Octoberfest

Last year we held our end-of-season dig the first weekend of October. We had the most magnificent weather: a little windy, but warm -- not too warm -- and lovely. The first week of October this year was the same. I know it was, because we were at the site in Randolph, NH, the first weekend this October dropping things off in preparation for the second weekend in October.

But we couldn't have it the first weekend, so we admired the weather and dropped off the Big (20'x20') Tent and some sifting screens and went back south.

Last Wednesday a few of us packed the truck and went to the grocery store. Our load of breakfast and lunch for maybe 40 person-days cost just over $200. Every year I skirmish with Dick to get slightly better than the cheapest chips, cookies, and cereals. He wants to keep the costs down without revolting anyone. Shaws' generic tortilla chips are good, but Hannaford's are not. This year I lobbied successfully for half-and-half for the coffee-drinkers, and two-not-one half gallons of milk. We turned out to have overbought the bread (but not the bagels) and underbought the hash. One must have hash at breakfast. Dick insists the cheapest cooks up the crispiest, and since he makes unusually splendid hash we get that.

Thursday Dick, Kevin Q, Mike M, and I met at the lab at 8 and zoomed off to the north country in slightly humid sunshine. The leaf colors were not at peak, but it was certainly beautiful.

The Old Basset of the Mountains lies across the road, nose hidden off to the left.

Jon E and Rich M met us at the drive into the site.

If you look back, you can se how the color came on in the past week.

The landowner, who would be a fine and lovable person even without his tractor, pulled the gear we had cached in his garage down in his cart.



The Beast made it down the trail with no actual neck-snapping, but it was bumpy enough to be fun.

With a short break for lunch, we put up the tent fairly quickly, perhaps because we have done it nearly enough times not to put anything together wrong, and perhaps because the pipes are getting burnished. It would still be good to carry a can of teflon or lithium spray. Then Dick announced that it was Chainsaw Time. Those of us who had no chainsaws acted as line-of-sight targets and leaped quickly out of the way when we had to. We added fresh dead trees to the piles of slash from the last two years. It was quite hot and my feet hurt. After cutting and flagging (every four meters) the two new lines up on the hillside,

"Take only artifacts over ten thousand years old, and leave only a mile-wide swath of destruction."

we went across the road to a beaver-clearing and laid out another line of potential shovel test pits.

The sun was beginning to set and math mistakes broke out; finally, we were allowed to go set up our tents. Some found it necessary to have a bit of a lie down. It was still hot. I had brought lots of foul weather-gear but wearing any of it didn't bear thinking of. Dick, who was somehow still on his feet, warmed up a chicken dish he had brought from home and fed everyone. Sue T, Seth B, and Chris O, whom we had met for the first time this past past field school, turned up, and three people from Connecticut (two of them had been up for Octoberfest last year) There were were enough people to have a single conversation around the fire. I was using strong denial to deal with the weather forecasts, which got worse with each new arrival.

The next morning didn't dawn so much as ooze, but it was still dry and the sun came out strongly. Excellent hash. Then we went up the hill with the field desk (a really admirable piece of Army surplus that weighs like a cubic yard of lead)and the shovels and the screens and last year's paperwork and a bunch of plastic tarpaulins. Dick got us rigging tarps over the two 2x2-metre blocks we had started in October of 2004, hotspots identified during the 2004 field school. I could understand the need for shelter but I was worried any rain would be like the squalls we had in Manchester last summer, which threated to rip the tarp to shreds. It was still hot, still humid, but a weird little breeze started up from time to time.

Finally, but well before lunch, we were able to start digging. For some people this was 50x50 cm shovel test pits (STPs), and for others it meant digging the back fill out of the 2x2's. Digging under the tarps gave a weird underwater cast.



I was walking around, writing down who was there and where and making sure everyone had all the paperwork and bags and tags they might need, when Dick called on the walkie-talkie. "We have a moose on the pond. Bring the crew down quietly." As I have been stewing since July 2004, when I missed the previous moose on site, I was very pleased and we sneaked down, crashing through the brush fairly quietly, to stand at the edge of the gravel pit and stare down at the moose in the beaver pond. I went down and took the beaver drag-trail behind Dick's tent. She gave me a few long looks, but really, she didn't care. It was great.



Jen and Pete and Matt and Mark and Deb appeared in time for dinner (The pot roast I brought turned out to be seriously bland, but it was still food. Mikey's mother sent us some totally satisfying, delicious soupe aux pois) and we were able to have another fireside evening. It began to drizzle softly about the time I turned in.

The sound of infrequent drops condensing off the ceiling onto a tight cot waked me up quite well, but I put a pair of jeans underneath it and went back to sleep till dawn. By then it as raining gently and steadily. I tightened up my guy ropes. It was still warm enough not to notice the rain, and a bunch of intrepid STP diggers went out to what Dick called Pondside but I thought should be South Beach.

The rest of us stayed and either dug under the tarps, sifted under the tarps, or did paperwork under the tarps. Rich's block, C, had an extension added on, making it C+ (the geeks are hoping for an extension on the extension sometime). We were dry and stayed warm until mid-morning, when we all went and added layers, and the STP crew came back. Five sterile pits and it was too damned wet. We added trowellers to the 2x2's, (I think Rich's Block C had six people on it, with three or four of us fighting over whose turn it was to sift. We made remarks about archaeology as a spectator sport. Not unlike golf.



Since both blocks were on hotspots (from the 2004 summer session), it was not surprising to find Munsungun and high-quality rhyolite flakes in almost every layer of every quad. We even found two pieces that fit together, a point broken as the manufacturer made the _second_ flute, poor guy. It was fun, but something like cheating. The constant rain on the tarp meant that we could wash everything that came up in the drips off the side. Very handy. One corner of Rich's tarp was self-adjusting,; about every ten minutes it tilted and dumped about half a gallon onto the forest floor.

That evening for dinner, Deb offered spectacular pulled pork and something not wholly unlike ratatouille, because she has a weird concern about nutrition. It was good, anyway. Food becomes very important when you are cold and tired and damp. It was never really wet enough or cold enough to allow us much to complain about. Though I gather the inability to have a fire around which to huddle left some people watching pistachio nuts dropped into the stream running through the tent (diverted by Deb and Karen, with many references to the 9th Ward in New Orleans). Linda had thoughtfully brought along a bottle of 18-year old Johnny Walker. It did not get any older.

It rained steadily, a perfect gardener's rain, all night and into the next day. About mid-morning Linda's boyfriend, from just outside Keene, NH, called and told her not to come home. The house was fine -- he was stuck in it -- but the road had washed out. This was the first we heard of the flooding down south. It was simply not that bad in the mountains. We shrugged. The rain diminished to veils of fine mist or light drizzle, and then gave up altogether as most people packed up to go home.

Some of us were free to stay through to Monday, so we went on digging till nearly dark. We put the nearly-dark off when Dick realized that...

we could take the tarps down
because it had stopped raining. Pretty wild. We took most of the gear down and backfilled Block F before supper (canned chili and leftovers; no one had planned for four nights out). Unfortunately, it began to rain just as we hoped to light another campfire. We wiped out the remianing beer and the last of the tequila and reeled to our tents.



It was cloudy again, but not actualy raining, as we packed everything up. We headed South by noon. Do not ask Dick where next summer's field school will be; he got all strange when I did.