Lives in Ruins (13 page)

Grant and Jo were still on Caribbean time and late picking me
up from my hotel in Lichfield. We piled into the little yellow car they had bought from her mother, Grant squeezing between the empty children's car seats in the back, and headed off to see the sights of the charming and ancient city. Their children were in school all morning for the first time, and the hours stretched ahead of us, a recess for adults.

We wandered through the medieval Lichfield Cathedral under the soaring eaves and the stained glass, and lingered in a side room off the chapel, where major archaeological booty was displayed: the eighth-century Lichfield angel, unearthed from beneath the altar, and some of the priceless Staffordshire Hoard, the bounty of gold and silver weapons uncovered in a nearby field in 2009. The woman in charge of the exhibit couldn't figure out how to illuminate the display cases, so Grant helpfully trotted off to find a guard who could decode the lighting panel.

We piled back in the car—this time I took the spot between the car seats—and drove through bucolic country to the old Roman wall where Jo first learned to dig, a crumbling ruin set in a vivid green landscape. We were in a fantasy of English countryside, rolling hills cut by stone walls, green lanes out of Thomas Hardy. “It's gorgeous here,” I enthused. Jo and Grant exchanged an amused look. “This is the first time the sun's been out in six weeks,” Grant said. “We did have that nice week in March, remember?” Jo added.

Jo remembered digging ferociously along the historic wall after having been told how scarce jobs were in archaeology. “I
will
be an archaeologist; I
will
be an archaeologist.” The week before I arrived, she and Grant found her old diaries in her mother's attic, full of her archaeological obsession and her first experience of Statia, when she headed there to study with Gilmore. He had chosen her to be his graduate assistant because she was serious and dedicated and she had the short fingernails to prove it. “Archaeology. Love it. Hate it. Can't live without it,” as she summed it up. “What a conundrum!” Gilmore had never considered being anything else; his parents (his
father is a prominent marine biologist) pegged him as an archaeologist when he was four or five and already collecting fossils and stones. Jo and Grant were in thrall to a profession that couldn't sustain them.

We drove to their modest brick house—Jo's mother had recently married and moved nearby with her new husband—and Jo ran to pick up the children. They came in hiding behind her legs; Elias, named for Elias Ashmole (whose priceless collection is now housed at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford), was sneezing and his nose was dripping. Both he and Amélie had been sick much of the English spring with viruses and infections, and were just getting healthy when Elias licked a train window and fell ill again.

The original plan for the afternoon was to whisk Grant to physiotherapy for a knee injury he sustained digging in clay on an old excavation, while the rest of us spent the afternoon at Beaudesert, a fourteenth century estate where the Gilmores had been volunteering, but the children didn't want to cooperate. Because Grant had flunked the British driving test, figuring out the logistics of the afternoon was as complicated as a typical day on Statia, juggling consultants and volunteers, multiple sites, and one vehicle.

The easiest course was for Jo to drive Grant and take Elias, and for Amélie to stay behind with me. The four-year-old and I colored companionably for an hour. “I was scared of you,” Amélie admitted after we covered the table with bright drawings, and I realized with a start, Wow, they just left their kid with me. But all was fine, and we laughed about it later; Grant and Jo were working on being more guarded in England, but their relaxed island habits died hard.

The Caribbean approach served them well in the storm of children's moods. These parents were so calm! Grant was in the middle of telling me about the guide to colonial artifacts he had been working on when Elias had a meltdown. It was contagious; soon Amélie fell apart, too. One whimpered in Jo's arms, one howled in Grant's, and Jo gave me a little smile. “It's like this every day,” she said. The
weather hadn't helped, and even this sunny day had turned gray and drizzly. “Last week was so bad and stormy, we saw no one,” Grant said. “We might as well have been in Statia.” “Except for the grocery store,” Jo countered. So many choices! Even the marked-down, days-old produce was fresher than what they could get on the island. And in this age of streaming video, they had been at a disadvantage in Statia, almost the last place in the Western Hemisphere to get broadband. I mentioned a documentary, and Grant looked blank. “Did it come out in the last thirteen years?” he joked.

