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1.
Tanaru
With apologies to Robert Earl Keen, the road does not go on forever, and the party always comes to an end. Witness Brazil, where FUNAI reports that the last surviving member of yet another indigenous tribe—an uncontacted band of determined holdouts–has been found dead in his hammock in the Tanaru region. He was thought to be in his late fifties or early sixties, and was known as “Man in the Hole” for his habit of digging deep holes around the rainforest. Nobody is sure why he did that—maybe to hide, maybe to hunt–but he is reported to have been found covered in macaw feathers. “He was waiting for his death, there were no signs of violence,” said Marcelo dos Santos, an expert on Brazil’s indigenous peoples. And because he was uncontacted it is not known what language he spoke, or what ethnic group he may have been related to. He is simply gone, an alternative universe of history gone with him, under a blanket of macaw feathers.
Imagine that, then, his final night in a black rainforest with the screaming insects. A blinking satellite visible only for a second in the canopy, tracing its orbit. Did he know it was over? Did he pray for it? What was his last thought? He seems to have gone peacefully, closing his eyes, the hammock swaying perhaps, hands resting on his blanket of colorful feathers. And then nothing. Twenty thousand years gone down. Not even a name to leave behind.
Even people go extinct. Finis Viae.
2.
Fort Clatsop, Oregon
It isn’t much, this fort, and I strain for verisimilitude. It might be the very sad museum, where the most interesting item on display is a woven Clatsop hat. The rest is fraud. Intellectual and physical. Reconstructions of reconstructions. The people inside shuffle and wheeze in unison behind their masks, a phlegmatic choir requiring oxygen and historical handrails. It feels like the medical examiner’s waiting room before an autopsy.
Or it might be the park ranger inside the fort who has just finished telling a young girl that he ate dog in Vietnam. It’s meant to be a lesson in survival but it sounds more like there is something broken in his head. He’s in the wrong costume. Nobody who survived the journey across North America with the Captains would have been wearing what he’s got on. By the time they made the portage at Great Falls their clothing was destroyed. They had rags more useful for binding wounds, for soaking in whiskey and packing a bad molar. The girl is frightened. She moves on. Later, when I am inside espying the absolute minimum the park service has done to recreate living conditions, I find her hiding behind a door, waiting to ambush her sister. She bumps into me and looks up as though I have arrived from another planet, scampers off. Stranger danger. It is the world she knows. The ranger invites a clustered party of obese tourists to probe him with questions. They demure. He is grandiose. Their cell phones are all ringing and beeping and making cathedral noises. A man steps forward and a long discussion about Thompson sub-machine guns ensues. They have all been to the wars. The exchange is wild with laughter and uneasy pretense. It ends. The party moves off. The Ranger looks across the fort to where I am sitting on a bench hewn by a chainsaw. We match eyes. He looks away. I have no questions for him and he knows it. I click my pen, slide it back into my shirt pocket. Maybe I sigh, unconsciously.
I close my notebook.
The Corps of Discovery did not stay here long. Through the winter. They had friendly relations with Indians. They traded. They built a trail to the beach where they made salt from seawater. They found a dead whale and cut blubber from its carcass and hauled it back. They ate plenty of elk. The place would not have looked as it does now, which has been sanitized into stupidity. Imagination came here to die in platitudes made into placards for the minds of children. It would have been cleared back for firewood, for fields of fire. Hides and gutpiles. Soot. Mud. Smoky fires. A winter grimness and perpetual coughing and sickness. Fear of death. Endless, endless, rain.
I hear someone speaking German. Father, mother, and daughter. They have come up from the creek where water was fetched. Today it is dry, a viewing stand over a ravine full of choke cherries. The Germans are far more interested in what happened here than the Americans who have come wearing flip flops and an overwhelming vagueness. I wonder what they believe in. What they would fight for, what hill they would choose to die on. I can’t picture one. They are walking billboards, plastered with consumer brands. Each one of them is clutching their phone like Thomas More mounting the tower scaffold with his prayer book. The truth is they embarrass me. Or am I embarrassed for them? It is hard to know. This place is the end of one road and the beginning of another. It isn’t even serious. I look up. There is a Sitka Spruce here. An enormous tree. It is old enough to have been here when the Corps was here, when the axes rang out and the fires sizzled in raindrops and the elk were hanging. But it provides no answers. It just is. Covered in moss.
