I found a feather on the drive, a very nice feather contributed by one of the ravens that lives over in the church grounds. I picked it up, deciding our good-luck troll, who collects such things, might have a Spokane raven feather for his collection.
Then I thought: bird flu. West Nile Virus.
And put it down.
And now I think, y’know, I’m going to find that feather and hand it to the troll.
The world isn’t half as dangerous as television watchers believe. Oh, sure, I know a dozen places you can get shot, mugged, infected, or drown quite easily. But Swine Flu, pandemics, Bird Flu, radon gas and free radicals, eat this, don’t eat that, caffeine is good for this and bad for that, ditto red wine, white wine….
Y’know, when I was a kid, I dipped my fingers in hot tar, just to get some free ‘bubble gum’. Works. We collected liquid mercury out of broken thermometers and played with it. We danced in the spray of the DDT trucks trying to eliminate the mosquitos that were carrying something brought in from overseas-returning military. We ate snow-ice-cream, until it became radioactive. We went trick or treating into strangers’ houses. We ran the streets at night. We were, perhaps, the people others worried about. I went to a rough junior high and guns were common in the student population—they had search-desks in the halls and did random stops, picking up a whole arsenal of lovely things, zip guns, real guns, you name it. I walked through gang turf daily. I hiked alone, as a teen, through wildlife parks. I grew up playing on an old firing range with unexploded ordnance that turned up now and again, once lethally…so I kind of know what risk is. I rode a bike with no helmet and all our wiring was cloth-wrapped and our fuses, yes, sometimes used pennies. I was frequently exposed to whooping cough, and polio, pre-vaccine. We had only the most rudimentary refrigeration: it wouldn’t keep ice cream hard. And we ate potato salad that had been out all day and even overnight, on spring nights. It was probably colder than the fridge. We never refrigerated butter, jams, often not cheese, usually didn’t refrigerate leftover fried chicken or pork chops, just had it on the counter…it would disappear within two days. And I am still in one piece and healthy.
So now the internet and the news can inform us of the latest plague before it arrives, and we spook out, lather ourselves with alcohol gels, worry about our free radicals while wolfing down supersized Big Macs, and enough idiots are willing to order Tamiflu and Viagra lookalikes from the internet and pop this stuff in their mouths without question…they must be making money offering this stuff, since my mailbox is flooded hourly with offers…we hear about a home invasion on the telly and everybody in smalltown America checks their door locks. We hear about some trick or treat incident and every parent in America restricts their kids to their block, their neighbors. We have a mindset where a person sues a riding stable because a horse threw them, or a playground because they fell off the jungle gym. Hey, I learned not to walk under the supersized teeter-totters. One headache was enough for me. I never fell off the merry-go-round, but I was dragged a few rounds when I missed: I learned that great lesson—make up your mind where you’re going to land or don’t let go. I also learned you will not die of a skinned knee. And if you get one, hey, just pour a mercury compound on it, and you’ll be fine.
My dear friends, I think we run just a wee bit too scared. We get too much information and internalize it much too closely: it’s become the phobia of the week…so heck, yes, I’m going back to my bad old ways. Well, minus the mercury (though it’s great for one really odd thing: hangnails, and I have one bottle in stash that has lasted me for, oh, thirty years.) And I do refrigerate potato salad. And I wash the veggies.
But I maintain we are not half as fragile as the panic-of-the-day news reports would have us think.
Thought bubbles:
1) “green soap” (fittingly), used as a school-yard antiseptic on blisters. Best administered by pouring, full-strength, and letting it sit to “kill germs”. Does anyone know what “green soap” actually was? The teacher reported to my mother that I turned white & she thought that I was going to pass out from the pain.
2) “The Swamp Lady” & “The Bloody Stump”: two stories always good for a scare during camp-outs. I suspect everyone has heard both tales, no matter where & when they grew up.
3) I took photos of the 29,400 masks as I knew no one would believe me.
