Having a Science Center nearby is one of the perks of living in St. Louis. It is an interesting and informative place. The Center is full of machines and interactive displays that focus on everything from dinosaurs to farming to space travel. There is an IMAX theater (currently being upgraded) and a planetarium. They even have a flight center that houses a couple of full motion simulators. Nothing nearly as fancy (or expensive) as those at work, but something that will be fun to explore with the grand kids one of these days.
The Center often hosts special exhibitions. The current display is focused on artifacts recovered from the city of Pompeii. There are actually two separate displays. The first one that visitors enter is filled with statues, household goods, art, models, and video recreations of daily life. They reveal a people who were master artisans. Pottery, metal and glass work, sculpture, art...2000 years old and utterly captivating.
Their engineering prowess was equally impressive, with complex waste and water management systems, under-floor heating, paved roads, with the weight and measure standards necessary to support a complex economy and robust construction efforts. Though they did have the slave economy common to many ancient cultures, their slaves were usually paid wages and could, eventually, buy their freedom. Unfortunately, that was not the reality with the sex-slave trade, which was a legal enterprise openly supported by the government and the elite. Not everything about their culture was as beautiful as their art.
After learning about the city and its culture one enters a small, stand up theater where the destruction of the town is played out on a large movie screen, complete with sound and light effects. Pompeii met its end on August 24th, 79 AD when the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano experienced a massive eruption. The town and most of its thousands of inhabitants were buried under 12 feet of ash and debris; lost to the world for over 1,600 years.
The theater screen then lifts and one enters the final room of the display, filled with pictures of the excavation…and the mummified remains of some of the inhabitants. Children, mothers, husbands, and neighbors caught in their final moments, terrified and trying to escape or huddling with the people they loved most as their world fell in on them.
It is a sad and sobering display. These folks had no idea what their end would be, there wasn’t even a word for “volcano” in their language. They would likely have laughed at the very idea that a mountain made of rock could blow up, spew fire and ash, and destroy their city between one sunrise and the next. It is likely religious, business, and civic leaders would have vigorously joined in attacking anyone who claimed such a thing as being a fool, a charlatan, or simply insane.
The city's religious leaders might have declared that Bacchus ( a lesser god of agriculture, wine and fertility) had assured them that He would never allow a city known around the world for its wine, to meet such an end. Should Bacchus prove inadequate, the city boasted great temples built to the glory of the most powerful gods Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Virtually every house included alters where daily worship took place. The Priests would expect such piety insured a prosperous future for generations to come.
For more mundane reasons, business leaders would seek to silence such claims in order to protect the city's economic health, and civic leaders would surely take a dim view of such nonsense alarming the less educated among the population.
They all had less than a day of knowing how wrong they were. Then they died.
On nearly the same day (though nineteen hundred years later) Dorian stalled over the Abaco Islands, then moved N-N-W toward the US east coast. The storm’s track meant that that Daughter Eldest and Family suffered nothing more than a few days of hiding out in a hotel room. Both their boat and Kintala notched up yet another close hurricane call while escaping without a scratch.
But the news out of Marsh Harbor, Treasure and Green Turtle Cays, Hope Town…nothing short of heart breaking sadness. Those were places where Deb and I lived for months at a time, where our perspective of the world was changed for the better, where we became different people than we were when first setting out to go cruising. There is no way to process what has happened, to balance the relief against the sadness. So many people have suffered a devastating loss. People we met, knew, and admired. People who welcomed us into their communities and invited us into their homes.
The two, relief and grief, are incompatible; yet there they are. There is nothing anyone can do about a Cat 5 hurricane stalling over the home of a friend. And though, unlike the people of Pompeii, there was some warning that this was coming, some knowledge of what could happen and why; not everyone had the chance, the resources, or the time, to escape. Barely a week before Dorian grew into the most violent storm to ever hit the Islands, the best forecasters on the planet using the most advanced equipment available thought there was a good possibility that it would pass the Islands as a tropical storm, harass parts of Florida with some wind and rain, and fade away.
I have to wonder though, how many of them secretly feared the worst? I know I did…Mathew, Irma, Michael, and now Dorian. But I am not a forecaster, and billions of $$ of prep aren’t spent on wild speculations about the mountain looming in the background.
