Seasonal Urban Archeology
Posted on February 12th, 2009 – 3 CommentsMy best laid plans had all the chances of snow in hell.
I had been depending on the bitter cold to stay in place; I needed liquids to be able to flash-freeze on contact with surfaces. Unfortunately, a major thaw settled over the city and I ended up with nothing more than slush and puddles, and my originally planned topic ran down the storm drain along with everything else.
I was moping along until, my eye being drawn by a reflected glint of sunlight, I spotted something just as worthy of an in-depth article: a filthy snowbank, slowly disintegrating in the gentle afternoon sun, dislodging it’s treasures onto the sidewalk.
It occurred to me that the layers of the grimy snow (and more importantly their contents) were, in a sense, a sort of stratified time capsule much like the earth embankments of traditional archeological digs. Each line represented a period in which it snowed sufficiently to engulf any lost or discarded articles.
We could (more or less) correlate these layers’ contents to actual calendar days and trace the history of the pile. A whole two months’ worth of history just lay there in the dirty ice waiting to be uncovered! … Continue Reading
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