Merry Xmas to you, if you own a house

Last week at this time, I was back in the suburbs of Seattle, in the towns where I grew up. My sister lives in Kent, in the familiar neighborhood where my grandparents lived, where the church I attended was located, and also, where my wife-to-be grew up. My sister can’t drive anymore, so she let me use her car that week, and I drove out to Kent multiple times to pick her up and bring her to my mother’s place, and I’d drive through old familiar places and reminisce a bit.

Except…they all felt terribly cramped.

It wasn’t just that these were places I frolicked in when I was a small child, and now I’m all growed up, but because everything was walled off with barricades and police tape. In particular, the entire strip along the railroad tracks was cordoned off. This was one of my favorite places to play, because it was full of garter snakes and grasshoppers, and when I was very young, we’d walk along the tracks picking up coal that had fallen off the coal cars to bring to my grandmother, who’d burn them in a pot-bellied stove to keep her house warm. It never appealed as a place to camp, though, since all through the day and night the freight trains would roar through there, and the crossing would flash red lights and ding-ding-ding. You’d have to be truly desperate to want to sleep there.

Well, now no kid is going to want to play there because it’s taped off and there never were any toilets there, so I guess people would just go in the bushes, and they were strewn with garbage. It’s all very unsightly. Here’s a convenient map of homeless hot spots in Kent, and it’s disturbing because I knew the area well. #18 is right next to my grandmother’s house, and #33 is the Green River Road where I’d often go biking and swimming in the river and fishing.

So far it seems like the solution is to send the cops in to chase everyone away, and to ask local religious charities to help out. Remember, this is in the kingdom of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, where incredible wealth thrives, but at the same time many people are assembling cardboard lean-tos in rocky fields next to the railroad tracks. It’s a bit chilly out there, and it rains almost all the time. Too bad they can’t all build a mansion with a gorgeous view of Lake Washington or something.

Another solution: the NY Times ran a story about people in Oregon who were so distressed by all the homeless people that they fled to red Missouri, where apparently they do a more thorough job of rousting the layabouts and keeping them away from good Republican citizens. AR Moxon summarized the story, which is good for me, because I do not read the NY Times anymore and forevermore. The whole article is worth reading, but this is the hard nasty core of it all.

Anyway, everywhere around this country, cities whose governments (not always Republican government, I notice) have agreed to accept the underlying supremacist premises (even if they oppose various supremacist tactics), and have engaged in a policy of elimination of unhoused people, all in the name of safety, even while state governments pursue policies that ensure that more and more people will fall into poverty and lose their access to housing.

It seems to me that better, but more expensive, strategies than walling off portions of the town with police tape would be things like Universal Basic Income, and cracking down on predatory landlords, and capping and enforcing limits on rent, and taxing the hell out of McMansions and especially real mansions, and changing zoning laws to encourage the construction of low income housing. I imagine the people running those towns would panic over the hit to their tax base, but you’d think they’d realize that having refugee camps scattered all over town wasn’t particularly attractive, either.

There is more to that NY Times story, though, because it sure as heck isn’t about deploring policies that create a tide of homelessness. No, it’s about how the Huckins family of Portland was so disturbed by liberal Oregon policies, in exactly the same way that the Nobles family of Iowa was forced to flee to Minnesota because of red state policies. They’re exactly the same! Both sides are indistinguishable.

The Nobles moved because one of their children is trans, and the government of their home state of Iowa has decided that it would be better if trans people didn’t exist quite so much in Iowa, and have passed a law to make that happen. Iowa isn’t particularly special here. Pretty much every state controlled by Republicans has decided much the same thing, and has either passed a similar law or is planning to. There are a lot of intentions stated behind this: the desire for fairness in girls’ sports is one, for example—which is interesting, since Republicans have never been particularly interested in funding girls’ sports, and the actual impact of trans kids on high school sports in Iowa is best described as “undetectable.” The desire to keep girls safe in school bathrooms is another, which is sort of rich coming from the same people who refuse to make schools safe from gun massacres, and who insist on forced birth legislation that is making maternal mortality rates spike, and who pass laws that require genital inspection. The desire to make students comfortable is cited, which is interesting, since it gives away the clear belief that trans kids, who are being othered and excluded in the name of this comfort, are not considered students, or at least that their comfort is considered utterly immaterial, that their existence as students is something divorced from the general responsibility to create a safe comfortable environment for students—that their existence as students represents only discomfort and danger for others.

