Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Year in Review

A number of publications related to the Lost Quarter were published in the past year and it seems appropriate to take this opportunity to highlight them for those wishing to better understand this place.  

The first is Days Without End a rather remarkable chronicle of the early days of homesteading on the Quarter by an unknown author from a manuscript discovered in a mourning box that was inadvertently opened following its purchase at a local farm sale. Beginning with his arrival to a desolate land emptied of its inhabitants, he describes those early difficult years of survival when only a handful of settlers were scattered across these parts, the coming of the railroad and the influx of so many others looking to make their lives, and the alternating years of plenty and drought that followed. It includes perhaps the only first-person description of the Great Sibbald Fire that is extant.  

The Silver Locusts is a series of interrelated tales, largely concerning an earlier interregnum where those indigenous to the Quarter (called the First in the text) lived and interacted with these strange new arrivals who had found their way to the Quarter. Misunderstanding, plague, violence, surveying, starvation and exile follow. It illuminates, as well as any other work I have encountered, how the paths into and out of the Quarter, which were once many and well-marked (or at least well-known) were fragmented and forgotten in the aftermath of this encounter. Leaving the Quarter and its environs in its current disjointed space, adrift from all that surrounds it. 

Concerning itself with more current affairs is Black Money a taut, grim survey of the current moment in the Quarter where oil barons and their minions try to cling desperately to what is rapidly becoming apparent is a failing empire. Like the late Byzantine kings their reigns are short-lived and bloody, everyone grasping and grappling for a crown which will not rest easily upon their heads, the foundations of their monuments falling away without their even noticing. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

The Sotted Lord

Christmas celebrations in the Lost Quarter are much as they are elsewhere in these Dominions and across the world. The customs of the various sects that have established themselves in these parts follow those that were in place in their countries of origin, with a few minor deviations that time and distance have allowed to accumulate. It has also resulted in a peculiarity where the Quarter is the only region where certain customs are currently still followed, their practice having been abandoned or forgotten elsewhere.  

The most famous such case is the Sotted Lord, who has gone by many other names in other locales. Typically such celebrations took place during Christmastide among monks, but in the Quarter it is earlier, most commonly around the winter solstice, and involves much of the local populace. Members of the community who wish to lead the celebrations put forward their names, which are voted on secretly, with the winner declared the Sotted Lord who will lead the revels into the longest night of the year. 

When Those Who Came were first settling the Quarter, the selection of the Sotted Lord would take place the same day as the revels, with homesteaders travelling to the nearest community to cast their lots, the counting of which was done immediately following. Now the voting is conducted by mail, with all those who wish to be considered having to announce their intention by the first day of December, and all those who wish to vote having to submit their ballots by the fifteenth. The counting is done by the postmaster in some communities, while others assign the task to a mayor or other important personage. The newly selected Sotted Lord is announced in the local paper along with the time of their reign.  

That time is typically sunset on the day of the solstice, the shortest day of the year. Those who wish to (and these days it must be said most do not) gather in town at the appointed place, usually a community hall, curling barn or hockey rink. The Sotted Lord is masked and calls the revels, leading those gathered throughout the town. Everyone is dressed in vibrant colours with bells attached to their toques and gloves. Masks, once common, have become less so as the celebrations have become less wild. Candles are lit and carried throughout the streets, with drink shared openly. The Sotted Lord calls upon the mayor and the priests and other town fathers to submit to the reign of the revels. And for the longest night of the year the natural law is reversed. Those who are last come first and those who are masters become servants and beggars act as kings.  

The revellers go from door to door demanding gifts and singing carols, drinking warm cider and mulled wine, until their candles have burned down or the sun has risen. There is much mockery and japes and games of duck-duck-goose in the snow. In most cases, especially in our quiet modern times, this is the extent of the revels. But, in some cases, the debauchery has become excessive (Some would say, disapprovingly, it is by its very nature excessive). Certain politicians who were unpopular have been targeted for particular abuse and have had their homes overrun. There is at least one known instance of a fire consuming several buildings on main street as a result of the revels. 

