The Laxley Mine had zinc, copper, and silver.  Notably, it did not have coal.  Coal used on the island had to be transported across the Irish Sea and was too expensive to be used when it could be avoided.  The result was a mine system that needed pumping but no access to the large steam pumps of the era.  The result was the Laxley Wheel, properly known as Lady Isabella.

The Laxley Wheel is a backshot water wheel that stands seventy-two and a half feet in diameter in the middle of the valley.  Using a reverse siphon, it pulls its water from a cistern high in the mountains.  Since water seeks its own level, a pipe from the cistern flows down the mountainside and inside the structure without needing a raceway. As long as the cistern is at a higher elevation than the wheel, through the magic of engineering, the wheel spins without a visible water source.

The wheel produces between 185-200 hp​(Google Arts and Culture)​, and could pump 250 gallons of water 1,500 feet up from the mines each minute ​(Wikipedia)​. That’s a ton of water every minute, up 150 stories. It’s an incredible piece of engineering.

Several sources will tell you that Robert Casement designed the wheel. Almost every reference to the Laxley Wheel I’ve found calls him a “local engineer.” Not mentioned is his education, which is a matter of pride for the locals I talked to. Mr. Casement was not a trained engineer with an off-island degree. He was a Manxman with a strong practical knowledge of physics and a problem that needed to be solved. The local kid who did well, and even if it’s been 150 years, it’s a source of islander pride. I understand the sentiment.

Growing up on an island in Alaska, I was surrounded by similar folk. A friend’s father was a millwright for a local fish processor. It was said that if you wanted something fixed at the plant, you’d wait until he was in earshot and mutter that it’d be impossible. I worked at that plant in college several years after his death, and we were still using his impossible fixes. They probably still are. Another friend who was, for all practical purposes, a naval architect if they would ever give him the papers. His rudders are still in use in fishing boats across the Gulf of Alaska.

So it’s not history I witnessed when I saw the Laxley Wheel. It was an ongoing statement of pride in the local abilities of Manx Islanders. And perhaps, the pride of people at the end of the logistics chain. Where limited resources mean ordinary people are expected and allowed to do extraordinary work.

“How did the United States develop a taste for multiculturalism when the original European colonists were religious zealots, prisoners, and Highlanders too dangerous to leave in Scotland?

A significant part of the answer is that old New York was once Nieuw-Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is built of different stuff than feudal Europe. As the saying goes, God made Earth, but the Dutch made Holland. This is an important distinction because land that was “made” by areas reclaimed from the sea was not feudal land. Collective water boards formed and owned land, who then sold the land to individuals. The water boards were easy for people to buy into, so while much of the investment came from people already wealthy, a lot came from the local butcher, baker, or chandler. Land in Holland was not ruled by divine right, and people could pool resources to create a corporate profit. While not middle class by modern standards, land ownership was available to anyone with the resources to buy in. Land title could be bought and sold and was not held by a lord or king.

It’s one of the great twists of Western history that one of the foundation stones of personal property rights was the need for people to work connectivity to take land from the sea.

The sea provided a second piece of Amsterdam’s magic in the form of herring. Not in having herring; everyone had that. But Amsterdam discovered a way of preserving herring that could last over a year, be easily transportable, and be done at sea by experienced hands.

This meant that the onshore fishery could become an offshore fishery, leading to the Dutch developing seamanship and larger craft. Now, with ocean-going craft and a market, the Dutch needed products for the backhaul. Imported raw materials led to local industry and the need for more trade. And in trade, there is one foundational truth, and that is that profit is made from differences, not similarities.

Dutch colonizers were still colonizers, but many of their colonies were formed on the understanding that trade with locals was more profitable than outright subjugation. Colonies, yes, but also trading posts.

