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John L. Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Yucatan - Volume 1 (1843)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Reading the Dover Edition, with 127 engravings.
Now this had no right to be as good as it was. A little wary of reading it, I love first person history, travelogues, archeology, but I know nothing of the Maya or the Yucatan.
Now I know more precisely how little I know and I want to go dig a hole and learn more...
The author writes with a clear, contemporary prose style. Meaning it's an easy read. And it's part travelogue, part adventure, and - largely - part "archeology", although the modern world would describe it mostly as looting. In his defense - and the defense of countless others (including myself) - he was visiting places and doing archeology where the locals had no interest. He, in his favor, was very interested, and his notes inform and inspire archeologists today.
The first few chapters he gets into the history of Mexico, and it's a travelogue of his arriving, staying with the locals, etc, etc.
Chapter 2 describes bullfights, the customary tortures, injuries, and the author finds it all a bit savage, for reasons his descriptions make clear.
From here to a brief history of the conquest of Mexico, the Yucatan, etc. He describes the ill fated first explorers (Cordova, not good), and provides context for the culture he's encountering.
His background, for example, on the first Galleons sent from Spain to "Conquer and Colonize" - he delineates the restrictions and rules placed upon Conquistadors/Merchants/Colonists from Spain:
"The last provision, which may seem rather illiberal, if not libelous, was, that no lawyers or attorneys should go into these lands from the kingdom of Spain, nor from any other part, on account of the litigation and controversies that would follow them."
By now already I am bitter that I have only Volume 1, there are 2 Volumes to this (and he refers the reader to past books he's written on the area and topic and I have some searching to do but he is, unfortunately, a little bit obscure).
I find it notable, remarkable, laughable even that given their explicitly stated intentions of seizing gold and taking slaves, that the Spaniards seem genuinely surprised by their less than enthusiastic welcome.
Worth noting, we live in the same age where both Bezos and Musk lament the dearth of employees - when - if any of us - if all of us could come to our right minds we'd be showering them both with arrows and ripping out their beating hearts on the tops of temples...
The Indians, in short, realized their evil and insidious intents and no sweet words could save them.
So, violence having failed they send them the Friars and Priests, to convert them, teach them the doctrines of obedience, mercy, kindness, to educate their children, and you know what follows.
"Send in the Priests" could well be the most sinister line in New World History.
More notes upon the Spanish Conquest:
"All these they gained in succession; and so great was the slaughter of the Indians that at times their dead bodies obstructed the battle, and the Spaniards were obliged to pass over the dead to fight with the living."
When the Spanish, with the help and preparation of the priests, have conquered they begin their colonization.
He makes mention of the Spaniards tearing down the Pyramids to build their own cities, recycling the stones, history lost forever beneath new towns constructed over ancient and overgrown metropolises, and you realize that only a fraction of what you can view as a tourist exists only because the more historic remains were recycled into the new.
Now consider the pyramids torn down to pave and flag the piazza's and plazas of Mexico today and you have an idea - only an idea - of how much of their history was lost.
To continue. Stephen's travels take a curious and morbid turn with their daguerreotypes and squint-fixing surgeries, they appear Mountebanks, or charlatans on the world tour. "Strabismus" is the affliction they're curing now, the uncomfortable comedy of surgery upon cross-eyed peasants, Monty Python in the extreme, bloody, gory, reminding me of nothing so much as the "Duke & Dauphin" of Huckleberry Finn.
From here they set out onto their adventures. The journey to unvisited Mayan Villages, discovering Catholic Churches festooned with skulls and crossbones, altars covered in skulls, as if lifted right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs...only, Stephen's was here first.
"Before the door of the church lay the body of a child on a bier. There was no coffin, but the body was wrapped in a tinsel dress of paper of different colors, in which red and gold were predominant; and amid this finery worms several inches long were issuing from it's nostrils, curling and twisting over its face; a piteous and revolting spectacle, showing the miserable lot of the children of the poor in these Indian Villages."
He encounters caves filled with fossils - "...from when the sea overflowed", in want of a more current geological explanation, with no concept of tectonics, uplift or continental plate he defaults to the Flood Mythology from the Bible.
