WW: Century-old wiring

(This ancient outbuilding, one of a few derelict structures still surviving from what was a working dairy farm near my home when I was a child, has knob-and-tube wiring. As you can see, it was a two-element system consisting of cloth-covered wires strung on insulators. In living areas they were usually hidden inside walls, but in basements, attics, service buildings, and outdoor applications, they were hung along rafters, down siding, and under eaves, as here. [Note the old-school porcelain insulators – no longer wired – on the rafters.]

Though alarmingly primitive to modern eyes, knob and tube wasn't much more dangerous than recent methods. The main reason it disappeared was that it required twice as much labour as the single integrated cable introduced in the 50s, and was therefore twice as expensive to instal.

I believe that old farm dated to the 20s [the other 20s, I mean], when knob and tube was industry standard. But this shed was apparently still rocking it in the 70s, while in active commercial service.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Ancient oil can

(Found this all-steel imperial quart motor oil can on a recent walk along a former logging road – now in a protected natural area. Judging exact age is hard with no labelling left, but Internet-roshi says cans of this type were standard from the 20s through the 50s. All things considered, I'd guess 40s – early 50s for this one. Note the distinctive hole left by the old-school oil can spout. I threw at least one of those spouts away a few years ago, when I moved my mom out of the house she'd lived in for nearly 40 years.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Morse code radio

(My thirty-year-old OHR high-frequency CW [Morse code] transceiver, set up at the home of friends. My friends are biologists, and their fossil-sorting table was convenient on several levels.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Ask a Dinosaur

Insight from a sangha-mate on Mastodon (appropriately enough):

One of the most important ideas to sit with – amid the convulsion of climate change – is that Earth was not made for us.

That idea flies against many religions, but also appears in secular settings, with even activists thinking of Earth as a sort of organic machine, a spaceship, a system that’s carefully balanced in absolute ways.

Those metaphors have power, but they’re ultimately unhelpful. Our place here is precarious because we don’t 'belong' in any cosmic sense.

We’re just here.

(Photo of a well-worn dinosaur path in Colorado courtesy of James St. John and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Ancient bench

(The city developed a small but interesting walking park here a few years ago, on utilities land it's owned for many decades. Part of it includes a long stretch of lakefront, all of it densely forested. One could believe this shore had never been developed.

Until one stumbles on this ancient park bench in the jungle, now reduced to just the two concrete end supports, its wooden seat long since melted away.

So this is not the first park to be located here, though this property has been wild and overgrown for most of the half-century I've known it.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Potsherd on the beach

(Because the North Coast has only been densely populated for the past two centuries, we have nothing like the glorious mudlarking they get in the UK. [On the other hand, we also don't need a licence to do it.] Generally, unless you stumble on something pre-contact, you're looking at a 20th century Euro-American artefact. Maybe 19th; very rarely 18th. The above probably falls in the first two categories. I still wonder how it comes to be there, and where in the bay it was lying before the tide fetched it up.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Railway iron

(This is a pile of old railway iron, found in the ground by a bike trail maintenance crew. The trail was built on the right-of-way of one of the many narrow-gauge logging railways that seamed this part of the world right up my youth. All have since been decommissioned; some, like this one, were converted to bike trails.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Aboriginal hole

(Found this giant old cedar stump on the beach some time ago. The hole has been a matter of conjecture ever since. It's clearly not the work of an animal; too clean and too conical.

But the clincher is that remnant of charcoal.

Only one culture I know around here did that, and they gave it up when they got steel. Until then, to determine whether a trunk was sound enough for construction, they gnawed a shallow pit in it with their knapped adzes, kindled a tiny fire inside, then deepened the test hole by pecking out the charred wood.

But the arrival of crosscut saws made it economical to fell first and ask questions later.

Is this stump old enough? Well, it's a stump, saturated with preservative resin, and has been pickling in a saline environment since it washed into the bay a long time ago.

And I haven’t come up with a better theory.)

WW: The Blockhouse Wars

(On this site stood one of the first homesteads in the neck of Thurston County, Washington, where I grew up. During the Blockhouse Wars of the 1850s – a string of skirmishes touched off by settler abuse of First Nations treaties – the Eaton place hosted one of the tiny wooden stockades for which the era is named. I'm told the ruins of "Fort Eaton" endured well into the 20th century.

The marker was placed, not by any government organism, but by the Freedom Community, a Christian commune established nearby later in the l9th century. It too succumbed to entropy, but persisted as an ordinary village for decades thereafter.

When I was a kid this monument was all but lost under Scotch broom, baldhip rose, and Garry oak, beside a county highway that began life as the main wagon road between Oregon and Puget Sound. While reading history at university I found the plaque by the ancient oak beside it, which I was told was the local hangin' tree. [Oaks are rare on the North Coast; their presence on the Salish Prairie in great number was and remains much remarked.]

In the decades since someone has cleared a respectable little rest stop around the marker, rendering it much easier to find.)

Practice Models

What I most ached for on the mountain was a musical instrument. They're like languages, each complete and distinct and irreplaceable. Sadly, of the several I play, only the harmonica is easily carried. Which is why I learned it, but as I never acquired the true harpist's seatbelt-sense of "nowhere without it", I'd managed to forget mine before leaving. And I missed it every day.

Flautists have it figured out: a simple tube, and a jackknife with a reamer, and you've got music. Archaeologists believe that, percussion excepted, the transverse flute was the first instrument we invented.

Of course, simplicity on that order demands complexity on another. I tried to learn, once.

And so, the harmonica. Because anything your instrument won't do for you, you have to find in yourself.

(Photo of 43,000-year-old Aurignacian bone flute, which clearly demanded more talent than I have, courtesy of José-Manuel Benito, Parque de la Prehistoria de Teverga, and Wikimedia Commons. Photo of my old Hohner Chromonica model also courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Indian War veteran

(H.J. Cameron here served in Company C of the 2nd Washington Territory Volunteers, a settlers' militia of the 1850s Blockhouse Wars. The stone doesn't say whether he was a casualty, but the lack of birth and death stats suggests he was. If so, he was one of a select few; the Blockhouse Wars were famously more smoke than fire, at least on the Green Side. [And for white folks.])

WW: Old phone

(From my mother's attic. It could still come in handy some day.)

WW: Fossil imprint

(This is the imprint of an ancient scallop shell, pressed flat underground over several million years. This summer it was stripped out by the action of sea, and the peat it rested in was thrown up on the beach. Enjoy it while it lasts; the medium is soft and friable, and will soon dry into a tiny heap of anonymous dirt. As will we all, one day.)

WW: My cowboy grandfather, Crooked River, 1918

(Far left, holding his horse.)

WW: Aboriginal fishing weight (found in surf)