Voices from Port Outreach

Although the Point is notoriously hilly, and leads up into even higher country, the highest spot in Port Outreach is actually located in the Elms. The next time you take the #8 ‘bus along First Avenue, note where it crosses the street called (as of this writing) Onoris Way. On one side you’ll see the broad, curved pavilion that houses the Fiberart Cooperative and the Machine Tool Lending Collection; on the other side is a gently sloping tree-lined park with a pond in the form of twin ovals, like a fanciful stylized heart. The top of this slope, represents, at 873 pyks, the highest spot within city limits. If you go there, you’ll see an old, crumbling stonework wall.

Though not in good condition by any means, the wall, about one and half pyks high by two and a half decipyks wide, is still mostly in place. It is all the remains of the original location of the Elms Gate. It was here, in the time between the ninth and tenth cycles, that a barbarian invasion was beaten off in a battle that lasted three days, and in the end was fought with stones and bare hands. About fourteen pyks from the east end of the wall, you can still see the cracked, indented stone from a missed blow by Lilia Twistedleather who fought with a hammer in each hand when the Flux arrived on the last day to help defend the city. The bloodstains where she fell are long gone, but standing there, beneath the hiss of the whispertree, it is easy to imagine the scene.

This is the place where the Conkleshell Collective wants to build an abstract sculpture representing, so they say, the spread of culture within the Elms and so out to the rest of the city. I look forward to seeing this work, as the Conkleshell group has done fine sculpture in the past. I look forward to seeing it, I say, but I think there must be a better place for it. I don’t think this work, however beautiful and even profound it may be, can ever take the place of being able to put one’s hands on the place where so many died to protect our city.

Do you?

Although I have great respect for my esteemed colleague, Dak of the Point, I am afraid that I must respectfully disagree about several of his points here. First off, I will say that Dak’s lectures on history are always illuminating, even if only of the preconceived notions of a certain school of historian. I will certainly agree with our Tellurian visitor, TexAnne, that I hope he continues to share his knowledge with us.
 
The period of which Dak speaks here, the early part of this cycle, is one I happen to have studied quite a bit. In my paper, “The Sewer System and the Sandies,” I go into quite a bit of detail about the competing theories surrounding the septic system designed by Nowes and his pod.
 
At the time, the sewer system was extremely controversial. Many nagara felt then, as they do now, that subsistence is a basic human right and therefore cannot and should not ever be traded for — it can only be freely given. Many nagara were furious about rumors that the City Council had indeed traded subsistence for 500 years to some Sandies for the sewer system. Even worse were the widespread rumors that the trade had actually been for access to city resources that the Council had no business trading — I won’t bore you with the minutiae here, but many felt they’d overstepped their bounds — for details see, City Council History Volume 5, by Liemchek, et al. One group of nagara began calling for a full investigation, another for the City Council’s resignation. Every member of the council resigned at once, and then refused to cooperate with any investigations. As such, the full details of the Nowes’ Septic Deal have never been unearthed.
 
Dak, you do a disservice to the past by conflating the Sandies of the early cycle with their compatriots today. There were significant philosophical differences. I recommend you contact Chalim, who has been conducting a detailed survey of extant paper documents from the first century with a focus on Sandytown. In her unpublished research, you can see several documents from a movement known as the Manakhists. This group departed Port Outreach for Sandytown in protest of the use of the modern calendrical system because they preferred the previous agriculturally-based system that, though more complex than the one we have now, was, in their words, actually more true to the ebb and flow of life on Mother. They were, in fact, ‘back to the land’ types as jeffy puts it. Because their objection was to the calendar and not subsistence, they made arrangements to receive it in Sandytown. Though the original beliefs of the Manakhists are forgotten, their descendants represent the largest percentage of Sandies who receive subsistence.
 
In other words, an obscure and confusing breakaway group of nagara, and a obscure and confusing political maneuver have been blended in the memory of history, and we actually don’t really know what it took to get our septic system.
 
Yours in Teacher Town,
Enkin Binderstape of Bookwahj Alliance