Category Archives: Chronicles

Field Notes

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

The Turning of Seasons

Springs are always haphazard in these parts. It is bright and sunny one day and then the next twenty centimetres of sleet falls. The next day the sun is out again and you can almost imagine it is summer. Nothing happens for days and then all at once everywhere you look it is green and trees are filled with leaves. 

That’s life, in a way. Long stretches of stillness, followed by a frenzy of activity that sputters out seemingly as soon as it begins.  

He had mixed feelings about spring in truth. Haphazard even. It was the end of winter of course, which was always welcome. But some years winter seemed to drag on through spring and they had more snow in April than in January. The trees had tried to bloom and then had to retreat with the temperatures dropping below freezing. Now they were trying again, green slowly unfurling.  

Misery too. The air was full of pollen; he could almost taste it. Nothing and then all at once, everywhere. There was no escaping it. Keep the windows closed and don’t go out and it made no difference. It found its way in. His eyes itched, his throat scratched and soon enough he was sniffling and sneezing. Then he was applying all the remedies: neti pots and antihistamines, eye drops and constant showers, staying indoors and changing his clothes as soon he came back from being out. For you couldn’t just live your life in your house all the time. 

He tried to those few weeks when everyone else was glorying in spring (The sunshine! The green!). All to hold the pollen at bay as best he could. There was no stopping it. Like the changing of the seasons it would come, celebrated by most. He treated it like most people treated winter: an unwelcome guest, barely tolerated, counting the days till it was gone. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

New China

The sun set quickly in that part of the world, a half hour of gloaming before the darkness took hold. They gathered in the city’s old main square while the full brightness of day still held, though the sun had already vanished behind the crowded buildings. Trees lined the outer edge while a statue of some notable raised up on a white pedestal occupied the centre. At either end food vendors clustered, stalls offering quail eggs, fish balls, and skewers of bbq meat, including tongue and heart and intestine dredged in a mixture of vinegar and soy sauce.  

They picked their way among the stalls sampling the wares, joined by a crowd of others. Mostly students finished classes for the day and enjoying a snack and a few last moments with friends before heading home for the evening. A few men pushing small carts offering dirty ice cream wandered the square, a popular choice given the oppressive heat of the day. Even the sun’s disappearance offered little relief. They each had a cone of the watery stuff – more sorbet than ice cream – which they had to eat frantically before it disintegrated onto the pavement at their feet. 

Just off the square was the New China Restaurant, the oldest in the city. Large fans whirled from the ceiling while portable ones stood along each aisle vainly trying to bring some cool air to the cramped tables. But there was no relief to be found anywhere. The place was empty but for them, despite the fact it was dinner time. They ordered lumpia – the best lumpia in the city it was said – and beers. It really was the best they had had, crispy, flavorful, a marvel. 

They were the only customers, the owners sitting at another table gossiping in low voices. When they finished they returned to the square, sill bustling with activity amid the shadows, going to the far side where the tricycles idled waiting for customers and headed for home.  

Notes on the Grippe

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Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Thousand Four Hundred Sixty One

I have never been one for anniversaries or birthdays, getting the measure of our days through accounting. As though by tallying the moments of our lives in their thousands into a ledger they might somehow be given a greater meaning. It is their very lack of meaning that gives them power.  

During the era of the Grippe Reborn such accounting seemed the only meaning we had. For two years we lived in suspended animation, uncertain of anything. I counted the days and marked the anniversaries. The Ides of March took on a new significance as the time when the Dread Lord Grippe Reborn made himself known in these parts. The whole world seemed to be collapsing in a matter of days. This year as the calendar turned to March I did not think of the Dread Lord’s return. Only as I heard others speak of it did I recall it was now four years since his return. 

Four years. It seems impossible that it has been that long since those first unsettling days of our strange, shared nether existence. And yet it also seems a lifetime ago. We were other people then and we are something else now. Time was broken and we were too and now the pieces have all been put back together. Yet we are changed, and who wants to go back and be reminded of that breaking and what was lost.  

I had another encounter with the Dread Lord after Christmas this year and experienced first hand how much reduced in power he is. A trifling cold that lasted less than a week, and which I gave no thought to after it was over. My love did not even get sick. The only consequence was that we had to cancel our New Year’s plans.  

A mark was made upon us, much as we might prefer not to think about it. We shall not get those two years back and we have already gone a long way toward forgetting them, putting them outside ourselves. A wound that has healed over leaving a scar whose path we can just trace. I wonder what aches we will feel from it in the coming storms. 

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

Local Monkeys

They passed from a flat plain filled with rice fields into forested hills, the road winding precipitously. The towns and villages, which had clustered along the highway all the way from Manila vanished as they began to climb. The van roared as the switchbacks became steeper and steeper, drowning out the easy listening on the radio. As they climbed the world dropped away until they were clinging to a precipice. On one side the hill, still rising above them, and on the other an impenetrable chasm, green with the tops of trees.  

At the pinnacle, the road levelled out and the sky came into view, bright and blue with a few porcelain white clouds scattered across it. They could see the whole of the hill and the hills that surrounded it, all thick with forest. There were monkeys there he was told. What kind, he asked. Local ones. 

They descended on the same winding roads. Here and there they caught glimpses of small houses through the trees, surrounded by them, seemingly soon to be swallowed by them. There were people on the side of the road selling this and that and places for vehicles to pull off and hikers to venture out in search of the unseen primates.  