At the haul-out where the canoes were parked there is a kind of lagoon full of pilings. It is another layer of history draped over the place. There is a signpost with some kind of explanation I have a hard time reading, as if I’ve lost the capacity for English. I keep trying to see the Corps moving about on their daily tasks but they are ephemeral, shades, sucked away by the aluminum wind of the highway. Something important is missing here. There are a dozen kayaks full of chipper undergads paddling around in the reeds. They are ripping out invasive species, I’m told. The purple-headed flower, they tell me, is a harbinger of worldwide climactic doom. The water is two feet deep and they are all wearing life jackets and helmets.
Fade to black.
3.
The Last Selfie Ever Taken
We turn to computers. We make our pilgrammages. We visit the oracles at Bing and Google, who give us answers for a price. We make offerings to see the relics of the great bishops and cardinals of coding. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Cupertino and Seattle are holy cities on a holy coast, bustling with monks, missionaries, and secret societies. Mores and Tyndales, scheming and coding in their cloistered hermitages. They are at war with each other in a world we cannot see. They are the birthplaces of digital inquisition, too, but that comes later, and is the remit of the King.
We go about our business. Blacksmiths and boatmen we are, hammering and plying, singing our songs beneath the tower walls. We would like to be left alone but there are taxes to raise, realms to defend, abbeys and priories to ransack and inventory, to haul down to make way for the King’s new religion and his gifts to allies. There are rumors of plague and the sweating sickness, of emperors stirring to war in the east. The hunger stones are revealed again in the river beds.
And the computers give us our new revelations, our new landscape of spiritual terrors, of the eternal battle between sin and salvation, our synthetic Hieronymous Bosch. The computers are meant to bring us succor in our lack of understanding, to forgive us our trespasses, to carry us from Latin to English and to open the prison gates into a new promise of salvation. But we are stubborn, dull crofters and lollers, possibly heretics. We ask the oracle: show me the last selfie ever taken. It rolls the dice. It rattles bones in a leather cup and spills them on the granite. It makes incantations in ones and zeros. It is intelligent. It is artificial. It is a dark angel called DALL‑E. But we lean into its velvet robes, lean into the song it sings to hear the answers. And when the conjuring is done it spits out a vision of earthly paradise at the end of the road. And this is what it thinks of us, who have come to worship it.
Matthew says
Dark piece.
My life recently has been like that Cody Jinks song Waiting for Times to Get Better. My Grandma is in the hospital. We drove all the way from Colorado to Alabama thinking that she was on her death bed. Turned out that reports from my uncle were exaggerated, but she is not doing too good. I happened to know a lot of people whose lives are falling apart right now. A coworker had to put her mother in hospice. Another’s dog had its tail amputated because it was doing its best to chew off probably from a tumor. A guy I know very well is seeing his marriage fall apart do to his wife’s narcissism.
Not intentionally dark, just calling it like I’m seeing it at the moment. There is something in the air. And it ain’t good. It smells like collapse. Or revolution. Or maybe both.
Quixotic Mainer says
Grim musings, but enjoyable as always. Studying the bipedal herd as it goes by, which I’m guessing has always been a game lawmen have played, gets depressing as soon as it strays away from the darkly humorous.
I cringed a little in sympathy at the part of the tale where the tourist and the park reenactor start prattling fudd lore about submachine guns. It reminded me too readily of eye roll inducing things I overhear at my local range as the Peter Griffin lookalikes question the beady eyed kid working the counter about the merits of buying flamethrowers.
Indeed. There is a lot to the study of the herd and its environs. Since we moved here I’ve been telling my wife there would be an active shooter at/near the Costco in Bend. Bad vibe there, just hinked up to all hell, and not a place I’ve ever gone into unarmed. Sure enough, it happened yesterday. Some places, you just know. The study is important, slows down the speed of the game.
Quixotic Mainer says
Wow. You read the wind right on that one. Maybe someday we’ll understand what that 6th sense is, but for the meanwhile it’s enough to know it’s there and believe in it.
Spidey sense is a real thing. It’s an evolutionary gift. Gavin de Becker wrote an excellent book about it called The Gift of Fear. Worth reading.
Quixotic Mainer says
I have heard of it, but haven’t picked it up yet. I’ll try and move it up the queue.
Worth it.
slm says
“‘Forgive me. I—I have mourned so long in silence—in silence.… You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear.…’
“‘To the very end,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very last words.…’ I stopped in a fright.
“‘Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with.’
“I was on the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’
Jim says
There’s a lot in there. By being a natural grumbler I am in tune with all musings negative. I am right there with the best of the worst observations. With regard to the tech world, down right scary. Cyberdyne?