When Nieuw-Amsterdam was being formed, Amsterdam was possibly the most cosmopolitan city on Earth, and their American colony, with its wealth of oysters and furs, relied on local knowledge and workforce to fill Dutch ships. And the city that would go on to be the financial powerhouse of the United States was rooted firmly in its original namesake.

And that namesake, Amsterdam, is the city I get to explore today.

Maus I and II have a lot of horrifying images. They depict a series of conversations author Art Spiegelman had with his parents about their experience in Auschwitz. Jews (represented as mice) are gassed, hung, shot, rounded up, and displaced. None of this was deemed too much for schoolchildren.

If we take the school board at face value, they were focused on a single panel that depicted Spiegelman’s mother, as a mouse, being found after she committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. This was not an erotic scene. The author was depicting his mother, dead at her own hands.

All of the violence was ok. The problem for the school board was that there was a nude mouse representing a woman in a bathtub. There was no issue with the fact that she was dead. There was no issue with the fact that she was driven to suicide. There was no need to protect schoolchildren from that. The issue was that she was a nude mouse in a bathtub. A stand-in for what one might imagine would be a nude woman.

The firm ground on which the school board is standing is that they expect us to accept as granted that a woman without clothing is more damaging to children than all the horrors of a concentration camp. We can’t continue to let that assumption go unchallanged.

/As a coda, I want to thank my excellent high-school English teacher, Ms. Orbison, for understanding that the best way to tend to my education was to present material that I found challenging rather than to protect me from the world. It was in her class that I first ran into Maus.

No Dr. King quote could capture his work with sanitation workers demanding simple human dignity, his call to faith from the Birmingham Jail, or his call to action from everything he did.

No quote of his could convey the reality that while we’ve given him a federal holiday, we’re still fighting for equal access to the ballot box.

He was the martyr that gave Congress the shocked motivation to pass the Civil Rights act. 58 years later, Congressional Democrats hope his memory can push voting protections through the filibuster. We’re still fighting for equal access.

Today, we lost Clyde Bellecourt, the Thunder Before the Storm. He was one of the greats. A co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and organizer of the Wounded Knee occupation, he founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to address police violence against Native Americans. AIM spans the US and Canada and has made great strides, yet 54 years later, the Minneapolis Police Department is the poster child for violence against minorities. We’re still fighting police violence.

You are going to see a lot of memes this weekend. The memes will show Dr. King or Clyde Bellecourt either in a heroic pose in front of a crowd or a pensive pose in soft lighting. It’s safer that way, they can be presented as the scholars speaking wisdom from the past, rather than the leaders of fights that are still very much with us today.

It’s hard for me to describe how much I enjoyed this book.

It is perhaps the first Steampunk book, yet others have not copied it in a way that makes the original of the genre seem trite or predictable. Written in the 70s, set in Victorian London, Jeter set his narrative style as a homage to the works of the 1890s. The book reads with the intensity of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the probing questioning of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, and the biting commentary and whimsy of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Along the way, Jeter pays homage to both Herman Melville and Jules Verne without cluttering his own story.

With a foundation firmly rooted in the traditions he was borrowing from, Jeter launched a new genre of stories, yet I had not heard of it until Stuart Greenfield gave me a copy for Christmas.

This
book
is
fantastic!

The lens pedestal sat on a cushion of liquid mercury, allowing tons of glass and metal almost frictionless motion. The rotation of the lens was based on a clockwork that only needed to be wound every two hours by the lighthouse keepers.

The lighthouse is a miracle of architecture, engineering, optics, and (if you count the foghorn) acoustics. It was designed, built, implemented, and lit within 5 years, including the time it took to source specialized material from halfway across the world.

Rember this whenever someone tells you that government can’t work. It can work when it’s allowed to.

My wife, son, and I stayed with my parents for three weeks. The need for social distancing meant that we saw very few other people, while the realities of the pandemic meant we could do so while still working from home. According to my employer, home is not a piece of geography, but the end of a VPN from my office. That can be Sitka as easily as it is Eagle River.

