled a syringe full of bleach, and injected it into their body, but the media perseveres in the possibility that this could have happened.  So on April 26, now three days after Trump’s bizarre statement, Jake Tapper asks his final question: In effect, tell us what a moron Trump is to imply that people should inject UV or disinfectant into their bodies (something that Trump didn’t really imply.)  This is the fundamental question that underlies each and every hostile encounter between the Press and Trump’s medical team or supporters: surely you must think your boss is a fool and, so, could you kindly tell us publicly that you think your boss is a fool?  If not, please say the worst thing that you can about Trump.

Dr. Birks won’t say anything bad about Trump and Tapper gets more and more outraged, dismissive, and indignant.  He demands that the doctor denounce Trump.  But Birks won’t be bullied into this statement and she points out that the media are probably doing more harm than Trump’s original tentative and questioning remark.  (The media are outraged that Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic” – there’s no shred of evidence for sarcasm either.  The media need to cease being outraged that Trump lies.  Of course, he lies – he literally doesn’t know the difference between truth and falsehood, a point that raises an interesting semantic and philosophical question: is someone lying when they don’t know that they are lying?  The media should simply note the misstatement and move on.)  Finally, Dr. Birks forgets Tapper’s name and calls him “Michael.”  Tapper’s huge earnest eyes almost fill with tears; he seems about ready to weep.  He would be so, so wonderfully happy, if the physician would simply something very bad about the president.  But she isn’t interested in making that statement.

The media’s message is this: You are going to die or starve and the President of the United States has done this to you.  The relationship between the media and the President and his minions is totally dysfunctional and, probably, clinically insane.  The Watergate debacle, at least, was about the health of the body politic; this debate is about the health of our actual corporeal bodies.  There are no metaphors here.  Trump is literally making you sick. 

32.
The smell in the house is turning sour, a bit like an expensive French cheese.  When I drive to McDonald’s for breakfast, I keep pulling out in front of oncoming cars.  It seems that I want to crown this misery with a car crash.  Scott Simon, a NPR broadcaster, says that he dreamed that an elevator had stopped on his floor.  The door to the elevator opened and Simon’s father, who had died when he was 16, was standing in the elevator.  He said to his son: “At least, I don’t have to wear a mask, because I am already dead.” 

33.
The dog is alarmed.  She barks and whines and paws at the floor until I see the cause of her distress – an elegant-looking wasp with a yellow-striped abdomen is creeping across the living room floor.  The windows and doors have been open to air out the house, but this wasp has the appearance of a fledgling, as if it hatched from some hidden hive in my dwelling.  Normally, I pick up insects and put them outside, but the wasp might sting my dog’s nose and, so, I crush it with tennis shoe.  The flattened wasp has a little fleck of turquoise at its mandibles.  When I look more closely, I see that it is wearing a tiny surgical mask.

34.
On Monday, the plumber comes with the intent of jack-hammering out the floor under the porch, the concrete in the noisome “cold room”.  But, first, he levers open the pump-out in the middle of the floor and sees that the water is relatively clear so that, perhaps, his camera-scope can be deployed once more.  And, so, he departs for the shop and returns a few minutes later with the device.  A half-hour passes and the plumber calls me at home – “I’ve got to 40 feet and can see in the water; the pipe is open to the city sewer.”  I drive the five blocks back to my house and look at the TV monitor: the water trapped in the pipe is a reddish stew of floating debris with big pink earthworms that sometimes spin into view.  The worms rotate in the murk like planets in outer space, elongated by the subtle gravitational fields in the sewage. 

The plumber spends another two hours rooting out the pipe until the lines flow through to the city sewer.  Some picturesque words describe the situation underground: “root curtains” for places where tree roots have infiltrated the old clay pipes and “mud prisms” (or, possibly, “mud prisons”), describing, I think, the lenses of mud that have seeped between the pipe segments.

The rooter has extracted a half-dozen “root curtains” and they are very delicate, masses of tiny black tendrils, not the nasty fibrous bundles that I imagine, but small spheres of fragile-seeming threads.

A Service Master contractor comes in the afternoon and power-washes the floors with disinfectant solution.  The ruined carpet on the basement steps is removed.  The clean-up is underway.

35.
A long metal dumpster has been delivered curbside.  We are going to clean out some of the house, discarding thirty years worth of stuff that we have acquired and no longer use.  We have set items to be discarded on the curb for people to scavenge if they want – so far, the only things taken are a folding chair and a single old lamp.

36.
Most states are re-opening albeit tentatively on Friday, May 1,2020.  Businesses are supposed to provide curbside delivery – although how well this will work is unclear.  Testing for the virus is supposed to be ubiquitous but there’s no mechanism to manage these measures.  If I wanted to be tested, I don’t know where I would go or how I would accomplish this.