The Center often hosts special exhibitions. The current display is focused on artifacts recovered from the city of Pompeii. There are actually two separate displays. The first one that visitors enter is filled with statues, household goods, art, models, and video recreations of daily life. They reveal a people who were master artisans. Pottery, metal and glass work, sculpture, art...2000 years old and utterly captivating.
Their engineering prowess was equally impressive, with complex waste and water management systems, under-floor heating, paved roads, with the weight and measure standards necessary to support a complex economy and robust construction efforts. Though they did have the slave economy common to many ancient cultures, their slaves were usually paid wages and could, eventually, buy their freedom. Unfortunately, that was not the reality with the sex-slave trade, which was a legal enterprise openly supported by the government and the elite. Not everything about their culture was as beautiful as their art.After learning about the city and its culture one enters a small, stand up theater where the destruction of the town is played out on a large movie screen, complete with sound and light effects. Pompeii met its end on August 24th, 79 AD when the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano experienced a massive eruption. The town and most of its thousands of inhabitants were buried under 12 feet of ash and debris; lost to the world for over 1,600 years.
The theater screen then lifts and one enters the final room of the display, filled with pictures of the excavation…and the mummified remains of some of the inhabitants. Children, mothers, husbands, and neighbors caught in their final moments, terrified and trying to escape or huddling with the people they loved most as their world fell in on them.
It is a sad and sobering display. These folks had no idea what their end would be, there wasn’t even a word for “volcano” in their language. They would likely have laughed at the very idea that a mountain made of rock could blow up, spew fire and ash, and destroy their city between one sunrise and the next. It is likely religious, business, and civic leaders would have vigorously joined in attacking anyone who claimed such a thing as being a fool, a charlatan, or simply insane.
The city's religious leaders might have declared that Bacchus ( a lesser god of agriculture, wine and fertility) had assured them that He would never allow a city known around the world for its wine, to meet such an end. Should Bacchus prove inadequate, the city boasted great temples built to the glory of the most powerful gods Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Virtually every house included alters where daily worship took place. The Priests would expect such piety insured a prosperous future for generations to come.
They all had less than a day of knowing how wrong they were. Then they died.
On nearly the same day (though nineteen hundred years later) Dorian stalled over the Abaco Islands, then moved N-N-W toward the US east coast. The storm’s track meant that that Daughter Eldest and Family suffered nothing more than a few days of hiding out in a hotel room. Both their boat and Kintala notched up yet another close hurricane call while escaping without a scratch.
But the news out of Marsh Harbor, Treasure and Green Turtle Cays, Hope Town…nothing short of heart breaking sadness. Those were places where Deb and I lived for months at a time, where our perspective of the world was changed for the better, where we became different people than we were when first setting out to go cruising. There is no way to process what has happened, to balance the relief against the sadness. So many people have suffered a devastating loss. People we met, knew, and admired. People who welcomed us into their communities and invited us into their homes.
The two, relief and grief, are incompatible; yet there they are. There is nothing anyone can do about a Cat 5 hurricane stalling over the home of a friend. And though, unlike the people of Pompeii, there was some warning that this was coming, some knowledge of what could happen and why; not everyone had the chance, the resources, or the time, to escape. Barely a week before Dorian grew into the most violent storm to ever hit the Islands, the best forecasters on the planet using the most advanced equipment available thought there was a good possibility that it would pass the Islands as a tropical storm, harass parts of Florida with some wind and rain, and fade away.I have to wonder though, how many of them secretly feared the worst? I know I did…Mathew, Irma, Michael, and now Dorian. But I am not a forecaster, and billions of $$ of prep aren’t spent on wild speculations about the mountain looming in the background.
1 comment:
It's hard to figure survivor/casualty numbers for Pompeii, Herculaneum and vicinity in 79AD, population perhaps 40-50k citizens. Because many did evacuate, some via Roman navy sealift.
Certainly several thousand people in Pompeii were instantly roasted by the pyroclastic flow late in the eruption.
And many choked to death or had the roof fall in or died fleeing, being hit by rocks.
The Romans had no memory of the mountain exploding and did not associate the earthquakes with the volcano.
Signs of earthquake building repair were evident when the town was again shaken, burned and buried.
Nice pics.
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