A Work Progressing

A brutal name, full of want unfulfilled. A horrible name for a place made for mining gold. ‘On this hill, you will not find anything, but poverty.’ Someone must have said it. That would have been in the 1850s. I wouldn’t know, I was only eleven in the 1960s.

I tagged along on someone’s quest. I had to. He was my father. Every summer he sought the unfished stream teeming with rainbow trout. Sometimes it was a small lake. It was always three or four hours away in the Northern California Sierras. In particular Plumas and Sierra counties.

My father picked the spot, my mother made it our home, I helped unload the car. It was always shades of dark green in the pines. Shadows in the ferns, bark and needles on the ground. All that was needed was a level place for the tent, we brought everything else.

The constant pounding of logging trucks on the dirt road into Poverty Hill had left a thick layer of fine dust. It was almost like powder, it made a soft crunching sound when you walked on it, and filled the cracks in my father’s face with fine brown outlines.

I stayed off the road, preferring the trails. Someone made these to go to somewhere, it was always exciting to find out where. After the tent was up, I went for a walk. The path twisted a little through a stand of young pines, with the sun mostly blocked.

Then, almost like a door opening, there was full sunlight, and a landscape that I had never seen before. It was so starkly different that I had a hard time making sense of it.

White stones, tons of white stones, most of them the size of a man’s fist. Bleached by the sun because the trees were absent. They lay in low piles several football fields long. In the middle was a pond that nearly glowed an emerald color, unnaturally. Not a trace of soil or dust.

The path ended there, I could walk on the stones, but with some difficulty. I went to the edge of the pond. There was a faint metallic smell, copper but not copper. There was no plant growth, no movement of creatures, bug or fish. It was still greenish water.

I turned to go back to the camp and report. My father would be disappointed, but maybe he could explain to me what I saw.

He was troubled by the pond, and warned me not to drink, or even wade in it. That was not necessary but I was fascinated by the rest of the story. The ponds were made by damming the creek, once the pond was large enough, the men built a floating barge with a huge water cannon, a steam engine to give the cannon power, then a sluicing system to separate the gold from the hillside. It was a mine turned inside out, all on a floating barge. The pond moved down the creek, the muddy earth moved down the creek. The bones of the earth, the piles of white stones were left behind.

I’m not sure how my father knew this, and perhaps it wasn’t completely accurate. It was at least a better explanation of the blasted landscape. I was thinking aliens.

Another longer walk with my father revealed two more ponds, two healthy ponds with plants, bugs, and fish. It wasn’t disappointing after all.

Heading down the valley we came upon several abandoned buildings, one still locked up, the others empty but open. They had typical log foundations and lower walls, but the upper part of the walls and roof were framed in lumber. They were old, maybe a hundred years. That seemed very old to me.

One building may have been a kitchen, it was more out in the open and my father told me that the kitchen had fire. It was better to place that fire away from buildings that were important. Kitchens often burned up.

The buildings were not on the accessible dirt road, but I could see where there was still a trace of the early road, now covered in pine needles and shrubs. It would only be a matter of time before more people would find them.

We got back to a meal my mother had prepared combining the campfire and the two-burner stove. Another mystery I could not fathom.

The early evening was used for cleaning up, and storing the food safely. We rarely had bear issues because we camped in areas that were rarely camped in. The bears liked the steady campgrounds of forgetful campers.

Later, we sat by the fire and listened to the wind in the tops of the trees. We slept in folding beach lounge chairs made comfortable with air mattresses, warmed by big, plaid-lined sleeping bags from Montgomery Ward’s. There was even room left over in the tent to stand up and stretch.

After a few hours sleep, I woke up. It was silent in the tent and that was unusual. I had learned to fall asleep quickly to avoid my father’s snoring. Sleeping on his back in the lounge chairs aided the amount and volume of his snore. But it was quiet. Was he awake? Was he even there?

I moved to raise up a little in order to see. ‘Shhh…’ a low whisper came from that general area. Then I heard something outside. A close howl.

It was one long howl that was answered by another not far off. Then more howled, the sound came from all directions, surrounding us. My mother slept, my father and I listened.

It was probably coyotes, although I don’t know if I knew the difference between coyotes and wolves. The sound was not comforting, it was mournful. It wasn’t baying at the moon, it was crying out for the lost. The dark of the tent, the lonely sounds outside, the blasted landscape…

It was several hours before I heard the sound of snoring that gave me the confidence to go to sleep. In the morning we briefly talked about the coyotes over breakfast, my mother didn’t like the idea of little wolves prowling about. My father said his familiar refrain, ‘Oh, Billie…’ stretching out the last part of the name.