I remember that green soap. I’m sure it had pine resin in it. It and Pinesol I think are one and the same thing. When I worked in our grade school infirmary and we had a girl who hadn’t heeded the maxim, Pick a good spot to land or hang on, did neither. We had an 8″ wide patch from which we had to remove rocks and dirt, and green soap figured in it…we were not her favorite people, but we two 6th graders were all she had until the school nurse could reach us from downtown.
Far, far too true
On Blisters:
The only thing I ever did was opening them up with a lancet and empty them – usually three times a day, then they healed.
Some months ago I went to an apothecary, because I forgot my lancets at home (we were on a 400km hike), and that person did not want to sell me lancets. They were the wrong stuff to use, she told me. I should use some crazy blister patches, they were specially made for having blisters in shoes.
One thinks… blister patches in hiking shoes if you expect to hike 40km more that day, over rough terrain? That begs more blisters by the dozen.
I said thank you and left. In the next pharmacy shop I told the saleswoman I needed lancets because I was a diabetic. I got them, I picked the blister, pulled through come cotton line to keep it drained and was happy ever after.
Sometimes you can just be too careful and aseptic-believing.
CJ: I like your troll. If I have some leftover hemp from my current weaving project, I might try to make one, too.
–Thea
Herzogenaurach, Germany
I’m not sure if I understand your dislike of the blister blocks. Blisters are caused by friction between the foot and the shoe. If, at the first sign of a blister, you put on the blister block, it eliminates the friction, thus keeping the blister from progressing. And they have a gel part that goes over the blister, so it is padded when you walk. I’m not sure why you think that using them would cause more blisters than your method, which just sounds painful to me, which, if it is, would cause me to walk differently, thus likely causing blisters on other parts of the feet.
And the reason that people are moving away from lancing blisters is that it does increase the chance of infection (not hugely, I’ll admit), it increases the chance that the blister opens up, exposing soft skin to the environment that caused the blister in the first place, and we now have ways of treating them that stay in place much better than the old band aids. While I think that we may have gone overboard on some things in modern life, there is a danger in clinging to the old ways of doing things, too. I’ve used the blister blocks, and they work very well, better than any of the old ways I used to do. You’d really rather lance them three times a day rather than throwing a block on one and being able to ignore it for the rest of the day (or several… a lot of people leave them on for 2-3 days, enough time for the blister to heal up).
Those waterproof slightly slippery ones are great: fortunately my feet don’t sweat much and they stay put just fine, in the rare instance I get one. Dunno, but I’d think if you’re one of those individuals whose skin sweats and sheds bandages left and right, that could be a problem.
My feet are standard cold-and-wet. Blister patches don’t stick.
On the other hand, I get blisters (usually 1 per foot) early on on long hiking excursions. That means we hike 40km (roughly 20 miles, I think) with all luggage on our backs.
With that weight presing down on your feet, the blister patches don’t help because they raise the blistered part of the foot even higher from the soles of the shoes, putting pressure on other parts of the foot that should not be affected. The result is that one blister on the sole of the foot begets blisters on the toes or somewhere else.
You also have no possibility of putting pressure off your foot, so you need it back in working order as soon as possible. Lancing and draining blisters does not hurt, and if you clean your feet beforehand and use sterile lancets, there is virtually no risk.
Then, when the blister is empty, you add one more layer of socks, get back into the shoes and go on.
Blister patches are fine for work environments where it is the nice shoe that causes the blister. They are horrible on trails.
–Thea
Herzogenaurach, Germany
At the moment there are 6 bottles of anti-bacterial gel in our office (of about 100 people). It smells … like a dentist’s office, actually. Given, the UK is having this whole epidemic of Swine Flue (a.k.a. “bacon lung”), but … well, it’s all a bit much. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for paranoia. But … about the right things. 😉
Girl scout camp on Oahu circa 1972. Canvas tents on raised wooden platforms (to keep out the centipedes!), sleeping bags on iron-springed cots, outhouses with lots of BIG spiders, long hikes at midnight to tire us out because someone would be telling stories about Captain Nemo and his submarine and getting all the girls excited, making hula skirts out of ti leaves, singing by the campfire, and eating s’mores. Can’t ever go back to that carefree time.