At the coming of dawn, those revellers who are left abandon the Sotted Lord, leaving them to wander through the wastes of winter, waiting for the return of spring. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Après the Deluge

They gathered for lunch as the midday heat reached its sweltering peak in a white house, one storey, surrounded by a stern wall with a large gate that opened onto a sleepy side street. The humidity was heavier than usual, clouds thick in the sky overhead as she walked from the corner where the tricycle had dropped her off. It was all instantly familiar, though it had been a decade at least since she had walked down this street. Her aunt and cousins were waiting at the gate to greet her, while her uncle stood in the doorway, a hand on the frame to steady himself.  

Inside it was as she remembered. A long room divided between sitting and dining areas, leading to a large kitchen at the back of the house. The table was filled with brimming dishes waiting for them to eat. There was fried chicken and fish, dinuguan and puto, banana fritters and lumpia, papaya and pineapple for dessert. Prepared by her aunt, no doubt under her uncle’s supervision, for since his stroke he’d been unable to work in the kitchen.   

This place felt like home as much as the one she had grown up in. She had stayed over often as a child, running about in the surrounding undeveloped lots, where there was always adventure to be found. In high school and college she and her friends would come over for lunch or to while away the afternoon when they had nothing better to do. Both schools were only a short walk way, so it was convenient, and her uncle was an excellent cook.  

As if it had been waiting for them to sit down to eat, the clouds erupted with thunder and rain, a deluge that quickly swamped the street outside. By the time they were finished and had moved to the couches in the sitting room, the water had passed through the gate and was approaching the entrance, leaving her pleasantly stranded. Her uncle told her, not for the first time, of how the surrounding area had once been swamp with a canal that had connected to the river. She had memories of walking across wooden boards that had been set out by locals to allow passage over the swampy ground. 

The land had long since been reclaimed, the swamp banished, except those days when it rained, of which there were many in these parts. The paved ground couldn’t absorb the water under even the slightest downpour and it swelled up and into the front entryway, a forgotten guest that could never be banished. The past was always like that, she supposed, never completely gone no matter how much of life one built atop it. 

She was thinking this as she and her uncle lapsed into a comfortable silence while her aunt and cousins put away the food. The rain ceased and all she could hear were the clatter of dishes from the kitchen and the rotating of the fan, trying vainly to push the heavy air around. Her eyes wandered to the windowsill and she saw a familiar line of ants steadily and inexorably marching across it. She and her cousins would spend hours trying to disrupt them, turn them from their path, but they always kept on. And evidently still did. They had been crossing that windowsill as long as it had been in existence, she was certain. 

Gradually the water began to recede as the sun came out. One of her cousins went to clear the water out of the entryway with a shovel, though she said it wasn’t necessary. She could get her shoes a little muddy. But no one would hear of it. Goodbyes took forever, as they always did, and it was already well on into the afternoon by the time she stepped outside. There were still puddles on the streets where the gutters didn’t drain, but they disappearing rapidly. She picked her way among them, thinking of different times. 

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Afternoon in the Park

She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, gaze cast across the adjacent park. A few people were gathered there, idling in the sunlight, but she didn’t seem to be looking at any of them. The day was beautiful, a few cirrus clouds floating on an achingly blue sky, the autumnal warmth of the sun inviting. Despite the warmth she was wearing a long tan trenchcoat, unbelted, a backpack slung over her shoulders and a purse at her side. She was looking up and off, perhaps at something in one of the trees that ringed the park. Only magpies and pigeons remained there, the other birds having started their migrations. Her phone was raised up as if to take a picture. So intent was her focus that she didn’t step out of the middle of the sidewalk to give room to passersby who glared at her in annoyance. 

Abruptly she sank into a crouch, arms resting on knees, phone still held out before her. She spoke in a strained voice, eyes intent on the screen. After a moment, long enough for a reply, she threw the phone on sidewalk. A sob escaped her and she frantically pressed one hand to her lips as though to contain it. With the other she clutched at the phone, staring down at it, her shoulders rising and falling with each breath. 

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

Crosstown Traffic

One bright and muggy day, like any other day only more so, the traffic was as it always was, chaotic and confused, idling one moment and racing the next. The city had no locus. Roads went everywhere, criss-crossing, climbing over and crawling under each other. A many-tentacled creature whose every appendage had its own perverse agenda. Buildings seemingly had to accommodate the roads rather than the other way around, standing at bewildering angles, disjointed and separated, with the sole purpose of enabling the cars to keep flowing onward to some other destination. 

