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  • A Forebear Foreshadows Indiana Jones

    and written for our pleasure too For some months I had been trying to enliven an inherited 150-year-old manuscript describing a forebear’s adrenaline-charged adventures in Brazil and on the Santa Fe Trail and Old Spanish Trail in the 1830s and 1840s “written for the pleasure of my boys” in the 1860s. The memoir was a cautionary tale and a shoutout to Providence for having spared him on countless occasions. Though its 25,000 words neatly penned into a notebook had been transcribed by typewriter in the 1960s by my mother, only this year did I get around to digitizing her typescript. Things had come a long way over those six decades. How easily one could now do what was impossible, or at least laborious, in the pre-digital era. Likewise, I could delve online into the backstories of the numerous supporting characters, without the laborious trips to the library of yore. And I could gather illustrations to depict the pre-photographic world of the 1830s-40s. The protagonist, my great-great uncle Dr. Jonathan Huntington Lyman (1816-1890), was the seventh of thirteen siblings, raised in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the second generation of our nation. His father and namesake was a lawyer and state representative who once was invited to give the Fourth of July oration in town. Chester Harding had painted his father’s portrait in 1822. A sister, my great-great grandmother, had been kissed by Lafayette in Northampton on his triumphal national tour in 1825. Yet no amount of internet searching could turn up an image of him, so I have settled for one likely taken in the 1850s, of his brother John Chester Lyman, the namesake of his second son. Standing in for Jonathan Huntington Lyman is his brother John Chester Lyman (1813-1883), namesake of his second son Online research did turn up obituaries, no surprise, but little else, except this. A posting by Paul Spitzzeri of the Workman and Temple Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, outside Los Angeles, quoted Lyman from a book that had appeared in the 1840s, news to me. When I reached out to him with what I had, he suggested that we co-present Lyman’s extraordinary account at the Old Spanish Trail Association Conference, to be held in Santa Fe in November 2024. I had never heard of such an organization, let alone the trail name. Lifelong learner that I aspire to be, I enthusiastically agreed to attend. I wondered what an audience of non-family members might have to say about what Lyman called his “Incidents of Travel.” As I was feasting on all of this, AI was earning a seat at the table, first by generating colorful images of a native American using Lyman’s own words (via Shutterstock), then by generating podcasts on his adventures using his own words (via Google NotebookLM). Yes, within minutes, a file can be transformed into a “Deep Dive”, a rollicking half-hour conversation. Noting his youthful swagger and bravado, one of the podcasts compares Lyman to Indiana Jones. When I first shared one such podcast with an audience in real-time, they were riveted. And each time I uploaded Lyman’s 25,000 words for a Deep Dive, the outcome unearthed a fresh nugget of insight. I have tried ten Deep Dives so far.  In each, the digital voices, male and female, are utterly colloquial—the “hold on”, “get out!” ”no way!” “I kid you not,” even the breathless delivery. If only Hunt were here to hear them!  These Deep Dives make him more relatable, more present, and his close encounters seem all the more miraculous. Here, try it for yourself. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e982dfce-9b04-48f4-a90c-1b2a63dbf7c1/audio Lyman was the quintessential American risk-taker. Even in his teens he was eager to split off from the group, leave home, cross boundaries and explore frontiers. He was aptly nicknamed “Hunt.” Spending two and a half years in the mid-1830s in South America on what his memoir records as “all its three coasts,” especially Brazil, daredevil eighteen-year-old Hunt Lyman swam among sharks in Rio Harbor, spent the night in the jungle surrounded by snakes, leopards, jaguars and possible robbers, and survived a deadly coastal-water vortex that nearly sank a boat whose pilot was drunk. As the usually cocky Hunt put it in describing the whirlpool, “I had always felt some confidence of success, in avoiding or getting through perils, but here I had not a particle of hope.” Subsequently, unaccustomed to champaign, the nineteen-year-old got himself plastered at the American Consul’s Fourth of July party, climbed out a second-floor window, somehow climbed into a third-floor balcony overhead, reached the roof, and proceeded to belt out “Yankee Doodle” and the Brazilian national anthem to a crowd in the plaza 40 feet below, while hurling roof tiles, miraculously killing no one, before he was subdued and given “some fatherly advice” by the Consul. Later Hunt ignored the Consul’s advice as to which ship he should board to sail home to Massachusetts; had he done so, he would have vanished to the bottom of the sea. The much-maligned captain of the ship he chose to board turned out to treat him like a son. He arrived home, he writes, “in the full vigor of health and weighing 160 pounds. I at once entered upon the study of medicine and after two years of close and intense application to my studies, received my diploma from the University of Pennsylvania.” Dr. Lyman set up shop in Enfield Massachusetts (a town that a century later was doomed to become part of Quabbin Reservoir), “but with a broken constitution and suffering from pleuritic adhesions and with a jaundiced body weighing only about 128 pounds,” he realized that he must act boldly to regain his health. Seeking a warmer climate, with money in his pocket and an appetite for adventure, in the summer of 1840, Hunt closed shop and headed out West. As he puts it, “My only companions for the two years occupied in reaching the coast of the Pacific were wild Indians, semi-civilized Mexicans, and a class of white men, trappers, etc. from Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas, who were well known to us during our [recent Civil] war as ‘Border Ruffians.’ But as slavery had not then become the vital issue in our politics, I found those white men, with one or two exceptions, friendly and perfectly reliable in every emergency. Still they were a hard set, with no fear of God or man before their eyes.”   After reaching St. Louis by rail and crossing the then-westernmost state, Missouri, by stagecoach, Hunt hired a guide and mules to catch up with a wagon train that had left some days earlier for Santa Fe. He headed out into the open prairie. On his very first night, he experienced the most violent thunderstorm of his life, from which there was no shelter. After six days of hard riding for some 200 miles, he finally caught up with the caravan of 12 men and 6 wagons, exhausted. Hunt shares with his sons that moment: “The Captain asked me if I had had any supper. Upon replying in the negative, he told one of the men to fry me some bacon. The man went to the end of a wagon, to a box containing wrenches, grease, tools, etc., for repairing the wagon, and took out a piece of bacon, cut off a slice, and without washing it, fried it and gave it to me. I ate it— and wanted more. Then, as an act of politeness to his guest, the Captain gave me his best bed chamber, for, pointing under the wagon, he said to me, ‘Doc, you may sleep there’—and I did sleep there, a long sweet sleep, with no fear of wolves or Indians all the night.” Hunt stayed with the wagon train for three months. He often rode ahead alone, recklessly.  One time, he was nearly unsaddled by a buffalo charging at him and frightening his mule. Another time, when the caravan was camped, he headed out alone on foot along a small river: he approached several buffalo heading into the water, hoping to bag one, “every nerve in my body strung to the highest pitch of intensity,” only to step on a rattlesnake. “The tremendous leap I gave was only equalled by the jump of those buffalo up the bank.” “When within eight or ten days of the Rocky Mountains, four of us left the caravan and proceeded on to Santa Fé by a short route through the mountains; a distance of nearly 300 miles. We met a party of trappers who told us the route we were on was full of Comanches, and advised us to proceed with the utmost caution.”  And so they did, building a campfire at dusk “to deceive any Indians that might be watching us from among the prairie knolls. It is their way to mark out where small parties camp and then, about midnight, to come down and spear them. After dark, we would silently get up, resaddle our mules and strike off a mile or more into the prairie, at right angles with our line of travel…and there, unsaddling our mules again, we would lie down and sleep quietly in perfect safety. On one of those nights, when sleeping comfortably, off one side of our track, we were suddenly awakened by a thundering noise and shaking of the ground as by an earthquake. We sprang to our feet and found that a large drove of wild horses, alarmed by Indians or something else, had rushed down in our direction…shaking the ground in the act, and worse, as we thought, stampeding our mules. Fortunately our mules, being well hobbled, did not escape.”             After three months on the trail, Hunt arrived in Santa Fe and, he writes, “had gained wonderfully in health, strength, flesh, and was then informed by my companions that the night I joined them they had said to one another, that they would soon have to put me under the sod.” Santa Fe, looking east from the Plaza, 1869-71 In late November of 1840, hoping to avoid being snowbound, Hunt headed south for Chihuahua, with a Mexican servant and packed mules, and a pouch of the gold dust and doubloons, considerably more capital than the locals needed to carry with them. On the evening of the third day, reaching the village of Algodones, as his servant corralled the mules, he walked over to see the Alcalde, the village head man, who was surrounded by unsavory characters and promptly arrested him. The corrupt New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo in Santa Fe had sent a courier ordering his return to Santa Fe, dead or alive, on trumped up charges. The Alcalde and his thugs knew that Hunt had gold on him, and confiscated his shotgun and mustang, but kept their distance from him, as he also had two pistols on him.  New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo (1793-1853) (Alfred S. Waugh, c. 1840, Museum of New Mexico) They held him under house arrest for three days before he realized that his “detention was owing to a plot between an American gambler named Lee and Governor Amijo, to rob me. That Governor was one of the foulest and most treacherous men I ever met. He came into power though assassinations under his orders.” And Stephen Lee was no better—the Kentucky-born trapper and distiller of Taos Lightning knew that Hunt had $900 on him, because Hunt had been repaid that sum by one Tayon after Hunt lent it to him for a specified short period, but Tayon had to borrow from Lee to repay Hunt, and since Tayon was now unable to repay Lee, Lee had decided to go after Hunt’s gold instead, conspiring with Governor Armijo, who ignored an order from the American Consul Manuel Alvarez to release Hunt, and instead ordered Hunt’s detention and dead-or-alive transfer back to Santa Fe. Only after bribing the Alcalde with two gold doubloons, plus a ring as a keepsake for the Alcalde’s wife, did Hunt secure his release and recover his gun, mustang and Mexican servant, and resume his journey to Chihuahua. But two days later, another courier from Santa Fe caught up with him, with a message from a friend urging him to come back and clear himself of false charges. Consul Alvarez had “scared the Governor and compelled him to send an order to the Alcalde to release” Hunt. Returning to Algodones, Hunt confronted the Alcalde’s wife, who reluctantly returned the gold ring. Back in Santa Fe, Hunt came across Lee in the Plaza and confronted him, but Lee fled, “a thoroughly bad man.” Hunt now corralled Consul Alvarez to confront Governor Armijo, who sent for the Algodones Alcalde, who returned Hunt his doubloons, to which Hunt said, “Now pay me another doubloon for staying at your house eating your dinners” and threatened “a still more severe punishment to be inflicted—but only to scare my humble friend.” The Algodones incident was a wakeup call: “a quiet New England boy” wet behind the ears and on his own in the Wild West was an easy mark for corrupt officials and hostile tribes alike. Indeed, three Apaches “on the war path” soon surrounded him, one of them seizing his horse near the bit, demanding gunpowder in Spanish, to which Hunt replied in Spanish, “No powder for you, let alone the bit,” and seized the Indian’s wrist, gave it a wrench and so loosened his hold on the bridle, and pressed forward some thirty rods in a walk, acting unfazed, with an unseasoned companion. “But I confess,” Hunt continues, “that during the time we were going that thirty rods, I felt every instant, spears, bullets and arrows sticking all over my back, and I feel them to this day, when I read of Apaches in our daily papers.” Hunt records that Apache animosity toward Anglos went back to a massacre of them in 1837 by duplicitous Anglos looking for bounty from the Mexican Governor.  