Back at home, my 8 year old sister and I would disappear for hours hiking the Aiea Loop Trail. Didn’t ever seem to bother Mom. And of course, we would stuff the whole family in a Volkwagon Bug without seat belts and the baby in Mom’s arms!
KIDS DOING STUPID THINGS — This is just evolution at work. I have a theory that this is why the whole Extreme Sports thing has taken off over the last 10 years: Yeah, a LOT of kids have split their heads open, paralized themselves from the neck down, or crippled themselves to some lesser degree on skate-boards, bikes, roller skates, “jumping”, bungy cord foolishness, etc . . . but for everyone out of the 1000 that makes it, we’re THAT much closer to Kimball Kinnison.
SWINE FLU: I supposedly caught this bad boy earlier in the year, and I am high-risk type: diabetes, HBP, dirt’s younger brother . . .
And no more pathetic excuse for a communicable disease have I ever encountered. Ran a 102 fever for twenty minutes at the start and had chest congestion for a couple of days towards the end of the usual two-week run of this sort of thing. I walked the dog (usually RAN — he’s a Siberian Husky, they sometimes have only two speeds, with STOP being one of them) three and four times a day, half-hour minimum each time. Did lots of laundry and all the Spring cleaning around the house. My doctor didn’t even bother to put me on antibiotics! Best week off I’ve had from work in many a moon (not that I felt that bad, they considered me a plague-carrier and sent me home): went through two Hard Case Crime or old (1970’s) DAW SF/Fantasy novels a day sometimes.
This is why we have the Darwin Awards. http://www.darwinawards.com/
Flu is caused by viruses, which laugh at antibiotics that are aimed at bacteria. So getting antibiotics is not a measure of how serious the illness is.
Usually what kills people is not the flu but the opportunistic diseases that come after the damaged immune system. *These* diseases are usually caused by bacteria that the body as no time to kill since it is busy with the flu virus. That is the time antibiotics work.
On the other hand, the swine flu is currently rather less serious than the common flu going ’round. But I refuse to be spooked into a panic for no reason. I also refuse to take an illness I contract lightly. I had plenty. I know what whooping cough feels like, if untreated.
–Thea
Herzogenaurach, Germany
Oh, yes, thanks for this post. I agree totally.
Storm drains – doesn’t THAT bring back memories. My town has a network of drainage creeks (natural creek routes, mostly, but encased in masonry) that were done by the WPA — concrete beds, native sandstone walls — that periodically disappear underground and become storm drains. I used to know the entire map. Down at the corner of the block some kids were lamenting because one had dropped schoolbooks down the gutter drain. I knew just where the open creek was that went to that spot to retrieve them.
But most of my friends now, even the outdoors lovers, are horrified at the very idea that a child was allowed to play in such a place, and consider it a wonder that I didn’t die of plague from whatever might have been in the rivulet running down the center of the creeks.
Camps. We were the City Leader’s group of Campfire Girls. We got to weed the campground, saw logs, build bridges and do maintenance—but we also got the neat winter campout (aka snowbound for a week) and other neat assignments. We were in and out of the wildlife refuge.
And we had started as kind of a city-center sort of group when I lived in city-center, sorta, and we just kept on, because me mum was also a leader, and the City Leader took us over when Mum had my brother…
Well, there was one other prominent group that just constantly waved a flag in our faces, the group that was more from the well-to-do area. They were good. But they were cheeky. They had nice stuff. And if it wasn’t us doing a project, it was them. But we generally didn’t do them together.