Yet it did not flow. Traffic was forever snarled. Even the motorcycles that darted through every nook and cranny available, oblivious of any law except for those of geometry, were forced to slow or halt on occasion. You could drive for hours seemingly and suddenly look up and be on a street much like any other, surrounded by cars (surely not the same ones?), swarms of motorcycles still lunging ahead, following their own logic. Looking around you could be filled with the sinking feeling that it had all been for naught, that you had gone nowhere and would never go anywhere. That the future was an endless line of idling traffic going on forever. 

In the midst of this despair a motorcycle appeared, distinctly visible from the rest because of the party balloons tied to the back of its seat. Dozens of them, multicoloured, filled with air and bouncing in the air high above the traffic. So many that you could almost swear the rear tire took air with each bump of pavement. You could almost imagine the motorcycle being lifted up, taking flight, a creature of the air now, drifting where the winds would take it. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Harvest Moon

Harvest moon at the Harvest Dance, shining bright in a clear sky as darkness comes across the land. A cool evening after a warm day, the surest sign of autumn. Everyone gathers at the community hall, parking in the empty field behind it. There’s not much else left of main street anymore. The church was shuttered and torn down, leaving only the foundation. The same with the general store and gas station down by the highway and the elevators that stood by the railway tracks at the other end of street. The post office too has been closed, the building donated to the local museum in town. Now people get their mail from boxes set in front of the hall. 

Town is what this once was, but it has been a long time since anyone thought of it that way. Only the community hall, the hotel bar and a few houses remain. The community is all those who live in the surrounding area and they are the ones coming in to the dance. Volunteers bringing turkeys and mashed potatoes and squash and carrots and jello salads and pie. Everyone pays their ten dollars and they line up for dinner and eat at the long tables set out across the whole hall. The talk is of the weather and the harvest, recently completed for all those in attendance. They compare yields and discuss prices, shaking their heads at those who are still out combining. Equipment troubles and nothing but bad luck. 

Some go home after the potluck, while those that remain put away half the tables and chairs, folding them up underneath the stage The band starts up and the bar at the back gets busy. Two dollars a drink. There are a few dancers but most mill about around the dance floor, sipping drinks or continuing their conversation. In the kitchen the volunteers disburse the leftovers and clean the pots and roasting pans and run the dishwasher.  

As the evening goes on, the crowd gets younger. Kids from high school disappear outside to their trucks where they’ve got a bottle hidden. They saunter back inside, faces flush, convinced of their cleverness, while the adults eye them skeptically. More people arrive from outlying communities. The Altario boys, back from university, appear, taking advantage of the lower age limit to cross the border and drink. This draws the ire of some of the local youths who squint across the hall at these interlopers. 

The evening goes on for awhile with country standards, hard stares and too much whiskey, until one of the locals gets it into his head to take a run at a smirking Altario boy. He sprints across the dance floor, landing an off-balance punch. A halfhearted melee follows, the combatants basically hoping someone will intercede to break things up. Some of the older farmers do, reaching in and pulling people apart, grumbling about the goddamn kids. The local and his friends are deemed responsible and tossed out into the night. 

It’s too early to go home so they wander across the road to the hotel bar, a dismal old place that smells of mildew and stale beer. They order beers and are halfway through them when someone else from the dance arrives, looks them over and says to the bartender: You know those kids aren’t eighteen. Off into the night they go again, crossing the road to the truck with the bottle. After a couple unsteadying drinks they decide to return to the dance. Not quite an hour has passed and bygones may now be bygones. 

They slip in one at a time without incident, all except the one who started the fight. He is turned around at the door and sent back into the night. He returns to the truck with the bottle, though it’s locked so he can’t get at it, figuring everyone else will be back in a minute, especially once they realize he hasn’t made it in. No one returns though and it starts getting cold and his ride home is inside, having apparently decided he’s better off forgetting about him. A few older folks leave the dance and shake their heads at him without comment as they get in their trucks.  

He contemplates trying the bar again, but he’s sobered up enough by now to know that’s a poor idea. Instead, he starts walking, heading north on main street to the highway, which he scampers across into a stubble field. As soon as he is off main street and its two feeble street lights, the darkness is almost total. Only the moon, bright above is there to guide him. He walks along the edge of the field to where the road going north is and starts following it, staying in the safety of the stubble. It’s only five kilometres to home, so it shouldn’t take him much more than an hour. 