As Hunt sees it, “We curse the Apache for his fearful cruelties. Who shall curse those white men, the actual cause of the unutterable sufferings of hundreds of innocent white men and women? God is the Adjuster.” By 1841 Hunt spent much time in the camp of trapper and distiller William Workman, ten miles south of Taos. One day, in utter recklessness, he rode off alone on his mustang for Taos. “I heedlessly took no weapon with me,” and sure enough, he ran straight into a band of hostile Utes and “was instantly surrounded by 50 or more young warriors who made many hostile demonstrations. Weapons then could have done me no good…they surrounded me and compelled me to go with them,” toward Taos. “I kept firm grip on my bridle rein, determined to make a dash for life while on my horse—my only hope.” Miraculously, just as the band rode by an adobe compound, Hunt noticed a Mexican acquaintance peering over a wall, wondering what the commotion was all about. “As we approached his gate I called out to him in Spanish to open his door for me as I passed, intending to dash my wild mustang through any opposition, get into the yard, and then trust to Mexican diplomacy. All happened as I hoped and much to the annoyance apparently of the Indians.” That was not all the socializing Hunt enjoyed that day in Taos. After nightfall, as he headed back to Rowland’s camp, sure enough he ran into more Utes. “Unluckily they were on the trail that I ought to take—the ground towards the prairie being full of little ravines or gulches from two to four feet wide. But there was no remedy. I must trust to the sure feet of my half wild mustang and dash off, in the twilight, into the prairie, off the trail—or be captured again, which might have been fatal indeed. “I gathered up my reins, dashed my heavy iron Spanish spurs into my pony, and away I went over ditches made by the rains, over rabbit holes, sage and I don’t know what else. The Indians, as soon as I started, chased after me and we did indeed have a time that would have beaten old Tam o’ Shanter. Fortunately they—the Indians—were returning from buffalo hunting, and their horses were not us fresh as mine. How long the race continued I don’t know. I soon found I could keep ahead, and then I took it quietly… “Soon after when in Santa Fé I met the American Company that had fought these Indians, and they considered my escape most remarkable. Humanly speaking, I was booked for another world and with no pleasant transit. The Indians had just been defeated by white men and were sure to seek revenge.” John Rowland (1791-1873), ca.1850s ( Rowlandgenealogy.com ) William Workman (1802-1876), ca. 1851 (Homestead Museum) In mid-1841 John Rowland and his business acquaintance William Workman, trapper and merchant, spent months co-preparing for an exodus of many locals to California, prompted by rumors that they were collaborating with the Republic of Texas to seize much of New Mexico, incurring the wrath of Governor Armijo. More likely, it was the prospect of either continued misrule by Governor Armijo or annexation by Texas that alarmed the group planning to accompany Rowland and Workman. Hunt decided to join those 64 people: 27 men, 7 with families or servants. In California, they could escape persecution, or worse, and begin life anew. In the fall, they set out on the Old Spanish Trail, which covered 1000 miles, crossing Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, heading down the Colorado River, and crossing deserts before reaching California—no trip for the faint of heart. Perhaps more traffic than that of the Old Spanish Trail: Burro Pack Train, loaded with merchandise for San Juan, Colorado, silver mine community (from a stereoview, Gurnsey's Rocky Mountain Views, 1870s) As the exodus crossed the Navajo hunting ground, Hunt and others from the expedition encountered “one of the handsomest Indian chiefs I ever saw.” In Spanish they asked him his name and tribe, to which he answered, “Walkara, Ute.” He was a member of the Timpanigos [Great Salt Lake] Utes, who were friendly to Anglos and enemies of the Taos Utes, with which Hunt had sparred outside Taos. Walkara was riding alone deep in what was, for him, enemy territory, because a relative had abducted one of his wives and fled to the Comanches, and he wanted her back, but was now returning from the chase without her.  Hunt’s group offered to escort Walkara through the Navajo country, and he accepted, “in full confidence of our hospitality,” giving Hunt a chance to get to know him.   When a rough North Carolinian in Hunt’s party aimed his rifle at Walkara, telling him to move his horse from where he was staked for the night, the chief “moved slowly and most majestically towards his horse, and, with the utmost calmness, led him towards those of the rest of our party. The superb scornfulness of his manner must, I think, have unnerved the brute. If he had fired, I believe we should have shot him. I went up to him and warned him to beware, and verily think I should have been tempted to shoot him on the spot myself.” Walkara “continued very confiding and friendly to us till we parted within the borders of his own country, but he treated the North Carolinian with utter and contemptuous indifference.” Walkara (1808-1855), chief of Timanigos Utes (Solomon Nunes Carvalho, wiki) Walkara probably neglected to confide that he made a business of stealing horses in California to bring back to New Mexico and enslaving Paiutes and Navajos to sell to Mexicans. He sometimes partnered with his Anglo brother-in-law Peg Leg Smith, whom Hunt considered “a perfect specimen of the Rocky Mountain Trapper—fearless, reckless, and indifferent to suffering—a hard drinker and the wildest of carouses”—even after a leg amputation far from anesthesia, requiring him thenceforth to wear a peg-leg, his with a barbed hook that fastened to his belt but once came loose and accidentally tore the flesh in his armpit. Hunt traded with the Navajos, and marveled at their unrivalled blankets, for which they tended large flocks of sheep. As he shared with author Thomas J. Farnham for his ponderous book Life, Adventures and Travels in California (1847), “I have now in my possession one of these blankets which I purchased of the Navajos soon after I entered the Taos Mountains, and which, during two years’ encampment in the wilderness, did me most valuable service. Throughout very many nights of incessant mountain rains it was my only shelter; and never, in a single instance, was any part of my clothing wet which was covered by it.”  It was the Paiutes [“Paiuches”] who truly brought out the anthropologist in Hunt, and tested his humanity. Their people were relegated to lands of almost desert barrenness, in constant famine, as he shared with Farnham, “almost entirely destitute of clothing to protect them from the inclemency of winter, what more could be expected of them than an equality with the brute creation? ...[T]heir long untrimmed hair, instead of hanging in flowing masses over the shoulders, like that of the other American Indians, is thickly matted with dirt, stands out on the head in hard knots, alive with vermin; which latter are eagerly sought after by them, as an article of food…Without knowledge, without shelter, without raiment, food, water, fit for man, they are born and live and die among these terrible deserts, the most miserable of men, yet contented with their lot. But every man’s hand is against them. The New Mexicans capture them for slaves; the neighboring Indians do the same, and even the bold and usually high-minded old beaver-hunter sometimes descends from his legitimate labor among the mountain streams, to this mean traffic.” The next generation of Paiutes were not doing much better (Kwi-toos and his son , Jack Hillers, 1873) “Notwithstanding their horrible deficiency in all the comforts and decencies of life, these Indians are so ardently attached to their country, that when carried into the lands of their captors and surrounded with abundance, they pine away and often die in grief for the loss of their native deserts. In one instance, I saw one of these Paiuches die from no other apparent cause than his home-sickness. From the time it was brought into the settlements of California it was sad, moaned and continually refused to eat till it died. “In this description of the Paiuches I have been governed by my own personal observations made during the three months I was occupied in traversing their country. I have been rather minute, because I am not aware of any other correct account having been given of them. And although one is disgusted with their personal filth and mental degradation, yet his strongest sympathies must be excited by this shocking degradation, which the character of the country they inhabit promises to perpetuate. They were the innocent cause of a great deal of suffering to myself and two companions. Four New Mexicans attached to our party captured on the banks of the Colorado an adult male and female with one child, whom myself and two friends tried to induce them to liberate. But as the Americans of our company would not aid in our effort, the majority was found against the movement and it failed. Our humanity raised such prejudices against us, that dissensions arose which resulted in a determination on the part of three of us to have no more connection with the party, and to prosecute our journey ‘on our own hook.’ The other Americans, as desirous as ourselves for the liberation of the captives, but, as it proved, more discreet, remained with the Mexicans. So off we started by ourselves, three lone men, and travelled thirty-five or forty days, and endured the most excessive fatigue, and deprivations of food and water, much of which would have been avoided if we had smothered our objections to our companions’ conduct in this affair, and been guided by their greater experience over those dreadful wastes.” Benjamin Davis Wilson (1811-1878) Hunt’s memoir mentions a close call that his companion Benjamin Davis Wilson still recalled three decades later. “One day, when traveling with two companions on the San Juan—one of the headwaters of the Colorado river, I noticed a peculiar eddy in the stream, and told my friends if they would go on a short distance only and camp, I would catch a Cat fish for supper. I always carried a hook and line in my bullet pouch. So tying my horse to a tree, I descended the bank to fish, and there I remained till nearly dusk when I had a grand nibble—at the same time a bullet from the bushes across the stream struck the water close to me. My first impulse was to spring up the bank to my horse and cover—just then I had a big bite, which was too tempting. “I determined to have that fish, and very soon I did have him, a splendid fine flavored Cat fish nearly two feet long. I at once wound up my line and then slowly walked up the bank, tied the fish to my saddle, took up my rifle and mounted, giving an eye all the time to my concealed neighbor in the opposite bushes. Probably that bullet was his last shot, for I heard no more from him. “I followed after my companions, and, instead of finding them close by as I expected, it was long after midnight before I saw their campfire, and fortunately without any other unpleasant incident occurring.” No more such shots came their way. “One evening we camped in an open plain, just beyond the great [Grand] Canyon of the Colorado. For miles about us there were no signs of vegetation of any kind, except at one spot. The whole country seemed to have been blasted with lightning. The ground was hard and sterile, and the rocks of the spurs, which cropped out here and there were black and scorched as by fire. It happened to be cloudy weather, thus making the whole scene dark and gloomy in the extreme. “At one spot only were there signs of life. In a depression of the general surface we found marsh or saline grass growing, over an area of only about a half dozen rods. By digging in it we found a very little brackish water—not more than a pint could be obtained in, perhaps, a half hour’s waiting. But the most remarkable feature were the ruins close by of the walls of an ancient town, in the shape of a parallelogram. The walls had crumbled and formed a ridge beveled on both sides and about six or eight feet high. “With the rod of my rifle, I dug into the ruins and found several fragments of glazed pottery, resembling the specimens or ancient Etruscan ware, sometimes found in Italy. When and by whom was that ruined town occupied, and when and how was the surface of the country changed, destroying its fertility, drying up the springs of water, and making all that region desolate and uninhabitable as the plains of Sodom?” Hunt shared with Farnham that the ruins were about four hundred miles up the Colorado River, a short distance from its northern bank, thirty miles from the closest fresh water. He reckoned they were about one mile long by three-quarters of a mile wide, with entrances on the center of each of the four sides. No Anasazi ruin visible today comes close to that size; perhaps it is submerged under Lake Mead. Hunt’s narrative for his sons largely omits what he, Benjamin Davis Wilson, and the one other companion endured beyond the ruins on the way to California, but he shared it with Farnham, who wrote, “When Dr. Lyman passed this desert, the sands were drifting hideously, and he was only guided in the right path across, by the carcasses of the horses which had perished in previous attempts to pass it. And such appeared to be the saline character of the soil, and so destitute of moisture was the atmosphere, that the flesh of these carcasses, instead of being decomposed, was dried like the mummies of Egypt!” Farnham also observed, “ Doctor Lyman suffered so many hardships and privations while traveling down the Colorado, that he, as well as his animals, barely lived to reach the green fields and pure waters of the Californian Mountains.” As Hunt wrote Farnham, “ [W]e travelled many successive days along the Colorado, over sandy deserts, subsisting on a daily allowance of a few mouthsful of thin mush, and a little nauseous and bitter water wherewith to wet our mouths once in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. No druggist ever compounded a draught more disgusting than the green, slimy or brackish waters which we were compelled to drink. Finally our little stock of provisions was consumed to the last grain; and starvation was staring us in the face; but relief was not denied us; the sight of the wooded mountains of Upper California inspired us with new strength and courage and soon after we fell in with a river of pure waters coming down from them; more delicious than the streams of olden fable; and our thankfulness and delight—who can measure it? It was ecstasy—such feelings I believe have no words. In those beautiful mountains we surfeited ourselves on the rich meats and fruits there abounding; prudence was cast to the winds; we could eat, and therefore did so; but ere long we suffered bitterly for our imprudence.“  Hunt spared his sons the harrowing details, putting it this way: “My…second winter [out West] was spent in the semitropical region about Los Angeles, in California, where grapes, oranges and figs, peaches, pears, and nectarines grew, in great profusion, and were large, luscious and perfect in flavor. Plaza, Pueblo de Los Angeles, 1869 (wiki) “This excellence was all the more real to me, as I had but just emerged from those fearful deserts of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, and from among the great canyons of the Colorado, where I and three [two] companions had wandered nearly two months, and endured great hardships before we reached the pure waters of the Mohave.” Farnham quotes Hunt recalling this poignant moment: “We were not a little gratified, however, on arriving at the settlements on the sea-shore to learn that after we left the camp of these New Mexicans, our countrymen who remained with them, secretly in the night time loosed the Paiuche captives and sent them to their desert homes.” Hunt shares this much with his sons: “The hardships I had endured in the desert, followed by a profusion of fruits and food of the coast, had thrown me into a fever, a few weeks after arrival, and after those little bills were created. For many days I was dangerously sick, and for weeks was helpless. My life was probably saved by the kind and gentle care and nursing I received from an old woman, poor as myself—a perfect stranger to me. She staid by me faithfully, till I was able to go out, and she shared with me her last chicken. I suppose I was the means of saving the lives of two of her children subsequently, but I never could repay her in full the debt of gratitude I owed her. Good old Dona Fernanda.” “Being destitute of money on reaching the shores of the Pacific, I was compelled to remain there many months, practicing my profession, till funds were replenished.” He learned the hard way that his patients must pay up before he dispenses medical advice, after being stiffed by leading ranchero Don José Carillo and others. Years before the gold rush, in 1842 Hunt came close to learning the location of a major placer, through trader Abel Stearns, a transplanted Bay Stater, who in late 1841 had invited him to dinner and shown him a quart bottle of gold dust and now invited him to join him on an expedition with a native chief from the Sierra region to the location of the placer gold, only to have the chief’s fellows talk him out of showing them. Here is Hunt’s counterfactual: “Had Stearns and I been permitted to discover it, while that country belonged to Mexico, the fame of the placer would have spread abroad and led to the discovery of other gold fields, and California would today, probably, be a Mexican province. For the twenty million dollars, war expenses, which our Government claimed after General Scott entered the City of Mexico, and which that country could not pay but compromised by giving us California instead—those twenty millions, five times told, Mexico could easily have borrowed of English capitalists, by pledging that province, if she had only known of the rich placers that were under its soil or even of that rich one where Stearns and I went and which Providence did not permit to be revealed, till the sovereignty of the land had passed to a Protestant power. “If that Indian had dealt fairly with us—as he originally intended to do—I should have been instrumental in revealing to the world, the golden wealth of California and that province would today belong to the Spanish race and to the Papal Church, two conditions that, for three hundred years, have been a hindrance to human progress. But the existence of those wonderful gold fields, being concealed till the Anglo Saxon and a Protestant race assumed the sovereignty, a great empire is growing up there, to send forth civilization and human liberty through the isles of the Pacific, and throughout Asia, on westward to the home of the Saxon race in Western Europe, thus girdling the earth with a pure civilization and a pure Christianity.” Whoa, there, Hunt! We may now beg to differ with such overreach. If Hunt were with us now, I am sure his thinking would have dramatically evolved. With funds replenished, after twelve months in California, Hunt “ sailed from the port of San Diego, in a Spanish brig loaded with mules, for Mazatlan on the coast of Mexico, below the Gulf of California, a distance of over 1200 miles.”  “Seeing a beautiful brig in the harbor I went on board. Finding it was about to leave for the Sandwich Islands, over 3000 miles due west, I concluded to take passage. My destination was Siberia, and I was told that once a year, a vessel from the United States touched at Honolulu, on its way to Kamchatka and she would be at the Islands in a few weeks.”  In Honolulu, receiving his first letter from home in three years, written two years before, “gave me my first twinge of homesickness.” The fact that the letter had been sent to Oahu indicates that Hunt had been planning to reach there from the beginning, destination Siberia. “ I had not had wild life enough. I fancied a trip across Siberia.”  Waiting for a ship to take him there, Hunt mingled with the natives. Thanks to missionaries, he noted that “there was as much decorum and quietness all that Sabbath day, throughout the town, as in any of our New England villages on Sunday.” He enjoyed a particularly memorable evening. “I was invited one evening to go to the house of a foreigner and play whist. On arriving there and entering the room, I found present, two Americans and a native of the island, a stout, dark skinned, but well-dressed man, who was introduced to me in Yankee style as ‘Kamehameha III, King of the Sandwich Islands’. “We were requested to take seats at a table and the game commenced. Soon my partner shocked me, by his tone of familiarity in addressing the King, who was seated at my left and was slow in following my play. He said to him, ‘Come, King, it is your play’. His majesty took the hint as a most natural thing. I reflected upon such regal quietness for a while, and then thought I would see how it felt to hurry up a King. So, when he again delayed his play, I called out, ‘Come, King, we are waiting.’ Instead of seizing a spear and transfixing me on the spot—the Monarch heeded my request—and played. Why should I fear? Was not I a sovereign also? “I took a long walk with the King that night. He had but one attendant, who was in the rear of us. The King could speak English, and was intelligent and practical in his conversation… Kamehameha III (1814-1854), ca. 1853 (wiki) “After waiting a long time for the Siberian ship and no signs of it appearing and having received an invitation to take passage on the ‘Boston’ around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, I concluded to accept the invitation especially as I was a little homesick.”  The ‘Boston’ had just frightened off British warship HMS ‘Carysfort,’ commanded by Lord Paulet who had threatened to bombard Honolulu “unless certain outrageous demands were immediately conceded to the Englishman.”  