I didn’t like the little wolves either. I knew they were hunting. Smaller game than wolves would have hunted, but they were still hunting. We have had many pet dogs, and I have playfully opened their jaws to discover teeth. Looking back they looked more like Tyrannosaurus teeth than pet teeth. Coyotes had the same teeth.

I began the day thinking about mini dinosaurs stalking our tent. I went for another long walk. I was entering another stand of very tall, slender pines. Some had been damaged by the lack of water or bark beetles. In any case, they were dead but still standing.

I heard a sharp crack from above. Looking up, I saw an eight-foot top of a pine snap off, and fall to the ground. Not like a gentle leaf, more like a hurled spear. It impaled the ground not ten feet in front of me. I’m sure this has happened before, but I had never seen it, and haven’t seen it since.

It became my walking staff, later in life it became my cane, my walking stick. I still have it today, more than sixty years later.

We stayed there for four nights. The coyotes were there for two nights. My mother did not sleep one of those nights. My father caught dinner every night. I looked at old wood and tried to see the men in their work clothes. We returned a few times the next year.

As an adult I traveled the mountains to some of the places in my youth. I went to Poverty Hill. The buildings were gone, burned, and hauled away. The ponds were still there. The poisoned pond was fenced off with cyclone and barbed wire. I spent the night. The coyotes were still there, and the bears had discovered the campers. 

It was not a safe space. I left in the middle of the night. It wasn’t frightening, it was just too sad.

I once saw the killer of poems. He was not intentional, he simply moved through the world with such disdain that poetry could not survive near him. Not even poetry that was awful.

I followed him for a while, wondering what agendas he might have. Not too closely, for fear of being discovered, and for fear of my safety. Flowers wilted in his passing. It was not obvious, but I know it was true.

His clothes might be called shabby, but they weren’t dirty. Shabby because they didn’t fit well, one size bigger than it should be. The weight was all wrong, they were heavy, with creases that didn’t match the structure of the man. His shoes did not match. They were close, black with laces, round toe, serviceable. At a distance you couldn’t tell, but upon closer inspection one shoe had six holes for laces, the other had eight.

His gait was also unusual, his arms swung loosely from the shoulders, moving like a clapper in the bell of his heavy coat. It gave the illusion of a distorted timing of a natural swing. His shoulder roll projected his neck to go forward almost horizontally and his  head tilted up to compensate.

I notice that he comes to a complete stop on the curb, before stepping down to cross the street. This causes confusion for pedestrians behind him, there is a repeating ripple in the flow of traffic.

He appears to be traveling from the more residential areas to the city center complex. The dozen stairs up are as wide as the building. He shifts to the far right, then walks diagonally back to the center doors. I see his reflection in the glass doors. The gold lettering says ‘Senior Services Center’. He is old.

I see my reflection in the glass doors, with my mismatched shoes. I am old.

A friend once stated, “History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.”

This takes a little time to unwind. It has become popular to assume that history is a construct of “his story.” Linguistically, that is false. Yet, like many false etymologies, it reveals something worth considering. It suggests both a narrator and a gender bias. More importantly, it directs our attention to the second word.

Story.

Is it fiction? A myth? A rumor? A testimony? A narrative? A fabrication? Those are very different things.

For now, let’s set that aside and return to the Greek etymology. Historia did not mean “the past.” It meant inquiry—knowledge gained by investigation. History, then, begins not with an event, but with a question asked of events.

I’m struck by a modern ad phrase, ‘Inquiring minds want to know…’ it is a well used constructed phrase, it is circular, it’s an Ouroborus. And it does not help define the boundaries of the word.

A historian uses disciplined inquiry constrained by surviving evidence. The questions are asked of events through the evidence they leave behind.

This is complicated by the shape, quality, and verification of the evidence.

Evidence does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted.

Time is full of events, not all are noticed, very few are recorded. The record may have survived as artifact, but even that must be interpreted. They may have survived as a sort of textual communication. Making sense of records requires training and discipline.

This is ongoing, so we must revisit what ‘we know’ with the better tools that we make. History may have stones, but our inquiries are not.

The past does not change, the inquiries do.