It was time for
Mister Maker
on the BBC, and that was how we all wrapped up the afternoon, watching a rubber-faced Brit make little aliens with three googly eyes out of modeling clay and pipe cleaners. The little aliens in the living room in Staffordshire watched, entranced, and the adults smiled over their heads. Jo's mother and her new husband were on their way, to free them for an evening of wine and Indian food and, best of all, talk of archaeology.

There was no question in their minds they made the right decision. They were glad to move on, even into difficulties, and I realized that, in spite of everything, they were cheerful. Even when Jo said, “It's like this every day,” about the meltdown, she was smiling, and Grant—where was that self-mocking almost bitter tone that underlaid everything he had said in Statia? He was bitter-free. The upside of not working, they freely acknowledged, was that they got to spend this time with their children. And Statia had simply become untenable. A friend who escaped the island to live in the Netherlands had decided, on retirement, to return to it, and Grant was mournful recounting this. “You know that Dutch phrase,
dat is verkeerd?
—that is just wrong? Well, I told her,
dat is zo verkeerd
.”

He shook his head, then began to outline a big idea he and Jo wanted to float past the International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM): a registry of archaeological sites and monuments on Google Maps. Anyone could list a site via iPad. An archaeological directory for the world!

In 2013, almost a year after my trip to Lichfield, Joanna posted on Facebook, “My hero of the day is Grant Gilmore, for never giving up.” Grant found work in a bike shop for a while, and reported that he was getting in shape. Later in 2013, two years after he left Statia, he won a six-month teaching position in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. That signaled the beginning of the end of his professional limbo.
The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Archaeology
that he coedited was published in early 2014, and soon after, he landed a plum job in Charleston, South Carolina, another cradle of historical archaeology, as director of the Program in Historic Preservation and Community Planning at the College of Charleston. His mission: to introduce more archaeology into the curriculum. “Yes, we have had champagne,” he told me at last after the thirty-month test of his commitment and character. “We cannot believe this is happening—I think over three hundred job applications has resulted in the perfect job.”

M
uch important history has been lost forever
. I thought of that line from one of Grant Gilmore's reports as I went out in my dusty gray-and-brown trail shoes, a copy of
Ethnic Oasis: The Chinese in the Black Hills
in hand. Spurred by the book's coauthor, archaeologist Rose Estep Fosha, I was looking for the last piece of the Chinatown of Deadwood, South Dakota. The town was hardly big enough to have a separate section with
town
in its name, but during the gold rush years of the late 1800s, hundreds of Chinese had lived and worked around lower Main Street. The street was mud and muck in those days; now it was quaint brick, restored to a pretty period of history, not quite to its ugly roots. I walked down Main Street, past the Masonic lodge and the Franklin Hotel with benches along its broad porch and Charlie Utter's place and Kevin Costner's joint and the open doors of T-shirt shops and casinos, pop music and
ka-ching, ka-ching
, the music of money falling into local pockets, at least some of it marked for preservation. The desire to rescue its crumbling buildings was what brought the gaming industry to Deadwood.

The weather had been unseasonably warm for September, and all day long the ozone had been building up as clouds stacked above the hills. Late afternoon, a broody, purplish sky hung over the historic
and half-historic buildings, tourists snapping one another's pictures or milling around slot parlors. I reached the newer, rawer part of town dominated by the innocuous Hampton Inn and the Tin Lizzie casino on one side of the street and a series of shallow-graveled parking lots backed by eroded ravine walls on the other. I could see exposed tree roots and the occasional crumbling foundation in the walls. Signs strung on chains broke the parking lots into sections:
FOUR ACES CASINO & HAMPTON INN PARKING; VALET PARKING; GUEST PARKING ONLY
. A trashcan sat next to a large interpretive sign about Deadwood's Chinese population, not far from a blue Dumpster parked by an old retaining wall. This was all that was left of the city's Chinatown.