Now the “Boston” was headed home by way of the Society Islands—Tahiti. Hunt experienced rapture over cosmic spectacle and natural wonder. “During the three weeks passage, we had, nearly every night the magnificent spectacle of that huge comet, with its enormous train spanning the southern heavens. It was so vast and so luminous as to cause the beautiful constellations of the south to look pale through the shadow of its nearer and brighter light… The view of Tahiti, that gem of the ocean, as seen from the deck of our ship, was beautiful beyond description… The center of the island was crowned with lofty volcanic peaks, along the base of which were other hills, with rounded tops and gentle and graceful slopes, which skirted the higher peaks, like an emerald setting—and all appeared to be clothed in various shades of green; the deep valleys among the hills, by their darker shading, contrasting beautifully with the lighter colors of the more prominent crests…The sight was exceedingly soft and pleasing to the eye, and the effect was intensified by those grand volcanic pinnacles shooting high up through the midst, like giant sentinels guarding the paradise at their feet. The firm white shell beach, reflecting the bright sunlight from the crests of countless ripples of water seemed to surround the whole view with a circlet of burnished silver. Even under the water of that pretty little bay, nature’s beautiful handiwork was seen, in the forests of gracefully branching coral—both purple and white—with brilliant colored fishes, playing among the branches. In all my tropical wanderings, I have never seen any spot so lovely as Tahiti.” By August 1843, emerging from the dreary winter waters of the southern hemisphere, the ‘Boston’ anchored in Rio Harbor, Hunt’s old shark-defying swimming waters. He debarked for a short nostalgic sojourn, remarking, “Nowhere else have I seen such a variety and abundance of beautiful birds and flowers and gorgeous insects, and even of snakes. “Nature seems to have exhausted her powers in her efforts to cloth[e] those creations of hers in the richest and most splendid combinations of colors. But, alas, she did not discriminate between the evil and the good, and she also failed to endow them with those qualities which, under less favored climes and bright skies, she has bestowed on the birds and flowers of our own northern homes. “With us we usually find the more modest the clothing of the bird and flower, the sweeter the song and the fragrance. But in Brazil we almost always find the more gorgeous the plumage of the bird the less he has of the spirit of song—the more splendid the flower, the less the sweetness of the fragrance. “As to those serpents, gliding about, under every green tree the more dazzling and brilliant the silver and gold and coral rings that encircle them, the more deadly is the venom under their tongues.”  On that cautionary note, Hunt’s Incidents of Travel draw to a close. He returned to civilization, married, and sired three sons, two of whom lived to adulthood. As they reached their mid-teens, in the late 1860s, he decided to write up his Incidents of Travel “for the pleasure of my boys.” When one of them took up medical practice in San Francisco in 1877, Hunt returned to the land of his adventures, and looked up Benjamin Davis Wilson, one of his two companions who with him had crossed the desert. Having decided against a voyage to China in 1842, Wilson instead became a leading rancher—Don Benito, elected the second mayor of Los Angeles in 1851. One of his grandsons was to be General George Patton. It is a good thing Wilson survived that perilous journey. Farnham’s lengthy book on California (1847) included two maps which label the Old Spanish Trail as “ Dr. Lyman’s Route.”  The author summed up what his “excellent friend, Dr. Lyman,” had shared: “ An eventful journey—through an unexplored country of untamed savages, which the Doctor’s scientific attainments and interesting style amply qualify him to detail to his countrymen in a manner that would forever connect his name with the border literature of America. But to this end, I fear he can never be persuaded.” "Dr Lyman's Route" from Santa Fe to Los Angeles is delineated in this 1845 map Likewise, from a letter of March 19, 1887, handed down with the manuscript, we know that Hunt’s sister Sally enjoyed reading his Incidents of Travel so much that she wanted to see it published. She had met Benjamin Davis Wilson in California: “ [He] told me of your reckless daring and the sharpies and villains who tried to provoke you at Santa Fé & of the success you had in winning them by your defiant tone. Your Honolulu and Tahitian experiences were delightful. Your Brazil scenery picturing exquisite. Indeed, we have had a treat & why should not others?…I want to see it all in print.” The manuscript passed from “Dear Hunt” to his sister, my great-great grandmother, and so by a direct ancestral trail to me. Perhaps at long last his narrative will earn its rightful place after all. A young American with guts, resilience and decency forges ahead of the crowd and experiences countless dangers so deeply etched in his mind that he can recall them vividly a quarter of a century later. That speaks across the generations. Lyman’s recent audience in Santa Fe loved it.  Why should not others? I want to see it all in print and podcast. Walkara, AI-generated using Hunt's description: "handsome Indian chief, colorfully dressed, riding a beautiful horse near a Utah mesa. He carries a lance in one hand. On his back he carries a bow and quiver of arrows. On his saddle is a rawhide shield" (Shutterstock, March 2024) At the conference of the Old Spanish Trail Association, Santa Fe, November 1, 2024, holding up the 1960s transcription of Lyman's Incidents, in lieu of the original manuscript which I had donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society the previous April   On hunt's trail, at the start of the Old Spanish Trail, Abiquiu, New Mexico, November 3, 2024

  • Pre-Xi China

    This long-march of a blog draws on material I had hoped to see into print a decade ago— China Makeover , the perspective of a design professional then working in China. As classmate Jim Fallows has written, China’s vastness warrants many takeaways. Here is mine, on the buildup to the era of Xi-jinping. The Chinese Revolution in 1911 at long last ended thousands of years of dynastic rule going back to 2000 BC. Delegates meeting in Nanjing elected Sun Yatsen as provisional president of the Republic of China. Dr. Sun is still fondly remembered as the Father of Modern China. Educated in Hawaii, having visited Chicago, and discovered Lincoln, Sun modeled his Three Principles of the People of the new Constitution—nationalism, democracy, livelihood—on Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address—of the people, by the people, for the people. I love that connection. I was amazed that my great aunt, artist and photographer Helen Paine Kimball, had stood within a few feet of the newly elected president tipping his hat to a crowd of Western-well-wishers in Shanghai in 1912. Unifying and modernizing China—vast in size, varied in dialects and ethnicities—continued to pose almost insurmountable challenges. Warlord infighting met Japanese occupation of Manchuria and points south. In World War Two, the Americans assisted the Nationalist government by basing Flying Tigers in central China. Four years after Japanese surrender ended their occupation came the Liberation, the proud work of the Communists’ Peoples Liberation Army, ending not just decades of civil war, but what the Chinese called “a century of humiliation” by foreigners, be they Europeans, Americans, or Japanese. As of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled the mainland, henceforth to be known as the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the coast, to maintain their Republic of China (ROC) government in exile. For the next four decades, while the U.S. and most other countries recognized the ROC, the PRC did not permit Americans to visit “Mainland China.” Though the PRC remained terra incognita to Americans , most weren’t buying the hype of various Western apologists. In fact, the place seemed primitive, ill clad, ill fed. If the thirty-hour train ride from Beijing to Shanghai only offered toilets only in the form of a squat toilet exposed to all, this was progress. But who were we to judge? No one suspected that CCP Chairman Mao’s big push from 1957-62, the Great Leap Forward, mimicking Stalin’s back in the day, was so bungled that it caused the Great Famine, with a death toll probably twice as large as the officially acknowledged astronomical thirty-five millions, while the Chinese people were being told that the people starving in capitalist countries were the ones who really had something to complain about. The difficulties were described as three years of natural calamities, but were mostly man-induced, from the demolition of thirty to forty percent of all housing to the deforestation of much of eastern China, and brutally enforced collectivization of peasants. The student unrest that started to unfold in the West in 1966 was no match for the virulence of young people’s unrest that Mao fomented in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that same year, in his bid to consolidate his power that was once again being challenged in the wake of his recent failings. The Cultural Revolution focused on eradicating old ways of thinking, indeed thinking itself. Intellectuals were reviled as “the stinking ninth category.” The people were going after “landlords,” although the State had owned all the land since 1949. While I was a college student majoring in visual and environmental studies and for good measure taking John K. Fairbanks’ and Edwin O. Reischauer’s celebrated survey history course on China, Korea and Japan, kids my age in China were becoming sworn enemies of everything for which we stood, denouncing teachers and parents alike, and losing face by self-criticism. The teenage and twenty-something children of Chinese professionals were fast becoming Red Guards and helping Mao “beat down the Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. Out of fashion were tolerance for religions like Christianity and pride in the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History that would be touted a few decades later. Beijing’s Ming Dynasty city walls had to go, forty kilometers of them. Tactically, the Gang of Four, which included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was calling the shots as much as Mao, outmaneuvering the voice of reason in Premier Zhou Enlai, whipping up a frenzy of destruction and “class struggle” against “class enemies,” exacting confessions from “capitalist running dogs,” indeed punishing anyone who dared to own property or have an attitude. Two “olds” that did not make the short list were relationship ( guanxi ) networks and saving face ( ai mianzi ). At all levels in the hierarchy, these two olds played pivotal roles in the control of the group (“do it because you owe me”), the goals they set for themselves, and the impossible demands they made of their subordinates. The Red Guards were on a rampage so out of control that they were in essence the prime example of what social unrest would later mean for the CCP. Once central to the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History, Confucianism was now so dead, and the Cult of Mao so strong, that the young obediently denounced their own parents and teachers as “counter-revolutionaries” and “revisionists,” meting out “yin-yang haircuts” and “jet plane rides”—arms held behind the back like wings to inflict humiliation and even excruciating pain. Universities, so recently restructured in the 1950s and now viewed with suspicion as fostering elites of no use to the masses, were being closed. Everyone recited endless quotations from Chairman Mao’s infallible Little Red Book, sold by the billions. All other book learning was replaced by book burning, all but obliterating the domestic record of the alleged glories of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History. The cultural elite were beaten down, beaten up, tortured, and killed. One million died. Losing face in the public ritual of self-criticism replaced saving face. This not-so-great Revolution itself would later be denounced, though extolled by some Chinese for giving the Chinese the gift of free speech for the first time. But group-speech denouncing the group’s superiors was a far cry from the individual right of free speech. That right remained unrealized into the era of Xi Jinping. And above all, the CCP would allow no freedom of the press. That would create social unrest. In 1971 the Chinese ping pong team invited the U.S. ping pong team to the PRC, ushering in the era of ping pong diplomacy. A year later, Nixon traveled to Beijing to shake Mao’s hand, a gesture China compared to waving the white flag. Our sense of face lost and gained in such ritualistic moments did not align with theirs. Suddenly, studying English in China went from being illegal to being indispensable to getting ahead. Foreign books, no longer condemned, opened eyes again. The universities, shuttered since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, started to reopen. But signals remained mixed as long as the Cultural Revolution continued. Though Americans then thought of it as our Bicentennial Year, for the Chinese 1976 was the Year