There are the descriptions of ruins, sculptures, hideous demons, jaguars, birds, snakes, deities, that could be lifted right out the set decoration of Indiana Jones, or - as more likely - a good deal of Indiana Jones was lifted right from here.
A curious note - the author postulates that "Yucatan" meant "I don't know what you mean" in Mayan, when the Spanish would ask "What is this land?", this was the invariable reply.
I follow along these adventures on Google Maps, looking up each of the Mayan ruins he discovers and villages he visits. Satellite view, some no longer ruins but replaced by villages, others still there in the jungle, and given the swiftness with which the jungle overtakes it is easy to imagine the entirety of the Yucatan, at one point or another, has been under a metropolis. There is the monumental scale of the architecture they come across, 200, 300 foot plazas, pyramids, buildings, only the climate did not favor their survival as did the deserts of Egypt, yet the scale and frequency of ruins suggests a vastly greater pre-Columbian population than exists there even today.
Then there are the hazards - largely things like the risk of fevers, mosquitos, other winged pests and biting scourges, the being covered head-to toe with midges and the countless winged horrors that populate jungles and wild areas worldwide. Curiously in the entire book he makes no mention of the Tarantulas or Venomous Snakes, the real perils here are the flies.
He describes abandoned temples filled with bats, ruins, underground labyrinthine corridors, tombs, entering a cave he writes: "Candle in one hand, pistol in the other...", coming across idols and toppled statuary grotesquely carved after the Mayan fashion, and then in his return to civilization details the Mexican custom of exhuming, cleaning, and reinterring bodies until the bones are clear (usually only 2 or 3 years), at which point they're moved outside.
It would be hard to find a better book to winter with, and - while unfortunately I've finished this one there are a few more by him that I'll have to track down. This was perfect.
Pulchritude
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
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An ugly word to describe physical beauty.
I mean, sound it out, it can't mean that, can it?
Nevertheless it does. Perhaps a backhanded way to describe a beautiful woman one doesn't particularly like...
Alberta RCMP Not Guilty of Blatant Murder
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1005
How afraid are people that they acquit this sort of behavior?
To summarize: RCMP wake man sleeping in vehicle. Man is startled. Man is shot 10 times and dies.
The rest does not matter - that they'd had a "call about a suspicious vehicle" is a pretext. And sleeping in your vehicle is not a crime (I know. I spend over half the year in mine).
While I know he was a not entirely a good guy (who is?) this in no ways justifies the excessive "cowboy" approach of the RCMP. And - be real - it's pretty much guaranteed that if the cops shoot you they will stop at nothing to discredit or malign your character, making YOU the threat.
In any event, if you have a score you need settled, a wife you need offed, a drug debt you can't pay, join the Police force/RCMP. There, it's all in a days work.
Winding up Ken
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
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Now, news that Ken has gotten a job in the dive bar in Nelson. For the moment he's liking it, and I'm a little saddened because one of the highlights of my summer at work was finding new and inventive ways to wind him up...
Ken, Ken, had the patience of Job and would generally just look at you with a "What did I ever do to deserve this?..." look upon his face, before occasionally reaching for his knives which signaled it was time to get back to work.
To begin, Ken, as of late, had taken in with Jessica, the homeless woman living out of her car on the Ferry Landing. She had been slowly starving to death, in a spiral of being unable to make any decisions regarding her life. She was the dine and dash that we caught. So, after taking her for Thanksgiving Dinner I charged Ken with keeping her alive, bringing her food from time to prevent her from starving. Ken was too willing to oblige. Soon they were living together - not LIKE THAT, but you could tell, Ken, Ken, he had hopes. They called each other "Partner" and she went and got a job at the Hotsprings and Ken got a job in town and they found a small place to live together in Balfour.
To hear Ken describe it it was just going to be a matter of time. There were backrubs and petty domestic squabbles and they would make up.
I got to hear it all, or as much as he would tell me, which probably still too much given my incessant roasting of him.
From his descriptions he was "In like Flynn". Read between the lines and this was not going to work out well. Ken, he's used to being "Friendzoned" but this, this was "Petzoned". In the end, shortly after he got his new job he was sick for a couple of days, during which time Jessica was sick as well. Well, not sick, she just called in sick to the Hotsprings. And when finally Ken dragged his ass out of bed to go to work he came home to find a note declaring him "The Best Friend Ever" and his carton of cigarettes missing. Jessica had vanished. He checked his computer, saw that she had been googling Grand Prairie, driving routes, figured out that she was off.
