Bodie's Grim Cousin
By popular request — meaning that one person asked — here’s another place that speaks to hardship and suffering in remarkable ways. It’s at the edge of Owens Lake, also in the Eastern Sierra:
And it’s adjacent to a tiny town, if you can even call it a town, called Keeler.
Like the graveyard at Bodie, you can stand in the Keeler Cemetery and see very old mine tailings, visible here in the distance between the graves and the mountains:
Those piles of rocks: That’s it. That’s what many of the graves look like. Several are child-sized.
A few are marked; a few more were marked, but the marker has gone mute in the desert:
A very few are unmarked but with recent additions:
These were hard lives, and it’s useful to see. As a deranged political class leads us into economic crisis and an energy crisis and military crisis and medical crisis, remember that suffering and loss are the normal human experience, and that tough people have lived through periods of pain and decline.
I hope this knowledge won’t prove to be important, but I’m not taking that bet.
Bad times breed strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times breed weak men. Weak men create bad times.
In all seriousness though, humans are doomed anytime we have enough time to wring our hands over worries about the percentage of “People of Color” on the corporate boards of tech companies. Woke politics isn’t just the method of decline, it was the harbinger too. We could have put an early end to it, but too many were worried their neighbour would call them an “ist” or “_____phobic”. We need to find our strength so that we may survive what is to come, and make better times again. It needs to start with mass non-compliance with all the woke and far-left political bullshit.
This is why history is important. Especially family history. If you know the stories of your ancestors, you know the insanely difficult circumstances they struggled through and triumphed over - at least enough that they were able to muddle along to the degree that ultimately, you were born. Those conditions were worse than anything we've experienced, at least physically (I'm half convinced that our spiritual malaise is up there with the worst humanity has ever gone through). If they got through that, and they're in us, then so can we.
Conversely, the contemporary push to anathematize the past, to 'live in the present, man' and therefore maintain a near perfect ignorance aside from a half-mythological, vague impression that the past was nothing but bigotry and oppression, makes it impossible to draw strength from our ancestral examples. That makes us weak, easily controlled, and fragile - the smallest molehill looks like the cliffs of K2 when you don't understand the sheer uncompromising savagery of the mountain ranges our ancestors found navigable passes through.