I really didn't feel like dragging out the boat and rowing over to Skins's island today, so passed.
There's a Great Discombobulation coming for the primitives, but this isn't it. The Edwards thing is as if all the primitives had a case of mass diarrhea, which is not the same thing as a Great Discombobulation, or even an ordinary discombobulation (May 12, 2006 and somesuch).
I had to go to the "big city" today to get my head--er, my face and neck examined--and because I don't like to drive a long distance wearing an eye-patch (nothing wrong with the eye; an infection preventative), I first had to go to town to find someone who was also headed that direction.
When I returned here, the prairie archaeologist was working, trying to dig a hole where he supposed a cellar had once been, maybe, 100-120 years ago. As he's running out of time--his last regular day here is August 15--and wasn't having much luck, I suggested I could get the town inebriate to come out and poke around for him, while he did other things. The town inebriate is no prairie archaeologist, but he knows how to dig, and knows if he's found something.
Thus far the graduate student has located the site of two sod houses, three outhouses, and nine outbuildings used for storing livestock or grain. The sod houses, one outhouse, and two outbuildings, had been made of--well, sod, while the others had "components of lumber."
All of these things pre-date the memory of even the ancient elderly gentleman who used to mow the lawn here, who had been born in 1927 and whose earliest memories of the place go back to only the early 1930s. This is stuff from at least two generations before him, back to 1875 when this place was first set up.
I am really surprised that a near-metrosexual (but apolitical) guy from a people's republic in upstate New York, has managed to absorb knowledge of life in Nebraska before our time. One suspects it will affect his politics, what little there are of them, sooner or later.
For example, he had been not at all surprised that upon reaching this place in the spring of 1875, the family had expended much time, labor, and money, building the barn (the barn which burned down in June 1950). That had been the first thing, the barn; while the family lived in, essentially, a hole in the ground.
It makes sense to people around here, but probably to Democrats, liberals, and primitives, it would seem assbackwards. How about putting up comfortable quarters for the family first, including running water and air-conditioning, and let the animals survive as they could? After all, they're just animals.
Yeah, right.
Our forebearers had a proper sense of priorities; it was the livestock that kept them alive, and the livestock they hoped would make them prosper, and so it was more important to take care of the livestock first, the humans making out best they could until things were better established.
And so the livestock here enjoyed better, more state-of-the-art, quarters for about 15 years, while the family lived, first in a half-tent-half-hole-in-the-ground, then a hastily-put-up-sod house (erected just ahead of winter), and then a better sod house (put up the following spring) that was the family abode until 1891, when this place, made of "components of lumber," was built.....from money made by taking good care of their livestock.
Primitives would never understand this, but primitives don't understand shit.
There are more than 100 cardboard beer-flats on the back porch, full of metallic and other things the New Yorker has collected from here. It all looks like dirty old rusty little tiny pieces of metal to me, but he knows what they are.