The blue cloud disappeared as they came to the bottom of the hill and left the forest behind. Rain began to fall. A few splatters on the windshield and then a torrent, water coming in rivers down the road. Suddenly there were towns again and the road was crowded with dripping motorcycles and jeepneys and tricycles. They would pass from one to another with only a few breaks where rice fields sprawled and carabao stood indifferent to the deluge. The rain ended just as they came in sight of the sea, a thin line of blue along the horizon beneath the grey of the clouds. 

Field Notes

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

Further Notes on the Drylands

The summer’s fires still burned through the depths of winter, hidden from sight beneath the black scars on the land where they had previously raged. They slumbered now, patiently waiting for the inevitable turning of the seasons. The winter had not been cold enough, nor had there been enough snow, to douse the flames. And when spring came and the days began to lengthen and warm, the fires would be ready to rise from the dark earth and begin to feed again. 

It hardly felt like winter, except for two weeks of such bitter cold that everyone was left feeling as though they had been transported to some far polar clime. There were as many days above freezing as below it seemed. When it snowed warmth soon followed, returning the hills to a barren state. Even in the valleys they could see the brown grass poking up through the thin patches of white. The snow did not melt so much as evaporate, the ground still frozen far below so that the water could not penetrate.  

Rivers, which had dwindled to trickles over the summer and fall, continued to shrink until it seemed the flow might cease entirely. Reservoirs and lakes were low, exposing the pipes where water was pumped out to the surrounding communities. Everywhere they looked bare, silted and creviced land was exposed. They felt exposed too; the world they thought they lived in had gone away and what came next was unclear.  

In centuries past it was said there were droughts in these parts that lasted for decades. 40 years of drylands. The last hundred or so had been wet ones by comparison, though not without dry years intermixed. The usual way of things had been a few years of dry, followed by a few years of wet, balancing everything out. Water had not exactly been plentiful, but there had been more than enough for growing communities, expanding irrigation and oil drilling. Now it was clear there would not be enough for things to go on as usual.  

Politicians spoke of crisis, of not watering lawns or taking shorter showers, to ensure there would be enough water this year for farmers irrigating, communities to drink and oil companies to drill. A crisis suggested this was a temporary moment, from which there would be a return to normality. But if the aberration had been the last century, with its lack of decade spanning drought, then it was a crisis so much as a return to an old equilibrium, hurried on by a warming climate. No one wanted to acknowledge that possibility, for it mean the end of life as it had been in these parts.  

Miscellanea

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Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

The Fair Way

It had been raining most of the morning by the time they drove down the long boulevard leading to the golf course. The road was lined with carefully sculpted shrubbery, hiding what lay beyond. A gold statue of some notable stood a gaudy watch at a roundabout. The pavement was the best quality they had driven on that day right up to the parking lot in front of the clubhouse.  

They parked as close as they could and ran through the rain to the cover of the building, which looked out on a driving range. The left side had a bar and the right a pro shop, while the middle was open leading to a concrete veranda lined with tables and industrial sized fans to keep back the humidity. The veranda was empty so they went into the bar, which was empty as well, except for the usual half dozen staff idling bored in one corner.  

They requested a table outside looking out on the driving range, which resulted in a surprisingly long, hushed conversation among the staff, at the end of which they were informed that would be quite impossible. Mystified, they pressed the point, saying they preferred to sit outside, to enjoy this brief respite from the crushing heat of summer. Again, they were told it was impossible. “But there’s literally no one else here,” one of them remarked. 

The staff grew defensive and it emerged that the outside tables were held for the local congressman who expected them to be available should he turn up. This was his economic development project, an attraction to bring wealthy tourists to the area. When they asked if he normally golfed in the rain, the staff finally relented and a table was arranged. They sat, eating pizza and watching the rain fall upon the empty driving range, staying well into the afternoon. 

Eventually the rain passed and, as if they had been waiting, a family appeared and started on the golf course. A well-dressed mother and her two children got a bucket of balls and some clubs and set up in front of their table. The staff hurried about, glad for the opportunity to do something. More golfers straggled in throughout the rapidly warming afternoon and by the time they left the veranda was full.  

Field Notes

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

What Moves In the Cold

The coldest of winter days. The sun shining bright with only a few shrivelled clouds in the sky. Even with the sun so vibrant above the cold is obvious. There is a stillness to the air that is visible, as if the world, or this frigid part of it, has stepped out of time for the moment. Nothing stirs. The chickadees and magpies and other birds that do not migrate have vanished. The skies empty, their calls silent. The coyotes and foxes are huddled in their dens. There is only a whisper of a wind, as if it has forgotten its way. Hour by hour, day by day, time does not pass and the cold remains. A picture hanging in a frame. 

The sound is different in the midst of such stillness. When nothing else is moving, the sound of distant footsteps on hard snow is startlingly near. You look for the person but they are somewhere beyond the next hill. There are strange noises in such cold. Some are things you simply never noticed before in amidst the general cacophony of life. The hum of the transformer on the power pole, the occasional rush of a car passing on the highway several kilometres away. Those sounds were always there but now you can actually hear them, loud and present set against the stark quiet. 

But there are other sounds too, inexplicable and unidentifiable, that only exist in this kind of cold. Something between a whistle and groan that comes as the sun sets and only when standing near the house or the garage. At first you think it is the building itself, protesting against the weather, but it sounds too alive for that. Is there some miserable creature huddled against the building for warmth?  

An investigation reveals nothing except the prints of an absent bird hopping about on the snow. There is a feeling like something is there, something watching you. The air briefly stirs, stinging your cheek, and you decide to go in. As your feet crunch under the hard and brittle snow you hear the sound come again. A mournful howl from no animal you have ever heard from before. You quicken up the steps to the door and inside to the warmth.  

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.