Clovis and the Virus

By: | April 10, 2020
Covid-19 distribution / Ice Age fluted point distribution

Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was made. I’ve held it in my hand, turning it over and over, one of the finer pieces of stonework I’ve seen. He found it, oddly, while picking up trash along a rural ditch. He figured it had to have been dredged up during modern history, dumped to the side, out of place, no known provenience, showing up here out of the blue. Maybe not entirely out of the blue, though, this point is part of a much bigger puzzle.

A week ago I snapped a shot of the coronavirus map for North America. This was before red dots merged and turned the US into a record breaking blot. Next to it, I placed a map of fluted projectile points from the Ice Age, dating to about 13,000 years ago. The two maps struck me as remarkably similar. What might be behind this?

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Guest Post: How to be alone

By: | April 8, 2020

I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something bracing or stupid, anything. The worse the news, the better. It feels more real somehow. “You can’t go on like this,” my wife told me during one recent bout. “It isn’t good for you. You can’t possibly read everything.”

Try me. My family lives in Seattle, where the outbreak in the U.S began. From our house we can see Kirkland, the suburb where the first coronavirus cluster bloomed out of a senior care center. Since late January we have watched as the virus spread in horrifying slow motion, the numbers ticking up, then leaping, and now who knows where or when they will stop.

A few weeks ago, when an epidemiologist tweeted that the virus had likely been creeping about the region undetected for weeks, I felt a strange giddiness that I took at the time to be relief. Covid-19 was among us and life as we knew it had not ended, right? But then it started to. All the schools closed, first for two weeks, then six weeks, and now for the school year; the libraries were next, which hit my wife especially hard, since she considers them the spine of a functioning society; then most of the stores, the playgrounds, the parks. Now we are locked down, allowed out only for essential business.

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Making a Renaissance

By: | April 6, 2020

This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012.

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one below: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a continuous low roar. Florence is in the Arno’s floodplain, so when it does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

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The Year Time Stood Still

By: | April 3, 2020

I have somehow become involved in wholesale Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement. That is not my job, and I know nothing about it, but the old rules no longer apply in this sudden new world. All it takes now, apparently, is to know some people with particular connections in China and all of a sudden you have state governments and federal agencies clamouring at your cellphone, lighting up your home screen with the photo of your cat on it. I sense the urgency of the world squeezing through a bottleneck of production capacity and I am glad to be merely a switchboard operator in that game, forwarding emails from my people to theirs, hoping I am helping.

Meanwhile time has, in other ways, stopped. Mortgages are frozen where I am, rent in some places is suspended. School has stopped, no matter what the three homeschoolers on my Facebook feed pretend. Many people’s incomes have stopped. That is not sustainable, but this will, nevertheless, go on. For the academic year or for the calendar year? I don’t recall anything ever being quite so up in the air.

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By: | April 2, 2020

Notice: due to distraction, the People of LWON are posting only Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. We’ll be back in strength in the foreseeable, we hope, and meanwhile wash your hands and socially distance because we love you.

A Note to Our Readers

By: | March 31, 2020

Dear Readers of LWON,

Like everyone else, the People of LWON are still adjusting to life with Covid-19, especially those with kids at home, parents at large, and full time jobs, remote and not. We’ll be posting less frequently for a while, but please keep coming to visit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We’ll keep serving up as much comfort and diversion as we can muster, and return in force once things settle down. 

Wash your hands, we love you.

The People of LWON

Watching and Waiting

By: | March 30, 2020
Green leaves growing on a chain link fence

From my apartment most of the view is a small parking lot, a few stories below me, lined by vines and a few weedy trees.

The last few weeks, a mockingbird has been loudly claiming this as his territory. On and on and on, a few phrases of a song he’s learned, then to the next song, then to the next one and the next. The dead stems of winter are turning green, hiding the chain link fences.

I’ve spent more time than usual admiring this little parking lot this month. The space between my desk, on the inside wall of my apartment, and the compost bins, at the far corner of the parking lot, are most of my world right now.

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