It was alarming at first — watching two men emerging from the scrim of a sudden April snow flurry, both men dressed in camo and dun, up along the edge of a lake in Pippy Park. My first impression was of facing the vanguard of a ragged paramilitary group practicing maneuvers. Then, seeing the metal detectors, I thought of a minefield for only a moment, before realizing they were hobbyists hunting treasure.
It was remarkable how well the camo worked — I literally didn’t see them until they were less than 20 feet from me, when their moving shapes simply appeared. Another movement to my left, and I saw a third man, digging, someone who had been even closer, but who I hadn’t seen until he moved.
I asked them what they’d been finding: big old Newfoundland pennies, some silver, and, as always, a mention of the biggest prize they’d ever found, an American coin from the 1780s found closer to the water’s edge.
They weren’t keen to talk: it was a miserable day, and I’m not sure they felt comfortable. I don’t know what the rules are about parks and metal detectors.
But before we parted company, the man who’d been doing the most talking — the guy with a smudge of brown dirt on his forehead like an extra right eyebrow — said “people don’t know what used to be here.”
What they see, I guess, is only what’s here now.
I turned around, looked towards the lake and tried to imagine the space as the open space it must have been, before the shore was crowded with the patchy low spruce – all the same height – that stand there now.
I tried to imagine it in summer, the way it would have been a space cut out of the woods, instead of the shoulder of a popular urban walking trail. Tried to visualize it in summer, with families along the shore, perhaps splashing in the shallow water. Looking at it that way, it was easy to imagine why it would be a profitable place to search.
It made me think of something else.
I think what people forget, in amongst all the advances in technology and the sheer belief that we are so much better than those who came before is that, biologically, we still function pretty much the same way. We’re still greedy, still powered by lust and greed and the love of power, still eager for creature comforts and to keep the thing that we think are ours. We are creatures of our biology and our ethics — but we’re not unique at this point in history, nor are we any better than those who came before us.
Sure, it’s hard to imagine something like your parents having a lively, exciting and vibrant sex life — you may not even want to imagine it. But don’t think for a minute that the biological realities that bend our behaviour in certain directions didn’t exist for our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.
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OK, I’ve strayed a little here — but my point’s a simple one.
We truly are doomed to re-experience the things we don’t learn anything from history.
If we don’t look at the events that brought us to where we are now, if we don’t look closer and learn from the way that xenophobia and the hatred of “the other” that caused the Holocaust and world war, we’re going to miss the fact that the world could spin that way again.
The clear-cut rise of ethnic hatred in North America is startling. The way it is fomented and delivered online makes its spread even more insidious than the 1930s. You don’t need a printing press any more. You don’t need to tape up a poster.
I honestly feel that this is not the time to look away.
The only people I want to see come out of the trees in camouflage are the detectorists.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 39 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