Since inquiries are made by humans acting as witnesses, let us break that down.

The Trained Witness: They know where to look, but they carry the biases of their training. A 19th-century archaeologist saw a burial mound and looked for kings and gold; a modern archaeologist looks at the exact same dirt and analyzes pollen grains to understand climate and diet. The evidence didn’t change; the framework did.

The Accidental Witness: Often the most honest, yet the most chaotic. The merchant’s ledger or the private grocery list isn’t trying to sway posterity—it’s just recording the price of grain. Yet 500 years later, that accidental record tells us more about economic collapse than a king’s official decree ever could.

The Reluctant & False Witnesses: This is where history overlaps with detective work. Propaganda, self-justification, and trauma mean that the record is often actively trying to mislead us. A document doesn’t just tell us what happened; it tells us what the writer wanted someone else to believe happened.

The Absent Witness: Perhaps the most haunting category. The vast majority of human experience—especially the lives of the non-elite, the conquered, and the marginalized—leaves no written trace. Silence is also an artifact, and learning how to interpret what is missing is often a historian’s hardest task.

I recently read about a claim for a pottery stamp on a bowl. There is a known pottery maker in England called Dedham. Pottery found with this stamp can be very expensive.

This stamp appeared to say DEDHAM in all caps. No other piece of Dedham pottery has this form of stamp. Other humans thought they saw an R instead of an E. They suggested it was BIRDHAM. 

Some scanned it with Ai, and Ai saw the R and the I. So it concluded it was BIRDHAM.  

It was interesting in the comments how many people still concluded it was Dedham.

Being trained is not based upon opinion. Being trained provides the basis for opinion.

My friend wrote, ‘History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.’

I would write, ‘History is the edge between what survives and what inquiry can reveal.’

History does not advance because the evidence changed. It advances because someone asked one more question.

Yadaphenia is a failure to witness—to recognize or accept the significance of genuine patterns.

This failure is not singular. It may arise from several distinct causes:

* Refusal — “I won’t accept what this pattern implies.”
* Inattention — “I never really noticed it.”
* Habituation — “I’ve seen it so often I no longer see it.”
* Premature closure — “I already know what this is.”
* Lack of inquiry — “I never asked the next question.”

When these failures persist, they often culminate in cognitive closure—the mind becomes satisfied with its present map regardless of how reality is arranged.

The most reliable sign of cognitive closure is simple:

The question stops.

Speed leans toward processing.

Time leans toward thinking.

Attention leans toward meaning.

Meaning leans toward wisdom.

Wisdom leans toward knowledge.

Knowledge leans toward humility.

Humility leans toward wonder.

Wonder leans toward inquiry.

Doom Cycle
I am on a ship, a steady place with warmth, food, entertainment, and more food.

When you step out in the bow of the ship, you may witness dolphins keeping pace, sometimes cutting across the bow, leaping, zig zagging for miles. If you are focused you may also see something curious.

In the front of the ship, on the distant horizon, you can see an island rising from the sea. The closer that the ship comes, the more it rises. The proof is that if you reverse it sinks again. If you turned 90 degrees to the left or right it stops sinking, but it does not rise.

Only if you move directly towards it, will it rise from the depth.

When you arrive at the island, you have a decision, ‘Do I get off?’, and if I get off, what happens if I stay? Does the ship leave?

Let’s witness each case independently. If you get off you will notice something immediately. Everything seems normal. The island should still be drenched, it rose from the sea just a few hours ago!

There is water here and there, but much less than expected. The good news is that there is shelter, warmth, and food similar to the ship, but in a different style.

As long as you stay on the island, and the ship stays, things are in balance and life goes on as expected.

If the ship plans to leave temporarily, and then come back for you, you face another more serious dilemma. As you watch the ship leave, it slowly sinks, taking your former safety, comfort, shelter and tremendous amounts of food with it.

Your island is now safe and stable, but something has transferred to the ship, and now it sinks. This appears consistent.

Here is further proof. If you land, it appears to be dry. You walk about, get back on the ship and sail away. If you go to the stern you can look out and witness the island sinking again, the farther you sail, the more it sinks, until it completely returns to the depth of the ocean. And this too, is continuous.

Here is the deeper question, and it refers back to the old adage, ‘A tree falls in the forest, you are not there to hear it or see the fall. Did it make a sound?’

Does the ship sink and rise, does the island sink and rise, without you?