of the Dragon, ordinarily the most auspicious of years in the twelve-year Chinese zodiac. But not this time. In China, 1976 became known as the Year of the Curse. In January came the death of Zhou Enlai, the beloved and urbane first Premier, the PRC leader whom the U.S. considered the voice of reason and who had personally greeted Nixon deplaning in Beijing in 1972. When Tiananmen Square attracted a huge outpouring of mourners for their “Beloved Premier” in April, the attempts by the anti-Zhou Gang of Four to suppress the mourning precipitated rioting. The year 1976 was also the year I went to Asia for the first time, to work as a landscape architect in Taiwan. In the spring my wife Lynn was selected as one of fifteen profoundly lucky young Americans to become a Luce Scholar. Named for the China-born son of missionaries who had founded Time-Life, the Henry Luce Foundation wisely sought to remedy the ignorance about Asia among the best and the brightest by sending young Americans to work for a year in Asia. Then in its third year, the program operated in East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and the ROC in Taiwan—but unfortunately not “the real China,” since the U.S. and China had gone without diplomatic relations for a quarter-century, nor Vietnam, Myanmar or Cambodia. After all, the U.S. was winding down a disastrous war against Communism in Vietnam in which the best and the brightest in their arrogance had made miscalculations based on faulty assumptions about the Asian world in every dimension. Through the Asia Foundation, which had offices in most Asian countries, the Henry Luce Foundation found work placements for scholars and their spouses in their chosen fields. Since the PRC was off limits to Americans, Lynn and I decided to go to Taiwan. Though it had lost its seat in the U.N. to the PRC in 1971, and only a quarter of its trading partners still recognized the Taiwan government’s claim to represent all China, Taiwan continued to flourish, with the second highest GDP growth rate in the world. Taiwan was one of the Four Asian Tigers. A year in Taiwan in 1976-7 proved to be the ideal preparation for a year in China three decades later. Days after we arrived in Hong Kong en route to Taiwan, Chairman Mao died. In our hotel room we took in the stunning news as black and white televised images lingered on mourners wailing over the Great Helmsman’s remains, with an emotional English-language voiceover. This was the biggest news yet in 1976. It was truly the end of an era. Although it would be months before we knew, the Cultural Revolution was finally over, and the healing after its decade of destruction could slowly begin, with the arrest of the Gang of Four in October. The Revolution had failed miserably to stamp out CCP corruption. Mao’s legacy fell woefully short of the idealism of the rhetoric, yet his image facing Tiananmen Square in Beijing, ground zero, remains to this day. We arrived in Taiwan to be greeted by “Recover the Mainland” billboards. Portraits of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen were paired in all public buildings. The big story was that while Taiwan may have been under martial law and under one-party rule led by refugees from the mainland, they had not taken over the economy or land ownership: the native Taiwanese continued to dominate both—and the Nationalists, perhaps chastened by the mess they had made on the mainland, had used their power wisely to develop the country’s export economy and its infrastructure in the Ten Major Projects, including rail and superhighways. They welcomed U.S. consultants, and cooperated closely with the U.S. on land reform and agricultural best practices through the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), founded in 1948 on the mainland and then still alive on Taiwan. In its accomplishments, the ROC leapt twenty years ahead of the PRC. Taiwan was called the Economic Miracle, while the PRC remained a shambles. Unlike the PRC, Taiwan celebrated traditional Chinese culture, despite ever-increasing trade, exchange, and communication with the West. If baseball was the national sport, Taiwan lovingly celebrated Teachers Day on Confucius’ birthday, as I came to appreciate after I attended a moving ceremony at the historic Confucian temple in the heart of Taipei, whereas Confucius was still on the outs with the PRC. Double Ten Day (October 10) celebrating the founding of the Republic of China culminated in the most stunning display of fireworks I had ever seen. I studied traditional Chinese ink brush painting—cherry blossoms, bamboo, pavilions hovering over mountain waterfalls, and leaned to inscribe my Chinese name in calligraphy. Every weeknight, a tutor came to our apartment and drilled us in our spoken Chinese. I worked in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau, in its Technical Services Division, alongside well-educated colleagues my age who spoke good English. I was responsible for the design of facilities at a network of Special Scenic Areas that attracted international as well as local tourists. Off limits was scenic Green Island, where political prisoners were jailed. Seeking independence for Taiwan from Nationalist rule was considered as punishable as supporting PRC claims to Taiwan. On matters of political sensitivity, the heavy-handedness of the two Chinas was still comparable. Had there been no Taiwan for me in 1976-77, there would have been no China for me later. I knew enough spoken Chinese to make many friends, I knew how to accept cultural differences, and I knew how to go with the flow . But it went deeper: I felt a strong spiritual connection to a Taoist-Buddhist sensibility that had its local historical counterpart in New England Transcendentalism. I would be back in 1984, in 1988, and yet again in 2005. Each time I went back to Taiwan, I could see that the liberalization continued—“opening-up” by another name, long before the “Reform and Opening up” of which the PRC made such a fuss. If the ROC on Taiwan originally liberalized to score points with the West against the PRC, it hardly looked back longingly for a less prosperous or more disorderly time anymore. Taiwan functioned as an independent nation claimed by China as part of its nation, but could not officially declare as much. What it lacked in diplomatic recognition due to its uniquely ambiguous political state it more than made up for in its unambiguous economic state as an export powerhouse from plastics to computer chips. Meanwhile, Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng was doubling down on Mao in his soon to be infamous Two Whatevers: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” Resolute was never forever. In late 1978, after China adopted its third Constitution in as many decades, CCP paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the Four Modernizations campaign focusing on agriculture, national defense, science, and technology. Deng remarked that Mao had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong. The West was thrilled to hear about the Democracy Wall, where at long last ordinary Chinese could post suggestions, and where political dissident Wei Jingsheng proposed the “fifth modernization,” democracy. They had a year to delude themselves, before Deng Xiaoping had the Wall removed, foreshadowing his behavior in Tiananmen Square a decade later. Deng Xiaoping became the first CCP leader to visit the U. S. Along with millions of others that January 1979, I watched the telecast from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in which singer John Denver entertained Deng by greeting him with “Mr. Vice-Premier, it is with great joy that we welcome you to our country, and it is with true love that we extend our very best wishes to you and your people, on your ‘New Long March Toward Modernization In This Century,’” and then singing Rocky Mountain High . Deng instituted the counter-revolutionary Four Moderns and “Reform and Opening up” granting Americans access to China for the first time in three decades. Deng also announced “One Country, Two Systems,” in effect acknowledging that the system in the PRC was hardly the same truly open system of Hong Kong and Taiwan. By 1981 he could proclaim that the Cultural Revolution, in which a million people had died, was an official “catastrophe.” In 1984 Deng rebranded the economic opening-up begun in 1979 as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The phrase was catchy. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics was an inability to eradicate a culture of rampant corruption—punctuated by the occasional show trial—that a longtime expat Communist and CCP member like American Sidney Rittenberg bemoaned finding on all sides when the CCP finally released him from wrongful imprisonment. In 1987 Deng acknowledged that central economic planning no longer drove the Chinese economy, while Taiwan ended thirty-seven years of one-party rule in 1986, lifted martial law in 1987, and began to allow its citizens to visit China. China in 1988 was full of the hope of economic growth and democratization—delivering the full promise of a Chinese society that had opened up. Only a year after the PRC opened up to Taiwanese visitors, in 1988 Lynn and I finally got to visit mainland China, at least Beijing, with the Henry Luce Foundation. I may have missed the wall-encircled version of Beijing and the original smaller Tiananmen Square that survived intact until the 1950s, but at least I got to see the fabled city before the skyline was upended with inane high-rises, the sky polluted to a pulp, the hutong neighborhoods eviscerated, and the roads clogged with cars, all of which would happen in the next two decades. If the airport roof had solar panels, the road from the airport was a mere two lanes wide ride, through open country. If there were already cars, there were still millions of bicyclists, and no second and third ring roads. Foreigners were required to use foreign exchange certificates to make purchases. The big Henry Luce Foundation event was meeting one of the Eight Elders of the CCP, Li Xiannian, at the Great Hall of the People. Recently made Chair of People’s Political Consultative Conference, the veteran of Mao’s Long March had risen to prominence after Mao’s death to become one of the most influential architects of China’s economic policy after the Cultural Revolution and become President of the PRC from 1983-1988. At a banquet on that visit I was seated next to Hou Renzhi, a retired Peking University professor of geography and urban history. Born in 1911, the year of the birth of Modern China, he gained exposure to the Western field of historical geography while earning his PhD at Liverpool, in time to return to the New China in 1949, ran marathons, was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, became renowned as a pioneer in the field of historical geography and lived to be 100. When I met him he was a lean and vigorous seventy-seven. Prof. Hou told me how he had been one of those who were shouted down during the Cultural Revolution as he tried to save from the Red Guards, whose slogan was “smashing of the Four Olds,” what was left of Beijing’s magnificent city walls already largely demolished for a subway line and air raid shelters, only to have one of those who had shouted him down apologize years later, telling him that he had been right all along. They were now friends. Nowadays, if you wanted to experience an elevated people’s greenway, you had to walk the walls of Xian or Nanjing. What a difference a year made. In the spring of 1989, Prof. Hou was leading a tour of Beijing’s city wall remnants along the second ring road when events in the heart of the city took a dramatic turn. Soon after the death of beloved pro-democracy reformer Hu Yaobang, students gathered in Tiananmen Square both to mourn him and to demand democracy of their government. Though cellphones had not yet been invented, word spread rapidly by fax machine. Intellectuals, students, workers, even some peasants from the countryside gathered in the center of the capital city, indeed gathered in scores of other cities as well. For the first time in Chinese history, coming from all walks of life, to use Mao’s phrase uttered here in 1949, the people had stood