The NY Times pretended that these two families were exactly the same. They ignored the fact that what drove the Huckinses away were wasteful, destructive Republican policies that amplified the rich-poor divide and that have dismantled the social safety net, while what drove the Nobles away were hateful Republican policies that directly threatened their family. There’s a reason I don’t read that rag that props up the status quo.

The Nobles needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government. The Nobles were, and are, in serious danger.

The Huckinses wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time, specifically for people like the Huckinses, who enable the danger that others are in, and still do.

I guess I can be thankful this Christmas that we don’t have a visible homelessness problem here in rural Minnesota — you can’t survive a Minnesota winter with a makeshift camp, it takes a serious investment in survival to build the kind of shelter you need here.

Although that makes me wonder — we still have a serious problem with poverty here, there are homeless people around, we just don’t see them. Where do they go? Missouri?

It’s not genes that make a family

Every once in a while, I get an email from 23andme to notify me that I have a new DNA relative. When a new person gets their DNA sampled, and if they have given permission to do so, they send out a message to all the people who have some degree of genetic relationship. There’s a limit, obviously — we’re all related to everyone, so they don’t want to have to send out a notice to all of their subscribers every time someone signed up. It looks like the limit is somewhere around 4th cousins, which is already pretty tenuous. I have over 1500 DNA relatives flagged on the site, most around the 4th degree cousin level of relationship, which means that we share about 0.34% of the DNA inherited from our last common ancestor. I know hardly any of them.

When I look at the list, yeah, I definitely know the top 2 names — they’re my kids. 50% of our DNA shared. I don’t have to go at all far down the list before descending into total mystery. I recognize a couple of cousins, some familiar family names, and then…who are these people? Once you’ve dropped below 4% shared DNA, you’re too distantly related for me to have known you, with some exceptions, not that I would mind knowing you. I’m sure you’re all lovely people.

What I see from these kinds of data, though, is that genes are not at all a good measure of relatedness. Every child of each generation throws away half of one parents’ DNA, so generation after generation “your” genes are rapidly and progressively diluted, unavoidably. If you’re hoping for some kind of genetic immortality, it’s not going to happen, because the mechanics of meiosis are going to steadily break up the particular combination of genes that make up the genetic “you”. You can draw up all the pedigrees you want to illustrate your family connections, but they aren’t particularly meaningful.

As you can see, a fourth cousin would share a great-great-great grandparent with me, but that connection is rather abstract. I personally knew two of my great-grandparents, but anyone before that is, at best, an old black-and-white photo in a dusty family album, or perhaps a line in a census record. 23andme tells me that we have less than a percent of shared DNA passed down from that great-great-great grandparent. Lineage really doesn’t matter all that much, because we’re all just a great sloppy gemisch, a random subset of a population, and it’s the population as a whole that matters in the long run. The unique combination of genes that make up me are going to be broken up and dispersed over time, and some will be lost.

I can’t even stress enough how trivial those genetic inheritances are: I am not the sum of my individual genes, but the product of all of my genes interacting with each other and the environment in complex ways. My kids may each have 50% of my genes, but they are not 50% “me” — each one is unique and distinct, and I can have no claim on them. Part of the pleasures of parenting is creating someone new and watching them become independent and express themselves in ways you wouldn’t have thought of — not as a reflection of yourself, but as someone completely novel in all ways. They may share 50% of my genes, but they’re marshalling them in different ways in different contexts in cooperation with my wife’s genes.

I have no patience with possessive parents who want to mold their children to their preferences. I also don’t have much sympathy for “royal bloodlines” or other such nonsense. The king of England and I might both be related to William the Conqueror, but that drop of blood has been attenuated and reduced to meaninglessness by a thousand years of gene juggling and recombination and drift and mutation and loss. We shouldn’t care any more.