Even with the full moon, the going is tough, the ground uneven, and though he is much more sober than he was he still has trouble keeping his feet. His eyes adjust as he goes, the darkness changing around him. The sky, once just a moon and a vast blackness speckled by a few bright stars is now full of light, thousands of stars visible. He stands teetering atop a rise, looking up in awe at the vastness of it all, beyond his comprehension, and is filled with indescribable emotion that is bigger than himself somehow. More than he can contain.  It is a long while before he notices the yard light from home is visible ahead in the darkness and starts toward it.  

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

Blessings

They arrived at the agreed upon place, straggling in twos and threes to the hotel lobby where masked attendants welcomed them with bows and ma’ams and sirs, ushering them through the entrance to the restaurant. With each new arrival everyone had to stand and greet the newcomers. There was laughter and embraces, explanations offered for those absent. The elders held out their hands and the younger pressed it to their foreheads, bowing down slightly, lending a formality to the occasion.  

After some stilted conversation, where everyone worked to reacquaint themselves after so many years apart, they decamped to the buffet. Some conducted reconnaissance of the full spread before making their selections, but most headed to the soups for a bowl of sour broth with pork or congee to begin. The serving tables were filled with local delicacies as well as more standard fare: Kare Kare, siomai and siopao, Laing, Lechon belly and more. For dessert there was cake and ice cream, flan and a Halo Halo station. 

Now that they were eating the talk was much easier. No one felt obligated to speak to the whole group, instead chatting with those closest. There was the usual discussion of politics, of what had happened in the city since the visitors had last been there, and all the good and bad of the world. Work was discussed and relations not present. The visitors talked of their lives overseas, of the weather and how cold it was, how the government worked and how (very) distant places were. 

As the evening wore on servers began to move about the restaurant loudly singing happy birthday at every table that had availed itself of the birthday discount for any guest whose birthday fell in the current month. Applause followed each rendition, ending when the next round struck up in what, for a few terrifying minutes, seemed, an infinite loop.  

They were in a land of discounts. There were senior discounts, birthday discounts, discounts for those staying at the hotel, discounts for charging the bill to the room, discounts for groups larger than 10, and more. The visitors had wondered as they made their reservation the day before if they would somehow end up being owed money by the restaurant.  

They were left alone when they were done eating, as every table was, to converse for as long as they wished. When they had exhausted all conversation they took their leave as a group, gathering again in the lobby. It was prom season and gleaming teenagers, practically vibrating with excitement, trailed by their proud parents kept streaming through. They looked on benevolently, reminiscing about the schools they had attended.  

The visitors had returned to one earlier in the day, exploring the grounds after claiming to the security guard manning the gates of the campus that they needed a copy of their transcripts. The campus was vast, a series of long, interlocking buildings with courtyards at the centre. High school, elementary and university students intermingled in a constant buzz of activity. They sat in the shade of one courtyard watching as people moved about, the air still, hot and heavy.  

Everyone said goodbye two or three more times in the lobby, lingering and not quite willing to let the evening end. Just as it seemed all conversation had been exhausted someone had another question or anecdote. There was heartfelt goodbye after heartfelt goodbye. More embraces and shaking of hands. At length all those who had come took their leave, the attendants bowing and ma’am siring them out. They disappeared into the darkness of the night, leaving the visitors to return to their hotel room. 

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

The Heart of the City

The church was under a white tent, protecting those gathered from the midday sun. Chairs, mostly empty, surrounded the pulpit. Surrounding it was a carefully manicured forest of green, with ponds and streams intertwined throughout. The already humid air was made positively damp by the greenery and water. People walked through but didn’t linger, heading to one of the buildings that encircled the gardens. Inside was air conditioned and gleaming. Well-dressed people wandered through the corridors of this oasis, idling in shops. There were security guards everywhere, watchful and unobtrusive. By the pathway leading to the tent, at every entrance to the buildings and within as well. They gave a cursory check of bags and asked people to take off their hats. A familiar protocol.  

The city surrounding this idyll was a warren of streets choked with exhaust and traffic. The pavement absorbed the noon sun, reflecting it back, affording no relief. A profusion of buildings crowded, apparently haphazardly around it. Modern business towers with gleaming windows, campuses for private schools built at the turn of the previous century, shops with apartments above them, the buildings crowded so close together it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Half-built complexes littered the landscape. Cranes stood beside them, seemingly forgotten. The streets were crowded with people, though not as much as the roads were snarled with cars. They lingered in the few places that offered any shade, where jeepneys and trikes picked people up, or hurried from building to building where air conditioning might be found.  