up to express frustration at rising inequality, rampant official corruption, and the lack of democratic freedoms. In Tiananmen Square, exercising their right of free speech, students read aloud both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address in translation. They hardly expected a repeat of what happened there after Zhou Enlai’s death twelve years before. Though the demonstrators committed not one act of violence, the government imagined huge risks to the country. Seeing its legitimacy threatened and the nation’s existence imperiled by social unrest, spreading like a contagion since the fall of the Soviet Union and political reform in Eastern Europe, and now to 80 cities across China, the frightened government reacted in a harsh crackdown in Beijing that was forever etched on the minds of Chinese participants and observers and millions of Westerners who were riveted by the television coverage and subsequent eyewitness accounts. The most enduring images were the highly symbolic clone of the Statue of Liberty erected in the Square and Tank Man, a lone figure standing in the middle of Chang’an Road, gesturing with his two shopping bags, halting a line of tanks sent in to enforce the will of the state. After the tanks shut off their engines, the man climbed onto the turret to talk to the human being hidden within. It was a gesture of nonviolent resistance in the heroic tradition of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. His fate remains a mystery. Eyewitnesses reported seeing pro-democracy demonstrators crushed by tanks, and soldiers bayoneting mothers and children. Deng had cracked down on the Democracy Wall a decade before, and now was implicated again. But which army leader was really to blame for the brutal tactics of the People’s Liberation Army that resulted in the death of 300 to 1000 unarmed democracy-denied civilians? And some commanders in the People’s Liberation Army had been opposed to violence against the People. The opportunity costs were enormous. The perceived brutality in the crackdown cost the PRC dearly in the public relations tug of war with Taiwan, and in international investment for a while. What the West called the Tiananmen Massacre remained a taboo topic in China, which wanted to avoid social unrest at all costs. The abrupt turn away from the people’s consensus as if none could be had, only chaos, placed China squarely and defensively on the sidelines of global democratization. By 2023, as electoral democracies benefited 45 percent of the world’s population, China was working overtime to assert the superiority of its system of government for the people and churn out “democracy has failed” screeds. In 2023 one might think they are winning. Don’t bet on it, any more than investing in its real estate. Given what China has been through with nearly two centuries of foreign powers cutting up China “like a watermelon,” dynastic decline, warlords, a brutal Japanese invasion, and civil war, how can we in the West really blame them or begin to feel their pain? Self-inflicted wounds come with a history. Doubling down on official Tiananmen amnesia, China chose to rebuild its way out of the 1989 crisis. Indeed, in 1993 it became a net importer of oil for the first time, and Beijing was already trying to rein in the real estate bubble before the economy and social unrest spun out of control. The phenomenon of empty blocks replacing farmland, and landless ex-farmers forced to live in otherwise barren blocks could trace its origins back that far. As long as the nation grew and the standard of living improved for the masses, the people would choose stability over social unrest, economic growth over stagnation, leaving for another day the luxury of human rights and justice before the law, or so the state reasoned, and postponing the day of reckoning with the ever-ballooning real estate bubble. One thing that was off the table was another famine. Chinese citizens could now talk to foreigners and not get arrested; with the danger gone, there was a sense of risk-free and optimistic adventure in the air. But still the riots broke out in far-off ethnically non-Han Chinese strongholds like Xinjiang and Tibet, where with irony that escaped the CCP, they dealt with the locals precisely the way the much-hated Japanese had with Manchuria back in the day. And still the official voice of the state was shrill; nuanced discussion was an oxymoron. The persistent state-stoked narrative of national humiliation promoted by Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, and Sun Yat-sen before them—victimhood at the hands of colonial powers whether European or Japanese— wuwang guochi , “Never forget our national humiliation,” would in fact soon be forgotten a lot of the time, although trotted out whenever the state felt its power eroding. That, and protesting when something “hurt the feelings of the Chinese People.” Meanwhile, on the political front, Taiwan kept up the pressure on the PRC by the force of its counterexample. In 1989 Taiwan had embraced legislative reform, culminating in the retirement of the old Nationalist representatives of Mainland provinces, and not a moment too soon. In 1991 Taiwan held its first national elections, and newly elected President Lee Teng-hui formally recognized the PRC government, as if to say the ROC enjoyed the status to do such a thing. Henceforth, the ROC would no longer claim to represent all of China; it had been some time since that old rhetoric had seemed credible. President Lee’s reforms extended to inviting free discussion of sensitive political issues of Taiwan’s past, an opening-up of thought. Taiwan was occasionally in the news as forever living under the threat of a PRC takeover, given the PRC’s prickly insistence on preserving the “Motherland” and intolerance for “splittists.” When Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996, the PRC’s attempt to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate by staging war games in the Taiwan Strait backfired into yet another public relations gaffe. The U.S. dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region. By the 2010s the naval intimidation became habitual. In electing Democratic Progressive Party candidates Chen Shui-bian as President and Annette Lu as Vice-President of Taiwan in 1996, a Chinese people had freely voted for the peaceful transition of power for the first time in Chinese history. Ordinary Taiwanese people had voted, and not for reunification. In 1997, Hong Kong reverted to China with the assumption that it would be able to keep its democratic system for the next fifty years, much to the relief of an apprehensive world. From the vantage point of 2023, we can see how shortsighted that sense of relief was to be. After the death of Deng, China stayed the course of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” rather like capitalism in socialist clothing, under the new PRC leader Jiang Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, and as liberal and pro-Western a leader as we could hope for. In October 1997, Jiang visited Washington and with president Bill Clinton agreed to establish a regular consultation mechanism for defense. Jiang then spoke at Harvard, in halting English, about our common destiny. In 1999 Premier Zhu Rongji signed a joint statement with Clinton on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), promising reforms to increase transparency and protect intellectual property, and unleashing Chinese industrial might beyond anything the world had ever seen. Foreign direct investment exploded. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics had taken root. Even as I paid attention to all these momentous events, I had been assuming that a new generation was in charge in Taiwan and in no need of advice from Americans, much less Americans of the previous generation. I assumed the same about China, whose reputation had been sullied by Tiananmen. But I was wrong on both counts. The PRC and Taiwan were becoming more interlocked economically: now their peoples could even travel back and forth to sightsee or visit relatives. Between the PRC and Taiwan, the days of antagonistic clashing over ideology seemed, until the Xi Jinping era, to be behind them. In 2001 Taiwan joined China in the World Trade Organization. And both the PRC and Taiwan still looked overseas for design advice. I was about to put everything I had ever learned to work in Taiwan once more. And it would take me across the Taiwan Strait to the China that had been closed to me when I had first gone to Taiwan in 1976 and that I had barely seen in 1988. In 2005 an old Tourism Bureau colleague from 1977 and now the Bureau’s Director General invited me back to consult on 23 special scenic area construction projects over a three week period. When I was back, I was amazed at the power of democracy. Taiwan was moving on from trying to suppress dark moments in its own past to finding ways to acknowledge them and mourn the victims. In downtown Taipei, it had created the 2-28 Peace Memorial Park, two blocks from the Presidential Palace, to honor the victims of the “228 Incident” of Nationalist Party brutality against native Taiwanese that occurred on February 28, 1947, a forbidden topic when I had been in Taiwan before. Of all the sites I consulted on, the most profoundly moving was Green Island. Off limits in 1977 when it still housed political prisoners, totaling anywhere between 30,000 and 70,000 from 1951 to 1989, Green Island was now a vacation destination attracting 349,000 visitors annually. Its mix of spectacular unspoiled scenery, the only seafront hot springs in Asia, its Human Rights Monument, and prison museum showcasing human rights progress had the power to win many friends for Taiwan. What Robben Island and its political prisoner Nelson Mandela meant to South Africa, Green Island and its political prisoners meant to Taiwan. American land artist Maya Lin would recognize the big design idea of the Green Island Human Rights Memorial, also known as the White Terror Memorial Park: an inscription wall descending into the earth, with hundreds of names inscribed in the sandstone. No, these were not the kind of heroes who had gone off to Asia to fight a war against Communist revolutionaries and for whom decent records were kept, as with Maya Lin’s celebrated Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These were a different kind of hero, the names of Taiwanese imprisoned for simply voicing dissent, when the Nationalist government did not recognize the right of free speech, or even the right to a decent record. Some of the inscriptions were ringed by a dark grey oval, burnished by the tender touch of adoring hands, for these were the names of people who were now leading Taiwan to greatness. Heading the list were Taiwan’s top two leaders, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu, perhaps the highest ranking Chinese woman anywhere, a graduate of both Green Island Prison and Harvard Law School. Lu had been one of the Kaohsiung Eight, arrested for a pro-democracy demonstration on Human Rights Day in that city in 1979 when Taiwan was still a one-party state. Among other famous prisoners was Cai Ruei-yue, Taiwan’s first lady of modern dance, who had never breathed a word of it to my wife 29 years earlier when Ms. Cai taught her traditional Chinese dance. The Memorial spoke to me not for its design but for the fact of its existence, what it represented, and what that meant. It represented the triumph of democracy and human rights for the largest predominantly ethnic Chinese population outside China. And that meant Taiwan had gained enormously in good will and world admiration. As I could personally attest over the last thirty years, Taiwan had a great story to tell, one of incredible economic and political progress, a fabulous success story in so many spheres. In Taiwan, innovation goes hand in hand with a deep respect for tradition, the environment, and human rights. Now that our three children were out the door, with Lynn’s encouragement I looked for opportunities in China in late 2006. Little did we know how perfect the timing was: the year of 2007 proved to be the banner year for China’s GDP growth, 14.2%, almost double the 8% target, itself far ahead of any other