There is something meaningful there, though. I started this post by mentioning my email from 23andme — they had a new member who, they said, was my second cousin. I recognized the last name as belonging to one branch of my family, so I contacted my brother and sisters and asked if they knew who they were, because I sure didn’t. Yes, they did. It wasn’t my 2nd cousin, they were my first cousin twice removed; they were the grandchild of my first cousin. We shared 2.65% of our DNA with my grandparent, their great-great-grandparent, which, as I’ve said is a bit trivial and not at all grounds for showing up unannounced at their house for Sunday dinner. But we do have a connection.

I knew their grandfather well — he was my cousin, we regularly met throughout our childhood and youth to engage in shenanigans at their ranch in Eastern Washington. We hiked, we went fishing, I called him a stupid redneck, he called me a liberal pussy, and he beat me up now and then. It was a sometimes prickly relationship. He got wilder as he got older, while I became more staid, and we drifted apart, which meant fewer bruises for me but fewer wild adventures in the back country. You know, he once killed and ate raw a red-winged blackbird in front of me to prove he was tougher than I was? Kinda grossed me out.

Their great-grandmother, my cousin’s mother, was a rock who earned our respect. She was a tough old bird who raised a sometimes fractious family with love, despite often struggling economically. She was my father’s older sister, and I think she helped hold that family together, too. We visited her a few weeks before her death from liver cancer. She knew it was coming. She was awesomely brave about it all, retiring to a little house on the Palouse, where she could appreciate the country in her last days.

I knew their great-great-grandmother, my grandmother, even better. I spent many happy days in my childhood at her house, which was a crumbling shack next to the railroad tracks, with one wall slowly peeling away from the rest of the house and floors that sagged in odd ways. She had been a widow since about 1939, and raised a family of six kids single-handedly, working as a fruit-picker in season and in a cannery in the off-season. She was always kind and generous with her grandchildren, which was good since she had a great milling mob of them running wild over the house all the time. Sometimes my cousin would visit to twist my arm and make me say ‘uncle’ while I was there.

Those are the ties that bind, the connections that really matter. Native Americans have the right idea — you aren’t an Indian if you have a pedigree that shows some distant relative gave you a dollop of tribal DNA (Elizabeth Warren was taught that lesson a few years ago), what matters is the personal associations, the actual sharing of the life of an Indian. As a biologist, you’d think I’d place more weight on the numbers and percentages and genetics, but no, I’m not at all impressed with a 2.65% genetic share in my twice-removed first cousin’s DNA…but hey, I knew their grandfather, and that matters far more to me. I’d probably enjoy meeting them and having a conversation about family.

Unless they decided to beat me up to prove how tough they were. I would hope that doesn’t run in the family.

Waiting for our snow

We were wondering if we were going to have a white Xmas this year — it looks pretty brown out there with a few small spots of crunchy snow here and there. The weather forecast looks like continuing brownness through next week. So we were wondering how often this happens…and the National Weather Service provided the history. We had brown Christmasses here in 2021, 2018, 2015, 2014, etc.!

I’m not worried. I’m sure we’ll get a white January and February.

West Virginia University is so screwed

Portrait of an insufferable dork

This is where American universities are at right now. Enrollment is down, tuition is up, and we’re all wondering where we went wrong…and I think WVU is a great bad example. They hired a bad president.

Then, in December, 2020, the university’s president, Elwood Gordon Gee, announced the start of an “academic transformation.” Gee, who is seventy-nine, has a wry smile and a penchant for bow ties. (He reportedly owns more than two thousand of them.) He served as W.V.U.’s president from 1981 to 1985, then had similarly short stints at the University of Colorado, Brown University, and Vanderbilt University, and two at Ohio State University. His two-year tenure at Brown was controversial—he left abruptly, amid criticism that he had ignored the school’s faculty in some of his decision-making—but he has always been a successful fund-raiser. He returned to W.V.U. in 2014. Gee has long argued that land-grant universities, which were created in 1862 by an act of Congress, are meant to “prioritize their activities based on the needs of the communities they were designed to serve,” as he puts it in the book “Land-Grant Universities for the Future.”