Vice-President Mike Pence jets into Rochester to glad-hand with the Mayo bosses.  He doesn’t wear a mask and visits a ward where there are sick people.  The craven Mayo Clinic tweets that VP Pence was told to wear a mask, but declined to do so, but, then, this act of lese majestie is rescinded: the Clinic takes down the tweet.  But the damage to Pence is done and the media denounces him and, then, adding insult to injury, repeats the best jokes made about his visit on late-night TV: Jimmy Fallon, for instance, “Pence isn’t allowed to wear a mask because his lips must always be available for ass-kissing (President Trump)” and so on.  David Letterman tells Howard Stern that Pence’s failure to wear a mask when visiting covid patients at the Clinic is tantamount to “taunting them” – I don’t see the symbolism in exactly that way. 

Spring is underway.  The season advances regardless of what we do to hinder or encourage it.  In one week, the trees have put on some of their brightest green and most tender leaves.  The birds are trilling overhead and squirrels chatter.  In wild places, the virus has eliminated human visitors (everyone is in their setts at home) and bears and deer are frolicking among empty tourist cabins at Yellowstone and Yosemite.  A catastrophe for mankind is a boon to animals, although the slaughter-houses are running on skeletal crews and the news reports that 1.5 million hogs will have to be simply murdered since they can’t be more productively butchered in packing plants now crippled by sickness.  What if the animals were simply released into the wild – imagine vast herds of feral pigs roaming the alleys and thickets, devouring small dogs and babies, gorging themselves on growing crops, growing increasingly wary and cunning and, ultimately, seizing control of whole tracts of southwestern Minnesota, most of Iowa and the eastern slope of the Dakotas. 

37.
The wind howls.  The buckets used to carry water out of my basement are blown so far away that I can retrieve only one of them – it’s resting against a curb, a block away.  The others have vanished. The sky has opened up its corridors to the wind and howls like a banshee.  Cables slump down over the parking lot at my law office, hammered off the utility poles by the relentless gales.  Cardboard kites up into the air, empty boxes skipping merrily down the street.  Because of the virus, people have been buying things on-line and there are vast amounts of cardboard discarded next to garbage bins and all of it has now taken wing and is soaring through the air.

38.
30 million people unemployed. 

39.
Now the trees are stitched with green, not clouds or veils of it yet, but brittle slippery-looking pale celadon buds.

40.
At Waterloo, Iowa, about a hundred miles away, the Tyson meat-packing plant is ground zero for the infection.  Six-hundred cases are traced to the plant and the contagion has spread into the nursing homes where it will, undoubtedly, reap a deadly harvest.  The plant is shut-down and farmers are selling hogs on e-bay or killing them to avoid feed costs – there’s nowhere the transport the animals.  Undoubtedly, someone will just release a thousand or ten-thousand swine into the woods somewhere, possibly in the brushy valleys and remote valleys around the Mississippi River.  There the freed swine will breed and build their empire and, if the winter doesn’t carry them off, they will overrun the country, root out the growing crops, and, perhaps, the boars will grow mighty tusks with which to threaten the townsfolk.

Trump has vowed to keep the meatpacking plants open.  But what this means is that he intends to issue executive orders insulating the ownership of these firms from liability if workers get sick on the job.   The key is to avoid defining covid-19 as an occupational disease – if the sickness is treated as an occupational disease, then, employees will be entitled to worker’s compensation if they become ill.  This would bankrupt the industry. 

41.
The Hormel woods are resplendent with bright blue flowers, blue-bells, growing where the forest floods.  The flowers look metal-grey in the distance and spread in sheets between the trees.  The swales in the woods where standing water is often seen have dried.  The fiddle-head ferns are not yet swaying in the breeze. Winter winds have uprooted many trees.  The park is full of bikers swishing here and there on narrow trails from which foot traffic is barred.  Whole families are out with dogs, riding along the main pedestrian trail and there are immigrant men from southeast Asia toting fishing gear, lovers strolling between the blue-bells, and, on the creek, some canoes and kayaks paddling downstream to the place where the stream rolls under the freeway bridges and spreads out to flood a low-lying forest of oak and maple still winter-bare.  On the terrace overlooking the creek, the cemetery is lush-green, studded with white and grey tombs, a few obelisks standing here and there like exclamation points against the blue sky. 

I know someone whom I meet by coincidence on the Hormel Woods trail.  We chat as the bike-rider pedals slowly about ten paces ahead of me.  His wife is farther along the trail, towing a cart in which a baby is riding.  The wife tells me that at the University of Madison veterinarian school experiments are underway to determine if the growth of hogs can be chemically slowed or reduced by certain forms of judiciously applied starvation – the idea would be anti-growth as opposed to the pro-growth hormones usually applied to boost weight-gain.  If the animals can be kept relatively small and lean for a longer period of time, perhaps, they can be kept in the food pipe-line until the quarantines are lifted.

42.
It’s startlingly cold this morning. The governor is maintaining shelter-at-home restrictions for another two weeks – until the 15th of May.  Minnesota has seen about 6663 cases with 419 deaths.  (80% of the deaths are in nursing homes.)  Twenty-eight cases are confirmed in Mower County where I live, but no deaths.  The second largest number of cases by county after Minneapolis (Hennepin) is Nobles County where there is a meatpacking company and over 900 people tested positive. 

May 4, 2020