The day before, I had hiked up the steep hill to Mount Moriah Cemetery, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were famously buried. The altar where the Chinese laid their burial feast offerings had recently been rebuilt, using bricks salvaged from the last piece of Chinatown, the Wing Tsue Emporium of Fee Lee Wong. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he had been the most prominent Chinese merchant in Deadwood, the link between the white and Asian populations. Like a bright-white miniature temple, the altar rested on the side of the hill over the old and crooked tombs, just up the path from Bill and Jane, the wild and the calamitous, and the stark white cross over the Civil War tombstones worn almost smooth, and the Jewish section where piles of stones commemorated the ancestors. Brand new tombstones nearby memorialized the
Infant of Fee Lee Wong, born Deadwood, died January 30, 1895
, and the
Child of Fee Lee Wong, born Deadwood, died March 20, 1899
.

The story of the Chinese in Deadwood was a story of resourcefulness; chased off the potentially lucrative claims for gold, they became merchants, launderers, and restaurant owners in Deadwood and catered to the daily needs of the miners. Even when the claims yielded nothing, the miners needed food and clean clothes. Few of the Chinese had emigrated with their wives; after the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882 banned further immigration, the mostly male population dwindled. Fee Lee Wong had had the good fortune to bring his wife, and though two of their children died, eight survived.

His descendants had met in 2004 and gathered on lower Main Street in front of the establishment that their great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had built. A memorable photo was taken. Then, before they left town, the descendants of Fee Lee Wong visited the mayor and lobbied to save the building. Everyone wants to save the building, the mayor assured them. The owner had been specifically instructed to preserve the building when he got permission to demolish the unstable structures on either side. But somehow, on Christmas Eve 2005, the owner and his sons began the demolition, and when it was over, the Wing Tsue Emporium—the final architectural vestige of Deadwood's Chinatown—lay in rubble on the street.

Archaeologist Rose Estep Fosha's voice was tight with emotion, recounting the story of the demolition. “I couldn't talk about it for eighteen months without tears. It was a wonderful piece of the history of Deadwood.” When she and her husband, archaeologist Michael Fosha, told me about the Deadwood dig, they struggled to keep their composure.

The story of the demolition wasn't the only sad thing I heard from them, or from other archaeologists, for that matter. The sites that get written about and become heritage destinations and tourist sites often incorporate a story of loss and destruction; think of the Parthenon, or Pompeii. But how many sites get destroyed altogether through carelessness or venal intent, whose treasures get plowed under or sold on eBay? Rose Fosha had been focused for years on the dwindling and threatened remnants of this particular part of Deadwood; she had supervised digs into the foundations of Chinatown, and after endless polite requests, had finally persuaded the owner of Wing Tsue to let her make a record of the interior of
the building, if only for an hour. That was a request modest enough to entertain; the owner let her in, and for an hour she snapped and snapped and snapped pictures—just one floor, no more, one hour, no longer. “I have a presentation I give on it that is . . . I don't know that I could do it without tears, still,” she said.

Mike Fosha listened intently to his wife in the back room of Botticelli Ristorante in Rapid City, an hour from the empty lot in Deadwood. His passion was tracking down mammoth sites, looking for places where humans had cut and flaked mammoth bone into tools. “Fresh mammoth bone works just like stone, only better,” he said. Looking for evidence of human culture in North America that was older than 13,500 years ago—pre-Clovis, the archaeologists call it—he thought it was a good bet it would come from a mammoth butchering site in the West. “Pushing back human entry into the New World is fun because it is hotly disputed,” he said. He found a site in Brookings, South Dakota, that would have passed the stringent requirements for an undisturbed site, and sent the broken mammoth bone samples from it to two labs for dating. “There's only one critter that can break up mammoth bone and that's a human.” The labs dated the bone to roughly 14,500 years ago, a thousand years earlier than the oldest Clovis points. But before he and his volunteers could finish excavating and recording the layers, a county highway crew destroyed part of the site. It was a mix-up, or maybe it was a turf issue. There was no poetry in the story, and no sense either, for the likes of me. “All you can do is laugh about it,” he said.