So ended the best potential relationship he never had. And while you knew, you knew, she was - unstable? - maybe not the word. Maybe just down on her luck and the intolerable friendship that saved her just provided her with enough incentive to find her way home. I mean - really, the weather was snowy, shit, and to consider heading back to Grand Prairie - in the winter - well, things had to be dire. She knew she was being suffocated, groomed, Ken lacks a certain required degree of chill around women, his hopes heaped upon her slender shoulders probably proved to be too much.
Anyways, Ken in mourning, Ken now grieving yet another romance trampled before it had a chance to bloom.
***
So, Ken, starting at the restaurant some 5 years ago, a few weeks after me which meant I was his "senior" and could roast him as I saw fit. Back then I knew Ken from the Superette, where he'd worked previously, the convenience store clerk of perpetual good nature, everyone knew Ken, and so it was like a bit of "Celebrity Apprentice" when he came to work for us. And of course I'd take the piss. When customers sat at the bar I would yell into the dish-pit questions about the well he had in the basement and his butterfly collection and the van he prowled the ferry landing in and what's with all those missing women posters, huh?
And the customers would laugh and Ken would bristle and stick his head through the small dish-pit pass and glower at me like Oscar the Grouch.
Back then, Ken wasn't the only one, there was the alcoholic chef complaining about his alcoholic girlfriend's health issues, she was sickly, blind, and I would suggest maybe he should just drive up the highway with her, throw a can of Bud out the window, let her go, somebody would find her, she'd be fine....
Or the two younger guys, 19, 20, members of a "Boy Band", and I could easily divert myself roasting them. Or the other service staff.
In time, though, over the next few years we got fewer and fewer staff, chef's, the Pandemic was the final wedge, most of our kitchen staff was now teenagers, in high school, and not the sort of people I could roast with the same impunity I could Ken. And Ken, ever good natured Ken, well...the whip that once cracked over the whole crew became squarely focused on him.
I would warn the new staff about him. About how they were never to turn their back on him and never, ever, bend over in front of him. I made them practice saying "No, KEN, DOWN, DOWN" and shake their legs. I would tell them about how worldly he was and how he could say: "How much is a blowjob????" in 12 different languages. Or about his origin story, which was that basically you just had to dig a basement and a Ken would appear, most construction crews would just whack him with a backhoe and fill it in, but this Ken, Our Ken, he'd escaped. And I would do David Attenborough styled narrations of his life: "Kenneth in the Springtime. It is spring, and the Ken is emerging from his winter long slumber. Appearing in the doorway to his basement, clad only in a towel, the Ken lights up a cigarette and begins to try and attempt to attract a mate. He is the last living member of his species. His nest, feathered with soiled pizza and poutine boxes, awaits, as it has for 30 years now, the loving attention ..."
And so it would continue. I would tell the new hires about Ken's "Special Cocktail" which was basically just Date-Rape-Drug and how you'd wake up dressed funny and posed all around his basement, never remembering anything but pretty sure you'd had a good time.
Or about how they should never, ever, visit his "Only Fans" page, and then, under the shock of it all refuse to discuss it further but allude obliquely to raccoon costumes and his kittenish clawing at the camera from a red-velvet bed...or introducing him to the female customers with whom he had some sort of acquaintance as the "King of Balfour", only under some sort of evil enchantment, if only he could get a kiss from an honest woman he'd be restored....
I don't need to tell you he never did.
I would do my creepiest Ken voice and tell the new hires they "Must puts the lotion on it's skin...", or brag him up by telling them that he was one of the bestselling authors in the "Bigfoot Erotica" community, sadly he wouldn't give me his pen name but I have heard through the grapevine that he's very highly regarded...
Sometimes I'd forget to tone it down, forgetting that our staff, now largely under 18, under 16 even, they didn't have the necessary cultural background and reference points to appreciate how vividly I was painting his character. Ken, unfortunately, did, and would invariably try and interrupt my praises....
Anyways, dammit, Ken, Ken, Ken, has gone and found another job.
I'm pretty sure he's going to miss me.
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