So, I spent three weeks with my wife in the town that raised me, watching my son discover the geography I discovered 40 years ago. And for those three weeks, for the first time since College, Sitka was home again. The piece of geography was finally connected to my peace of mind.

Of course, the creek has a name, has had one for a long time. However, the placeholder name is the one on the maps, and therefore the one in the big typeface.

Every Easter reveals something new to me about my faith. This year, my thoughts keep going to Judas Iscariot.

The role of Judas has always caused me some trouble. He had his role to play. Matthew made it clear that it was part of God’s plan foretold by the prophets, and John 13:27-28 has Jesus almost giving Judas his blessing, saying, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” Why, then, do things go so horribly badly for Judas after the deed is done when he is acting within God’s plan?* Many theologians far better versed than I have made the argument that IF Judas is damned, it’s not for his betrayal, which was part of God’s plan. It was for what happened afterward. There are more issues than just the betrayal.

I think that it’s important to reflect on how Jesus was betrayed. Jesus told Judas to do what he needed to do. He stilled the swords of his followers when they tried to keep him from being captured. He led himself into the arms of the Romans. Yet he had time to ask of Judas, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” Luke 22:48

The betrayal had to happen, but it did not have to happen with a kiss. I think it’s this corruption of an act of love that may have changed things for Judas. It was that corruption that set Judas apart from what he was meant to do.

The actions of Thursday set the chain that lead to Sunday, but Christ was still in control. Christ could have shown Jesus to literally anyone in the world, so it’s significant to look at who Christ appeared to. He did not appear to his most vocal followers. They were hiding and distancing themselves from the Christ, fearing the law.

Jesus revealed himself to two women who were not looking for a miracle or payment but were looking to respect the man, Jesus. They did not fear being associated with him. They brought oils to anoint his body. An act of human decency and kindness made bold by their willingness to perform it for an enemy of the State.

It was to them that Christ showed the miracle. They were rewarded far beyond the disciples who would trade on their public closeness to Jesus.

This has been a tough week to watch the news. Politicians continue to trade on their alleged closeness to Christ while corrupting his message of love. And to my friends, many of whom have been poorly treated by the Christian Church, I can only say this:

It’s not to politicians the Christ revealed himself. It’s not to his disciples or to the people who publicly identified with him when the politics of doing so were good.

It was to two women who risked what little they had to be kind to a friend that the Christ revealed the miracle. Many use my religion to harm you, my friends, but not a single person has the authority to use my faith to do so.

He has risen, indeed.

Hallelujah

At the Interpretive Center at Totem Park, I learned about the fights between the Russians and Tlingit, but in a kitchen with a November gale keeping us kids indoors, I learned about the Kake wars between the Tlingit and the US Navy.

I learned about Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in civics classes, but In a back room of my church, I learned about the Pullman Porters covertly connecting POC nationwide while the FBI was shutting down labor newspapers.

I saw the Rodney King riots on every cable news program. It was around a campfire with a bunch of Wobblies that I learned about the MOVE bombing, where the City of Philadelphia bombed a house to dislocate MOVE activists and ended up burning down 65 houses in the process.

It was not until the age of the internet that I learned about the burning of the Douglass Indian Village (now part of Juneau) in 1962 to make way for a harbor. It’s this last piece that gives me hope. Not only is the Douglas Indian Village story online, but so is the MOVE bombing, the organizing work of the Pullman Porters, and the Kake Wars in Southeast Alaska.

The long memory is the most radical idea in America. The ability for us to look at the official history, and ask “What else should we know?” As more of this history is collected and made available, it becomes an easier question to answer by the day, even if it is often terrible.

For years, we have shut down newspapers for telling unpopular parts of history. The House Un-American Activities Committee make it de facto government policy to economically destroy people who would tell those unpopular parts of history. That’s all changing.

For once, we are looking to a time when our stories are NOT being canceled. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.