economy. Record numbers of development projects needed to be designed. Alongside just about any other profession one could name, in China landscape architects were in as much demand as the world had ever seen. When I moved to Shanghai I hardly knew what to expect. As director of design at a Chinese landscape architecture and urban planning firm, and the lone American, I wondered how well I would assimilate. I needn’t have worried. Traveling all over China to meet with clients, I discovered that the Chinese people had a healthy appetite for almost all things American. Once banned under Chairman Mao’s dictatorial rule, American pop culture was everywhere . But it was not just pop culture that interested them. I was amazed that in school many had read American classics such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . At a conference on visionary urban planning, where I was the only non-Chinese, the big red banner behind the stage was emblazoned with a huge image of Abraham Lincoln, patterned on the famous Daniel Chester French statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I asked several attendees how Lincoln was relevant to an urban planning conference in China. “Because he represents good government ,” they said, gently implying that that should be obvious. Projects that would take years to get off the drawing board in the U.S. got built in months here; orders were given, people were moved, and, presto, a half billion square meters of new residential and commercial space were built every year. The Great Leap Forward these days was the real deal. Though the CCP still proudly displayed the official portrait of Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square, no one talked anymore about “class enemies.” Only curio shops were selling the Little Red Book . If the scars of that age of suspicion and denunciation ran deep, no one was admitting it now. The Chinese did not yet have the vote for their own top leaders but they voted for the leading facets of Western life in countless ways. Whereas they made no secret of their visceral hatred of the Japanese that not even apologies for the Rape of Nanjing and the like could ever cure, they held no such visceral hatred for us. Au contraire. The U. S. was the ambitious Chinese student’s destination of choice for studying abroad. Pregnant mothers seeking a stateside birth to confer US citizenship were voting for American stability, freedom, and educational opportunity over what they had back home. We took for granted that of course their business attire was Western; they could have continued with local garb even as Arabs and Africans did theirs but wisely chose not to. Long gone were Mao suits, the opposite number of leisure suits in the U.S. back in the benighted day. Recently Paramount Leader Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, former low-level Red Guards, wore Western attire and parted their jet-black medium-length hair to look like Westerners, not like their buzzed Communist parents. Regular people wore jeans with abandon, even baseball caps, including the Red Sox, and flaunted iPhones. The armed forces and police wore uniforms whose antecedents were hardly Asian, and sometimes a tad fascistic with the jackboots. On airlines, in mostly School of Boeing aircraft, the utensils of choice for all meals were not chopsticks. As to the second language of business here, the Chinese had voted with their commercial signs, traffic signs, and road signs, subway ticket machines and ATMs which proudly displayed not French or Japanese or Russian, but their best English. The street signage symbol for parking was P. They taught English as a second language and it began in primary school now; we had not yet begun to reciprocate, although we should: it would be a strategic national investment. They used “OK” more than we would ever use “ haode, ” and routinely signed off with “Bye bye” on the phone, and punctuate Chinese texts with Western exclamation points and question marks. Coffee drinking had taken the land of tea by storm; Starbucks was in every major city and had attracted many clones, pirates, imitators, coffeecats, none of which could resist using a logo that was round and ringed with white letters, everything but the mermaid. Coke had long been popular, and at the 2008 Shanghai World Expo it was the most popular exhibit in the consumer brands area. Fast food chains like KFC were ubiquitous. In the English class that I gave in the Shanghai and Beijing offices, I once chose as our subject what American movies my colleagues liked, and why, and what they disliked. The guys loved the action and fantasy flicks like Spiderman , the women chick flicks and TV shows like Sex and the City, just as in the West. Some had seen older classics like Gone with the Wind, and newer ones like The English Patient . The people adored not just our movies but our music in ways Westerners did not reciprocate. They sang our Happy Birthday song with Chinese words. Cell phone jingles I’d heard included Oh Susannah , Singin’ in the Rain, and the Eagles’ Hotel California . Hotel electronic muzak included Simon and Garfunkel’s’ The Sounds of Silence . The schoolyard behind my Shanghai office regularly blared Western and only Western music, Bolero and Pachobel’s Canon . Department store floors decorated with huge posters of Western models sold with sentimental fare like As Time Goes By , The Way We Were , and Bridge over Troubled Waters , all covers, no doubt royalty-free. I had caught people in the firm and taxi drivers whistling Ode to Joy or Silent Night (I concede these are not English) and Jingle Bells , the latter a little bit of New England in Shanghai (James Pierpont, Boston, 1857). Another taxi driver was humming along with everything on a Western classical music station. Indeed, I had heard so little Chinese music in China, classical or pop, that the vote seemed to be overwhelming. But it had been no overnight phenom. Western classical instruments and orchestration had amplified the cause of socialist revolution since the beginning in China, and with the opening-up, the familiar instrumentation and borrowed soundscape could hardly be expected to diminish. Chinese virtuoso violinists and cellists vastly outnumbered Western virtuoso performers on the guzhang . Western appreciation of sounds Chinese was not keeping up. We needed to be directed to the Chinese Beethoven, or even Pachobel. Surely with five thousand years of civilization, there was a vast musical repertory waiting for Westerners to hum along with. We Western barbarians needed to be properly schooled, was all. They and everyone else voted for perhaps the most far-reaching of all American inventions, the internet, the personal computer and the cellphone. Across China, the new generation, unlike their parents, were computer-literate early, facile with the keyboard’s indispensable Western alphabet, often as preschoolers. As soon as in primary school, people were voting for the Western alphabet as indispensable to computer literacy. The number symbols used in Chinese computers, texts, and traffic countdown signals were in Arabic, like ours, not their own cumbersome number characters. They went along with the Western calendar (Chinese New Years falls many weeks after ours), and dividing a day into twenty-four hours, systems invented long after they had come up with their own. I am profoundly grateful for their vote for American software, from operating systems to Excel spreadsheets to PowerPoint, which was called “PPT,” and above all for Google, whose maps and satellite images made far off places seem very near. For years Chinese urbanization happily borrowed many great inventions and innovations from the West—elevators and escalators; trains, planes, and automobiles; train stations, airports, and superhighways; high-rises and underground parking; tunnels and subways; large public parks, hydroelectric dams, and the power grid. TV newscasts, milk cartons and soda cans, business cards, telephones, gas stations, cars and even the legions of concrete trucks all looked all-American. The military and airline uniforms were Western knockoffs. Their nautical and aeronautical charts were virtually identical to ours. Even the party elite, whose parents had worn Mao jackets, sung the Ode to the Motherland and read the Little Red Book , took up golf as the ultimate status symbol. They played American-invented sports like baseball and basketball. One hundred universities offered baseball studies. The votes for American leisurely pursuits and technology across all fields could fill a book. It was just easier to adopt than to start a parallel universe from scratch. Very little was left that was pure Chinese except local foodstuffs, household products, crafts, and sundries. The voting went back even before the CCP era. Even the realm of pre-CCP memorial architecture owed something to the West. Did the architect Henry Bacon and the sculptor Daniel Chester French who together designed the sublime Lincoln Memorial have any idea how that idea would take wing and end up in China? And yet both China and Taiwan boast memorials to revered leaders whose exterior architecture may not look classical, but whose interior sanctuary focuses on a monumental statue of the hero, neither standing nor lying in state, but seated. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was so honored in Nanjing in the 1920s, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei in the 1980s. Now we in the West may take all this homage for granted, but we really ought to be profoundly grateful. In 2010, having led the world out of recession, China’s economy surpassed Japan’s to become the world’s second largest, 90-times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free-market reforms in 1978. If China ever becomes our Overlord, I seriously doubt that they will flip this all into a neo-Sino culture makeover with Chinese language at the helm. We may well remain the overlords of innovation for a while yet. After I opened the Shanghai-based design firm’s first overseas office in Boston, indeed the first bona-fide office of any Chinese design firm in the U.S., I found myself drawn to the idea of writing a book on urban public space best practices. I wanted nothing important to get lost in translation, so my vision for Cities with Heart included the original English text and the Chinese translation side by side. The company had hired Ran Weiming, a young Shanghai-based bilingual communications specialist who not only understood my English, but educated me by Skype on the differences in exposition between our two languages, both as to logic and to clarity. When I finally met her on a company trip to Shanghai World Expo in 2010, she mentioned that she had been captivated with Thoreau’s Walden since she was a fifteen-year-old high schoolgirl living in a mountain village a few hours outside Qongqing. I was stunned that she had found Thoreau in such a place. She loved Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Fuller. If this global connectivity was where our world was heading, it was a good place. It was my pleasure to make sure she saw Walden, birthplace of the modern environmentalism movement. On the first day that she had ever spent outside China, a jet-lagged Ran knelt before the pile of pebbles brought by pilgrims from all over the world to Thoreau’s cabin site, and added her own offering with these words for Henry: “My name is Ran, and you may not know me, but I knew you when I was a fifteen-year-old.” Henry surely smiled. Sadly, the Xi Jinping-Covid era has chilled the warmth of those days. There is blame on both sides. China looks at our current state as if it confirms the superiority of its system of government, even as ominous economic signs hover over the Chinese mainland. Indeed, even before those signs began to appear, Xi Jinping’s ponderous tome The Governance of China (2014) included this admission: "Actually, how to govern a socialist society, a completely new socialist society, has not been clearly addressed by world socialism so far." In Taiwan, democracy soldiers on, while across the Taiwan Strait, far from having anything close to a majority, the CCP that rules the Peoples Republic of China counts less than 7% of those people as CCP members.