“These are perilous times in higher education,” Gee said, that December. “Across the country, there is a loss of public trust, and the perceived value of higher education has diminished.” Enrollment at W.V.U. had dropped more than ten per cent from eight years before. “We must focus on market-driven majors, create areas of excellence, and be highly relevant to our students and their families,” he said.

The revolving-door leadership is a widespread problem. We’ve had a number of chancellors at my university, most of them forgettable, and I didn’t really know any of them — they were outsiders hired to do fundraising, and little more, and never made any impression (our new chancellor was promoted from the faculty ranks, so we can at least hope for a genuine commitment to this university).

I am not impressed by his bow tie collection. An affectation is not a personality.

What really raises my hackles, though, is that phrase, market-driven. Fuck you very much, you don’t understand education at all, go buy yourself another goddamned bow tie.

What’s telling, though, is how he chose to adapt the university to the “market”. He’s cutting programs, of course.

This past August, W.V.U. announced plans to cut thirty-two programs and lay off a hundred and sixty-nine faculty members. Among the undergraduate majors set to be purged or restructured were music performance, environmental and community planning, art history, German, Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish. Masters programs in acting, landscape architecture, energy environments, linguistics, and creative writing would go, too. The plans made national headlines, with much of the coverage focussing on what the changes suggested about the state of the humanities. But it wasn’t only humanities courses that were being jettisoned. Also on the way out were doctoral programs in management, higher education, occupational- and environmental-health sciences, and math. (The university was quick to note that fewer than five hundred students would lose their intended program of study.)

That’s a list that made me groan at every step. Music? Killing music? Foreign languages on the chopping block? No creative writing? This is insane. I’ve noticed that people who talk about market-driven tend to devalue creativity and diversity, but this is a great disemboweling of the purpose of a university.

And then…MATH? They’re gutting their math program! At a state university!

They’ve back-pedaled a little bit, but not on math.

The administration was receptive to some entreaties—the plan to drop the M.F.A. in creative writing was quickly abandoned, for instance, as was the proposed elimination of majors in Spanish and Chinese. The math faculty prepared an official appeal, arguing that the graduate programs could be preserved but restructured, with an emphasis on math’s connection to other sciences. The university was unmoved. In September, the school’s board of governors voted on the final recommendations: the master’s and Ph.D. programs in math would be discontinued, and sixteen of the department’s forty-eight faculty positions would be eliminated. The undergraduate curriculum would be revised, both to emphasize applied math and also to be more “efficient.”

There’s another danger word: applied. When some people think of math, after a brief, horrified shudder, they usually think that what we ought to be doing is teaching people how to balance their checkbook or how to do their taxes. That isn’t math. That’s accounting and filling out forms.

Relatively few people study pure mathematics — I’m one of those ignorant people who stopped at calculus. But I can appreciate the beauty of the subject at least, it’s just that I got distracted by other disciplines. Also, I’m definitely not one of those applied biologists, and I’ve spent a lifetime getting asked “why would anyone study that?” so I can empathize.

If you insist on being pragmatic and only teaching what you think students need to know to do a job, though, consider how impractical it is to reduce math to a service discipline. Very few people will want to work there. The article’s author interviewed a mathematician working at WVU, Ela Özçağlar.

In October, I went to see Ela at her office there. When I arrived, she was speaking with a third-year Ph.D. student from Turkey. On a board above her desk, she and the student had pinned a list of schools that the student was considering as transfer options. Standing in the doorway, he told me that he was hoping to specialize in geometry and algebra. Students at W.V.U. whose programs are being cut are permitted to finish their degrees, but he didn’t see value in staying. “All the pure mathematicians are planning to leave here in two years,” he said. “The math faculty will just be a teaching college.” A few days before, the university had contacted teachers who were being let go. Ela and Olgur, to their surprise, were not on the list. The unlucky group included four teaching faculty and two tenure-track faculty. Ten other faculty members, most of them senior, had volunteered to leave on their own.

