Playground III
continuing The Sketchbook Project Saga
RE: War and Floods
By Susan Holland ©2017
From floods surpassing anything America has ever documented, the headlines hint at military action here in our USA. And so we have domestic emergency with weather, and now we also have a Military Heads Up about North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test!
I am not sure how much my brain processes at night, but I’m moving today from watery thoughts to military thoughts. Last week it was mostly metaphysical wondering — and so rather cosmic.
These waking and dreaming themes turn up in the Sketchbook in an interesting way.
Last night I tossed and turned with certain marks in my head — marks to be made on paper and worked with in an abstract way. I did get up and make marks — and then after sleeping late this morning I looked at my marks, and, as usual, took photos of them and looked at them in the computer paint.net program — to get an objective eye on what I had done.
A warrior stepped out! From my dots and paint strokes and slashes — out came a sort of tribal aboriginal person, with his war paint on and the drawing of arms and legs came into the picture — some tassels were there for me and even a costume with a bushy skirt! Could be Japanese, or Asian, or any number of other ethnic warriors doing a sort of threatening war dance.
Is the world news invading my ears and eyes and coming out from my hand?
Very worrying to think of a war. I’ve lived during some doozies of wars — from the home front, of course, but with The War always front and center in the mind — in the news — in conversations — and with the rationing, the knitting of bandages, the air-raid drills and blackouts, and bad dreams of kinds that parents don’t like to fuel with gory details. The photos on the front page of the paper. The full spread journalistic documentation showing some glaring truths in Life Magazine on our coffee table.
It was WWII and the Holocaust and the Big Bulge and Okinawa, , and then Korea, Civil Rights Conflicts, and then Viet Nam, and then Iraq. Bay of Pigs.
Cold War. Chernobyl. And so on.
And as I looked at my warrior, I thought about the original people and their bloody wars. Before all the communication devices we live with today — before the days of guns and bombs warriors defended their tribes. They did dances to rouse themselves for battle, we read. And used various clubs and blades and arrows to inflict mortal wounds on food-animals and on the humans that threatened their life and limb.
www.texasbeyondhistory.net/coast/prehistory/images/intro.html
I got to wondering how the original people experienced the many churnings of nature, especially storms, along that Texas Louisiana coastal area. We don’t have photos or news clips to know.
But we can be sure that they had hurricanes and cyclones and tornadoes, and flooding on those lowland areas. No one told the rest of humanity about them. It was survival of the tribe against nature. No Federal Assistance for them!
Surely they had water craft for fishing.
So in floods, did they get into boats? Did they have enough boats to fit whole families in? How did their boats fare in 100 mph winds? What of their shelters? Did they band together or split up to find safety?
Did they know how to live in trees?
Did they know how to feed themselves with roiling muddy water making a swamp of their land? Did they give up the coast and decide to move inland, or did they regather there by the water again when the floods receded?
We won’t get to know. But we know they didn’t have streets and levees and dams or reservoirs. They didn’t have cars to flood. Their livestock surely drowned except for some who could swim. Horses? No gas stations or helicopters or volunteers from other states. No FEMA.
The waters were probably not as poisoned as the waters of Houston are right now. They did not have the residue of tens of millions of people flushing toilets and dumping waste into sewers. Fewer people, and an organic give and take must have kept their environment balanced to a greater degree than ours is now.
They hadn’t stripped the land of trees to build cities. Just enough to build dwellings for themselves. I’ll bet they learned to build on pilings because of the vagaries of weather up against the Gulf of Mexico.
So that is what I am chewing on today, and wondering if my Dancing Warrior is a part of all this. I mean the Whole of it all. Our brother in deep water.
Muddy Water, SGHolland ©2017
