California History

Doorway to the store

Today we drove up to Coloma, about 45 miles up into the foothills.  It was the spot where John Marshall discovered gold near Sutter's Mill and brought the Gold Rush of 1849.  80,000 people flooded into California in search of gold.  All that is left now is the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

I hadn't been there for 40 years, and when I was last there it was a true ghost town with a large dirt parking lot and crumbling ruins that one could peek into.  It's now a bona fide historic park, with docents playing settlers and old buildings furnished with period furniture and equipment.  My friend and I were lucky enough to find 2 men working in the blacksmith's shop and they showed us some of the tools and decorative iron work that they made.  They even made the tools they used to make everything else -- just they way it was done back then.

A lot of gold came out of the South Fork of the American River, and I think the people who became really wealthy supplied the miners and were not miners themselves.  Of course the peaceful indigenous people were decimated. They perished in great numbers from starvation, disease, abuse, and massacre. Their society, habitat, infrastructure and culture were utterly destroyed.  As the easily accessible gold dried up, brute force was used to force the gold from the earth.  Hydraulic mining destroyed the landscape, required enormous resources of man, water and machines, and yielded ever smaller amounts of gold for all their trouble.

It's a part of our state history that every Californian child learns from their earliest years in school.  When I was in school, there was no mention of the negatives to the endeavor, except of course that not everyone walked away rich.  It was told as a grand story of man's ingenuity and the primary reason California became a state when it did.  It was the bedrock of development, wealth and society in California.

Today, 163 years after the discovery of gold on the very land we were on, we enjoyed a sumptuous picnic in the shade of a tree.  Belly full, I could have taken a nap right then and there.

I didn't sense any tortured echos of the past, only enjoyed the pastoral beauty on a hot spring day with a dear friend. 

21st Century Easter

Easter bumout. This issue has been around for a long time...I'm just now reading about it. There is a campaign to get Hershey to come clean about whether their chocolate is made from slave labor or not. Hershey is also running a fine campaign in which they will donate money to the Children's Miracle Network. My dear cyber pal CJ has posted this. CJ is a tireless worker for human rights and helps people in numerous ways. It was quite serendipitous that after I read CJ's post, I went to a link my sister provided about slave labor, and therein found the chocolate information. I didn't know.

Welcome to the world of complexity and contradiction.

Hot Tub Advice

Taking a break from the world of politics. I wanna get down about relaxation!
 

I've wanted a hot tub/spa for a long time. I am a water baby. I want something small and portable - just a 2 or 3 person tub. Anybody out there have a tub they can highly recommend? The Belize 2 person spa above is the best 2 person design I've found yet. Many of them are triangular space with very molded seats which, I think, mean limited ability to float. And I love to float and look up at the sky.

So, if you own and use your spa, what are the pros and cons?

photo by Anton Ekdahl (see flickr.com)

Is John Edwards too good to be true?  Is his reach exceeding his grasp?  Gosh, I don't know, but I sure like his statement about keeping corporate lobbyists out of his administration.  He's right, we do need a fundamental and radical change in the way we conduct government. Government for the people - not government for the corporations.

This news on the heels of a friend sending me the video "The Story of Stuff."  A real winner in terms of information.  She's a knowledgeable and engaging storyteller, though I wish she didn't sound as if she were talking to 1st graders.  I watched the Story of Stuff and I am dumbfounded, yet again boys and girls, at the senselessness of waste and greed.  Watch it, I think you'll see what I mean.  And the cool thing is: it reinforces our understanding that STUFF is just STUFF and we're mostly better off without it.  So is the planet.

What will it take for this knowledge to circulate and be embraced by enough of us so that we can turn away the big giant bloated nasty corporate machine that has convinced us all that we need so much STUFF?  A couple of amazing points:  our average size house is twice as big as it was in the 1970s, and we throw away all but 1% of the stuff we buy within 6 months?  

And the boom in storage lockers in the last couple of decades. Really.  So we can store the STUFF that won't fit into our enormous houses.  You may now have a POD delivered to your house so you can load it up and ship that STUFF away until you decide you need it again.

So I hope Mr. Edwards is going to get elected.  He seems to be the only Democrat who has real ideas for meaningful change.