Now, the wildlife refuge in the area is a lovely place to camp. And we knew it well. I spent my nights in a sleeping bag on bare ground finding out that mosquitos can too bite through sleeping bags…and we did it safely, though bug-bit.
We also knew where NOT to camp.
And the super-kids group went camping. They camped on the shores of Lake Quanah Parker, right in this nice flat area by a pretty lake with a pretty view, and THIS group, being well-to-do, had tents.
They woke up in the night with huge creatures manuevering past their tiny pup-tents and huge shadowy things the size of mountains meandering delicately over their guy-ropes and tent pegs.
Whuff! Whuff! Very little sounds like an American Bison in a ruminative mood except maybe a steam locomotive just starting up.
They remained in their tents in stark terror. Buffalo have one well-known trait: if spooked, they move as a herd, and they can flatten what they move over.
Seems this nice flat spot was the watering place and wallow of the herd, and they would stay there until midmorning and then wander off.
Until that time, only a fool would leave her tent or make a sound and spook that herd, and nobody in that group was a fool.
Yes, lots of memories of mucking around outdoors for hours at a time: I thought I was the only kid who went crawling around in big drains. The tar chewing gum reminds me of when I was 5 and my parents wouldn’t let me have bubble gum. On the other hand, plenty of people would spit their gum out on the sidewalk, where it would lie, all pink and, well, flat from being stepped on… and a bit gritty…. But, when you’re denied gum at home, sidewalk fare makes perfectly fine dining!
I also have other, older memories of lying on a couch on my Grandma’s Camp’s porch, nose in book all summer afternoon long until my Grandma would come and chase me outside with “you need some sun!” Mind you, Grandma told me once that she carried around a dead mole she found all day, because his fur was so nice to pet!
Your grandma sounds like a rip! I like her!
Wow.. Best thread stamp of approval 😉
What memories.. green soap, mercurachrome, methiolate…
Age 11-15, walking or catching a ride with someones bros or parents up to the bus stop and waiting for the bus with my best friend every 2nd or 3rd Sat morning to ride 12 miles to downtown Richmond VA bus terminal and spend the whole day wandering around about a 12 sq block area with 4 theaters, 2 bookstores, bunch of dept stores, 1 dirty book store hole in wall heh we didn’t have the nerve to go into, seeing a couple movies, eating lunch and dinner at a counter or on the street, picking someone and following them blocks to see what they were doing, taking the last bus back to our town at 8 or last one at 10pm. Never got in trouble, never had an “incident” of any kind, never spent the bus ticket home money by accident, never had to call parents to pick us up, on probably a couple hundred times doing it. Last couple years we even took other buses all over the city to other theaters and then back downtown in time to connect to the one back home.
Unimaginable today..
The doors of our houses were never locked until we went to sleep and then I’m not sure they were all the time.
Ever made a firefly lantern? We used to get Mason jars with holes in the lid, run around all evening catching fireflies and competing for whose ‘lantern’ was brightest. Then in the morning, before anyone ever heard of ecology, we’d set our jars, opened, in the bushes, so last night’s captures could find their way to freedom.
We used to ride the bus down to the theater downtown, walk the streets before and after, just enjoying going to the drugstore soda fountain, and acting the fools under the street lamps, then catch our bus and get home again before 10. We were silly, but we harmed no one, physically or psychologcally.
We were known, occasionally, to stand on streetcorners pointing at the sky until we’d gathered a crowd, then duck and run.
Our Latin club, in togas, caroled the stores at Christmas, in Latin, and then went to county jail, where the drunks in the drunk tank would talk about seeing angels…. Perhaps a few of them got religion.
Never did it in togas, but I can remember our Latin club sings carols, too. Our Latin teacher did not think she could sing well; so, she persuaded the choir director to lead us. Of course, choirs are taught to pronounce Latin somewhat differently than they way we were taught to pronounce it. We were trying for something like a classical pronunciation and the choir director was using something between Latin-as-English and modern Italian. We noticed right away, and he noticed after a couple of carols. No gloria in egg-shells for us.
and what about the pyramid pulled by slaves in togas? what was that story all about?
who? Me? Instigate something like that?