If it continues, that points to one thing.
If it doesn’t… what does that mean about the universe we witness?

The world is filled with these examples. But it is less consistent than our thoughts. The rainbow is witnessed, but disappears upon approach. The tree disappears when we approach to see the leaves. The forest disappears when we approach the tree.

All of this can be a case of ‘incomplete witnessing’ but it is still suspicious to me.

The ground had always been there, a counterbalance to the sky. The ancient ground looked different—rough, jagged, ready for erosion and shaping. It waited for a very long time.

Eventually the ground became soft mounds, connected to other soft mounds, that were connected to larger mounds reaching the mountains. It was a cascade to the sea. Rainwater ran over them and between them, carrying away varying amounts of surface earth until the water met rock, and slowly, even the rock wore away.

But this place remained a series of soft mounds. Plants came and went, and came again. The earth became soil, enriched with generations of plant debris. The debris fed smaller lives, which drew larger ones, each in search of something edible.

The animals, too, became food, and the cascade continued.

Eventually humans came near the place, but not until a very long time had passed. So much time that the soil had become deep and rich, while the water lay far below in the water table.

Humans followed the traces of other animals and the traces of edible seeds. There was enough to gather, but not enough to settle for long. Other places offered a steady supply of shellfish.

So steady, in fact, that after harvesting, the shells were thrown to the ground and stepped upon, over and over, until they formed mounds of their own—places upon which humans would eventually live.

This place, this mound, was not made with human hands. It was made from debris of far greater magnitude.

Everything waited for the next great change, and that change was humans choosing this place to live. They came with tools to level part of the mound. They came with tools to seek the water deep beneath the soil. They came to plant their own seeds and place their own animals in pens and corrals.

They thought themselves masters of this place.

Yet the place had already hosted forests, grasses, countless lives, and kingdoms of creatures that had come and gone without ever knowing they belonged to something larger than themselves.

They built a structure to shelter themselves from the weather. The shelter almost seemed to morph on its own, growing taller, growing wider, giving shelter to a growing family.

In the lifetime of humans, it seemed forever. In the lifetime of the soil, it was only a moment. In the lifetime of the ground, it barely registered beyond the present.

In the ‘now’ the structure still exists. It is a shadow of its former self. Paint blasted by the weather, bare wood desiccated by the heat of the sun, a dry, mottled place, abandoned by humans.

In their time, it seems old. They never look at the ground, or the plants surrounding. There may be a dim reckoning that the tree may have been a sapling, but only because they are slightly aware of how a tree grows.

In the ‘now’ it has become an image, a frame of the surrounding landscape. Bringing meaning to a place that has already been a place for eons.

For humans it is a discovery, that tells us something significant.

refursive (adj.)

Characterized by recursive return, reflexive examination, and revision through recognized discrepancy. A refursive process returns to a point of fracture, refuses concealment of what has been revealed, and allows that revelation to alter future operation.

refursion (n.)

The process by which consequence reveals a discrepancy between expectation and reality, leading—through recognition and revision—to an altered future state.

Usage note:

Unlike recursion, which repeats a process, or reflexivity, which examines a process, refursion describes a process that is changed by what it discovers upon returning.

A refursive process returns, but not unchanged.

This word is the result of needing a blend of ‘recursive’ and ‘reflexive ’, with a touch of Edge Theory’s ‘fracture’.

It was a tedious push and pull, but the end definition fits the condition that has been occurring in my recent writing and thought. It might even be helpful to others.

Oh sure, I know change is coming, it’s in the song, it’s in my DNA! Meiosis is my new word of the month. I’m really okay with change.

It’s the ramifications that concern me. 

I’m good with adapting. Okay, mostly good, I do tend to flip back to ‘automatic’ responses. Like turning left on a corner, when I don’t need to anymore because I moved.

The biggest ramification for me is the decision making that some ‘changes’ force.

When I was growing up, for most of the time when you watched TV, you had three channels to switch between. Okay, maybe two more that didn’t really count.

You could even have a weekly booklet that told you the line-up for the week, with actual descriptions of the programs. Then change occurred, everyone was thrilled with more choices.

Four or five choices would have been great, but we got over 600 choices. Good luck trying to read a weekly booklet that was seven inches thick.

I know, it’s an isolated example that includes technology. What should I expect over time?

