It is Thanksgiving, and because it is also the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and in the fifties and sunny, everyone we have met today has commented enthusiastically but hesitantly about the weather. No one wishes to jinx this loveliness (although I did brag about it to my parents in Maryland earlier today, who groused about the drizzling damp and cold there) but also everyone wants to be out in it. We walked on the breakwater in Marquette where as we headed out one wide old man was heading in, sitting periodically on the large broken rocks to rest as he hauled his bucket of fish toward dinner. It smelled and sounded like the ocean -- water and fish and little waves -- on the West Coast during the gentlest of Januaries. There were three men still fishing out to the end, two on the huge cement blocks chatting while they lay there dibbling their lines, with their heads over the blocks looking down into the water, and one older man in a little bobbling aluminum boat, not quite asleep. It did almost put us to sleep to watch him. He was stretched out, his boat held in place by two anchors, one at either end, their lines visible all the way down, and he had his hat pulled down, and a rod over which his hands crossed but did not hold, and the little waves moved him and his boat slowly up and then back down, and again, and it was sunny but hazy and a few ducks floated on by and we all yawned.
When we walked back in, we passed several small groups of people, a young couple in sweaters only and big grins, an older couple with an eager Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a chatty daughter of about our age, and then a young father with two little energetic boys. The older boy (seven?) was running up and down the sides of the lower, sloped, concrete wall, exuberant to be out and able to run up and down, arms like wings. The littler boy (four?) stayed closer to his goateed father, who did encourage him to try to run up the slopes like his brother but the littler boy was just not enough settled into his bones and muscles to do it as gracefully and mindlessly as his brother. The littler boy looked nervous inside his big running smile.
I am reading, now, later, back in our hotel room, about the smallpox epidemic that hit the Americas between 1775 and 1782. Elizabeth A. Fenn wrote the book, Pox Americana, and she starts by describing how she got interested in the topic while an undergraduate but then worked for eight years as an auto mechanic, reading the whole time about smallpox and the life of the Americas in those years. She describes the high mortality rates for children under five and people over forty-five, and the lack of resistance of the people native to the Americas both because of non-exposure and genetic homogeneity, and so I am tacking her words onto the various people we have encountered today but also enthralled with the details that allow for more accurate imaginings about the past. She describes, for example, John Adams (the one who married Abigail) undergoing inoculation as it was practiced back in 1764. Adams writes Abigail about it: he and his brother are shut up in a house in Boston with a number of others, all under the care of different doctors with different approaches. First, Adams and his brother are prepared for a week through mercury treatments, various emetics, and a diet of bland soft things. Then their arms are cut and dried powdered scab material put in, and they pass through the course of the disease, but more lightly than had they caught it from someone else who had a full blown case: he comes out, a few weeks later, with only “eight or ten pockmarks.” How the fear of smallpox would have been background to everything one said or did (especially women who were pregnant, on top of every other fear).
The more I learn the more impossible I know it is to grasp any sense of the emotional tenor of other times but I look up from reading over lunch about smallpox and there is Dennis reading about something less scabrous and it is, after all, Thanksgiving and I believe I can take a few minutes from all that is due to enjoy this.
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