Oh yeah 🙂 We called them lightning bugs. I was older and had been a few places when I realized firefly was the more common name.
Peewee baseball as a pre-teen. We had one team and then two and then three in town, because any kid that wanted to play got to play and all were encouraged to play – and there was no “best lineup” on a team until the last few games of the season. Everyone on all the teams got to play no matter how bad they were, every game, winning or losing. Playing those games and practicing on the dusty clay in the hot sun. 🙂
I’m hoping this is kind of just a rant. I have some of these experiences, and I agree we are hardy, but I don’t agree that risks go away by ignoring them.
Some of the stuff we did as kids wasn’t a good idea. I rode without a helmet, but I would never do that today. I wouldn’t send kids to a school with a gun problem. Maybe I’ll eat day-old pizza, but I won’t eat two-day-old pizza. I wear a seatbelt, because I’ve been in four car accidents in less than four years. My great-uncle worked with radioactive materials in the early ’40s, and he ended up with several different kinds of cancer and lingering death a couple decades later. My grandfather’s first wife died in the Spanish influenza epidemic, and they say H1N1 may have effects like Spanish flu this fall.
I don’t need to live in a bubble and live forever, but I try to have a quantitative understanding of risks around me and I try to mitigate the more easily avoided problems. I wash my hands regularly, and I’ll do an energy-vector calculation in my head before I decide to step off a curb and jaywalk.
And I carry three cell phones too. I can show them to you this weekend. 😉
lol. And they’re saying we all need 3 flu shots this fall, to try to stem the spread of several varieties at once. I’ll definitely take them. I don’t believe in sitting on the railroad tracks when I know a train is due, and clearly something’s coming.
I’ll take all three shots, and then I’ll stop worrying about it. I know somebody who has 20,000 flu masks—if I need one.
Yep, me mum worked in the Bureau of Engraving, with aerosoled inks so thick they were like a fog; and 4 bouts of cancer later, she’s still here. Of course the fact she was a farm girl with all they were spraying back in the 30’s, hard to know which chemical’s the bad guy, inks or bug spray. Not to mention the cosmetics with lead, hormones, and who knows what else she used.
My point is simply you run risks daily, and worrying over every blip of a science study broadcast on the news is imho a general waste of energy. You pick your risks and figure sooner or later the cosmic dice will get you, but probably, in the perverse way of the universe, it’ll be a surprise.
We all run risks, but do we have the skills and information to evaluate them?
Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic are all very well, but back before we arguably over-focused on them, we had a couple more Rs in the curriculum: Research and Reasoning. I remember in Speech & Debate, you didn’t dare argue before checking at least Time, Newsweek, and US New & World Report; and if you left holes in your logic, you got hammered by your loyal opposition [i]and[/i] the teacher.
Now, I wonder if our consumer-fueled lawyer-ocracy isn’t to some extent suppressing those inconvenient Rs since emotions are far easier to manipulate than facts and logic. Thinking back to the jury duty discussion, the last thing most lawyers want is a dispassionate juror. And certainly a great amount of advertising is “FUD”: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Fear the germs!
Media myths add to unrealistic risk management. “If it bleeds, it leads,” so people are afraid of home invasion when the most dangerous thing they do is drive. So they buy a pistol, ’cause you can just pick one of them up and shoot the bad guys dead (saw it on TV, I did!)
In another forum, we discussed the California woman who, perhaps drunk, pulled her friend to “safety” after an auto wreck, possibly paralyzing her (but [i]post hoc ergo prompter hoc[/i]). The first thing you learn in first aid is to never move an injured person unless he is in immediate danger. But many argued the moving should be protected under the Good Samaritan law because cars blow up all the time. One person actually advanced as evidence that it always happens on TV!