Of course they volunteered to leave! They were being told that they couldn’t do the kind of work that stimulates them and makes it worth living in West Virginia. Somebody doesn’t understand the professor mindset. I found myself getting trapped in a rut of service courses, the undergraduate required courses that I could teach in my sleep, and volunteered/insisted that I get to teach some more advanced courses, despite the fact that they were going to require more work. Sure, I could sleepwalk through the basic stuff for a few more years, but I wanted a challenge that would help me learn more. I completely understand how being denied that opportunity to stretch oneself would lead to faculty leaving.

The author talked to another math faculty member, John Goldwasser, who chewed out the college president. Goldwasser seems to have expected President Bow-Tie to actually care about the university.

A few days before we met, Goldwasser sent a letter to Gee, castigating him for bowing to public opinion, and suggesting that, with a more concerted effort, he and his allies might have persuaded the state legislature to fund the university more generously. “If you had failed,” Goldwasser wrote, “you could have resigned in protest. That might have made it possible for your successor to reap the benefits of your efforts. If not, at least you would be remembered as a hero who battled to save the university.” At the heart of Goldwasser’s criticism, he told me, was the belief that a public university should help to create and shape values, not just reflect the things the majority of people already care about. “Did you know that guns will be legal on W.V.U.’s campus starting next July?” he asked me, referring to Senate Bill 10, which will allow West Virginians to carry concealed firearms on the campuses of state colleges and universities. “So, if I were still here, a student could bring a gun to calculus. The legislature cares about that.”

Goldwasser won’t be here: he’s one of the senior faculty who volunteered to go. The mathematician who asked that I not use their name intimated that perhaps Goldwasser’s decision was made altruistically, to save some of the younger faculty members’ jobs. I asked Goldwasser about this, and he smiled slowly, nodding, leaning into the silence between us. “My decision was selfish,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t want to work in the kind of department that’s going to be left.”

That’s understandable. Not at all understandable to a certain kind of college administrator, apparently.

We have permission, and cause, to compare Trump to Hitler!

It’s straight from Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law — you know, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” He wants us all to know that that is not a proscription, just a description. When he coined it, it was intended as a joke, but it’s not funny anymore.

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

It used to be that you could use Godwin’s Law to accuse someone of hyperbole, but not in the case of Trump. He really is a bombastic racist who wants to take over the government and round up his critics in camps. He has said so!

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.

Godwin is so confident that “more and more of us can see” how awful Trump is, but there is a troubling exception. The major media haven’t figured it out. Or they have, and are doing the bidding of their wealthy masters. Rather than calling out the wanna-be dictator, they’re instead doing their best to raise doubts about his opponent, Biden. I’m not a great fan of Biden, but he is a competent bureaucrat, and a far, far better person than Trump. This election ought to be sliding towards a total blowout, but I still see ridiculous headlines and op-eds that are desperately trying to inflate the contest into a nail-biter, and they might succeed.

Every article that whines that Biden is “too old” needs to recognize that yes, he is old and we’d prefer someone younger, but he’s a fit and active man, in contrast to the guy who is only four years younger, has to paint his face orange to look less corpse-like, and who thinks driving around a golf course on a cart is exercise. And is so bad at golf that he has to cheat.

Every article that blames Biden for the economy needs to be taught about relative comparisons. The economy is better than it was under the Republicans, as it always is. If the state of the economy isn’t good enough for you now, why do you still give the time of day to an incompetent crook who is guaranteed to make it worse?

Oh no, his poll numbers are down. Who cares, a year before the election? Poll numbers are going to be jittering up and down like the chart lines on a Trump lie detector test. They’re a game the media plays to drive up interest in their lazy reporting, and no one should care. This should not be a popularity contest, it should be a competence contest. But that isn’t entertaining enough.

Here’s what I want: the presidency should be an office filled by a civil servant, not a drama queen. It’s work. It’s a job. It’s well-rewarded, but the office holder should be recognized for how efficiently and smoothly they keep the country running, and that person should be eminently replaceable — they represent a set of policies that can be promoted by anyone with a history of training in government. Right now, the media are treating it as if it were a reality TV show, and are auditioning for someone sufficiently clownish, who can stir up conflict from week to week and keep the ratings high, and nothing could be more stimulating to the viewers than a needy, narcisstic, Hitler wanna-be. Stupid stereotypes and annoying characters are what made “Big Bang Theory” a commercial success, so let’s repeat that formula in our government.