  • 20/20 Blindsight

    We live in an age of arrogance, and cognitive bias Covid.  Take, for example, 20/20 hindsight. A lot has been written about the hindsight bias. Here’s my take. Merriam Webster defines 20/20 hindsight as “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one has about an event only after it has happened.” Sure, just a little Monday-morning quarterbacking and second-guessing. What could possibly go wrong? What Merriam-Webster meant to say is “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one believes they have” about the past event. The Monday-morning quarterbacks are utterly confident that they can explain the essential causal sequence that unfolded in the game, whether football or politics or worse. They are second-guessing, and likely guessing wrong. The pundits and pols are utterly confident that they know enough to fault people, other than themselves, for having acted without knowing what allegedly smart, well-informed people now know about their predecessor’s actions. The pundits might expound that what happened was so inevitable, or so avoidable. They may even go so far as to blame past wrongdoers for failing to know what we know, or believe what we believe, and judge them by our standard—in other words, for failing to adhere to a norm that only became a norm subsequently. They believe that they can confidently judge long-dead perpetrators who conveniently are no longer around to defend themselves. Their hubris allows them to expound what they believe without the disclaimer that of course the future will deliver more nuanced, fairer, and truer insights that may prove them to have been shortsighted, perhaps as much in their own ways as their predecessors were in theirs.  Our current understanding is nothing more than that—current, not future. And it is swayed by too many “known knowns”— the “availability heuristic.” The more garbage is out there, the more it confirms itself. As if all this were not enough, we have the slippery slope of language itself—how it morphs from one meaning to another. I was struck by this at the Massachusetts Historical Society while talking to a Native American who quoted a 17thc. document’s allusion to “reducing” her forebears. For her, the meaning was obvious: reducing the numbers of her people was nothing short of genocide.  I nodded, but later confirmed that 17th c. texts often use the word “reduce” to mean something closer to its literal original meaning, “lead back.” That is, the Anglos who had come into the indigenous people’s world uninvited hoped to convert them to Christianity and improve their lives by leading them back from ignorance—as if the white man’s ways were less ignorant than theirs. Not great in hindsight, but not genocide. Again, we must do our best to understand the norms of previous times, and that includes the norms of language in their day. Most irksome to me is mixing the fad of textualism aka originalism in reading our Constitution with a non-original interpretation of the language in that document. No example is more flagrant than the interpretation of the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” to allow unregulated ownership of weapons with lethal firepower the framers of the Constitution could not possibly anticipate.  If the framers were wary of poorly regulated militias in their day, what would they make of our weaponized world now?  This judicial hindsight is the wishful thinking of the gun lobby. But really, how does the 20/20 hindsight bias not intrude on legal outcomes?  For example, lawsuits against boards for not knowing what later became known and therefore failing to do the right thing, as defined in hindsight?  We know the outcome, bad or good; they could not. We should not make the bias mistake of blaming some people for their role in a bad outcome and crediting others for their role in a good outcome. Nor should we overzealously apply our notions of good and bad to former times when evil and injustice were far more prevalent than in our own worrisome era. The judgmental question ought to be simply this: was the person then acting decently according to the norms of their times? And how well do we understand those norms? So when opium made its way into the China Trade, an era when everyone was doing it but some were beginning to question it, we might be overly judgmental in our hindsight. We might call them drug dealers, even drug cartels. So might the Chinese. But their moral superiority, at the societal level, vanishes once the Chinese are trading opium internally in the early 20th century, and trafficking in synthetic opioids supplying American addicts. Time to call it a draw? Claiming the wisdom of hindsight while remaining ignorant of extenuating circumstances, some Western scholars might fault the Chinese, inventors of paper, printing, and the compass, for not having long ago put these inventions to good use in precisely documenting their vast territorial claims, instead of relying, even recently, on a vague dashed line surrounding unoccupied islets in the South China, islets far closer to other nations than to the claimant. Sorry, that fault-finding is 20/20 hindsight. What a misnomer! Likewise, future generations will judge ours for failing to do enough to stop global warming. Will that be entirely fair?  So easy for them to formulate the logic, or biologic, that should have guided society, somehow collectively, where it most mattered, to do the right thing. Easier said than done, and then some. So a word of caution to pontificators, me included.  Judge not that ye be not judged. If only the world were truly binary, black and white, male and female, young and old, even past and present. But boundaries are usually blurry. When that reality is a good thing, enjoy the frisson. When it is dangerous, tread lightly. And what is the boundary between good and dangerous?  Between blindsight and insight?  Knowing how blurry the boundary can be is a start. And that applies to the length of time between reality-checks. Accurate hindsight hinges on accurate memory for one’s personal history, and accurate information for preceding eras. But even our recollection of personal events may be inaccurate. Our brains fill in the blanks of our memory with what we think happened, because we are susceptible to what has been called false memory syndrome, or the confirmation bias, or good old-fashioned rationalization, or wishful thinking. Wishful thinking snares us with the sunk-cost fallacy. We may hold onto a loser investment too long, even doubling down on the bet, and end up losing even more by doing so. Let’s hope that by 2025 a little humility, humanity, and self-awareness will help get us all closer to 20/15 vision.

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  • Contact | Netizen Tom Paine

    Contact Me I hope you have enjoyed reading and browsing my website. Please feel free to contact me below. I would love to hear from you. May the conversation continue! First Name Last Name Email Message Send Thank you! Tom

  • About Me | Netizen Tom Paine

    Hi, thanks for stopping by! In a world of too much scrolling and not enough strolling, may this website do its small part to build bridges across space and time, bridges that in some modest way are inspired by the arc of the moral universe. Only connect! May this site inspire spirited conversations about our place in our community, our nation, our world, and our history, and share grounds for cautious optimism, one decent story at a time. We all have more in common, and are more connected, than we may realize. Feel free to comment. Onward! Message Me I'm Tom Paine What’s in a name? I was on my way to becoming a landscape architect, trying to safeguard nature, and drawn to beautiful landscapes, when I found out that the name “Paine” descends from “paganus,” which originally meant “rural person.” The name soon came to mean “pagan”—a religious free-thinker, rejecting the urban elites. I was named for two Tom Paines. One of them was the first Paine forebear to set foot on these shores, who I later discovered had styled himself “Thomas Paine Senior of Eastham, in the jurisdiction of Plymouth in New England in America, Cooper.” This cooper also built windmills, the high-tech of the 1600s, across Cape Cod. But I was also named for Dad’s hero, the free-thinking global citizen Tom Paine , best known for having written Common Sense , the tinder that sparked American Independence. In so many important ways he is our ideological forebear. OG Thomas Paine showed the world just how a regular guy with common sense could be a big threat to inaction and antiquated thinking. I began my career trying to safeguard public open space such as the iconic commons and greens spread across New England. I have come to realize that they symbolize the promise of America and its ideals. What better metaphor for cherishing our ideological common ground, and nurturing community? May this website do the same, one visitor at a time. The same thinking prompted me to use a photomosaic for the homepage. Randomly juxtaposing images from one’s life, one’s forebears, one’s children, grandchildren, friends, and passions in a photomosaic—each tile of which is composed of digital bytes, each of them in turn composed of electric impulses interacting with silicone, in a vast cosmos of subatomic particles defying time and space—evokes one’s place-moment in the space-time continuum, the human family, and this planet we all call home. Biography Tom Paine is a lifelong learner, local historian, and environmental advocate focusing on the intersection of local history, historic preservation, sustainability, and public space design. He is active with private philanthropic organizations promoting the preservation of cultural resources, as President of the Friends of Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society , member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vice-President of the Robert Treat Paine Historical Trust , and Board member of the Wellesley (MA) Historical Society . He is an authority on the Boston area’s astonishing legacy of firsts across many fields of human endeavor. For over four decades he practiced landscape architecture focusing on sustainability and cultural preservation in the U.S., Great Britain, Taiwan, and mainland China. His bilingual book Cities with Heart (Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press, 2015) is a celebration of open space in the great cities of the world and a compendium of best practices for urban open space planning and design. He received a BA in Architectural Sciences from Harvard College, Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

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