But lately it seems I’ve become inclined to view my circumstances better, by necessity. It’s like I’m forced to find something good or what’s the point. The world is cracking. Soon I’ll be told why I can’t drive a gas car or my ATM will not function because my social credit score isn’t too good. I better find something good to cling to. Maybe guns and religion. But…
I just walked in after talking with a newer neighbor who moved back a years ago after he was laid off in a November and his son committed suicide in December. One son is left who is just hanging on while suffering himself. Ok, I feel better about my life.
Wife and two kids just returned from a Ugandan orphanage for special needs. The employees make $4/day for 4 days of work. The average Ugandan daily wage is $1/day and 7 days work. The orphanage gave 2lb bags of sugar as a thank you gift. Made them cry. If things crash here people may realize that meat really doesn’t come from the market and Amazon Prime 2‑day delivery, well. If things crash in Uganda, you die. Since tyrants in Africa is just a game of wack-a-mole, there’s just 10 good years.
So, I feel better about my struggle between between buying real estate or gold as a hedge. I have to be because if I were a nihilist, I’d do a lot more canoeing without a vest.
There is no question that we have it better than many, or most, places on earth. It is one of the great things about leaving the US–coming back to it. And it’s probable that we have become far too accustomed to a standard of living that has made us soft. But if you aren’t the lead dog the view never changes, and the old lead dog is looking tired, and confused, and maybe even rabid. I won’t live long enough to see the end result of today’s headlines, but I can make a fair guess, and I won’t be far off the mark.
Jim says
I think if we devolve into a depression and our benefactors are no longer able to appease us with baubles and cell phones, people will suffer terribly.
The West has become accustomed to a lifestyle only found in 50s sci-fi. When the poor in Africa lose they pick more jack fruit and plantains and find one more hour a day to work. When the pacified urbanites in the US lose suffer they’ll collapse in their pile of Trader Joe’s bags and cry. I’m not afraid of the future as much as afraid of being prepared for the future. That is my current goal. Hunker down, spend wisely and learn from my grandparents. Oh, and buy a bigger chest freezer. Deer season is approaching.
I’m up to four freezers now. And a bigger generator. Life is weird. But when it hits the fan I’ll be ready. For a while.
Bach says
Meanwhile, Jackson Mississippi no longer can supply drinking water to the good citizens of this capital city. Car jacking has eclipsed all projections by even the most dire of the realistic guesses. 100,000 people succumb to fentanyl OD. 4.9 million new citizens from our southern neighbors. There is good reason for dark outlook. If nothing else than to get our eyes adjusted to the lack of lasting light.
This: If nothing else than to get our eyes adjusted to the lack of lasting light.
slm says
Admittedly optimism is a rare quality these days, but considering World War Two, World War One and similar cataclysms of the last few thousand years; perhaps we are just a lot of pitiful whiners regarding current events?
Buck Up!
It’s easy to disregard the cataclysmic decline of our nation by suggesting we are all pitiful whiners for saying the quiet things out lout. There is much to be disgusted by, and even more to fear, when a freight train takes to a dirt road. It isn’t a question of bucking up. It’s a question of being realistic about what is happening all around us, and choosing not to deny it.
Oliver Twist says
The fact that we have elevated ourselves and our Country to a high standard of living does not allow us to sit idlily by and watch it get dismantled either one piece at a time or a Jenga style collapse. The notion that it could always be worse does not support inaction or mindless hand wringing. I worked hard to provide a better place for my children. It is what parents do. I will work hard to leave this place better than when I found it.
J.F. Bell says
Perhaps relevant, perhaps not.
Dark eons ago when I was an inmate in the public school system we used to have safety drills of various sorts. This was admittedly before the phrase ‘active shooter’ was much in the lexicon, so to break the monotony we covered such exotics as fires and tornados wherein everybody either mustered in the parking lot for a headcount or squatted head-down in the hall to listen for the freight train and watch for spontaneously aviating singlewides. We may also have had flood drills, but I don’t recall ever executing one.
The idea being that if you were confronted with disaster you had a nominal plan for meeting it. Not much, but better than nothing.
Lately word comes through the non-internet grapevine. Sirens, it seems, are damaging to the psyches of constitutionally-fragile children, some as young as eighteen, and the theory has been floated (quietly, as yet) that schools might do better to make a general announcement rather than a simulated alarm.
