There is the ticking hum of maintenance, burning energy to fuel the work of being alive, excreting the byproducts and seeking more input to keep going until the inevitable, and then there is the other part of the job: responding to external change. Scarcity, abundance, safety, danger. Boredom is a luxury, crises are the milestones and checkpoints we navigate, until one of them becomes a gravestone.
Even then, the material world goes on. Those cells that finally stopped ticking are slowly disassembled to their component pieces and recycled, part of a larger picture. There is no The End* for the atoms that were born in the heart of stars millenia or eons ago, as hard as it is for our rather limited minds to fully grasp. That problem of scale leads us to some very silly conclusions sometimes. You know, the sort of hubris that insists that the way things have been for 30 or 40 years is the way they should always be, amen.
The narrative virus insists that for our memories and personal histories to actually exist there must be some sort of memorial, physical proof that they happened, to be witnessed by our fellow humans and those to come. Of course, in the cosmic scheme of things that's not even a remote possibility. In just a few centuries much if not all of the surroundings we take for granted in our daily lives will be altered in ways we can't know or be outright erased.
I won't lie, this final obscurity used to keep me awake at night in a cold sweat. Bad enough that I had to die, but to have my wild individuality (just like everyone else 😉) lost irretrievably? A second death, as the saying goes, and unbearable. It's the problem with being the protagonist in the little stories we live, subject and observer confused and swapped around. As Jarvis Cocker put it in Pulp's song "I Spy:"
I used to compose my own critical notices in my head"The crowd gasps at Cocker's masterful control of the bicycleSkillfully avoiding the dog turd outside the corner shop"Imagining a blue plaque above the place I first ever touched a girl's chest
It's disorienting when a personal landmark disappears, I can vouch for that - one of the perks of being almost 50. Yet the landmark itself doesn't have some mystical property that lets us relive our memories. It can help spark them, help ground them, but those moments will not happen again by any alchemy in the physical world. My personal opinion is they are happening forever at their moment in time, but for humans at least time has only one direction and memories are all we're left with. And think of all the memories that are jostling for space!
The place I first ever touched a girl's chest is still standing, last I checked, but the plaque commemorating it would be buried in an avalanche of thousands of identical notices before and after that moment. I'm sure before it was built it was someone's favorite spot to stroll, and after it's knocked down someday who knows what will come next? New memories will be created by people who haven't even been born, and they'll be tied to that arbitrary spot on the globe, and the cycle will repeat as long as we are collectively here. Yes, this post is about Telephone Hill.
It's a geological blink of an eye since trees were even cleared from this hump of ground. Settlers, colonizers, stacking logs to establish churches, mine buildings towering over the shore, incongruously plopped on the hillside to extract the land's minerals. Dirt roads yielding to boardwalk streets, naming rights of streets, parks, entire neighborhoods going to various white men of varying degrees of distinction. I don't mean to trigger any defensiveness or debate, but be real about how recently and thoroughly Juneau erupted onto its footprint. In fact, be real about that footprint itself! The shoreline is unrecognizable after pouring fill from the mine tailings to make room for more houses and roads.
The claims of important, capital-H history are flimsy. There's nothing unique to Juneau in the spread of a now ubiquitous technology. (For those Phone Phreaks who can't get enough, I'm sure a pilgrimmage to the actual homestead of Alexander Graham Bell will suffice.) It's hard to read the words of the people who began developing the patch of land and think that anything about the process should be revered. From the 2023 Historical Building Survey:
The United States Navy, in an effort to add to “the friendly feeling now prevailing towards the whites”, visited Aanchgaltsóow, the primary Áak'w village, in 1880 to explain that valuable minerals had been found and they were anticipating "a large immigration in the spring" (Rockwell 1881b).
Come the summer of 1881, the U.S. Navy began an expulsion of the Tlingit from the settlement. Naval records state that this removal was carried out to prevent conflict between the settlers and Tlingit people. In a letter to Commander Henry Glass who was stationed in Sitka, Alaska, Lieutenant Commander Rockwell writes, "I have caused those Indians who were camped on the beach to remove to other places, outside of town limits, and they have established two villages, on each side of the town, near the water" (Rockwell 1881b).
Mary O. Reynolds further described the settlers' developments in Juneau, writing for the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 18, 1881:
"This little camp, whose site a year previous to the time of which I write had never been visited by white men, now consists of nearly a hundred homes, and bids fair to double its size before another year shall have rolled around. On the eastern side of the town lies a little hill upon which is situated the military post, where a Gatling gun commands a most comprehensive view of the town and also of the Áak'w village on the opposite side of the hill. The Auks had formerly occupied the site upon which Harrisburg now stands, but were subsequently invited to remove themselves around the point..."
Excluding the historical fetishists, we're left with the real rub. A lot of people had a hell of a great time living and socializing there and it's integral to the story of their Juneau. I mean, of course they did! Of course it was! An enclave of creatives getting to create their own little bohemian village hunkered in the low-rent limbo of an eminent domain gone sideways? Fantastic. The stuff of legend and local mythmaking. And the myths were made and the legends told.
But when the loophole closed two years ago, with the return of the land to the city, the writing was on the wall. The aftermath has now reached a pitch that will be familiar to anyone who's informed a small child that "five more minutes" are now up and it's time to leave. Not a nice way of putting it, I know. But that's the thing, nobody involved is a small child. And of course, most of the remaining folks have since found other accommodations, much as any other renter whose home has changed hands (an extremely familiar scenario here, alas). Yet the petitions and social media screeds continue.
The houses themselves are not magical. They hosted the making of memories and music, but they are not necessary for those memories or tunes to live on. Their affordability was a springboard for eccentric folks to create their world, but they were also a haven for greedier folks who could easily afford to pay market rate. The sense of community that's been described is vital to human happiness and enables the best of our species' invention, but it also means that prospective tenants had to meet denizens to be admitted only if they passed the vibe check - pernicious exclusivity rearing its head yet again. Decades of home grown property management have calcified to a sense of ownership, an entitlement to public land, and a demand that this particular block never changes again.
Not possible, of course. If nothing else, the land itself will shake houses off like fleas whenever it sees fit, and we live along the Ring of Fire. I hope that doesn't happen here any time soon, but cataclysmic change is unpredictable. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as all that, though - the houses, barely a hundred years old, are already rotting to various degrees. The memory-makers are faced with their own mortality. That glorious era is over, no matter if the land stood untouched. Whatever comes next is for younger people to discover and create.