As if we need more handicaps than our natural tendency to remember bad events (potential threats) and forget good events.
I know that this runs the risk of turning into “kids today”… but does anyone else think kids today are less well-behaved than they used to be? I mean, I remember doing a lot of wandering around when I was a kid, but I also know that we (generally) respected other people’s property. We wouldn’t think twice about climbing over a neighbor’s fence to retrieve a stray ball, but we’d try to avoid trampling the plants when we did it. And my parents would take us out of where ever we were if we started to have a melt down. I’ve had to chase kids out of the tree in my front yard, mostly because I don’t want the liability issues if they get injured in it, but also at least partly because they didn’t have the courtesy to ask if they could climb it before they did. And I see parents letting their kids run around restaurants and stores with very little regard for other shoppers. And then when I watch court shows (yes, it’s a failing of mine) about people who think it’s stupid not to take everything you get offered, and the others who are willing to get into fights about the stupidest things… it does make you wonder.
So, am I just remembering only the “good parts”, or have kids gotten ruder?
Kids have gotten ruder…but a lot of that falls to under-parenting. Two income families, people working harder to make ends meet…buy the kid off with a toy to silence them or make them feel better because you weren’t there all day. Staying home isn’t an option for a lot of people anymore, but to blame the kids for their lack of direction and social graces isn’t entirely fair. People aren’t born polite, that’s a learned skill.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners toward authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are the tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter in the presence of guests, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” —Plato, ca. 400 BC.
Of course this was only one generation before the fall of Greece to Macedonia.
“I know somebody who has 20,000 flu masks—if I need one.”
Correction: that’s 29,400.
******
Paul Porter taught me how to smoke. In the 3rd grade. Inside a Sekrit Cave inside the haystack.
Paul assured me it was safe because it was raining.
When my younger sister and I and our teenage friends from a farm over the other side of the mountain went shooting kangaroos with our dad’s twenty-two rifles, on our ponies on the neighbouring sheep station we always put the wire boundary fences back up straight each time we crossed. Never got any roos or each other though it was exhilarating chasing the few we managed to find (didn’t know much about their habits in those day) and the father’s didn’t even miss the rifles.
Haven’t been too lucky lately though. Got tossed when the young horse I was competing on refused the last part of a combination, we had been going full speed. Looking back I must have had a slight concussion because I rode my bike back to my apartment did stupid things like applying Voltarène and lying on heat wheat bag before trying to go back for the afternoon’s competition which led to fainting twice on the stairs and spending 8 hours in Urgences. Anyway still have a 17 cm diameter haematoma over my sacrum two months on and am now grounded no more swimming even. Doctor says it will not heal for a long time.
Three days older than you CJ it’s not only kids who do questionable things, some of us never learn.
Ow, Evenus! I once, riding bareback to get old Skeeter around to the barn for saddling, ran head on into a cornered cow (hereford, not de-horned, brought in for treatment) who immediately went head down in self-defense: Skeeter lowered her head and pitched in startlement, and I did a whole somersault right over her head and landed on my butt, still holding the reins, facing, at about 10 foot range, a startled range cow who thought that was the wildest defense she’d ever seen from a horse.
Skeeter stood there, the cow stood there. Still holding the reins, I levered my aching self off the ground, picked up a stick and shooed the cow on around the corner of the barn lot, leading Skeeter in. I didn’t do too much riding that day.
That night we had a dance at the camp. Sitting it out was painful, but not as painful as any move whatsoever, for the next several weeks, and aspirin wouldn’t touch it.
I was, thank goodness, sixteen, and flexible. But I didn’t flex too much for a while.
Awwww…..Christmas Caroling in togas! I remember that day – I think it was sleeting…I ’bout froze my glutius AND my maximus off! Still to this day, I can’t sing Adeste Fideles without smiling over that fun memory.
Lol! I can’t remember ’em in English. I keep switching languages!