These two realms intersected underneath the mall in the parking garage with many levels and drop off points. The chaos of the streets outside was limited here, only because there so little room to maneuver. Every entrance and exit was manned by security, these individuals looking far more fearsome than those inside. They knew they were the barrier that mattered. There were many failings in the city, that no one would deny. Problems so vast it was hard to comprehend fully let alone hope to address them. Inside, all that could be forgotten, left invisible. There were no windows looking down on the streets. People drifted about, laughing, idling in restaurants and on benches. Enjoying a pause from what awaited them outside. 

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Drylands

The river, which in spring had briefly threatened to overspill its banks, was reduced to a near trickle, the stones that lined its bottom visible from the shore. They could walk across it without the water getting much higher than their ankles, though no one did. There was a time when such an event would have made travel easier – no need to find a place to ford – though no one would have been happy at the fact. A low river meant the same thing then as now: drought. 

The signs were visible everywhere. Leaves were already turning on the trees though it was still the middle of August. The crops were turning too, stunted and only half-filled out. The June rains had been miserly and the heat through July punishing. Creek beds and sloughs that might have kept water until midsummer had been dry since June. The mountains to the west had been bare since the end of May. Unheard of, though there was always someone to point out when it had last happened as though that were evidence of anything.  

The groundwater, always low through the summer months, was dangerously so now. The well they had dug when they first arrived was running dry. The water table had fallen several feet the year before and a warm and dry winter had not raised it. This year the levels were dropping fast, lower than they had ever seen. They had to be careful about how much water they used and had started contemplating drilling a new and deeper well. It was that or risk having to truck water in. 

With the creeks and sloughs and even the dugouts low and dry, there was a risk the cattle in the pastures wouldn’t have water, though they would run out of feed before that happened. The grass was burning up in the heat, turning brown, looking tired. Many years they might keep the cattle out on the pastures into September or even October, before turning them out onto fall grazing, the stubble left over from the harvested crops. Not this year. There wasn’t enough feed to get them through a normal winter, let alone having to start feeding early. Everyone was selling or planning to in the coming weeks. Shrinking their herds. The land couldn’t support them this year and maybe not next too. 

As August stretched on dry and hot, they had more difficulties with the well and realized they had no choice but to drill a new one. Test holes were sunk in the pasture near their house trying to avoid the gravel that pockmarked most of the surrounding land. A likely spot was found and the earth was cored out. Water flowed in and they lapped it out to see how much flow there was. Piping was put into the hole, surrounded by gravel and sand permeable enough to let the ground water through. The pipe itself had holes to allow the water to flow. A pump was attached and trenching dug and more piping laid in the ground to connect the well to the house.  

The day after the well was drilled it rained, a terrible thunderstorm with lightning cascading through the night. The rain lasted through the night, washing the land clean. Or it would have, if the storm had not brought smoke from the western fires with it. 

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond. 

On the Quality of the Smoke in the Sky

The sun was a red orb gazing down upon a shrouded planet. Particles from the fires burning uncontrolled and uncontained across the northern latitudes drifted through the high atmosphere, carried by planetary winds, descending on population centres below.  

The sun glared through the haze, a sickly red. A poisoned wound that wouldn’t heal. The smoke created a layer of grime that hung above, washing out the blue of the sky and casting everything below in a dissipated light. A new world would be born from the ruins of this one, some claimed, but in the meantime, they would be left to inhabit what was left. 

The smoke had a palpable ethereality. It sat above, a strange formless cloud that never moved. The blue of the sky was still present, but faded. Marred by a layer of grime that wouldn’t wash clean. 

The smoke clung to the upper reaches of the sky, mixing with the clouds, darkening them, so that it looked like rain might be coming. Yet no rain fell, only an invisible ash fall. The light was no longer true, the days felt faded and obscure, like some lost past they couldn’t find their way back from.  

In midsummer the smoke appeared from some far distant fire, settling throughout the river valley. An ominous warning. The world felt smaller, the sky far away. They were trapped in a room with a ceiling that was slowly falling in. Compressed and seething.   

Drought and heat and locusts, the seasons seeming out of joint. Now, a cloud of miasma they were forced to breath as they went about their days. Oh, this broken world.