Biden is far from perfect and, like anyone, has flaws, but at least he’s a sane grown-up, and that’s all I want for my president. You know the Republicans aren’t going to promote one of those, ever again.

I have come home to a new state flag!

A commission has been busy redesigning our ugly state flag, and they’ve settled on a design that they will submit to state congress. They may diddle with it a bit, but generally, this is what it will look like:

Initially, I had favored a flag that featured an Ominous Loon, but I guess this one will do. It’s clean and simple, the colors reflect our name (Minnesota is from a Native phrase that means “where the water meets the sky,”) and I think it’s just plain pretty.

It doesn’t have a loon, unfortunately, but then our newly redesigned state seal has one.

I look forward to all the Minnesota school children being able to draw their flag this spring. Alas, my poor granddaughter lives in Wisconsin, and will be tortured with the effort to draw the cluttered abomination of the Wisconsin state flag.

Why is my bedroom so crowded?

I was on the Oregon Trail in reverse for the last couple of days, it took so long to get home. I had to change planes once with the most awkwardly timed layover, and then I had to take a long shuttle ride with a couple of transfers, and then one of the oxen died and I was laid up with dysentery. Finally, though, a kindly lady picked me up and took me home to my home and my bed.

Except, then…

OK, not really (I also didn’t really get dysentery — was being dramatic). The “Modern Crusaders” are not getting anywhere near my house, but instead, are thriving on Twitter. They don’t seem to be trying to be ironic at all. Looking at their Twitter feed, which I am not linking to, their latest post announces that “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church,” they include a link to a Telegram channel that declares their goal of “Elimination of the demonic forces dominating our people politically and spiritually. Promoting the establishment of a Catholic monarchy,” and what follows is a welter of posts declaring that “Abortion is Jewish,” linking to Nick Fuentes, and engaging in Holocaust denial and Hitler apologetics.

So…just ordinary Twitter, then.

I’m happy to have left that shithole, and I don’t understand how anyone can be a fan of that hateful twerp, Nick Fuentes.

Travel day, yuck

I’m ready to fly away from the damp foggy Pacific Northwest to return to the cold snowy upper Midwest. It’ll be good to get home, but at least I can say that I got to watch my mother get visibly stronger in the week I’ve been here. She is off the oxygen during the day, and is able to get up and walk to the kitchen to get a cup of tea all by herself. If she keeps up with her therapy, I expect her to be roller-skating and dancing and changing flat tires next time I’m back this way.

The only downside is that she’ll be complaining even more vigorously about her offspring taking her cigarettes away. It’s for her own good!

Found! Treasured knife, a bit of history

When I was a young boy, my grandfather had a special knife hung above the fireplace, one that he said he inherited from his father, and that he would pass down to me when I was grown-up. Things happened. My great-grandfather died, my grandfather died, I moved around chasing an education, my grandparents’ house was sold, the contents scattered, and heck, I was more concerned about my family and family values and all that then in some lump of metal.

The knife, as it turned out, had gone to my mother, and my sister found it, and she says I can have it now. I guess this is my inheritance, a simple, practical knife that brings back happy memories. Here it is:

I think those are silver fittings. The handle has my great-grandfather’s initials (PV, for Peter Westad) picked out with small nails, and an engraving “WESTAD 1908” on the sheath.

Here’s the blade.

It’s still sharp, but I think you can see the edge is a bit rough — it’s going to need some tender loving care. My grandfather always told me that it was good Norwegian steel and would last a lifetime. He was wrong. It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes.

The photo is my great-grandfather and his brothers, taken in Fertile, Minnesota.

My sister is going to ship it to me later (I don’t think it would be wise to bring it on a plane), so it’ll be returning to Minnesota at long last. I’m going to have to consult some experts about maintaining it — it’s in pretty good shape after a century of neglect, so it doesn’t need a lot of work, but I would like to buff it up a bit. After all, I’m going to have to leave it to my descendants now!