Explorations and the Imagery of Those Interactions

Today is the federal holiday that celebrates Columbus Day; I'm willing to wager serious money that most of us don't have the day off.  When your mail doesn't arrive, you can take a minute to remember Columbus, who wanted to find a shorter trade route, but failed miserably in that goal. 

For most cities, gone are the days when we'd mark this holiday with parades and time off. Those of us who grew up in the 70's and later have likely rethought this holiday.

What marked an exciting opportunity for overcrowded Europeans in the time of Columbus began a time of unspeakable slaughter and loss for the inhabitants of the Americas, many of whom have never recovered or who disappeared completely.  Let us take a minute to remember all of the cultures that have vanished because of these kinds of encounters.  Let us mourn that loss.

But although those cultural encounters came at an enormous human cost, it also provided the opportunity to enrich the cultures on both sides of these encounters.  Look at the European cuisine before the time of Columbus, and let yourself feel enormous gratitude for the vegetables that came from the Americas. Look at the cultures that existed in the Americas before the Europeans arrived and let yourself marvel at the ways in which technology enables the building of cities.  For those of us who benefit from domesticated animals, which is almost all of us, let us celebrate Columbus and the opening of the space between cultures.

This morning, I'm revisiting the 2011 discussion with Charles Mann on NPR's Fresh Air.  He had just published 1493:  Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.  He points out that the arrival of Europeans does a lot to create wilderness--the diseases brought over wiped out huge swaths of indigenous populations, which left the land unpopulated, which meant the forces of the natural/non-human world could reclaim the land.

Today, perhaps because I spent a huge part of the week-end watching the 2020 mini-series The Stand, I'm thinking of the implications of disease.  Indigenous people had experienced something similar to the disease described by Stephen King, seeing most of their people wiped out.  Mann says the number was 2/3:  

"GROSS: So in North America, when the settlers were fighting wars with the Indians, the Indians that they were fighting with, the Native Americans they were fighting with, were survivors of these plagues?

Mr. MANN: Yes, they were, by and large, people, you know, who were in a state of complete cultural shock because, you know, two-thirds of the people that they knew had died. And there is just no culture that can resist foreign invasion, even by small bands of people like the Europeans were, when you've just had this enormous, shattering experience."

Later in the broadcast, he says that in the 100 years after Columbus, 1 out of 5 people on the planet had died.

I have been trying to think of a graceful transition to my next subject, but I can't come up with one, so I will just wrench away to something else:

Last night, as the sun was setting, I discovered that I had made my quilt top too wide.  How could this have happened?  Just last week-end, it wasn't wide enough, and I didn't think I added that much?  My spouse and I devised a plan, and I set to work ripping out the seam of part of the quilt that was too wide; later I'll add it to make the length of the quilt fit--it's far from catastrophic, as discoveries go.

I looked at the sunset colors in the sky and thought about that time when the crew on one of Columbus' ships saw land from a distance, that liminal time before all the changes got set into motion.  I am now trying to create a poem about ripping out seams on Columbus Day.  So far, it's not working, but I wrote down some ideas and maybe they'll come together.

This morning I look at my breakfast and think about the explorations of Columbus and those who came after.  I have pumpkin butter that I've made on my toast made out of 9 grain bread.  I began the morning by drinking coffee, and then switched to hot tea with milk and sugar.  It was Columbus that made this meal possible, although if he hadn't done it, surely someone else would have.

I think about the next 500 years.  If humanity survives, what will they look back to in 2025, either in amazement or in sorrow?