Okay, here is another one. I spent my youth being healed by Vick’s VapoRub, little blue jar of wonder. It was on my chest, rubbed into my abrasions, stuffed up my nose… I even had it shoved into my mouth, way back there next to my tonsils.

I rarely see it today, but there are nine different versions of NyQuil. I don’t know which one is right. Certainly there must be some that are wrong for me, or there wouldn’t be others on the shelf.

The ramification of change is the need to decide. I like Reuben sandwiches because there is only one decision necessary. By picking a Reuben, all other choices are already made. Run away if they ask what kind of ‘bread’.

By the increased level of the average blood pressure, I’m sure that forced decision making is high on the list for cause.

How many breakfast choices are necessary, or even healthy?

Is it a road? Is it a journey? Is it ambition? Is it the long ball struck cleanly with a three wood, rising against a blue sky? 

My father says, ‘Hey, let’s go for a drive!’ What that really means is ‘Let’s journey’ It’s 2;30 in the afternoon, no suitcases, so it can’t be far, but it might mean dinner at a restaurant before coming home. That means restaurants near the destination. Everything will flow from the first few blocks of driving the car. Technically we have the four cardinal points And everything between. Each turn he takes eliminates choices, but the turn do not define exactness.

After three blocks we are going west to the bay. No more than thirty minutes away, could be the old fishing grounds near the Butler plant, or perhaps under the Bridge. Maybe the Naval Station and the ruins of the Whaling Plant.

We pass the Butler turn off, the choices narrow. We slowly pass the Bridge, so we are heading to the Naval Station, we went through and the road dead ends at the Whaling Plant.

This is where my father changed everything. He made a sharp right turn on a very bad road that climbed the ridge. At the top it wandered a bit before it descended to the Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor. We walked about looking at boats and houseboats. My father told me about John Wayne making a movie here. It was winter, a warm day, but the sun was setting.

And the harbor had a restaurant.

That was the past…

I finally had a chance of a full-time job. As a student I had my share of seasonal work. Seasons are not always based upon the tilt of the earth, there are seasons of production, seasons of selling, and seasons of travel. I explored most of them.

Now I was locked into being a staff member at a college, with seasons of semesters. I suppose I could have treated it like the other jobs, a way station while heading to somewhere else. I didn’t. I liked it here, but I didn’t like the job I was hired to do.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the degree, training, or experience for the other jobs. So I had to develop a ‘drive’. It had not been something that I did normally. Not in school, not in factory jobs, and not even in the military.

I knew the ‘proper’ drive was to get certified for the areas I was interested. I thought perhaps that my drive might skip that part.

Strangely enough it did. For the next five positions, I obtained them without the standard qualifications. I just did the work. And when I found a position that required a four year degree, I made it work with 1.5 years. I was driven, with a 50 hour work week.

I did that for thirty years.

My father-in-law was a golfer. Yes he had an official job, but that was only to provide for his golfing.

He also had a son, slightly older than Sherry, so he had a partner. But he living states away from his condo surrounded by his 18 hole course. He looked to me, ‘Do you golf?’. ‘I play racquet ball. Golf can’t be that hard.’ , I replied.

That started months of the driving range work, short game putting green work. Finally I was ready. I was deadly with a two wood. Even more deadly with a three wood. I didn’t have to try very hard, I had a natural slice to right. So intense that most I landed in the adjacent hole, scattering the golfers there.

In compensation I did have a fiat long 2 iron, but my most accurate was a 7 iron. I could hop skip and jump to the hole it five drives. Maybe then a two putt?

My father-in-law never asked me to play on his course again. To many friends on his course, too many potential friendly deaths. We did go to several courses nearby, where we were strangers. I left my drivers at home and used irons to get close to par.

No.

This is about something found loose in a drawer. A hard drive.

It is an assembly in Thailand, made of parts that have parts that have parts.

Beneath the aluminum cover are platters. Upon the platters are magnetic domains. Within the domains are patterns.

Within the patterns are photographs, letters, accounts, arguments, dreams, and shopping lists.

Somewhere in that hierarchy is a younger version of me, waiting patiently in a folder.

Maybe something written about my father, some secret roads in the Sierras.

Maybe something written about the transition from military to civilian, something about the two divorces in marriage, and the lack of direction.

I hope there is not a treatise on facing the little dimpled ball. So easy to hit, so easy to drive.

I need to power it up. I need to see I different me responding to life back then.

Will I accept the spark and whine of a dying drive?