Which is largely bullshit, but if a single moron spares a single feeling we may count this an unprecedented success.
Which is, in turn, the going state of things. Humanity has always carried a subset of doom-and-gloomers…but always the saner heads have been able to discern what is panic and what is genuine and activate the responses accordingly. To recognize that yes, sometimes the warning bells sound without an emergency while allowing that even false alarms may have a certain educational utility.
The human animal finds the greatest clarity in darkness and duress. Sooner or later we all have to traverse a shadowed and trackless wood without map or lamp, in the cold and the rain, alone. It is one of the few inevitabilities.
To those who were aware, this is a trial. For those who denied the forest and the dark and the cold and the wind…this is calamity.
Relevant.
Ugly Hombre says
The park ranger inside the fort who has just finished telling a young girl that he ate dog in Vietnam”
Why in he hell would you do that?- I did that in two countries but would never tell anyone and anyway it was mostly that bastard Angel’s fault. “How you like the samvitch Bra? whant another beer? “Sure Angel- not bad” “Know what it was?” “No” I was thinking it was Kambing-. “Bow-Wow” said Angel, who was scar knuckled and sometimes a devil and almost got me bit by a rabid dog once .’
I always ate everything my hosts offered me overseas no matter how well.. you know but- I probly would have drawn the line at Aso. And anyway hill billys eat squirrels and wabits and thats about like eatting a rat- tree rats. lol
There will be a collapse but not a revolt American’s won’t can’t bothered to even vote there way out- they die is cast, The under half century crowd is gonna have a rough ride. If you are in a free state or have the means to get out to one, you can delay it that’s all you can ‑do delay it. ’
Wyoming might be the best bet- its cold and no welfare there.
The slicky boy Bai Zuo who runs the late great- just put out a poliburo edict “No more gas powered cars after 2035. The next day fortified by a pint of hair gel the dumchit was begging people not to charge their electric cars . Self aware don’t fit those jokers a bit.
Warned multiple times and told by the malfactors them selves what they were going to do- eighty one million Yankees voted the New Democrats in anyway. Yeah, “How you like Mao now? Kind of of smarts don’t it?
I got some MRE’s and some cash. That’s It .
I a’int going no where.
Except maybe Japan, if I get a chance — lol
That’s the rub…there’s nowhere to go even if we want out. It’s all down hill from here.
Ugly Hombre says
Yes, that’s the hell of it, down hill fast.. makes me want to weep, in the last three years we imported two family members into the country- cost upwards of ten grand had to get in depth back ground checks by the embassy other checks, medical exam’s, a dozen or more shot’s etc etc et all. took years. The home country is a U.S. Ally. Their Grandad was a US Army combat vet retired.
They are baffled by the importation of millions of unvetted criminal illegal aliens into the U.S.A.. We joke about it now sort of. “Should have got you into Mexico and told them you were El Chapo’s nephews- you could have even got free medical care and a monthly check.” ha ha ha barf.….
The Grandad wanted the boy to join the Army. We encouraged him to go in but he was talking to some friends who were already here and serving- they advised him different. Disappointed but won’t push him hard- I talk to young GI’s almost everyday and have heard the stories. I try to cheer them up when I talk to them-“You guys are doing something good for the country serving the Republic don’t forget it.” They look at me like I am wearing a fur loin cloth and just came out of a cave with a club- no body ever told them that they tell me. I can no kin.. Try again.-
“You see that Club over there? If this was Friday night in 75′- we would all be in there drinking pitchers of beer and smoking cig.‘s and watching cute go go girls in Bikini’s dance and shake it out in beaded cages- you might get in a fight over one of them and punch each other and then it was shake hands and no hard feelings and if the Commander heard of it he would give you a talking to on Monday and then grin at you like a chit bird.”
Now they know for sure I’m space alien- or maybe something worse. lol. They probley report me to who the hell knows. I don’t take it to far I don’t tell them about WAF’s for example.
Yeah there’s no place to go, I’m no going anywhere I do check out hide outs in the free states once in a while and I do think if you can’t live under rule of law and the Constitution maybe a place like Thailand or Japan, might fit- back and forth, but inertia is a enemy to the long in the tooth- the free states will hang on for a while, Wyoming like I mentioned will fight “Semi- Bolsheviks” lol- legally tooth and nail probably the longest. No hope at all for the late great.
I will vote and donate, talk and discuss with people etc. do what I can do to stave off the “Semi Bolshevik Borg”- long as I can the last great sad act of defiance..